Sunday, December 6, 2015
Big Cable’s Sledgehammer Is Coming Down
I want to talk about the sledgehammer of usage-based billing.
I take no pride in saying that I’ve been talking about it for years. The sledgehammer is not something I welcome, and I would have been happy if my fears about it never materialized. After all, the sledgehammer could cost internet users billions of dollars, enrich monopolists, and defeat the spirit — if not the law — of net neutrality. In a big way, the sledgehammer will also beat down our economic growth. This is one evil sledgehammer.
And it sounds so innocent! Usage-based billing. Kind of like paying for what you use, right? Don’t be fooled. The usage-based billing playbook was developed by the mobile wireless industry, which itself is nothing more than a duopoly (Verizon Wireless and AT&T) with a fringe of a few other firms with similar business models. I’ve been predicting for years that usage-based billing will be used as a sledgehammer by other internet access providers like Comcast. Unfortunately, it looks like I’ve been proven right.
The sledgehammer (as employed by the mobile carriers) is a part of a complex scheme designed to hijack the development of a fast, cheap, competitive, unlimited-capacity data communications systems — like the one our country should have.
It begins by announcing a data cap that’s set high enough to affect only a small percentage of current users who routinely hit it. Justify it by saying you’re only targeting the “hogs” who gobble up everybody else’s bandwidth. Say you’ll charge for data usage that exceeds that cap. Then sit back and wait. Eventually, increased usage by more Americans will bring millions into the fold. And presto: without lifting a finger, dominant players can charge more people more per month — on every side of every transaction, content sources as well as consumers — without expanding their facilities, much less upgrading to the communications capacity we need.
Why did this happen on the mobile wireless side? Because no one stood up and complained early enough in the game. And there’s no real competition to prompt better behavior.
That’s bad enough. But the sledgehammer’s use does not stop there. Now the country’s local cable monopolies feel emboldened to open up the mobile carriers’ playbook and set this scheme in motion. They are brash, unapologetic, and fearless — they are feeling their power. Usage-based billing is the sledgehammer they’ve been patiently weighing in their hands for a long time. Forget that they have lots more bandwidth than the mobile carriers —they will employ the caps not because they need to, but because they can get away with it.
What a great deal — for them. The scheme as a whole allows them to make the use of services that compete with their own businesses feel expensive to consumers. Today, these include streaming TV; tomorrow, the squeeze will come in home security, telemedicine, distance education, or anything else that requires modern-day levels of data capacity. It allows these giants to pick and choose among the providers of new businesses that will be allowed to reach consumers effectively. It allows them to charge differently for uses of their network that feel identical to consumers. And it’s unclear whether the FCC has retained the power to do anything about any of this.
The bottom line is that employing the sledgehammer of usage-based billing allows a cascade of practices that will make a mockery of net neutrality — allowing cable to pick the winners and losers among apps and services in the future. And it’s happening now.
Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it would be launching a $15 per month streaming pay TV service — cleverly named Stream TV — that wouldn’t count against the 300GB data plans (that number is the cap) it had already introduced in several states.
To understand why this matters, it’s important to realize that Comcast has intentionally architected the last-mile connections within its network pipe to allow for two different “lanes.” Traffic is either in one lane or the other. A rough way to describe it would be one lane for digital services that Comcast controls or has a relationship with, and the other for high-speed internet access.
I take no pride in saying that I’ve been talking about it for years. The sledgehammer is not something I welcome, and I would have been happy if my fears about it never materialized. After all, the sledgehammer could cost internet users billions of dollars, enrich monopolists, and defeat the spirit — if not the law — of net neutrality. In a big way, the sledgehammer will also beat down our economic growth. This is one evil sledgehammer.
And it sounds so innocent! Usage-based billing. Kind of like paying for what you use, right? Don’t be fooled. The usage-based billing playbook was developed by the mobile wireless industry, which itself is nothing more than a duopoly (Verizon Wireless and AT&T) with a fringe of a few other firms with similar business models. I’ve been predicting for years that usage-based billing will be used as a sledgehammer by other internet access providers like Comcast. Unfortunately, it looks like I’ve been proven right.The sledgehammer (as employed by the mobile carriers) is a part of a complex scheme designed to hijack the development of a fast, cheap, competitive, unlimited-capacity data communications systems — like the one our country should have.
It begins by announcing a data cap that’s set high enough to affect only a small percentage of current users who routinely hit it. Justify it by saying you’re only targeting the “hogs” who gobble up everybody else’s bandwidth. Say you’ll charge for data usage that exceeds that cap. Then sit back and wait. Eventually, increased usage by more Americans will bring millions into the fold. And presto: without lifting a finger, dominant players can charge more people more per month — on every side of every transaction, content sources as well as consumers — without expanding their facilities, much less upgrading to the communications capacity we need.
Why did this happen on the mobile wireless side? Because no one stood up and complained early enough in the game. And there’s no real competition to prompt better behavior.
That’s bad enough. But the sledgehammer’s use does not stop there. Now the country’s local cable monopolies feel emboldened to open up the mobile carriers’ playbook and set this scheme in motion. They are brash, unapologetic, and fearless — they are feeling their power. Usage-based billing is the sledgehammer they’ve been patiently weighing in their hands for a long time. Forget that they have lots more bandwidth than the mobile carriers —they will employ the caps not because they need to, but because they can get away with it.
What a great deal — for them. The scheme as a whole allows them to make the use of services that compete with their own businesses feel expensive to consumers. Today, these include streaming TV; tomorrow, the squeeze will come in home security, telemedicine, distance education, or anything else that requires modern-day levels of data capacity. It allows these giants to pick and choose among the providers of new businesses that will be allowed to reach consumers effectively. It allows them to charge differently for uses of their network that feel identical to consumers. And it’s unclear whether the FCC has retained the power to do anything about any of this.
The bottom line is that employing the sledgehammer of usage-based billing allows a cascade of practices that will make a mockery of net neutrality — allowing cable to pick the winners and losers among apps and services in the future. And it’s happening now.
Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it would be launching a $15 per month streaming pay TV service — cleverly named Stream TV — that wouldn’t count against the 300GB data plans (that number is the cap) it had already introduced in several states.
To understand why this matters, it’s important to realize that Comcast has intentionally architected the last-mile connections within its network pipe to allow for two different “lanes.” Traffic is either in one lane or the other. A rough way to describe it would be one lane for digital services that Comcast controls or has a relationship with, and the other for high-speed internet access.
by Susan Crawford, Backchannel | Read more:
Image: Backchannel
Shocking New Way to Get the Salt Out
As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable. Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy.
