Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Common, The Co-Living Startup
[ed. Paying more for less. Seems to be a 'common' theme in America these days.]
Common, a co-living startup from General Assembly co-founder Brad Hargreaves, is unveiling its first building today in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. With more than four floors and 7,300 square feet of space, the building has 19 private bedrooms costing anywhere from $1,800 to $1,950. Along with the private rooms, comes four communal kitchens, a large dining room, work space and a roof deck.
The Common opening comes at a time when venture-backed companies like WeWork are piling into co-living as a way to use urban residential space more cost-efficiently and to attract Millennials, who are delaying marriage and families later and later. In New York, older tenant laws control the number of tenants that can be listed on a lease, and brokers often charge upwards of a month’s rent to find apartments. That makes it difficult for newcomers to find housing easily compared to other American cities. On the property owner side, Common’s pitch is that they can partner to purchase whole vacant buildings and turn them into stable, market-rate income streams while removing the hassles of leasing and property management.
Over the summer, Common partnered with a local New York City real estate developer to buy Crown Heights building earlier this year. They invested a little less than $1 million in re-modeling the space.
They kept four suites or units in tact, but opened up large dining and work areas. “The whole idea here is is to use common areas and activate typically under-utilized space,” Hargreaves told me in a video tour via Skype.
Common built in several smart phone features like Bluetooth door locks compatible with keycards, phones and the Apple watch, and Nest thermostats. Through Hargreaves’ connections, they added mattresses from the startup Casper, along with furniture from Restoration Hardware and West Elm.
“Aesthetically, I would say it’s mid-century Modern with some Hudson Valley Americana built into it,” he said. “We wanted to evoke the neighborhood as well. A lot of the art is from Crown Heights and the furniture are things you would find in a traditional Brownstone.”
Services include free laundry, regular deliveries of coffee, tea and paper towels, and weekly cleanings in bathrooms and common areas. Utilities and wi-fi is baked into the price.
For the communal element, Common is bringing in Sunday potlucks and other kinds of event programming. He partnered with his old General Assembly co-founder Matthew Brimer, who went on to create the morning dance party Daybreaker. They’re bringing in Common residents to the next one.
Common, a co-living startup from General Assembly co-founder Brad Hargreaves, is unveiling its first building today in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. With more than four floors and 7,300 square feet of space, the building has 19 private bedrooms costing anywhere from $1,800 to $1,950. Along with the private rooms, comes four communal kitchens, a large dining room, work space and a roof deck.
The Common opening comes at a time when venture-backed companies like WeWork are piling into co-living as a way to use urban residential space more cost-efficiently and to attract Millennials, who are delaying marriage and families later and later. In New York, older tenant laws control the number of tenants that can be listed on a lease, and brokers often charge upwards of a month’s rent to find apartments. That makes it difficult for newcomers to find housing easily compared to other American cities. On the property owner side, Common’s pitch is that they can partner to purchase whole vacant buildings and turn them into stable, market-rate income streams while removing the hassles of leasing and property management.Over the summer, Common partnered with a local New York City real estate developer to buy Crown Heights building earlier this year. They invested a little less than $1 million in re-modeling the space.
They kept four suites or units in tact, but opened up large dining and work areas. “The whole idea here is is to use common areas and activate typically under-utilized space,” Hargreaves told me in a video tour via Skype.
Common built in several smart phone features like Bluetooth door locks compatible with keycards, phones and the Apple watch, and Nest thermostats. Through Hargreaves’ connections, they added mattresses from the startup Casper, along with furniture from Restoration Hardware and West Elm.
“Aesthetically, I would say it’s mid-century Modern with some Hudson Valley Americana built into it,” he said. “We wanted to evoke the neighborhood as well. A lot of the art is from Crown Heights and the furniture are things you would find in a traditional Brownstone.”
Services include free laundry, regular deliveries of coffee, tea and paper towels, and weekly cleanings in bathrooms and common areas. Utilities and wi-fi is baked into the price.
