Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Facebook Quizzes Are (Still) a Privacy Threat
[ed. Yet another reason to avoid Facebook like the plague (as if we needed more).]
An online quiz that illustrates the words you use the most on Facebook as a "word cloud" has gone viral -- and it's a great reminder of why you should be wary of connecting ostensibly fun games with your account. UK-based VPN comparison website Comparitech has delved into how it collects not just your name, but also your birthdate, hometown, education details, all your Likes, photos, browser, language, your IP address and even your friends list if you link it with Facebook. Too many details for a simple game, right? If you agree, you may want to think hard before linking any other FB quiz in the future, because most of them require you to give up a similar list of information.
You'll typically see what details an FB quiz app requires on the page asking you to authorize its connection with the social network. Some apps allow you to choose which info you're willing to share: If you're lucky, you'll be able to give up as little as possible and still be able to play the game. In this case, the application didn't work properly when I didn't allow it to access most of my details. That said, it's pretty easy to click through and overlook the part where you can choose the info an app can access. And if you've been using Facebook extensively, chances are you've done it at least once or twice in the past.
Now the real problem is, like any other entity that collects data, these apps collect it for a reason. Vonvon.me, the mysterious company that created the Your Most Used Words on Facebook quiz, notes in its Privacy Policy that if you log in with FB, you're giving it express permission to continue using your info even after you terminate your account. You're also permitting it to store your details in any of its servers around the world, even in places where your privacy isn't protected by the law. Vonvon does note that it wouldn't share your personal info with third parties unless it has notified you first, but in the same sentence, it admitted that the Privacy Policy itself is already one way of notifying you. Tough luck if you haven't read it before clicking OK, because agreeing to the policy is equivalent to allowing the company to sell or share your details.
by Mariella Moon, Engadget | Read more:
An online quiz that illustrates the words you use the most on Facebook as a "word cloud" has gone viral -- and it's a great reminder of why you should be wary of connecting ostensibly fun games with your account. UK-based VPN comparison website Comparitech has delved into how it collects not just your name, but also your birthdate, hometown, education details, all your Likes, photos, browser, language, your IP address and even your friends list if you link it with Facebook. Too many details for a simple game, right? If you agree, you may want to think hard before linking any other FB quiz in the future, because most of them require you to give up a similar list of information.You'll typically see what details an FB quiz app requires on the page asking you to authorize its connection with the social network. Some apps allow you to choose which info you're willing to share: If you're lucky, you'll be able to give up as little as possible and still be able to play the game. In this case, the application didn't work properly when I didn't allow it to access most of my details. That said, it's pretty easy to click through and overlook the part where you can choose the info an app can access. And if you've been using Facebook extensively, chances are you've done it at least once or twice in the past.
Now the real problem is, like any other entity that collects data, these apps collect it for a reason. Vonvon.me, the mysterious company that created the Your Most Used Words on Facebook quiz, notes in its Privacy Policy that if you log in with FB, you're giving it express permission to continue using your info even after you terminate your account. You're also permitting it to store your details in any of its servers around the world, even in places where your privacy isn't protected by the law. Vonvon does note that it wouldn't share your personal info with third parties unless it has notified you first, but in the same sentence, it admitted that the Privacy Policy itself is already one way of notifying you. Tough luck if you haven't read it before clicking OK, because agreeing to the policy is equivalent to allowing the company to sell or share your details.
by Mariella Moon, Engadget | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Why Pfizer’s Deal May Change the System of Taxing Multinationals
[ed. See also: Pfizer takeover: what is a tax inversion deal and why are they so controversial?]
Pfizer’s proposed merger with Allergan is a blockbuster deal in the pharmaceutical industry. History may remember the deal instead for finally killing off the United States’ outdated approach to taxing multinational corporations.
Pfizer will shed its identity as a United States corporation in the deal, notwithstanding the fact that it, not Allergan, is the larger merger partner. Allergan itself is an expatriate; it is nominally based in Ireland, but the bulk of its operations are still in Parsippany, N.J.
Our tax system is premised on taxing United States-based multinational corporations on 35 percent of worldwide income, with a credit for foreign taxes paid. This “worldwide” approach is often identified as anachronistic; most of our global trading partners have adopted some form of a “territorial” approach.
In theory, there’s not anything wrong with taxing American corporations on their worldwide income. The most vexing problem of international tax — trying to figure out the source of income within a multinational operation — would only be exacerbated by a territorial approach.
In practice, our approach has been a failure. One problem is that we allow the deferral of foreign-source income: the profits of foreign subsidiaries are not generally subject to United States tax until “repatriated” in the form of a dividend. Thus, to minimize taxes, multinationals use transfer pricing, cost sharing and other tax planning techniques to shift as much income as possible overseas.
Pfizer mastered this game early on, and its expertise in tax-shifting continues today. For example, Pfizer takes in about 40 percent of its revenue from sales in the United States and 60 percent from foreign sales. Yet, according to its 2014 annual report, Pfizer had about $17 billion in pretax income from overseas, and almost a $5 billion pretax loss here in the United States. By shifting profits overseas, Pfizer pays relatively low cash taxes compared with the nominal United States tax rate of 35 percent. Instead, much of its American tax liability is illusory, taking the form of an obligation to pay taxes in the future if it repatriates cash to the United States.
As of the end of 2014, Pfizer had $74 billion of foreign earnings “indefinitely reinvested” overseas, and another $63 billion in foreign earnings that have not been indefinitely reinvested. Repatriating $137 billion in earnings would generate a United States tax liability of about $48 billion.
Pfizer’s deal means that the United States will never see that $48 billion in tax revenue.