Instead, the system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes salty water to one side of the flow and fresh water to the other, allowing easy separation of the two streams. The new approach is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, in a paper by professor of chemical engineering and mathematics Martin Bazant, graduate student Sven Schlumpberger, undergraduate Nancy Lu, and former postdoc Matthew Suss.
This approach is “a fundamentally new and different separation system,” Bazant says. And unlike most other approaches to desalination or water purification, he adds, this one performs a “membraneless separation” of ions and particles.
Membranes in traditional desalination systems, such as those that use reverse osmosis or electrodialysis, are “selective barriers,” Bazant explains: They allow molecules of water to pass through, but block the larger sodium and chlorine atoms of salt. Compared to conventional electrodialysis, “This process looks similar, but it’s fundamentally different,” he says.
In the new process, called shock electrodialysis, water flows through a porous material —in this case, made of tiny glass particles, called a frit — with membranes or electrodes sandwiching the porous material on each side. When an electric current flows through the system, the salty water divides into regions where the salt concentration is either depleted or enriched. When that current is increased to a certain point, it generates a shockwave between these two zones, sharply dividing the streams and allowing the fresh and salty regions to be separated by a simple physical barrier at the center of the flow.
“It generates a very strong gradient,” Bazant says.
Even though the system can use membranes on each side of the porous material, Bazant explains, the water flows across those membranes, not through them. That means they are not as vulnerable to fouling — a buildup of filtered material — or to degradation due to water pressure, as happens with conventional membrane-based desalination, including conventional electrodialysis. “The salt doesn’t have to push through something,” Bazant says. The charged salt particles, or ions, “just move to one side,” he says.
The underlying phenomenon of generating a shockwave of salt concentration was discovered a few years ago by the group of Juan Santiago at Stanford University. But that finding, which involved experiments with a tiny microfluidic device and no flowing water, was not used to remove salt from the water, says Bazant, who is currently on sabbatical at Stanford.
The new system, by contrast, is a continuous process, using water flowing through cheap porous media, that should be relatively easy to scale up for desalination or water purification. “The breakthrough here is the engineering [of a practical system],” Bazant says.
Instead, the system uses an electrically driven shockwave within a stream of flowing water, which pushes salty water to one side of the flow and fresh water to the other, allowing easy separation of the two streams. The new approach is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, in a paper by professor of chemical engineering and mathematics Martin Bazant, graduate student Sven Schlumpberger, undergraduate Nancy Lu, and former postdoc Matthew Suss.This approach is “a fundamentally new and different separation system,” Bazant says. And unlike most other approaches to desalination or water purification, he adds, this one performs a “membraneless separation” of ions and particles.
Membranes in traditional desalination systems, such as those that use reverse osmosis or electrodialysis, are “selective barriers,” Bazant explains: They allow molecules of water to pass through, but block the larger sodium and chlorine atoms of salt. Compared to conventional electrodialysis, “This process looks similar, but it’s fundamentally different,” he says.
In the new process, called shock electrodialysis, water flows through a porous material —in this case, made of tiny glass particles, called a frit — with membranes or electrodes sandwiching the porous material on each side. When an electric current flows through the system, the salty water divides into regions where the salt concentration is either depleted or enriched. When that current is increased to a certain point, it generates a shockwave between these two zones, sharply dividing the streams and allowing the fresh and salty regions to be separated by a simple physical barrier at the center of the flow.
“It generates a very strong gradient,” Bazant says.
Even though the system can use membranes on each side of the porous material, Bazant explains, the water flows across those membranes, not through them. That means they are not as vulnerable to fouling — a buildup of filtered material — or to degradation due to water pressure, as happens with conventional membrane-based desalination, including conventional electrodialysis. “The salt doesn’t have to push through something,” Bazant says. The charged salt particles, or ions, “just move to one side,” he says.
The underlying phenomenon of generating a shockwave of salt concentration was discovered a few years ago by the group of Juan Santiago at Stanford University. But that finding, which involved experiments with a tiny microfluidic device and no flowing water, was not used to remove salt from the water, says Bazant, who is currently on sabbatical at Stanford.
The new system, by contrast, is a continuous process, using water flowing through cheap porous media, that should be relatively easy to scale up for desalination or water purification. “The breakthrough here is the engineering [of a practical system],” Bazant says.
by David L. Chandler, MIT News | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
Helen Macdonald’s ‘H Is for Hawk’
If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.
The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with.
Although “animal as emotional healer” is a familiar motif, Macdonald’s journey clears its own path — messy, muddy and raw. Early on, she drives to Scotland from her home in Cambridge to pick up a captive-bred, 10-week-old, Czech-Finnish-German goshawk she’s seen online. At the first glimpse of her bird, Macdonald’s “heart jumps sideways.” And so does the reader’s, for here is a creature worth writing about: “A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”
Back home, the bird fills “the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Fatherless mourner and baby hawk become acquainted. Macdonald grew up obsessed with birds of prey and later trained them, so she knows what to do and has all the necessary equipment: the tiny leather hood, as beautifully made, an observer says, as a Prada shoe; the jesses, or tethering straps; bells; and transmitters. The freezer is a morgue for dead chicks used to train and feed the hawk. Except for using devices that require a power source, Macdonald handles her bird much as a 15th-century falconer would.
The bird becomes Mabel, derived “from amabilis, meaning lovable, or dear,” and she learns to fly to Macdonald’s fist at the sound of a whistle: “There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove.”
There are tearful misunderstandings and glorious steps forward. But Macdonald’s progress is not as steady as her hawk’s. Training proceeds, but not without an existential hitch. “While the steps were familiar,” Macdonald writes, “the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.”
Looking back at her mad mourning, she realizes a painful transformation is taking place: “What the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.”
Macdonald feels safe in the dark house, barricaded from the outside world, but knows she must go out for Mabel’s sake — to the woods, where the goshawk’s “long, barred tail feathers and short, broad wings” are perfectly suited for the speed and hairpin-turning ability necessary for aerial slalom in dense forest.
We get to know Mabel as her trainer does. Macdonald stays so close, and the house is so quiet when they are together that she can hear the bird blinking. The hawk’s breath is like “pepper and musk and burned stone.” Her preening sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. Every mood can be read: Feathers held in tight is fear; when Mabel fluffs herself and shakes her feathers into place, she is content. We come to love the bird’s “shaggy trousers and waggy tail,” her “café au lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops,” and even her formidable weapons — the “curved black beak” and the black talons.
Soon enough, Macdonald doesn’t even consciously inventory the body language of her bird; instead she seems to just feel what Mabel feels. On a hunch, Macdonald even discovers a little bit of whimsy in this ultra-serious predator. She rolls up paper into a ball and hands it to Mabel. The hawk plays with it like a toy, eyes narrowed in “bird laughter.”