For the communal element, Common is bringing in Sunday potlucks and other kinds of event programming. He partnered with his old General Assembly co-founder Matthew Brimer, who went on to create the morning dance party Daybreaker. They’re bringing in Common residents to the next one.
by Kim-Mai Cutler, Techcrunch | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How One Doctor Changed Football Forever
[ed. The article that inspired the movie Concussion to be released later this week.]
On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.
The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. "Iron Mike," legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to...pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.
Omalu loved the brain. Of all the organs in the body, it was easily his favorite. He thought of it sort of like Miss America. Such a diva! So high-maintenance: It requires more energy to operate than any other organ. The brain! That was his love and that was his joy, and that’s why his specialty was neuropathology. (...)
Omalu stared at Mike Webster’s brain. He kept thinking, How did this big athletic man end up so crazy in the head? He was thinking about football and brain trauma. The leap in logic was hardly extreme. He was thinking, Dementia pugilistica? "Punch-drunk syndrome," they called it in boxers. The clinical picture was somewhat like Mike Webster’s: severe dementia—delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory—caused by repeated blows to the head. Omalu figured if chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer’s brain, couldn’t it also destroy a football player’s brain? Could that be what made Mike Webster crazy?
Of course, football players wear helmets, good protection for the skull. But the brain? Floating around inside that skull and, upon impact, sloshing into its walls. Omalu thought: I’ve seen so many cases of people like motorcyclists wearing helmets. On the surface is nothing, but you open the skull and the brain is mush.
So Omalu carried Mike Webster’s brain to the cutting board and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. It appeared utterly normal. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions, like in dementia pugilistica. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer’s disease. He reviewed the CT and MRI scans. Normal. That might have been the end of it. He already had a cause of death. But Omalu couldn’t let it go. He wanted to know more about the brain. There had to be an answer. People don’t go crazy for no reason. (...)
It was late, maybe midnight, when Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer working in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, got a call from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office. It was not unusual for him to be at the office that late; he was having a bad week. He struggled to understand the man’s accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. "Excuse me? You need what?"
The brain. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster’s brain for microscopic examination.
Oh brother was Fitzsimmons’s initial thought. As if the Webster case wasn’t already complicated enough.
Fitzsimmons had first met Webster back in 1997, when he showed up at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms and hands the size of ham hocks. Fitzsimmons shook his hand and got lost in it, mangled fingers going every which way, hitting his palm in creepy places that made him flinch. It seemed like every one of those fingers had been broken many times over. Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.
"With all due respect, you’re losing your train of thought, sir," Fitzsimmons said to Webster. "You appear to have a serious illness, sir." Not a pleasant thing to tell anyone, and here was a hero, a famous football player Fitzsimmons once bowed to, as did all young guys worth the Terrible Towels they proudly waved in the 1970s. The Dynasty! The black and the gold! It fueled optimism here, up and down the rivers, mill towns held tight in the folds of the Allegheny Mountains. And here was Iron Mike himself.
As a personal-injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons thought what he saw in Webster was an obvious case of a man suffering a closed-head injury—the kind he’d seen plenty of times in people who had suffered through car crashes and industrial accidents. No fracture, no signs of physical damage to the skull, but sometimes severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior.
"Please help me," Mike Webster said.
It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster’s medical records, scattered in doctors’ offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons’s suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.
Fitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.
Fitzsimmons said, "Oh, please." He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. The highest level was "total disability, football-related," reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. Fitzsimmons said to the NFL, "Four doctors—all with the same diagnosis!"
The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor. So their own doctor examined Webster...and concurred with the other four: closed-head injury. Football-related.
The NFL pension board voted unanimously for partial disability anyway.
Fitzsimmons said, "You have got to be kidding me." He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered. The judge reversed the decision of the NFL pension board—the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.
And yet still the NFL fought. They took the case to federal court. They said Mike Webster—who had endured probably 25,000 violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days—they said Mike Webster didn’t qualify for full disability.*
Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons grew close during those days. In fact, Mike Webster clung to Fitzsimmons like a baby to his mamma. He took to sleeping in the parking lot, waiting for Fitzsimmons to show up for work. He would stay there all day, just watching, waiting, and when Fitzsimmons would go home, Mike Webster would go back to his truck and write him letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters. "Dear Bob, Thank you for helping me. We’ve got to keep up the fight. We have to see this thing through." And then he would start talking about wars. And blood splattering. The letters would inevitably trail off into the mutterings of a madman.