This isn’t Pfizer’s first visit to the circus. In 2004, Pfizer successfully lobbied Congress for a tax holiday. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 temporarily allowed companies to bring back foreign earnings at a tax rate of only about 5 percent instead of the usual 35 percent. Pfizer brought back $37 billion, paying less than $2 billion in taxes.
Just 11 years after cleaning out its overseas coffers, Pfizer now finds itself with $137 billion of new earnings “trapped” overseas.
Pfizer’s proposed merger with Allergan is a blockbuster deal in the pharmaceutical industry. History may remember the deal instead for finally killing off the United States’ outdated approach to taxing multinational corporations.
Pfizer will shed its identity as a United States corporation in the deal, notwithstanding the fact that it, not Allergan, is the larger merger partner. Allergan itself is an expatriate; it is nominally based in Ireland, but the bulk of its operations are still in Parsippany, N.J.Our tax system is premised on taxing United States-based multinational corporations on 35 percent of worldwide income, with a credit for foreign taxes paid. This “worldwide” approach is often identified as anachronistic; most of our global trading partners have adopted some form of a “territorial” approach.
In theory, there’s not anything wrong with taxing American corporations on their worldwide income. The most vexing problem of international tax — trying to figure out the source of income within a multinational operation — would only be exacerbated by a territorial approach.
In practice, our approach has been a failure. One problem is that we allow the deferral of foreign-source income: the profits of foreign subsidiaries are not generally subject to United States tax until “repatriated” in the form of a dividend. Thus, to minimize taxes, multinationals use transfer pricing, cost sharing and other tax planning techniques to shift as much income as possible overseas.
Pfizer mastered this game early on, and its expertise in tax-shifting continues today. For example, Pfizer takes in about 40 percent of its revenue from sales in the United States and 60 percent from foreign sales. Yet, according to its 2014 annual report, Pfizer had about $17 billion in pretax income from overseas, and almost a $5 billion pretax loss here in the United States. By shifting profits overseas, Pfizer pays relatively low cash taxes compared with the nominal United States tax rate of 35 percent. Instead, much of its American tax liability is illusory, taking the form of an obligation to pay taxes in the future if it repatriates cash to the United States.
As of the end of 2014, Pfizer had $74 billion of foreign earnings “indefinitely reinvested” overseas, and another $63 billion in foreign earnings that have not been indefinitely reinvested. Repatriating $137 billion in earnings would generate a United States tax liability of about $48 billion.
Pfizer’s deal means that the United States will never see that $48 billion in tax revenue.
This isn’t Pfizer’s first visit to the circus. In 2004, Pfizer successfully lobbied Congress for a tax holiday. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 temporarily allowed companies to bring back foreign earnings at a tax rate of only about 5 percent instead of the usual 35 percent. Pfizer brought back $37 billion, paying less than $2 billion in taxes.
Just 11 years after cleaning out its overseas coffers, Pfizer now finds itself with $137 billion of new earnings “trapped” overseas.
by Victor Fleischer, NY Times/Dealbook | Read more:
Image: Mark Lennihan, Richmond Times-Dispatch
Monday, November 23, 2015
The Subscription Wars Are Here
The second wave of the web is here.
Soon you will be asking friends if they are part of the Google plan or perhaps the Amazon plan. In fact, in the very near future, we might all be part of the Google, Amazon, or possibly Netflix and Facebook plan. In fact, it is very possible that our choice of plan will be part of how the coming generation defines itself.
What is the second wave? The second wave is the idea that the internet goliaths of the world are now playing for the $150 or so we spend with the cable companies each month. In an effort to justify and grow the monthly price of their particular content bundle, these Goliaths will acquire, roll up, and merge anything and everything into the offering.
This is an all-out war, and it’s all about who you pay each month for all of your entertainment.
So, what does this mean for us consumers, how did we arrive here and where do we all go?
Let’s start by understanding what the first wave of the web meant to us as consumers. From a content perspective, the first wave of the web was all about content creators being displaced by social content aggregators. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others created and now own the distribution paths that content must travel to reach us, the consumer. These companies can create better ad supported monetization at scale, and provide a better user experience than any single content creator can provide on their own. Over the last decade, we have seen media company after media company succumb distribution to aggregators like Google, and more recently to Facebook and others.
While it has been exciting and easy for consumers to receive an infinite amount of free content in the palm of their hand, we all have been playing hot potato on who exactly foots the content bill. For the last decade, we’ve all danced around the fact that it’s impossible to make an ad-supported web economically sustainable for individual content creators and media companies.
With an infinite amount of content online, content creators will never be able to create and sustain enough attention to obtain the advertising rates of yesterday. Today, no professional content company can survive and thrive on ad supported revenue alone. Look at the recent death of Grantland as case in point. While Grantland is owned by ESPN, Grantland was run independently, and only generated revenue through selling ads next to their content. We have seen so many content companies hop on the ad supported hamster wheel, trying to somehow make it work. Companies like Vice and Buzzfeed have even made the hamster wheel sexy and trendy for periods of time, but in the end, it’s all the same. Nobody can do it forever.
Our culture has also suffered. Content in an ad supported world is mostly miserable. We live in an ugly clickbait world. Advertising models for content have created all of the wrong incentives. We’re subjected to an endless stream of terrible content begging us to click, and then click once more. Ryan Holiday wrote the seminal work on the misaligned incentives that arise for content companies in his 2012 book,“Trust me I’m Lying”.
But now, in 2015, something new is happening. We all finally had the sober realization there must be a better way to monetize content beyond advertising.
That’s right. The second wave.
The next wave of the web, the second wave, is essentially the post advertising web. Look at media business headlines in 2015, and they are all about subscription business models. Sure, they get called different names in different formats. In video, we call subscription offerings ‘over the top’ or for short, “OTT”. In print we call it the familiar– a membership or a subscription.