That’s not our image of hawks at all. And it’s an important point to Macdonald, who worries, rightly, that generations of preconceived notions rob us of truly seeing some creatures as they really are. “Wild things are made from human histories,” she writes.
by Vicki Constantine Croke, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with.
Although “animal as emotional healer” is a familiar motif, Macdonald’s journey clears its own path — messy, muddy and raw. Early on, she drives to Scotland from her home in Cambridge to pick up a captive-bred, 10-week-old, Czech-Finnish-German goshawk she’s seen online. At the first glimpse of her bird, Macdonald’s “heart jumps sideways.” And so does the reader’s, for here is a creature worth writing about: “A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”Back home, the bird fills “the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Fatherless mourner and baby hawk become acquainted. Macdonald grew up obsessed with birds of prey and later trained them, so she knows what to do and has all the necessary equipment: the tiny leather hood, as beautifully made, an observer says, as a Prada shoe; the jesses, or tethering straps; bells; and transmitters. The freezer is a morgue for dead chicks used to train and feed the hawk. Except for using devices that require a power source, Macdonald handles her bird much as a 15th-century falconer would.
The bird becomes Mabel, derived “from amabilis, meaning lovable, or dear,” and she learns to fly to Macdonald’s fist at the sound of a whistle: “There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove.”
There are tearful misunderstandings and glorious steps forward. But Macdonald’s progress is not as steady as her hawk’s. Training proceeds, but not without an existential hitch. “While the steps were familiar,” Macdonald writes, “the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.”
Looking back at her mad mourning, she realizes a painful transformation is taking place: “What the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.”
Macdonald feels safe in the dark house, barricaded from the outside world, but knows she must go out for Mabel’s sake — to the woods, where the goshawk’s “long, barred tail feathers and short, broad wings” are perfectly suited for the speed and hairpin-turning ability necessary for aerial slalom in dense forest.
We get to know Mabel as her trainer does. Macdonald stays so close, and the house is so quiet when they are together that she can hear the bird blinking. The hawk’s breath is like “pepper and musk and burned stone.” Her preening sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. Every mood can be read: Feathers held in tight is fear; when Mabel fluffs herself and shakes her feathers into place, she is content. We come to love the bird’s “shaggy trousers and waggy tail,” her “café au lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops,” and even her formidable weapons — the “curved black beak” and the black talons.
Soon enough, Macdonald doesn’t even consciously inventory the body language of her bird; instead she seems to just feel what Mabel feels. On a hunch, Macdonald even discovers a little bit of whimsy in this ultra-serious predator. She rolls up paper into a ball and hands it to Mabel. The hawk plays with it like a toy, eyes narrowed in “bird laughter.”
That’s not our image of hawks at all. And it’s an important point to Macdonald, who worries, rightly, that generations of preconceived notions rob us of truly seeing some creatures as they really are. “Wild things are made from human histories,” she writes.
by Vicki Constantine Croke, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
What Passing a Key CO2 Mark Means to Climate Scientists
This is written for anyone who is climate-concerned, but specifically for our DC readers in the policy-making community. This is the issue at which cautious incrementalism collides with urgency. If a meteor were headed for earth and due to crash in a year between 2020 and 2040, I doubt our policymakers would be talking about how long to delay before acting.
The climate emergency is that meteor. 2020 is five years away. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not feeling lucky. Neither are these folks. [via:]
This week is a big one for our world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory and it’s distinctly possible they won’t be back below that level again in our lifetimes.
Humans have burned enough fossil fuels to drive atmospheric CO2 to levels that world hasn’t seen in at least 400,000 years. That’s driven up temperatures, melted ice and caused oceans to acidify. Some extreme weather events around the world have become more likely and stronger because of it, and some will likely only get worse as the planet continues to warm.
Because CO2 sits in the atmosphere long after it’s burned, that means we’ve likely lived our last week in a sub-400 ppm world. It also means that the reshaping of our planet will continue for decades and centuries to come, even if climate talks in Paris in two weeks are successful.
To get some perspective on what this means for the world, we asked leading climate scientists for their insight on passing this milestone as well as what it means for their particular areas of research. Below are their answers, some edited lightly for clarity or length.
by Andrea Thompson and Brian Kahn, Climate Central | Read more:
Image: Climate Central
The climate emergency is that meteor. 2020 is five years away. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not feeling lucky. Neither are these folks. [via:]
Humans have burned enough fossil fuels to drive atmospheric CO2 to levels that world hasn’t seen in at least 400,000 years. That’s driven up temperatures, melted ice and caused oceans to acidify. Some extreme weather events around the world have become more likely and stronger because of it, and some will likely only get worse as the planet continues to warm.
Because CO2 sits in the atmosphere long after it’s burned, that means we’ve likely lived our last week in a sub-400 ppm world. It also means that the reshaping of our planet will continue for decades and centuries to come, even if climate talks in Paris in two weeks are successful.
To get some perspective on what this means for the world, we asked leading climate scientists for their insight on passing this milestone as well as what it means for their particular areas of research. Below are their answers, some edited lightly for clarity or length.
by Andrea Thompson and Brian Kahn, Climate Central | Read more:
Image: Climate Central
How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself
[ed. See also: How to look at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative]
Mark Zuckerberg did not donate $45 billion to charity. You may have heard that, but that was wrong.
Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle.
Sorry for the slightly less sexy headline.
Mr. Zuckerberg is a co-founder of Facebook and a youthful megabillionaire. In announcing the birth of his daughter, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, declared they would donate 99 percent of their worth, the vast majority of which is tied up in Facebook stock valued at $45 billion today.
In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.
An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That’s what America is all about. But as a society, we don’t generally call these types of activities “charity.”
In covering the event, many commentators praised the size and percentage of the gift and pointed out that Mr. Zuckerberg is relatively young to be planning to give his wealth away. “Mark Zuckerberg Philanthropy Pledge Sets New Giving Standard,” Bloomberg glowed. The New York Times ran an article on the front page. Few news outlets initially considered the tax implications of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan. A Wall Street Journal article didn’t mention taxes at all.
Nor did they grapple with the societal implications of the would-be donations.
So what are the tax implications? They are quite generous to Mr. Zuckerberg. I asked Victor Fleischer, a law professor and tax specialist at the University of San Diego School of Law, as well as a contributor to DealBook. He explained that if the L.L.C. sold stock, Mr. Zuckerberg would pay a hefty capital gains tax, particularly if Facebook stock kept climbing.
If the L.L.C. donated to a charity, he would get a deduction just like anyone else. That’s a nice little bonus. But the L.L.C. probably won’t do that because it can do better. The savvier move, Professor Fleischer explained, would be to have the L.L.C. donate the appreciated shares to charity, which would generate a deduction at fair market value of the stock without triggering any tax.
Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t create these tax laws and cannot be criticized for minimizing his tax bills. If he had created a foundation, he would have accrued similar tax benefits. But what this means is that he amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it. Anytime a superwealthy plutocrat makes a charitable donation, the public ought to be reminded that this is how our tax system works. The superwealthy buy great public relations and adulation for donations that minimize their taxes.
Here’s what happened instead: Mr. Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle.Sorry for the slightly less sexy headline.
Mr. Zuckerberg is a co-founder of Facebook and a youthful megabillionaire. In announcing the birth of his daughter, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, declared they would donate 99 percent of their worth, the vast majority of which is tied up in Facebook stock valued at $45 billion today.
In doing so, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Mr. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.
An L.L.C. can invest in for-profit companies (perhaps these will be characterized as societally responsible companies, but lots of companies claim the mantle of societal responsibility). An L.L.C. can make political donations. It can lobby for changes in the law. He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money. That’s what America is all about. But as a society, we don’t generally call these types of activities “charity.”
In covering the event, many commentators praised the size and percentage of the gift and pointed out that Mr. Zuckerberg is relatively young to be planning to give his wealth away. “Mark Zuckerberg Philanthropy Pledge Sets New Giving Standard,” Bloomberg glowed. The New York Times ran an article on the front page. Few news outlets initially considered the tax implications of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan. A Wall Street Journal article didn’t mention taxes at all.
Nor did they grapple with the societal implications of the would-be donations.
So what are the tax implications? They are quite generous to Mr. Zuckerberg. I asked Victor Fleischer, a law professor and tax specialist at the University of San Diego School of Law, as well as a contributor to DealBook. He explained that if the L.L.C. sold stock, Mr. Zuckerberg would pay a hefty capital gains tax, particularly if Facebook stock kept climbing.
If the L.L.C. donated to a charity, he would get a deduction just like anyone else. That’s a nice little bonus. But the L.L.C. probably won’t do that because it can do better. The savvier move, Professor Fleischer explained, would be to have the L.L.C. donate the appreciated shares to charity, which would generate a deduction at fair market value of the stock without triggering any tax.
Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t create these tax laws and cannot be criticized for minimizing his tax bills. If he had created a foundation, he would have accrued similar tax benefits. But what this means is that he amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it. Anytime a superwealthy plutocrat makes a charitable donation, the public ought to be reminded that this is how our tax system works. The superwealthy buy great public relations and adulation for donations that minimize their taxes.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
The Bonds of Catastrophe
Put your paranoia aside (at least temporarily). It is quite possible that cat bonds are basically a good thing, creating mechanisms as they do for hedging against the tremendously disruptive costs of low-probability, high-negative-impact natural and/or social events. It is also possible, of course, that they are simply another sophisticated exercise in plutocratic self-dealing. We will bracket that thorny problem for now, and focus here on conveying (1) a general understanding of how these instruments work, and (2) a specific appreciation of the way that they constitute perhaps the most elaborate and powerful social technology currently available for articulating just what we mean when we say “catastrophe.”
* * *
So what’s a cat bond? A cat bond is, first of all, a bond—meaning a kind of debt arrangement. The holder of any bond has conveyed a sum of money to the bond issuer for a fixed term (say, a year or two) in return for the promise of some sort of interest payment: You hold my hundred thousand dollars this year, but you promise that at the end of the year you are going to give me back, not a hundred thousand dollars, but a hundred and ten thousand dollars—netting me a 10% return on my investment. With an ordinary high-quality corporate or municipal bond, my odds of getting my principal back are pretty close to 100%, and my rate of return (given the near-negligible risk of loss) is generally pretty low. US Treasury bonds are about as minimal-risk an investment as the earth seems to afford at present (since they are backed by the American government, which, despite its problems, looks unlikely to evaporate anytime soon), and so whatever they are paying in a given year basically sets the baseline for investors everywhere: it’s a small rate of return but, for all intents and purposes, it’s guaranteed. By contrast, if I am buying a “junk” bond—issued by some business guys with wild eyes and big ideas—I am promised considerably bigger interest payments than I would get on a “T-bill” (a short-term US Treasury bond), but I have to weigh the non-zero probability of a default on the part of my debtors, who may in fact not only not pay me my nice premium, but could even lose some or all of my principal (though this is pretty rare in normal financial climates). That, in a nutshell, is the bond market: lend money to different folks, who have to promise to pay you more or less for the privilege of the loan, depending on how shady they look.
Catastrophe bonds have this basic structure. The holder of such a bond has indeed conveyed a sum of money to the bond issuer for a fixed term, in return for the promise of a downstream percentage premium. What makes a cat bond a cat bond, however, is that—unlike most ordinary bonds, which are issued by people/governments/institutions needing ready-to-hand money to build a building or a bridge or expand a business—a cat bond has been issued by somebody who is worried about some kind of possible disaster, somebody who is looking for protection from the financial effects of a catastrophe.
Think like a gigantic insurance corporation for a moment. If you’ve been writing property insurance for a large number of homeowners in southern Florida, you get pretty nervous every hurricane season. Yes, you’ve socked away everybody’s premiums for years and years, so you are sitting on a mountain of cash, but you still have to reckon with the fear that, in your competitive drive to underbid the other insurance companies writing policies in the Sunshine State, you may have left yourself inadequately capitalized in the event that a massive storm flattens the region. You would do well to hedge against that whopper, by basically buying some insurance yourself. And indeed, the “reinsurance” market—insurance for insurers—has been around for a long time, and amounts to a circa $500 billion business, whereby the financial risks of different large-scale insurable events are carved up and spread out among a sizable (but relatively cozy) community of mutually re-insuring insurers. This is all good old-fashioned insurance. Meaning, basically, contracts with the following form: “If you lose this under these conditions, I will pay you back for it.” It’s a big deal to take on that sort of obligation. You had better be sure you can do what you say you are going to do—or else you go bankrupt (and your clients get screwed).
by D. Graham Burnett, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: MultiCat Mexico Ltd
Banks Are About to Have an 'Uber Moment'
Antony Jenkins, the former CEO of Barclays, has a nightmare vision for the future of big banks.
In a speech in London this week he said: "The incumbents risk becoming merely capital-providing utilities that operate in a highly regulated, less profitable environment, a situation unlikely to be tolerated by shareholders."
Jenkins says a series of Uber-style disruptions in the industry could shrink headcount at traditional big banks by as much as 50%, while profitability in some areas could collapse by over 60% — huge predictions from a man who, until recently, ran one of Britain's biggest banks.
He adds: "In my view only a few [incumbent banks] will have the courage and decisiveness to win in this new field."
The problem? Financial technology, better known as fintech.