And now he was dead.
Bob Fitzsimmons did not know what in the world to say, in 2002, to the man with the thick accent who called from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office, four days after Mike Webster died of a heart attack, asking to study Webster’s brain. Fitzsimmons was, in truth, grieving his client’s death deeply; Mike Webster had been living for nothing but the case, the appeal, the last victory against a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that seemed to have used him, allowed him to become destroyed, and then threw him away like a rotten piece of meat.
And now he was dead.
"Yes," Fitzsimmons said. And he gave Omalu the brain.
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ | Read more:
On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.
The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. "Iron Mike," legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to...pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.Omalu loved the brain. Of all the organs in the body, it was easily his favorite. He thought of it sort of like Miss America. Such a diva! So high-maintenance: It requires more energy to operate than any other organ. The brain! That was his love and that was his joy, and that’s why his specialty was neuropathology. (...)
Omalu stared at Mike Webster’s brain. He kept thinking, How did this big athletic man end up so crazy in the head? He was thinking about football and brain trauma. The leap in logic was hardly extreme. He was thinking, Dementia pugilistica? "Punch-drunk syndrome," they called it in boxers. The clinical picture was somewhat like Mike Webster’s: severe dementia—delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory—caused by repeated blows to the head. Omalu figured if chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer’s brain, couldn’t it also destroy a football player’s brain? Could that be what made Mike Webster crazy?
Of course, football players wear helmets, good protection for the skull. But the brain? Floating around inside that skull and, upon impact, sloshing into its walls. Omalu thought: I’ve seen so many cases of people like motorcyclists wearing helmets. On the surface is nothing, but you open the skull and the brain is mush.
So Omalu carried Mike Webster’s brain to the cutting board and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. It appeared utterly normal. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions, like in dementia pugilistica. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer’s disease. He reviewed the CT and MRI scans. Normal. That might have been the end of it. He already had a cause of death. But Omalu couldn’t let it go. He wanted to know more about the brain. There had to be an answer. People don’t go crazy for no reason. (...)
It was late, maybe midnight, when Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer working in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, got a call from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office. It was not unusual for him to be at the office that late; he was having a bad week. He struggled to understand the man’s accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. "Excuse me? You need what?"
The brain. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster’s brain for microscopic examination.
Oh brother was Fitzsimmons’s initial thought. As if the Webster case wasn’t already complicated enough.
Fitzsimmons had first met Webster back in 1997, when he showed up at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms and hands the size of ham hocks. Fitzsimmons shook his hand and got lost in it, mangled fingers going every which way, hitting his palm in creepy places that made him flinch. It seemed like every one of those fingers had been broken many times over. Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.
"With all due respect, you’re losing your train of thought, sir," Fitzsimmons said to Webster. "You appear to have a serious illness, sir." Not a pleasant thing to tell anyone, and here was a hero, a famous football player Fitzsimmons once bowed to, as did all young guys worth the Terrible Towels they proudly waved in the 1970s. The Dynasty! The black and the gold! It fueled optimism here, up and down the rivers, mill towns held tight in the folds of the Allegheny Mountains. And here was Iron Mike himself.
As a personal-injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons thought what he saw in Webster was an obvious case of a man suffering a closed-head injury—the kind he’d seen plenty of times in people who had suffered through car crashes and industrial accidents. No fracture, no signs of physical damage to the skull, but sometimes severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior.
"Please help me," Mike Webster said.
It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster’s medical records, scattered in doctors’ offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons’s suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.
Fitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.
Fitzsimmons said, "Oh, please." He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. The highest level was "total disability, football-related," reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. Fitzsimmons said to the NFL, "Four doctors—all with the same diagnosis!"
The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor. So their own doctor examined Webster...and concurred with the other four: closed-head injury. Football-related.
The NFL pension board voted unanimously for partial disability anyway.
Fitzsimmons said, "You have got to be kidding me." He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered. The judge reversed the decision of the NFL pension board—the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.