It’s worth noting that all subscription offerings offer freebie content to get you in the door. There is a reason why Netflix and HBO do not hunt you down when you share your login details with all of your closest friends. In business speak, we call this “content marketing”. Content marketing is the idea that companies will make money in the end by some other means after they give you some awesome free shows and articles. This is a huge trend across the web. For the small creators, authors, and one person shops, they give away a staggering amount of daily free content, but are now monetizing through a crowdfunding and tip-jar revolution.
For larger content creators and aggregators, they need a reliable, steady business model after showing you so much great free content everyday. Some large aggregators have started with distributing free content, while others got started by offering premium original content from the start.
For example:
So in a post-advertising web, the big question to answer is who exactly gets your hard earned money each month? That is: Who are you subscribing to for content? We know it used to be all of those damn cable companies. And now it’s Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and HBO.
Consumers won’t shell out $9.99 a month or more for an ever increasing number of standalone ala carte subscriptions. And the fight for truly exclusive content that can distinguish a service will only make premium content more valuable. There is a reason why NBA salaries and franchises have basically doubled over the last few years. Nothing it seems is more valuable than live premium sports content.
In order to win and gain market share, the internet Goliaths will be forced to continually acquire, roll up, and consolidate everything into the content bundle.
This is the war. This is the new battle.
Soon you will be asking friends if they are part of the Google plan or perhaps the Amazon plan. In fact, in the very near future, we might all be part of the Google, Amazon, or possibly Netflix and Facebook plan. In fact, it is very possible that our choice of plan will be part of how the coming generation defines itself.
What is the second wave? The second wave is the idea that the internet goliaths of the world are now playing for the $150 or so we spend with the cable companies each month. In an effort to justify and grow the monthly price of their particular content bundle, these Goliaths will acquire, roll up, and merge anything and everything into the offering.
This is an all-out war, and it’s all about who you pay each month for all of your entertainment.So, what does this mean for us consumers, how did we arrive here and where do we all go?
Let’s start by understanding what the first wave of the web meant to us as consumers. From a content perspective, the first wave of the web was all about content creators being displaced by social content aggregators. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others created and now own the distribution paths that content must travel to reach us, the consumer. These companies can create better ad supported monetization at scale, and provide a better user experience than any single content creator can provide on their own. Over the last decade, we have seen media company after media company succumb distribution to aggregators like Google, and more recently to Facebook and others.
While it has been exciting and easy for consumers to receive an infinite amount of free content in the palm of their hand, we all have been playing hot potato on who exactly foots the content bill. For the last decade, we’ve all danced around the fact that it’s impossible to make an ad-supported web economically sustainable for individual content creators and media companies.
With an infinite amount of content online, content creators will never be able to create and sustain enough attention to obtain the advertising rates of yesterday. Today, no professional content company can survive and thrive on ad supported revenue alone. Look at the recent death of Grantland as case in point. While Grantland is owned by ESPN, Grantland was run independently, and only generated revenue through selling ads next to their content. We have seen so many content companies hop on the ad supported hamster wheel, trying to somehow make it work. Companies like Vice and Buzzfeed have even made the hamster wheel sexy and trendy for periods of time, but in the end, it’s all the same. Nobody can do it forever.
Our culture has also suffered. Content in an ad supported world is mostly miserable. We live in an ugly clickbait world. Advertising models for content have created all of the wrong incentives. We’re subjected to an endless stream of terrible content begging us to click, and then click once more. Ryan Holiday wrote the seminal work on the misaligned incentives that arise for content companies in his 2012 book,“Trust me I’m Lying”.
But now, in 2015, something new is happening. We all finally had the sober realization there must be a better way to monetize content beyond advertising.
That’s right. The second wave.
The next wave of the web, the second wave, is essentially the post advertising web. Look at media business headlines in 2015, and they are all about subscription business models. Sure, they get called different names in different formats. In video, we call subscription offerings ‘over the top’ or for short, “OTT”. In print we call it the familiar– a membership or a subscription.
It’s worth noting that all subscription offerings offer freebie content to get you in the door. There is a reason why Netflix and HBO do not hunt you down when you share your login details with all of your closest friends. In business speak, we call this “content marketing”. Content marketing is the idea that companies will make money in the end by some other means after they give you some awesome free shows and articles. This is a huge trend across the web. For the small creators, authors, and one person shops, they give away a staggering amount of daily free content, but are now monetizing through a crowdfunding and tip-jar revolution.
For larger content creators and aggregators, they need a reliable, steady business model after showing you so much great free content everyday. Some large aggregators have started with distributing free content, while others got started by offering premium original content from the start.
For example:
- Netflix and HBO in premium original video content.
- Amazon in premium video content, video game content, book publishing (and even hosting web services)
- Spotify in music
- YouTube in UGC video
- Facebook in print publisher content
So in a post-advertising web, the big question to answer is who exactly gets your hard earned money each month? That is: Who are you subscribing to for content? We know it used to be all of those damn cable companies. And now it’s Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and HBO.
Consumers won’t shell out $9.99 a month or more for an ever increasing number of standalone ala carte subscriptions. And the fight for truly exclusive content that can distinguish a service will only make premium content more valuable. There is a reason why NBA salaries and franchises have basically doubled over the last few years. Nothing it seems is more valuable than live premium sports content.
In order to win and gain market share, the internet Goliaths will be forced to continually acquire, roll up, and consolidate everything into the content bundle.
This is the war. This is the new battle.
by Benjamin Smith, Observer | Read more:
Image: Pixabay
[ed. Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. ~ Langston Hughes, Theme for English B.]
via:
De-Stigmatizing Hawaii’s Pidgin English
“You don’t know how happy this makes me,” I wrote a colleague after she casually sent me a link to a recent news story reporting that the U.S. Census Bureau now recognizes Hawaiian Pidgin English as a language. “Oh really?!” the colleague responded, surprised at my excitement.