Jenkins, who was ousted as Barclays CEO in July, says a new wave of tech-savvy startups that can do things better, faster, and cheaper than the big banks will disrupt their traditional businesses like lending, payments, and wealth management.
He isn't alone in thinking this. A survey by software firm Temenos released on Thursday found 27% of senior bankers named tech companies as the biggest threats to their businesses.
In fact, we're already seeing it happen with startups like Lending Club and Funding Circle(lending), Square (payments), Nutmeg (wealth management), and TransferWise(international payments) — all of whom Jenkins name checks in his speech at Chatham House.
Jenkins recently visited Silicon Valley to hobnob with fintech types out there and it's convinced him that financial services are about to be disrupted in the same way publishing, telecoms, and the music industry have been.
He says:
Jenkins also quoted research from consultancy McKinsey that technology will wipe out two-thirds of profits from things like retail lending, car loans, and credit cards.
So why are banks suddenly facing a swarm of new tech businesses eating away at their businesses? There are two big factors.
In a speech in London this week he said: "The incumbents risk becoming merely capital-providing utilities that operate in a highly regulated, less profitable environment, a situation unlikely to be tolerated by shareholders."
Jenkins says a series of Uber-style disruptions in the industry could shrink headcount at traditional big banks by as much as 50%, while profitability in some areas could collapse by over 60% — huge predictions from a man who, until recently, ran one of Britain's biggest banks.He adds: "In my view only a few [incumbent banks] will have the courage and decisiveness to win in this new field."
The problem? Financial technology, better known as fintech.
Jenkins, who was ousted as Barclays CEO in July, says a new wave of tech-savvy startups that can do things better, faster, and cheaper than the big banks will disrupt their traditional businesses like lending, payments, and wealth management.
He isn't alone in thinking this. A survey by software firm Temenos released on Thursday found 27% of senior bankers named tech companies as the biggest threats to their businesses.
In fact, we're already seeing it happen with startups like Lending Club and Funding Circle(lending), Square (payments), Nutmeg (wealth management), and TransferWise(international payments) — all of whom Jenkins name checks in his speech at Chatham House.
Jenkins recently visited Silicon Valley to hobnob with fintech types out there and it's convinced him that financial services are about to be disrupted in the same way publishing, telecoms, and the music industry have been.
He says:
We will see massive pressure on incumbent banks, which will struggle to implement new technologies at the same pace as their new rivals. That will make it increasingly challenging for them to deliver the returns and profitability that their shareholders demand.
Ultimately, those forces will compel large banks to significantly automate their business. I predict that the number of branches and people employed in the financial services sector may decline by as much as 50% over the next 10 years, and even in a less harsh scenario I expect a decline of at least 20%.A halving of headcount and branches over 10 years! That is a huge decline. The prediction coincides with reports that Lloyds is poised to axe 1,000 jobs as part of branch closures and increased automation.
Jenkins also quoted research from consultancy McKinsey that technology will wipe out two-thirds of profits from things like retail lending, car loans, and credit cards.
So why are banks suddenly facing a swarm of new tech businesses eating away at their businesses? There are two big factors.
by Oscar Williams-Grut, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: via:
The Third Son
Back in the house, the father sat at the dinner table, before his wife’s cold feet. He smoked; whispered to himself; watched the lonely life of a little gray bird in its cage; cried from time to time, then grew calm again; wound up his pocket watch; observed the weather in the window that changed from wet, tired snow to rain, to chilly autumnal sun; and waited for his sons.
The next day, the eldest arrived by airplane; the five others took two more days to reach home.
The third son brought with him a daughter, a girl of six, who had never seen her grandfather before.
The old woman had been dead for three days, yet her neat body, emaciated by a long illness, didn’t smell of death. After giving her sons a bountiful, healthy life, she had retained for herself only a tiny frugal frame, which she had sustained—even in its most pitiful form—for as long as she could, in order to love her sons and be proud of them, until she died.
Six tall men, aged between twenty and forty, gathered silently around the coffin. The father, the seventh, and smaller and weaker than even his youngest son, held the girl, who kept her eyes shut from fear of the strange dead woman whose white eyes seemed to watch her from beneath closed lids.
The sons shed infrequent tears, and strained their faces to keep their grief quiet. The father didn’t cry; he’d had his cry earlier, and now watched his progeny with inappropriate joy. Two of the sons had joined the navy and now commanded their own ships. Another worked in a Moscow theater. His third son, who had brought the daughter, was a physicist and a Communist. The youngest was studying to be an agriculturist, and the eldest headed a division at an airplane plant and wore a medal for excellent work. All seven men stood around the dead mother mourning her silently; the sons were hiding their despair, their memories of childhood, of the extinguished happiness of love that had constantly and generously renewed itself in their mother’s heart and that had always, across a thousand miles, found them and made them stronger and bolder. And now she had turned into a corpse. She couldn’t love anyone anymore, but just lay there like an indifferent old stranger.
Each son felt at that moment scared and alone, as though somewhere in a dark meadow, in the window of an old house, a light used to burn, and it illuminated the surrounding night, the flying bugs, the dark blue grass, the clouds of gnats in the air—the entire universe of their childhood—and the doors of that house always remained open for those who had left it, even if none of them chose to return. And now that light was extinguished, and the world it illuminated turned instantly from reality into a memory.
by Andrei Platonov, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Marcellus Hall
Library as Infrastructure
[ed. Fascinating (and sometimes frustrating) essay on the function and future of libraries.]
Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs. He was the quintessential Industrial Age entrepreneur, but unlike the Carnegies and Rockefellers, with their industries of heavy materiality and heavy labor, Dewey sold ideas. His ambition revealed itself early: in 1876, shortly after graduating from Amherst College, he copyrighted his library classification scheme. That same year, he helped found the American Library Association, served as founding editor of Library Journal, and launched the American Metric Bureau, which campaigned for adoption of the metric system. He was 24 years old. He had already established the Library Bureau, a company that sold (and helped standardize) library supplies, furniture, media display and storage devices, and equipment for managing the circulation of collection materials. Its catalog (which would later include another Dewey invention, the hanging vertical file) represented the library as a “machine” of uplift and enlightenment that enabled proto-Taylorist approaches to public education and the provision of social services. As chief librarian at Columbia College, Dewey established the first library school — called, notably, the School of Library Economy — whose first class was 85% female; then he brought the school to Albany, where he directed the New York State Library. In his spare time, he founded the Lake Placid Club and helped win the bid for the 1932 Winter Olympics.