And yet still the NFL fought. They took the case to federal court. They said Mike Webster—who had endured probably 25,000 violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days—they said Mike Webster didn’t qualify for full disability.*
Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons grew close during those days. In fact, Mike Webster clung to Fitzsimmons like a baby to his mamma. He took to sleeping in the parking lot, waiting for Fitzsimmons to show up for work. He would stay there all day, just watching, waiting, and when Fitzsimmons would go home, Mike Webster would go back to his truck and write him letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters. "Dear Bob, Thank you for helping me. We’ve got to keep up the fight. We have to see this thing through." And then he would start talking about wars. And blood splattering. The letters would inevitably trail off into the mutterings of a madman.
And now he was dead.
Bob Fitzsimmons did not know what in the world to say, in 2002, to the man with the thick accent who called from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office, four days after Mike Webster died of a heart attack, asking to study Webster’s brain. Fitzsimmons was, in truth, grieving his client’s death deeply; Mike Webster had been living for nothing but the case, the appeal, the last victory against a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that seemed to have used him, allowed him to become destroyed, and then threw him away like a rotten piece of meat.
And now he was dead.
"Yes," Fitzsimmons said. And he gave Omalu the brain.
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ | Read more:
Image: Nick Veasay
When You Give a Tree an Email Address
"My dearest Ulmus," the message began.
“As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.”
This is an excerpt of a letter someone wrote to a green-leaf elm, one of thousands of messages in an ongoing correspondence between the people of Melbourne, Australia, and the city’s trees.
Officials assigned the trees ID numbers and email addresses in 2013 as part of a program designed to make it easier for citizens to report problems like dangerous branches. The “unintended but positive consequence,” as the chair of Melbourne’s Environment Portfolio, Councillor Arron Wood, put it to me in an email, was that people did more than just report issues. They also wrote directly to the trees, which have received thousands of messages—everything from banal greetings and questions about current events to love letters and existential dilemmas.(...)
Melbourne’s email-a-tree service is one in a litany of municipal projects aimed at leveraging personal and institutional technologies to keep cities running smoothly. In Chicago, there’s a text-based pothole tracker. In Honolulu, you can adopt a tsunami siren.
These sorts of initiatives encourage civic engagement and perhaps help with city maintenance, but they also enable people’s relationship with their city to play out at the micro level. Why have a favorite park when you can have a favorite park bench?
It’s a dynamic that is playing out more broadly, too, in concert with a profound shift toward the ubiquity of interactive, cloud-connected technologies. Modern tools for communicating, publishing, and networking aren't just for connecting to other humans, but end up establishing relationships between people and anthropomorphized non-human objects, too. The experience of chatting with a robot or emailing a tree may be delightful, but it’s not really unusual.
“As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.”
This is an excerpt of a letter someone wrote to a green-leaf elm, one of thousands of messages in an ongoing correspondence between the people of Melbourne, Australia, and the city’s trees.
Officials assigned the trees ID numbers and email addresses in 2013 as part of a program designed to make it easier for citizens to report problems like dangerous branches. The “unintended but positive consequence,” as the chair of Melbourne’s Environment Portfolio, Councillor Arron Wood, put it to me in an email, was that people did more than just report issues. They also wrote directly to the trees, which have received thousands of messages—everything from banal greetings and questions about current events to love letters and existential dilemmas.(...)Melbourne’s email-a-tree service is one in a litany of municipal projects aimed at leveraging personal and institutional technologies to keep cities running smoothly. In Chicago, there’s a text-based pothole tracker. In Honolulu, you can adopt a tsunami siren.
These sorts of initiatives encourage civic engagement and perhaps help with city maintenance, but they also enable people’s relationship with their city to play out at the micro level. Why have a favorite park when you can have a favorite park bench?
It’s a dynamic that is playing out more broadly, too, in concert with a profound shift toward the ubiquity of interactive, cloud-connected technologies. Modern tools for communicating, publishing, and networking aren't just for connecting to other humans, but end up establishing relationships between people and anthropomorphized non-human objects, too. The experience of chatting with a robot or emailing a tree may be delightful, but it’s not really unusual.