After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?
The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.
I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.
Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:
According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.
But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)
When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”
“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”
After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?
The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.
Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:
Wen da keiki wen come olda da language wen come into da creole dat linguist kine people call Hawai‘i Creole. Us local people we jus’ call um “Pidgin.” Nowadays kine Pidgin get all da stuff from da pas’ inside. Plenny of da vocabulary for Pidgin come from English but plenny stuff in da gramma come from Hawaiian. Cantonese an’ Portuguese wen also help make da gramma, an’ English, Hawaiian, Portuguese, an’ Japanese wen help da vocabulary da mos’.It may read like a phonetic interpretation of a really broken version of standard American English, but linguists insist it isn’t. It has its own grammatical system and lexicon; it doesn’t use “are” or “is” in sentences, for example, and incorporates words from an array of languages like “keiki,” which means children in Hawaiian. (...)
According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.
But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)
When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”
“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”
by Alia Wong, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Sinco Kelleher / AP
The End of the Internet Dream
In 20 years, the Web might complete its shift from liberator to oppressor.
Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.
But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
Twenty years ago I attended my first Def Con. I believed in a free, open, reliable, interoperable Internet: a place where anyone can say anything, and anyone who wants to hear it can listen and respond. I believed in the Hacker Ethic: that information should be freely accessible and that computer technology was going to make the world a better place. I wanted to be a part of making these dreams — the Dream of Internet Freedom — come true. As an attorney, I wanted to protect hackers and coders from the predations of law so that they could do this important work. Many of the people in this room have spent their lives doing that work.But today, that Dream of Internet Freedom is dying.
For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.
Twenty years from now,
• You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
•Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need?
How can we stop being afraid and start being sensible about risk? Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
To Reach Seniors, Tech Start-Ups Must First Relate to Them
Daily, breathless announcements arrive in my inbox, heralding technology products for older adults.
A “revolutionary” gait-training robot. An emergency response device said to predict falls. A combination home phone and tablet system that “transforms how older seniors connect with and are cared for by their loved ones.”
Daily, too, I hear tales of technology failing in various ways to do what older people or their worried families expect. I hear about frail elders who remove their emergency pendants at bedtime, then fall in the dark when they walk to the bathroom and can’t summon help.
About a 90-year-old in Sacramento who stored his never-worn emergency pendant in his refrigerator. About a Cambridge, Mass., daughter who has tried four or five telephones — not cellphones or smartphones, but ordinary landlines — in an ongoing effort to find one simple enough for her 95-year-old mother to reliably dial her number and have a conversation.
A “revolutionary” gait-training robot. An emergency response device said to predict falls. A combination home phone and tablet system that “transforms how older seniors connect with and are cared for by their loved ones.”
Daily, too, I hear tales of technology failing in various ways to do what older people or their worried families expect. I hear about frail elders who remove their emergency pendants at bedtime, then fall in the dark when they walk to the bathroom and can’t summon help.About a 90-year-old in Sacramento who stored his never-worn emergency pendant in his refrigerator. About a Cambridge, Mass., daughter who has tried four or five telephones — not cellphones or smartphones, but ordinary landlines — in an ongoing effort to find one simple enough for her 95-year-old mother to reliably dial her number and have a conversation.
Which scenario represents the likelier future for senior-oriented technology? It depends on whom you ask.
Entrepreneurs are hard at work developing platforms, apps, sites and devices meant to help older adults manage their health, live independently and maintain family and social connections, all laudable goals. Let’s call their efforts silvertech.
Until a few years ago, “the whole tech world wasn’t sufficiently focused on this enormous opportunity,” said Stephen Johnston, a co-founder of Aging2.0, which connects technology companies with the senior care industry. “It’s changing quite rapidly.” He estimated that 1,500 silvertech start-ups had arisen globally in the past three years.
A couple of recent developments have intensified American entrepreneurial interest, said Laurie Orlov, a business analyst who began the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog in 2008.
Last spring, a start-up called Honor, which matches older adults with vetted home care workers, raised $20 million in venture capital from prominent Silicon Valley investors. “That gave all kinds of organizations hope for market potential,” Ms. Orlov said.
In addition, Medicare has begun to broaden the kinds of remote health monitoring — a.k.a. telehealth — that it will cover, though so far only in rural areas or in a pilot program for accountable care organizations. Eventually, remote monitoring will be “the way people will stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” Ms. Orlov predicted.
Yet Mr. Johnston, whose organization convenes pitch events for silvertech developers, acknowledges that “there have definitely been a few missteps, and there haven’t been too many huge wins yet.”
As a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ken Covinsky often hears from Silicon Valley tinkerers with big ideas. He has become something of a skeptic, as he pointed out in a post for the GeriPal blog last month.
“It’s incredibly well meaning,” he said in an interview. “But there are assumptions that are at odds with the problems our patients and families are facing.”
Tech people seem enamored, for example, with the prospect of continually monitoring older people using sensors that transmit information on when they get up, leave the house and open the refrigerator (or don’t).
Aside from the question of whether older adults appreciate such scrutiny, Dr. Covinsky suspects that an hour or two a day from a skilled home care worker (one paid more than minimum wage, he added) would do them more good.
“They don’t necessarily need someone to know when they open the fridge,” he said. “They need someone to make or deliver a good meal.” (...)
Design will play a crucial role in how useful consumers find any of these products, but it presents tricky questions. Do you come up with something specialized for older adults? “You don’t want to be handing smartphones with shiny glass to people with Parkinson’s disease or hand tremors or macular degeneration, and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ms. Orlov cautioned.