Dewey was thus simultaneously in the furniture business, the office-supply business, the consulting business, the publishing business, the education business, the human resources business, and what we might today call the “knowledge solutions” business. Not only did he recognize the potential for monetizing and cross-promoting his work across these fields; he also saw that each field would be the better for it. His career (which was not without its significant controversies) embodied a belief that classification systems and labeling standards and furniture designs and people work best when they work towards the same end — in other words, that intellectual and material systems and labor practices are mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing.
Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?
As Zadie Smith argued beautifully in the New York Review of Books, we risk losing the library’s role as a “different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, offered an equally eloquent plea for the library as a space of exception:
by Shannon Mattern, Places | Read more:
Images: Forgemind Archimedia; Pedro Szekely; Thomas Guignard
Dewey was thus simultaneously in the furniture business, the office-supply business, the consulting business, the publishing business, the education business, the human resources business, and what we might today call the “knowledge solutions” business. Not only did he recognize the potential for monetizing and cross-promoting his work across these fields; he also saw that each field would be the better for it. His career (which was not without its significant controversies) embodied a belief that classification systems and labeling standards and furniture designs and people work best when they work towards the same end — in other words, that intellectual and material systems and labor practices are mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing.
Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?
Library as Platform
For millennia libraries have acquired resources, organized them, preserved them and made them accessible (or not) to patrons. But the forms of those resources have changed — from scrolls and codices; to LPs and LaserDiscs; to e-books, electronic databases and open data sets. Libraries have had at least to comprehend, if not become a key node within, evolving systems of media production and distribution. Consider the medieval scriptoria where manuscripts were produced; the evolution of the publishing industry and book trade after Gutenberg; the rise of information technology and its webs of wires, protocols and regulations. At every stage, the contexts — spatial, political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so they are continuously reinventing themselves and the means by which they provide those vital information services.
Libraries have also assumed a host of ever-changing social and symbolic functions. They have been expected to symbolize the eminence of a ruler or state, to integrally link “knowledge” and “power” — and, more recently, to serve as “community centers,” “public squares” or “think tanks.” Even those seemingly modern metaphors have deep histories. The ancient Library of Alexandria was a prototypical think tank, and the early Carnegie buildings of the 1880s were community centers with swimming pools and public baths, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, even rifle ranges, as well as book stacks. As the Carnegie funding program expanded internationally — to more than 2,500 libraries worldwide — secretary James Bertram standardized the design in his 1911 pamphlet “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” which offered grantees a choice of six models, believed to be the work of architect Edward Tilton. Notably, they all included a lecture room.
In short, the library has always been a place where informational and social infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally) supports that program.
Now we are seeing the rise of a new metaphor: the library as “platform” — a buzzy word that refers to a base upon which developers create new applications, technologies and processes. In an influential 2012 article in Library Journal, David Weinberger proposed that we think of libraries as “open platforms” — not only for the creation of software, but also for the development of knowledge and community. Weinberger argued that libraries should open up their entire collections, all their metadata, and any technologies they’ve created, and allow anyone to build new products and services on top of that foundation. The platform model, he wrote, “focuses our attention away from the provisioning of resources to the foment” — the “messy, rich networks of people and ideas” — that “those resources engender.” Thus the ancient Library of Alexandria, part of a larger museum with botanical gardens, laboratories, living quarters and dining halls, was a platform not only for the translation and copying of myriad texts and the compilation of a magnificent collection, but also for the launch of works by Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes and their peers.
Yet the platform metaphor has limitations. For one thing, it smacks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial epistemology, which prioritizes “monetizable” “knowledge solutions.” Further, its association with new media tends to bracket out the similarly generative capacities of low-tech, and even non-technical, library resources. One key misperception of those who proclaim the library’s obsolescence is that its function as a knowledge institution can be reduced to its technical services and information offerings. Knowledge is never solely a product of technology and the information it delivers.
Another problem with the platform model is the image it evokes: a flat, two-dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to do stuff with. The platform doesn’t have any implied depth, so we’re not inclined to look underneath or behind it, or to question its structure. Weinberger encourages us to “think of the library not as a portal we go through on occasion but as infrastructure that is as ubiquitous and persistent as the streets and sidewalks of a town.” It’s like a “canopy,” he says — or like a “cloud.” But these metaphors are more poetic than critical; they obfuscate all the wires, pulleys, lights and scaffolding that you inevitably find underneath and above that stage — and the casting, staging and direction that determine what happens on the stage, and that allow it to function as a stage. Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu would call “structuring structures” that support Weinberger’s “messy, rich networks of people and ideas.”
It can be instructive for our libraries’ publics — and critical for our libraries’ leaders — to assess those structuring structures. In this age of e-books, smartphones, firewalls, proprietary media platforms and digital rights management; of atrophying mega-bookstores and resurgent independent bookshops and a metastasizing Amazon; of Google Books and Google Search and Google Glass; of economic disparity and the continuing privatization of public space and services — which is simultaneously an age of democratized media production and vibrant DIY and activist cultures — libraries play a critical role as mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub. Thus we need to understand how our libraries function as, and as part of, infrastructural ecologies — as sites where spatial, technological, intellectual and social infrastructures shape and inform one another. And we must consider how those infrastructures can embody the epistemological, political, economic and cultural values that we want to define our communities. (...)
For millennia libraries have acquired resources, organized them, preserved them and made them accessible (or not) to patrons. But the forms of those resources have changed — from scrolls and codices; to LPs and LaserDiscs; to e-books, electronic databases and open data sets. Libraries have had at least to comprehend, if not become a key node within, evolving systems of media production and distribution. Consider the medieval scriptoria where manuscripts were produced; the evolution of the publishing industry and book trade after Gutenberg; the rise of information technology and its webs of wires, protocols and regulations. At every stage, the contexts — spatial, political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so they are continuously reinventing themselves and the means by which they provide those vital information services.
Libraries have also assumed a host of ever-changing social and symbolic functions. They have been expected to symbolize the eminence of a ruler or state, to integrally link “knowledge” and “power” — and, more recently, to serve as “community centers,” “public squares” or “think tanks.” Even those seemingly modern metaphors have deep histories. The ancient Library of Alexandria was a prototypical think tank, and the early Carnegie buildings of the 1880s were community centers with swimming pools and public baths, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, even rifle ranges, as well as book stacks. As the Carnegie funding program expanded internationally — to more than 2,500 libraries worldwide — secretary James Bertram standardized the design in his 1911 pamphlet “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” which offered grantees a choice of six models, believed to be the work of architect Edward Tilton. Notably, they all included a lecture room.In short, the library has always been a place where informational and social infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally) supports that program.