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Morrow/Flckr
A Fight for the Soul of Science
Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.
But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained — one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said.
But desperate times call for desperate measures.Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained — one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said.
It was the opening session of a three-day workshop, held in a Romanesque-style lecture hall at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU Munich) one year after George Ellis and Joe Silk, two white-haired physicists now sitting in the front row, called for such a conference in an incendiary opinion piece in Nature. One hundred attendees had descended on a land with a celebrated tradition in both physics and the philosophy of science to wage what Ellis and Silk declared a “battle for the heart and soul of physics.”
The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”
They were reacting, in part, to the controversial ideas of Richard Dawid, an Austrian philosopher whose 2013 book String Theory and the Scientific Method identified three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data. Dawid, a researcher at LMU Munich, answered Ellis and Silk’s battle cry and assembled far-flung scholars anchoring all sides of the argument for the high-profile event last week.
Gross, a supporter of string theory who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the force that glues atoms together, kicked off the workshop by asserting that the problem lies not with physicists but with a “fact of nature” — one that we have been approaching inevitably for four centuries.
The dogged pursuit of a fundamental theory governing all forces of nature requires physicists to inspect the universe more and more closely — to examine, for instance, the atoms within matter, the protons and neutrons within those atoms, and the quarks within those protons and neutrons. But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy requirement, Gross said. “It hasn’t been a problem so much for the last 400 years, where we’ve gone from centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter” — the current resolving power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, he said. “We’ve gone very far, but this energy-squared is killing us.”
As we approach the practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access.
The problem also hampers physicists’ quest to understand the universe on a cosmic scale: No telescope will ever manage to peer past our universe’s cosmic horizon and glimpse the other universes posited by the multiverse hypothesis. Yet modern theories of cosmology lead logically to the possibility that our universe is just one of many.
Whether the fault lies with theorists for getting carried away, or with nature, for burying its best secrets, the conclusion is the same: Theory has detached itself from experiment. The objects of theoretical speculation are now too far away, too small, too energetic or too far in the past to reach or rule out with our earthly instruments. So, what is to be done? As Ellis and Silk wrote, “Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics.”
“The issue in confronting the next step,” said Gross, “is not one of ideology but strategy: What is the most useful way of doing science?”
Over three mild winter days, scholars grappled with the meaning of theory,confirmation and truth; how science works; and whether, in this day and age, philosophy should guide research in physics or the other way around. Over the course of these pressing yet timeless discussions, a degree of consensus took shape.
by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta | Read more:
Image: Laetitia Vancon
The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”
They were reacting, in part, to the controversial ideas of Richard Dawid, an Austrian philosopher whose 2013 book String Theory and the Scientific Method identified three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data. Dawid, a researcher at LMU Munich, answered Ellis and Silk’s battle cry and assembled far-flung scholars anchoring all sides of the argument for the high-profile event last week.
Gross, a supporter of string theory who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the force that glues atoms together, kicked off the workshop by asserting that the problem lies not with physicists but with a “fact of nature” — one that we have been approaching inevitably for four centuries.
The dogged pursuit of a fundamental theory governing all forces of nature requires physicists to inspect the universe more and more closely — to examine, for instance, the atoms within matter, the protons and neutrons within those atoms, and the quarks within those protons and neutrons. But this zooming in demands evermore energy, and the difficulty and cost of building new machines increases exponentially relative to the energy requirement, Gross said. “It hasn’t been a problem so much for the last 400 years, where we’ve gone from centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter” — the current resolving power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, he said. “We’ve gone very far, but this energy-squared is killing us.”
As we approach the practical limits of our ability to probe nature’s underlying principles, the minds of theorists have wandered far beyond the tiniest observable distances and highest possible energies. Strong clues indicate that the truly fundamental constituents of the universe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC. This is the domain of nature that string theory, a candidate “theory of everything,” attempts to describe. But it’s a domain that no one has the faintest idea how to access.
The problem also hampers physicists’ quest to understand the universe on a cosmic scale: No telescope will ever manage to peer past our universe’s cosmic horizon and glimpse the other universes posited by the multiverse hypothesis. Yet modern theories of cosmology lead logically to the possibility that our universe is just one of many.