Yet with some exceptions — the Jitterbug phone, for instance — products aimed purely at older adults have often faltered. Sometimes they’re too complex, or too difficult for those with dementia, which is a lot of people.
Or users may balk because the devices become an uncomfortably constant reminder of incapacity. Technology isn’t always the solution to a problem.
Entrepreneurs are hard at work developing platforms, apps, sites and devices meant to help older adults manage their health, live independently and maintain family and social connections, all laudable goals. Let’s call their efforts silvertech.
Until a few years ago, “the whole tech world wasn’t sufficiently focused on this enormous opportunity,” said Stephen Johnston, a co-founder of Aging2.0, which connects technology companies with the senior care industry. “It’s changing quite rapidly.” He estimated that 1,500 silvertech start-ups had arisen globally in the past three years.
A couple of recent developments have intensified American entrepreneurial interest, said Laurie Orlov, a business analyst who began the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog in 2008.
Last spring, a start-up called Honor, which matches older adults with vetted home care workers, raised $20 million in venture capital from prominent Silicon Valley investors. “That gave all kinds of organizations hope for market potential,” Ms. Orlov said.
In addition, Medicare has begun to broaden the kinds of remote health monitoring — a.k.a. telehealth — that it will cover, though so far only in rural areas or in a pilot program for accountable care organizations. Eventually, remote monitoring will be “the way people will stay out of emergency rooms and nursing homes,” Ms. Orlov predicted.
Yet Mr. Johnston, whose organization convenes pitch events for silvertech developers, acknowledges that “there have definitely been a few missteps, and there haven’t been too many huge wins yet.”
As a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ken Covinsky often hears from Silicon Valley tinkerers with big ideas. He has become something of a skeptic, as he pointed out in a post for the GeriPal blog last month.
“It’s incredibly well meaning,” he said in an interview. “But there are assumptions that are at odds with the problems our patients and families are facing.”
Tech people seem enamored, for example, with the prospect of continually monitoring older people using sensors that transmit information on when they get up, leave the house and open the refrigerator (or don’t).
Aside from the question of whether older adults appreciate such scrutiny, Dr. Covinsky suspects that an hour or two a day from a skilled home care worker (one paid more than minimum wage, he added) would do them more good.
“They don’t necessarily need someone to know when they open the fridge,” he said. “They need someone to make or deliver a good meal.” (...)
Design will play a crucial role in how useful consumers find any of these products, but it presents tricky questions. Do you come up with something specialized for older adults? “You don’t want to be handing smartphones with shiny glass to people with Parkinson’s disease or hand tremors or macular degeneration, and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” Ms. Orlov cautioned.
Yet with some exceptions — the Jitterbug phone, for instance — products aimed purely at older adults have often faltered. Sometimes they’re too complex, or too difficult for those with dementia, which is a lot of people.
Or users may balk because the devices become an uncomfortably constant reminder of incapacity. Technology isn’t always the solution to a problem.
by Paula Span, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Luc Melanson
Sunday, November 22, 2015
The Woobie
A "woobie" is a name for any type of character who makes you feel extremely sorry for them. Basically, the first thing you think to say when you see the woobie is: "Aw, poor baby!" Woobification of a character is a curious, audience-driven phenomenon, sometimes divorced from the character's canonical morality.
A story with the Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving the Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.) Woobification can also tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured so they can wish the hurt away. This is often explored in Hurt/Comfort Fic.
An important aspect of the Woobie is that their suffering must be caused by external sources. A character who suffers as the result of their own actions is a Tragic Hero and does not qualify.
The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot the Dog moment will stop things.
In Lighter and Fluffier fiction, the Woobie can sometimes earn their happy ending.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A story with the Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving the Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.) Woobification can also tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured so they can wish the hurt away. This is often explored in Hurt/Comfort Fic.An important aspect of the Woobie is that their suffering must be caused by external sources. A character who suffers as the result of their own actions is a Tragic Hero and does not qualify.
The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot the Dog moment will stop things.
In Lighter and Fluffier fiction, the Woobie can sometimes earn their happy ending.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Bringing Up Genius
Is every healthy child a potential prodigy?
Before Laszlo Polgár conceived his children, before he even met his wife, he knew he was going to raise geniuses. He’d started to write a book about it. He saw it moves ahead.
By their first meeting, a dinner and walk around Budapest in 1965, Laszlo told Klara, his future bride, how his kids’ education would go. He had studied the lives of geniuses and divined a pattern: an adult singularly focused on the child’s success. He’d raise the kids outside school, with intense devotion to a subject, though he wasn’t sure what. "Every healthy child," as he liked to say, "is a potential genius." Genetics and talent would be no obstacle. And he’d do it with great love.
Fifty years later in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, I met one of Laszlo’s daughters, Susan Polgár, the first woman ever to earn the title of chess grandmaster. For several years, Susan had led the chess team of Webster University — a small residential college with a large international and online footprint — to consecutive national titles. Their spring break had just begun, and for the next few days, in a brick-and-glass former religious library turned chess hall, the team would drill for a four-team tournament in New York City to defend the title.
The students, sporting blue-and-yellow windbreakers and polos, huddled around a checked board of white and black, a queen, rook, and pawn stacked in a row. They had started with the King’s Indian Defense, a well-mapped terrain. Now they were in the midgame. Polgár sat to the side, behind a laptop synced to the game, algorithms whirring. What should be the next move? she asked. "Be active and concrete."