Now we are seeing the rise of a new metaphor: the library as “platform” — a buzzy word that refers to a base upon which developers create new applications, technologies and processes. In an influential 2012 article in Library Journal, David Weinberger proposed that we think of libraries as “open platforms” — not only for the creation of software, but also for the development of knowledge and community. Weinberger argued that libraries should open up their entire collections, all their metadata, and any technologies they’ve created, and allow anyone to build new products and services on top of that foundation. The platform model, he wrote, “focuses our attention away from the provisioning of resources to the foment” — the “messy, rich networks of people and ideas” — that “those resources engender.” Thus the ancient Library of Alexandria, part of a larger museum with botanical gardens, laboratories, living quarters and dining halls, was a platform not only for the translation and copying of myriad texts and the compilation of a magnificent collection, but also for the launch of works by Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes and their peers.
Yet the platform metaphor has limitations. For one thing, it smacks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial epistemology, which prioritizes “monetizable” “knowledge solutions.” Further, its association with new media tends to bracket out the similarly generative capacities of low-tech, and even non-technical, library resources. One key misperception of those who proclaim the library’s obsolescence is that its function as a knowledge institution can be reduced to its technical services and information offerings. Knowledge is never solely a product of technology and the information it delivers.
Another problem with the platform model is the image it evokes: a flat, two-dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to do stuff with. The platform doesn’t have any implied depth, so we’re not inclined to look underneath or behind it, or to question its structure. Weinberger encourages us to “think of the library not as a portal we go through on occasion but as infrastructure that is as ubiquitous and persistent as the streets and sidewalks of a town.” It’s like a “canopy,” he says — or like a “cloud.” But these metaphors are more poetic than critical; they obfuscate all the wires, pulleys, lights and scaffolding that you inevitably find underneath and above that stage — and the casting, staging and direction that determine what happens on the stage, and that allow it to function as a stage. Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu would call “structuring structures” that support Weinberger’s “messy, rich networks of people and ideas.”It can be instructive for our libraries’ publics — and critical for our libraries’ leaders — to assess those structuring structures. In this age of e-books, smartphones, firewalls, proprietary media platforms and digital rights management; of atrophying mega-bookstores and resurgent independent bookshops and a metastasizing Amazon; of Google Books and Google Search and Google Glass; of economic disparity and the continuing privatization of public space and services — which is simultaneously an age of democratized media production and vibrant DIY and activist cultures — libraries play a critical role as mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub. Thus we need to understand how our libraries function as, and as part of, infrastructural ecologies — as sites where spatial, technological, intellectual and social infrastructures shape and inform one another. And we must consider how those infrastructures can embody the epistemological, political, economic and cultural values that we want to define our communities. (...)
As Zadie Smith argued beautifully in the New York Review of Books, we risk losing the library’s role as a “different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, offered an equally eloquent plea for the library as a space of exception:
Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity. If anything, they should slow people down and seduce them with the unexpected, the irrelevant, the odd and the unexplainable. Productivity is a destructive way to justify the individual’s value in a system that is naturally communal, not an individualistic or entrepreneurial zero-sum game to be won by the most industrious.Libraries, she argued, “will always be at a disadvantage” to Google and Amazon because they value privacy; they refuse to exploit users’ private data to improve the search experience. Yet libraries’ failure to compete in efficiency is what affords them the opportunity to offer a “different kind of social reality.” I’d venture that there is room for entrepreneurial learning in the library, but there also has to be room for that alternate reality where knowledge needn’t have monetary value, where learning isn’t driven by a profit motive. We can accommodate both spaces for entrepreneurship and spaces of exception, provided the institution has a strong epistemic framing that encompasses both. This means that the library needs to know how to read itself as a social-technical-intellectual infrastructure.
by Shannon Mattern, Places | Read more:
Images: Forgemind Archimedia; Pedro Szekely; Thomas Guignard
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Dark Clouds Over the Internet
The Internet is routinely described as borderless, and that is often how it feels. Tweet a photo or post a comment, and it is instantly viewable in nearly every country in the world. But a global Internet unbounded by territorial limits is pure fantasy.
Down where the cables lie and the servers spin, territory still matters.
Take user data. While 90 percent of the Internet’s users are outside the United States, the web is dominated by American firms. As a result, a great deal of non-American data is held on American servers. This was tolerable when trust in the United States was high. But after Edward J. Snowden peeled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance efforts, that trust withered.
In response, other nations are increasingly exercising their territorial control over the Internet, often in ways that mimic America’s worst practices.
Earlier this month, the British Home Secretary introduced a bill known as the Snoopers’ Charter that would broadly expand the government’s ability to collect user data — from authorizing the police to hack into phones and computers, to mandating that Internet companies decrypt encrypted communications. The bill goes too far and privacy advocates are right to oppose it.
But governments do have legitimate reasons to seek user data beyond their territorial reach, and privacy advocates ignore that need at their peril.
Ask a police officer anywhere outside of the United States and he’ll tell you that evidence for routine crimes — murder, theft, burglary — is very often stored in the cloud, typically in another jurisdiction. Last year alone, British law enforcement agents made nearly 54,000 requests for data from just five American firms: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.
These requests often go nowhere because America’s 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act only allows technology firms to release American-held data in response to orders from an American judge. So if a British cop is investigating a murder in London, and he has good reason to believe that Google or Facebook has evidence about the crime, he must satisfy an American judge using an American constitutional standard to obtain the evidence. This cross-border process is notoriously slow. Requests take an average of 10 months — an eon in a criminal investigation — and many languish for years.
Exasperation with this process was a key motivation behind the Snoopers’ Charter, and Britain is hardly alone.
Because American law has made it nearly impossible to obtain digital evidence through legitimate channels, foreign police are turning to illegitimate ones. I recently attended a conference for purveyors of surveillance software — an event unofficially known as the “Wiretappers’ Ball.” I asked one vendor if he was aware of law enforcement’s frustrations with American tech firms. The salesman grinned and told me that police departments now buy his malware precisely because they’re tired of waiting for evidence through established diplomatic channels. This is alarming: Making it harder for the police to get criminal evidence lawfully may actually incentivize them to seek that data by snooping.
Down where the cables lie and the servers spin, territory still matters.
Take user data. While 90 percent of the Internet’s users are outside the United States, the web is dominated by American firms. As a result, a great deal of non-American data is held on American servers. This was tolerable when trust in the United States was high. But after Edward J. Snowden peeled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance efforts, that trust withered.
In response, other nations are increasingly exercising their territorial control over the Internet, often in ways that mimic America’s worst practices.Earlier this month, the British Home Secretary introduced a bill known as the Snoopers’ Charter that would broadly expand the government’s ability to collect user data — from authorizing the police to hack into phones and computers, to mandating that Internet companies decrypt encrypted communications. The bill goes too far and privacy advocates are right to oppose it.
But governments do have legitimate reasons to seek user data beyond their territorial reach, and privacy advocates ignore that need at their peril.