Whether the fault lies with theorists for getting carried away, or with nature, for burying its best secrets, the conclusion is the same: Theory has detached itself from experiment. The objects of theoretical speculation are now too far away, too small, too energetic or too far in the past to reach or rule out with our earthly instruments. So, what is to be done? As Ellis and Silk wrote, “Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics.”
“The issue in confronting the next step,” said Gross, “is not one of ideology but strategy: What is the most useful way of doing science?”
Over three mild winter days, scholars grappled with the meaning of theory,confirmation and truth; how science works; and whether, in this day and age, philosophy should guide research in physics or the other way around. Over the course of these pressing yet timeless discussions, a degree of consensus took shape.
by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta | Read more:
Image: Laetitia Vancon
Monday, December 21, 2015
The Long Game
[ed. I'm not sure this is of interest to anyone but me, but it's the professional environment I worked in for over 30 years. One of my first projects involved advocating for nearshore seasonal drilling restrictions and protections around Teshekpuk Lake, back in 1980. I've met Mr. Babbitt. It is a long game for sure, and to the extent there are professionals on both sides of the conservation/development debate who negotiate these issues with integrity and good faith, cyclical politics and the type of careerism described in this article are why so much dysfunction exists in the system.]
From his seat in the small plane flying over the largest remaining swath of American wilderness, Bruce Babbitt thought he could envision the legacy of one of his proudest achievements as Interior Secretary in the Clinton administration.
Babbitt was returning in the summer of 2013 from four sunlit nights in Alaska’s western Arctic, where at one point his camp was nearly overrun by a herd of caribou that split around the tents at the last minute. Now, below him, Babbitt saw an oil field — one carefully built and operated to avoid permanent and other scars on the vast expanse of tundra and lakes.
Under the deal he’d negotiated just before leaving Interior in 2000, that would be the only kind of drilling he thought would be allowed in the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which, despite its name, is a pristine region home to one of the world’s largest caribou herds and giant flocks of migratory birds. The compromise was fair and, he hoped, enduring — clear-eyed about the need for more domestic oil but resolute in defense of the wilderness.
The deal lasted barely 15 years.
In February, the Obama administration granted the ConocoPhillips oil company the right to drill in the reserve. The Greater Mooses Tooth project, as it is known, upended the protections that Babbitt had engineered, saving the oil company tens of millions and setting what conservationists see as a foreboding precedent.
How ConocoPhillips overcame years of resistance from courts, native Alaskans, environmental groups and several federal agencies is the story of how Washington really works. It is a story that surprised even a veteran of the political machine like Babbitt.
As environmentalists, energy companies and politicians brawled over big symbols like the Keystone pipeline and offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, the more immediate battles over climate change and fossil fuels were being waged over projects like Greater Mooses Tooth — out of the public eye, away from the cable-news shout-fests and White House protests.
The fight was unfolding in the real Washington — where influence accrues across election cycles almost without regard to who’s in power. In this Washington, companies bend decisions of major import in their direction by overwhelming a bureaucracy that, after years of budget cuts, outsourcing and inattention, lacks the resources and morale to hold its own. Increasingly, industry spins the revolving door. It brings in people who learn there’s serious money to be made after leaving government jobs, by sticking around the capital and making it their career.
Big industries like oil play Washington as a long game, exhibiting a persistence too often lacking in the people in charge of safeguarding the public good. And to win the long game, to push ahead on frontiers like Greater Mooses Tooth, you need someone who is a real player.
by Alec MacGillis, ProPublica | Read more:
Image:Al Grillo/AP
From his seat in the small plane flying over the largest remaining swath of American wilderness, Bruce Babbitt thought he could envision the legacy of one of his proudest achievements as Interior Secretary in the Clinton administration.