Jocular debate broke out, accents betraying origins: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Hungary. "This is not human," one student said. "It looks magical," said another. Computers have long since outclassed humans in chess; they’re vital in training, but their recommended moves can seem quixotic. "No, it’s very human," Polgár assured them. The students, most of them grandmasters, grew quiet, searching the more than 100,000 positional situations they had ingrained over their lifetimes, exploring possible moves and the future problems they implied — moving down the decision tree. It’s the knot at the heart of chess: Each turn, you must move; when you move, a world of potential vanishes.
"Bishop G4?"
"Bishop G4," Polgár confirmed.
"That’s not a human move!"
"It’s a human move," she said. "It’s actually very pretty." The arrangement is close to a strategy she used before, against her sister. "I beat Judit on that."
The students murmured. This demanded respect. Susan Polgár may be the first woman ever to earn the grandmaster title, but her younger sister is the best female chess player of all time.
There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news.
The girls were not an experiment in any proper form. Laszlo knew that. There was no control. But soon enough, their story outgrew their lives. They became prime examples in a psychological debate that has existed for a century: Does success depend more on the accidents of genetics or the decisions of upbringing? Nature or nurture? In its most recent form, that debate has revolved around the position, advanced by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, that intense practice is the most dominant variable in success. The Polgárs would seem to suggest: Yes.
You may have heard of Ericsson. His work was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 best seller, Outliers, which spawned the notion of 10,000 hours of practice, in particular, as a mythical threshold to success. It’s a cultural fixture. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear a musician talking about "getting his 10,000 hours" in. This popularization also caused a backlash — documented in David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene and elsewhere — of researchers arguing that genetics and other factors are as important as practice. It’s a value-laden struggle, with precious few facts. In a globalized world where returns concentrate to top performers, research showing the primacy of practice is a hopeful, democratic message. "The scientific formulation of the American dream," as one psychologist told me. The Polgárs embody that hope. Is it a false hope? (...)
Equipped with celebrity and influence, Susan is an excellent recruiter. Many of her students are ranked higher than her; three have topped even Judit. Yet despite their great individual skill, the team members enjoy camaraderie. They visit the gym together. They’ve absorbed the Polgár way.
"Life and chess, they are similar in some points," Andre Diamant, a Brazilian graduate student and the team’s longest-tenured player, said during a break from practice. "Chess players know they need to study. They need to work. They need to improve. And they do that. In life, they have this same thing."
You’re probably nodding your head. Few would dismiss the value of hard work. But if there’s a snag to the Polgár method of success, it might arise from a simple question: Susan and her sisters had similar childhoods. So why was Judit so much better?
Before Laszlo Polgár conceived his children, before he even met his wife, he knew he was going to raise geniuses. He’d started to write a book about it. He saw it moves ahead.
By their first meeting, a dinner and walk around Budapest in 1965, Laszlo told Klara, his future bride, how his kids’ education would go. He had studied the lives of geniuses and divined a pattern: an adult singularly focused on the child’s success. He’d raise the kids outside school, with intense devotion to a subject, though he wasn’t sure what. "Every healthy child," as he liked to say, "is a potential genius." Genetics and talent would be no obstacle. And he’d do it with great love.
Fifty years later in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, I met one of Laszlo’s daughters, Susan Polgár, the first woman ever to earn the title of chess grandmaster. For several years, Susan had led the chess team of Webster University — a small residential college with a large international and online footprint — to consecutive national titles. Their spring break had just begun, and for the next few days, in a brick-and-glass former religious library turned chess hall, the team would drill for a four-team tournament in New York City to defend the title.The students, sporting blue-and-yellow windbreakers and polos, huddled around a checked board of white and black, a queen, rook, and pawn stacked in a row. They had started with the King’s Indian Defense, a well-mapped terrain. Now they were in the midgame. Polgár sat to the side, behind a laptop synced to the game, algorithms whirring. What should be the next move? she asked. "Be active and concrete."
Jocular debate broke out, accents betraying origins: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Hungary. "This is not human," one student said. "It looks magical," said another. Computers have long since outclassed humans in chess; they’re vital in training, but their recommended moves can seem quixotic. "No, it’s very human," Polgár assured them. The students, most of them grandmasters, grew quiet, searching the more than 100,000 positional situations they had ingrained over their lifetimes, exploring possible moves and the future problems they implied — moving down the decision tree. It’s the knot at the heart of chess: Each turn, you must move; when you move, a world of potential vanishes.
"Bishop G4?"
"Bishop G4," Polgár confirmed.
"That’s not a human move!"
"It’s a human move," she said. "It’s actually very pretty." The arrangement is close to a strategy she used before, against her sister. "I beat Judit on that."
The students murmured. This demanded respect. Susan Polgár may be the first woman ever to earn the grandmaster title, but her younger sister is the best female chess player of all time.
There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news.
The girls were not an experiment in any proper form. Laszlo knew that. There was no control. But soon enough, their story outgrew their lives. They became prime examples in a psychological debate that has existed for a century: Does success depend more on the accidents of genetics or the decisions of upbringing? Nature or nurture? In its most recent form, that debate has revolved around the position, advanced by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, that intense practice is the most dominant variable in success. The Polgárs would seem to suggest: Yes.
You may have heard of Ericsson. His work was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 best seller, Outliers, which spawned the notion of 10,000 hours of practice, in particular, as a mythical threshold to success. It’s a cultural fixture. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear a musician talking about "getting his 10,000 hours" in. This popularization also caused a backlash — documented in David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene and elsewhere — of researchers arguing that genetics and other factors are as important as practice. It’s a value-laden struggle, with precious few facts. In a globalized world where returns concentrate to top performers, research showing the primacy of practice is a hopeful, democratic message. "The scientific formulation of the American dream," as one psychologist told me. The Polgárs embody that hope. Is it a false hope? (...)