Ask a police officer anywhere outside of the United States and he’ll tell you that evidence for routine crimes — murder, theft, burglary — is very often stored in the cloud, typically in another jurisdiction. Last year alone, British law enforcement agents made nearly 54,000 requests for data from just five American firms: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.
These requests often go nowhere because America’s 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act only allows technology firms to release American-held data in response to orders from an American judge. So if a British cop is investigating a murder in London, and he has good reason to believe that Google or Facebook has evidence about the crime, he must satisfy an American judge using an American constitutional standard to obtain the evidence. This cross-border process is notoriously slow. Requests take an average of 10 months — an eon in a criminal investigation — and many languish for years.
Exasperation with this process was a key motivation behind the Snoopers’ Charter, and Britain is hardly alone.
Because American law has made it nearly impossible to obtain digital evidence through legitimate channels, foreign police are turning to illegitimate ones. I recently attended a conference for purveyors of surveillance software — an event unofficially known as the “Wiretappers’ Ball.” I asked one vendor if he was aware of law enforcement’s frustrations with American tech firms. The salesman grinned and told me that police departments now buy his malware precisely because they’re tired of waiting for evidence through established diplomatic channels. This is alarming: Making it harder for the police to get criminal evidence lawfully may actually incentivize them to seek that data by snooping.
by Andrew Keane Woods, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Christopher DeLorenzo
The Invitation
When I was young, and just beginning to travel with them, I imagined that indigenous people saw more and heard more, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were more aware, and did see and hear more than I did. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, however, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; but it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.
If my companions and I, for example, encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear here might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it. My companions would glance off into the outer reaches of that light, then look back to the fire, back and forth. They would repeatedly situate the smaller thing within the larger thing, back and forth. As they noticed trace odors in the air, or listened for birdsong or the sound of brittle brush rattling, they in effect extended the moment of encounter with the bear backward and forward in time. Their framework for the phenomenon, one that I might later shorten just to ‘meeting the bear’, was more voluminous than mine; and where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter itself, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund ‘bearing’.
Over the years traveling cross-country with indigenous people I absorbed two lessons about how to be more fully present in an encounter with a wild animal. First, I needed to understand that I was entering the event as it was unfolding. It started before I arrived and would continue unfolding after I departed. Second, the event itself – let’s say we didn’t disturb the grizzly bear as he fed but only took in what he or she was doing and then slipped away – could not be completely defined by referring solely to the physical geography around us in those moments. For example, I might not recall something we’d all seen a half-hour before, a caribou hoof print in soft ground at the edge of a creek, say; but my companions would remember that. And a while after our encounter with the bear, say a half-mile farther on, they would notice something else – a few grizzly bear guard hairs snagged in scales of tree bark – and they would relate it to some detail they’d observed during those moments when we were watching the bear. The event I was cataloging in my mind as ‘encounter with a tundra grizzly’ they were experiencing as a sudden immersion in the current of a river. They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene – the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots, which I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single line. My friends had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.
The lesson to be learned here was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening – resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects. When they saw the bear they right away began searching for a pattern that was resolving itself before them as ‘a bear feeding on a carcass’. They began gathering various pieces together that might later self-assemble into an event larger than ‘a bear feeding’. These unintegrated pieces they took in as we traveled – the nature of the sonic landscape that permeated this particular physical landscape; the presence or absence of wind, and the direction from which it was coming or had shifted; a piece of speckled eggshell under a tree; leaves missing from the stems of a species of brush; a hole freshly dug in the ground – might individually convey very little. Allowed to slowly resolve into a pattern, however, they might become revelatory. They might illuminate the land further.
If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later; the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind.
As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.
If my companions and I, for example, encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear here might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it. My companions would glance off into the outer reaches of that light, then look back to the fire, back and forth. They would repeatedly situate the smaller thing within the larger thing, back and forth. As they noticed trace odors in the air, or listened for birdsong or the sound of brittle brush rattling, they in effect extended the moment of encounter with the bear backward and forward in time. Their framework for the phenomenon, one that I might later shorten just to ‘meeting the bear’, was more voluminous than mine; and where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter itself, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund ‘bearing’.Over the years traveling cross-country with indigenous people I absorbed two lessons about how to be more fully present in an encounter with a wild animal. First, I needed to understand that I was entering the event as it was unfolding. It started before I arrived and would continue unfolding after I departed. Second, the event itself – let’s say we didn’t disturb the grizzly bear as he fed but only took in what he or she was doing and then slipped away – could not be completely defined by referring solely to the physical geography around us in those moments. For example, I might not recall something we’d all seen a half-hour before, a caribou hoof print in soft ground at the edge of a creek, say; but my companions would remember that. And a while after our encounter with the bear, say a half-mile farther on, they would notice something else – a few grizzly bear guard hairs snagged in scales of tree bark – and they would relate it to some detail they’d observed during those moments when we were watching the bear. The event I was cataloging in my mind as ‘encounter with a tundra grizzly’ they were experiencing as a sudden immersion in the current of a river. They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene – the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots, which I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single line. My friends had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.
The lesson to be learned here was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening – resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects. When they saw the bear they right away began searching for a pattern that was resolving itself before them as ‘a bear feeding on a carcass’. They began gathering various pieces together that might later self-assemble into an event larger than ‘a bear feeding’. These unintegrated pieces they took in as we traveled – the nature of the sonic landscape that permeated this particular physical landscape; the presence or absence of wind, and the direction from which it was coming or had shifted; a piece of speckled eggshell under a tree; leaves missing from the stems of a species of brush; a hole freshly dug in the ground – might individually convey very little. Allowed to slowly resolve into a pattern, however, they might become revelatory. They might illuminate the land further.
If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later; the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind.
As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.
by Barry Lopez, Granta | Read more:
Image: Angies
Creating Hipsturbia
[ed. Ack... gag me with an organic, free-range muffin. A bit dated but still relevant.]
A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.
Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”
You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.
As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.
But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.
To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives — culturally attuned, sprawl-free New York river towns like Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown — and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.
“I don’t think we need to be in Brooklyn,” said Marie Labropoulos, who recently moved to Westchester County and opened a shop, Kalliste, selling artisanal vegan soap in Dobbs Ferry. “We’re bringing Brooklyn with us.”
Welcome to hipsturbia.
A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.
Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.
As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.
But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.
To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives — culturally attuned, sprawl-free New York river towns like Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown — and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.
“I don’t think we need to be in Brooklyn,” said Marie Labropoulos, who recently moved to Westchester County and opened a shop, Kalliste, selling artisanal vegan soap in Dobbs Ferry. “We’re bringing Brooklyn with us.”
Welcome to hipsturbia.
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ryan Inzana
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