Babbitt was returning in the summer of 2013 from four sunlit nights in Alaska’s western Arctic, where at one point his camp was nearly overrun by a herd of caribou that split around the tents at the last minute. Now, below him, Babbitt saw an oil field — one carefully built and operated to avoid permanent and other scars on the vast expanse of tundra and lakes.Under the deal he’d negotiated just before leaving Interior in 2000, that would be the only kind of drilling he thought would be allowed in the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which, despite its name, is a pristine region home to one of the world’s largest caribou herds and giant flocks of migratory birds. The compromise was fair and, he hoped, enduring — clear-eyed about the need for more domestic oil but resolute in defense of the wilderness.
The deal lasted barely 15 years.
In February, the Obama administration granted the ConocoPhillips oil company the right to drill in the reserve. The Greater Mooses Tooth project, as it is known, upended the protections that Babbitt had engineered, saving the oil company tens of millions and setting what conservationists see as a foreboding precedent.
How ConocoPhillips overcame years of resistance from courts, native Alaskans, environmental groups and several federal agencies is the story of how Washington really works. It is a story that surprised even a veteran of the political machine like Babbitt.
As environmentalists, energy companies and politicians brawled over big symbols like the Keystone pipeline and offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, the more immediate battles over climate change and fossil fuels were being waged over projects like Greater Mooses Tooth — out of the public eye, away from the cable-news shout-fests and White House protests.
The fight was unfolding in the real Washington — where influence accrues across election cycles almost without regard to who’s in power. In this Washington, companies bend decisions of major import in their direction by overwhelming a bureaucracy that, after years of budget cuts, outsourcing and inattention, lacks the resources and morale to hold its own. Increasingly, industry spins the revolving door. It brings in people who learn there’s serious money to be made after leaving government jobs, by sticking around the capital and making it their career.
Big industries like oil play Washington as a long game, exhibiting a persistence too often lacking in the people in charge of safeguarding the public good. And to win the long game, to push ahead on frontiers like Greater Mooses Tooth, you need someone who is a real player.
by Alec MacGillis, ProPublica | Read more:
Image:Al Grillo/AP
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Japan’s Moss Obsession
[ed. See also: A Moss Girl's Guide to Japanese Moss Viewing]
It’s the latest craze in a country known for its eccentric tastes and quirky obsessions. The Japanese have gone gaga for…moss?
In 2011, Hisako Fujii published a book titled Mosses, My Dear Friends. It went on to sell over 40,000 copies, which helped trigger a wave of moss viewing parties among young women who call themselves “moss girls.”
Since then, according to The Wall Street Journal, moss-themed drinks and rings that sprout moss instead of gems have joined moss balls (marimo) as popular wares. Now moss devotees can go on special tours, during which guides lead small groups of fanatics deep into Japan’s lush, mossy forests, where they inspect the plants with magnifying glasses.
So what’s behind Japan’s moss craze? Is it a random, flash-in-the-pan fad? Or is it more deeply rooted in Japanese values, customs and aesthetics?
by Mako Nozu and Brian Thompson, The Conversation | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Nike's Football Business Depends on Adults Playing Dress-Up
Nike pays a fortune for the privilege of making all of the gear worn in the National Football League, and most of it will be bought by almost nobody. Professional and college players get their equipment for free, and few fans have enough enthusiasm to buy the same $100 gloves worn by their favorite wide receiver. But grown men and women have proved eager in the past decade to pay as much as $300 for jerseys identical to those worn on the field. The same feats of fabric wizardry meant to enhance the performance of elite athletes see more use by fans rushing the beer vendor at halftime and blitzing platters of chicken wings in front of the TV.
Last week, in the middle of its fourth year as the league’s gear supplier, Nike unveiled yet another futuristic football uniform. The shirts and pants players will wear next season, dubbed Vapor Untouchable, are almost a third lighter than the current uniform. “The feedback from the athletes is, ‘I’ve got better range of motion, and I feel faster,’” said Todd Van Horne, Nike’s creative director for football. Fans probably aren't concerned with how much their shirts weigh, but they will need to spend again to match the on-field look—and that’s exactly what Nike was counting on when it bet heavily on football. (...)
Adult fans didn’t always get a thrill by dressing themselves in the jerseys of football stars. For decades, a guy in the stands would clothe himself more like Vince Lombardi than like Bart Starr. Gradually, the sea of wool overcoats and fedoras gave way to logo-plastered sweatshirts and jackets. The NFL jersey didn’t become “official” until 2000, when the league cut a deal with Reebok for the exclusive rights to on-field apparel. For the first time, fans could pay for the privilege of donning the exact garment worn by players, and just at the moment when online shopping arrived in earnest.