Equipped with celebrity and influence, Susan is an excellent recruiter. Many of her students are ranked higher than her; three have topped even Judit. Yet despite their great individual skill, the team members enjoy camaraderie. They visit the gym together. They’ve absorbed the Polgár way.
"Life and chess, they are similar in some points," Andre Diamant, a Brazilian graduate student and the team’s longest-tenured player, said during a break from practice. "Chess players know they need to study. They need to work. They need to improve. And they do that. In life, they have this same thing."
You’re probably nodding your head. Few would dismiss the value of hard work. But if there’s a snag to the Polgár method of success, it might arise from a simple question: Susan and her sisters had similar childhoods. So why was Judit so much better?
by Paul Voosen, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Polly Becker
Saturday, November 21, 2015
I Knew I Would Never Drive a Taxi Again
Whenever someone claims that it’s not about the money, you know the chances are that really, it is. And I’d be lying if I said my decision to switch away from driving a taxi and start driving for Lyft had nothing to do with the amount I was earning. But money was only part of my decision—and probably not in the way you might think.
Instead it was one part of a culmination of events that led me to renounce everything I’d said before, to become a traitor, a scab, and to betray many people I’d come to know in the cab business.
I wasn’t the first, and I surely wouldn’t be the last. But that didn’t make me feel any better about it. There were people who I’d come to care about, good people, people that I counted among my genuine friends, who would be deeply disappointed by my treachery. Perhaps it had simply taken me way too long — and even a stint in rehab — to finally accept that I couldn’t spend my life trying to live up to other people’s expectations. And after all, isn’t that what loyalty is really all about?
When I first started driving a taxi, Saturday nights were the most coveted shift of the week. Typically, only medallion owners and drivers with the most seniority got them. Once in a while, if you were lucky or willing to wait around for several hours, then a driver like me — with only a few years under his belt — could get a cab to drive on a Saturday night, and the chance to make $400, or even $500, in a single shift.
Nowadays, however, with Uber and Lyft cars flooding the streets, it’s become the hardest shift to fill. It’s not uncommon for a Saturday night taxi to go one, or even two hours at a stretch without a single fare. What used to be exciting is now something drivers dread: I certainly know that driving around empty in a sea of vacant taxis, while watching people all around me hop into their Uber and Lyft rides, left me feeling desperate and frustrated.
It used to be that late at night, and not just on Saturdays, I could park my cab right outside the door of the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco — a nightclub just off the beaten path. Excited to see an available taxi waiting, people exiting the club would jump right in, one fare after the other, it was my spot. But soon, people leaving the club began waving me off. “No thanks,” they’d say, as they pulled out their iPhones and waited five or 10 minutes, sometimes even in the rain, until a car with one of those ridiculous pink moustaches, or a glowing blue “U” on it would pull up and drive them off into the night.
I didn’t get it.
I’m right here.
I’m ready to go.
All I got was “No thanks,” from person after person after person. I felt dejected. It made no sense to me.
I got a reprieve from my frustrations when I was offered a part-time job in the cab company’s operations office. Back then, the phones were still constantly ringing, and dispatch was busy with customers calling for cabs. The money was good, and the shifts were shorter than on the road. Best of all though, a job in the office usually came with the ability to get a cab — a good cab — immediately, whenever I wanted. My days of waiting around for hours just so that I could go to work were finally over. Or so I thought.
As it turned out, drivers with better or more longstanding connections were getting put out in taxis ahead of me, and I was still being made to wait. Except now the wait was even longer because more and more drivers were fighting for shifts, and for good cabs to drive. Meanwhile, the day drivers were making things even worse by keeping their cabs out longer, attempting to make up for their falling incomes. Every hour, hell, every minute that I waited, I could feel the crisp $20s just slipping through my grasp.
The topic being discussed among the various huddles of angry cabbies waiting there with me was always the same: Uber and Lyft. One driver heard that the mayor’s daughter had invested in Lyft. Another had heard that the mayor had exclaimed, “Uber has finally solved San Francisco’s taxi problem!” I didn’t know if either was true, but it was no secret that Mayor Ed Lee was a vocal supporter of “the sharing economy.” He led visiting politicos on tours through Uber’s headquarters, and had even officially declared July 13th as “Lyft Day” in San Francisco. I couldn’t think of a bigger slap in the face.
Still, as much as I hated Uber and Lyft—and as much as I hated our mayor—I knew that none of them were going away anytime soon. I continued to see Lyft, and particularly Uber, as illegal bullies that were flaunting the law. The whole rideshare premise, that these were just regular folks, “citizen drivers,” who just happened to be going your way and would give you a ride, was complete bullshit. It reminded me of the last line in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” No, call it what you want, but this was deregulation.
Even so, as I looked down my nose at these intruders, and their over-reliance on GPS to find their way through the maze of my city, I found myself feeling conflicted. While they were already doing essentially the same job as me, I knew these rideshare drivers would never have considered actually becoming taxi drivers, nor did they think of themselves in this way. Things just weren’t that simple. There was something else, something other than the money, that kept them coming back out here day after day, and night after night.
So when my fellow cab drivers complained that “Uber and Lyft are stealing my passengers!” I’d reply, “They aren’t stealing anything — we’re giving them away.”
I would argue that every time they refused to accept a credit card, and every time they refused to take passengers to their homes in the Sunset, or the Richmond Districts, they were only creating more Uber customers.
But they just looked at me like there was something growing out of my head.
I began to sense a chasm widening between us. Even while they could feel everything slipping away, they continued behaving as though there would always be more customers, more tourists, more conventioneers, to replace the ones we were losing. In their eyes—in their cab driver’s eyes—the passengers were there for them, and not the other way around. It had always been that way. Why should anything change now?
I remember imagining the person who decided to chop down the last remaining tree on Easter Island, and in doing so cued the collapse of an entire civilization. I became convinced; it had to have been a cab driver.
Instead it was one part of a culmination of events that led me to renounce everything I’d said before, to become a traitor, a scab, and to betray many people I’d come to know in the cab business.
I wasn’t the first, and I surely wouldn’t be the last. But that didn’t make me feel any better about it. There were people who I’d come to care about, good people, people that I counted among my genuine friends, who would be deeply disappointed by my treachery. Perhaps it had simply taken me way too long — and even a stint in rehab — to finally accept that I couldn’t spend my life trying to live up to other people’s expectations. And after all, isn’t that what loyalty is really all about?
When I first started driving a taxi, Saturday nights were the most coveted shift of the week. Typically, only medallion owners and drivers with the most seniority got them. Once in a while, if you were lucky or willing to wait around for several hours, then a driver like me — with only a few years under his belt — could get a cab to drive on a Saturday night, and the chance to make $400, or even $500, in a single shift.Nowadays, however, with Uber and Lyft cars flooding the streets, it’s become the hardest shift to fill. It’s not uncommon for a Saturday night taxi to go one, or even two hours at a stretch without a single fare. What used to be exciting is now something drivers dread: I certainly know that driving around empty in a sea of vacant taxis, while watching people all around me hop into their Uber and Lyft rides, left me feeling desperate and frustrated.
It used to be that late at night, and not just on Saturdays, I could park my cab right outside the door of the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco — a nightclub just off the beaten path. Excited to see an available taxi waiting, people exiting the club would jump right in, one fare after the other, it was my spot. But soon, people leaving the club began waving me off. “No thanks,” they’d say, as they pulled out their iPhones and waited five or 10 minutes, sometimes even in the rain, until a car with one of those ridiculous pink moustaches, or a glowing blue “U” on it would pull up and drive them off into the night.
I didn’t get it.
I’m right here.
I’m ready to go.
All I got was “No thanks,” from person after person after person. I felt dejected. It made no sense to me.
I got a reprieve from my frustrations when I was offered a part-time job in the cab company’s operations office. Back then, the phones were still constantly ringing, and dispatch was busy with customers calling for cabs. The money was good, and the shifts were shorter than on the road. Best of all though, a job in the office usually came with the ability to get a cab — a good cab — immediately, whenever I wanted. My days of waiting around for hours just so that I could go to work were finally over. Or so I thought.
As it turned out, drivers with better or more longstanding connections were getting put out in taxis ahead of me, and I was still being made to wait. Except now the wait was even longer because more and more drivers were fighting for shifts, and for good cabs to drive. Meanwhile, the day drivers were making things even worse by keeping their cabs out longer, attempting to make up for their falling incomes. Every hour, hell, every minute that I waited, I could feel the crisp $20s just slipping through my grasp.
The topic being discussed among the various huddles of angry cabbies waiting there with me was always the same: Uber and Lyft. One driver heard that the mayor’s daughter had invested in Lyft. Another had heard that the mayor had exclaimed, “Uber has finally solved San Francisco’s taxi problem!” I didn’t know if either was true, but it was no secret that Mayor Ed Lee was a vocal supporter of “the sharing economy.” He led visiting politicos on tours through Uber’s headquarters, and had even officially declared July 13th as “Lyft Day” in San Francisco. I couldn’t think of a bigger slap in the face.
Still, as much as I hated Uber and Lyft—and as much as I hated our mayor—I knew that none of them were going away anytime soon. I continued to see Lyft, and particularly Uber, as illegal bullies that were flaunting the law. The whole rideshare premise, that these were just regular folks, “citizen drivers,” who just happened to be going your way and would give you a ride, was complete bullshit. It reminded me of the last line in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” No, call it what you want, but this was deregulation.
Even so, as I looked down my nose at these intruders, and their over-reliance on GPS to find their way through the maze of my city, I found myself feeling conflicted. While they were already doing essentially the same job as me, I knew these rideshare drivers would never have considered actually becoming taxi drivers, nor did they think of themselves in this way. Things just weren’t that simple. There was something else, something other than the money, that kept them coming back out here day after day, and night after night.
So when my fellow cab drivers complained that “Uber and Lyft are stealing my passengers!” I’d reply, “They aren’t stealing anything — we’re giving them away.”
I would argue that every time they refused to accept a credit card, and every time they refused to take passengers to their homes in the Sunset, or the Richmond Districts, they were only creating more Uber customers.
But they just looked at me like there was something growing out of my head.
I began to sense a chasm widening between us. Even while they could feel everything slipping away, they continued behaving as though there would always be more customers, more tourists, more conventioneers, to replace the ones we were losing. In their eyes—in their cab driver’s eyes—the passengers were there for them, and not the other way around. It had always been that way. Why should anything change now?
I remember imagining the person who decided to chop down the last remaining tree on Easter Island, and in doing so cued the collapse of an entire civilization. I became convinced; it had to have been a cab driver.
by Jon Kessler, On Demand | Read more:
Image: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Japan Deco Matchbox Art
Young designers trained in Germany and Europe returned to Japan and produced elegant advertising for large companies such as Shiseido. Local artists and painters were both influenced by these national brands and spurred to produce more original designs. Many of these designs still showed the asymmetry and stylized flat shapes typical of Japanese woodblock prints. Some had amazingly clever use of only red and black ink colors while others used gold and silver metallic inks to add to their palette.
The Japanese matchbox labels are breathtaking in their stark beauty and simplicity: just a hand holding a glass or a dancing figure frozen in time. They were only low end ephemera but their reflection on the culture that produced them speaks of a world long gone.
by Arnon Reisman, A Phillumenist | Read more:
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