The market for authentic football jerseys “exploded,” the NFL’s Kane said of the period after the Rebook deal. “All of a sudden, if you were going to a game, you were wearing a jersey,” he said. “It has really become the uniform of the fan.”
When Nike was bidding on the NFL gear business, it saw some gaps in the field that Reebok had largely left open. Female fans, for one, had never been offered a chance to buy an official jersey with a cut that wasn’t intended to flatter massive men with shoulder pads, or Cheesehead hats. Nike made better-fitting women’s jerseys and helped the league move beyond what Kane describes as the “shrink-it-and-pink-it” approach. Today, women’s and kids’ styles account for almost half the jerseys sold at Fanatics.com.
Nike also took control of the official jersey business just as the fantasy football phenomenon was beginning to build. The traditional boundaries of fandom were shifting from geographies and teams to individual stars. In the 2012 season, for example, Saints quarterback Drew Brees made a lot of money for fans who couldn’t care less about New Orleans, and his jersey sold accordingly.
Nike is now selling three or four times as many jerseys as Reebok was 10 years ago, according to the NFL. People are buying more jerseys in part because there are more to buy.
Last week, in the middle of its fourth year as the league’s gear supplier, Nike unveiled yet another futuristic football uniform. The shirts and pants players will wear next season, dubbed Vapor Untouchable, are almost a third lighter than the current uniform. “The feedback from the athletes is, ‘I’ve got better range of motion, and I feel faster,’” said Todd Van Horne, Nike’s creative director for football. Fans probably aren't concerned with how much their shirts weigh, but they will need to spend again to match the on-field look—and that’s exactly what Nike was counting on when it bet heavily on football. (...)Adult fans didn’t always get a thrill by dressing themselves in the jerseys of football stars. For decades, a guy in the stands would clothe himself more like Vince Lombardi than like Bart Starr. Gradually, the sea of wool overcoats and fedoras gave way to logo-plastered sweatshirts and jackets. The NFL jersey didn’t become “official” until 2000, when the league cut a deal with Reebok for the exclusive rights to on-field apparel. For the first time, fans could pay for the privilege of donning the exact garment worn by players, and just at the moment when online shopping arrived in earnest.
The market for authentic football jerseys “exploded,” the NFL’s Kane said of the period after the Rebook deal. “All of a sudden, if you were going to a game, you were wearing a jersey,” he said. “It has really become the uniform of the fan.”
When Nike was bidding on the NFL gear business, it saw some gaps in the field that Reebok had largely left open. Female fans, for one, had never been offered a chance to buy an official jersey with a cut that wasn’t intended to flatter massive men with shoulder pads, or Cheesehead hats. Nike made better-fitting women’s jerseys and helped the league move beyond what Kane describes as the “shrink-it-and-pink-it” approach. Today, women’s and kids’ styles account for almost half the jerseys sold at Fanatics.com.
Nike also took control of the official jersey business just as the fantasy football phenomenon was beginning to build. The traditional boundaries of fandom were shifting from geographies and teams to individual stars. In the 2012 season, for example, Saints quarterback Drew Brees made a lot of money for fans who couldn’t care less about New Orleans, and his jersey sold accordingly.
Nike is now selling three or four times as many jerseys as Reebok was 10 years ago, according to the NFL. People are buying more jerseys in part because there are more to buy.
by Kyle Stock, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Robbie McClaran
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle for Puerto Rico’s Future
The money poured in by the millions, then by the hundreds of millions, and finally by the billions. Over weak coffee in a conference room in Midtown Manhattan last year, a half-dozen Puerto Rican officials exhaled: Their cash-starved island had persuaded some of the country’s biggest hedge funds to lend them more than $3 billion to keep the government afloat.
There were plenty of reasons for the hedge funds to like the deal: They would be earning, in effect, a 20 percent return. And under the island’s Constitution, Puerto Rico was required to pay back its debt before almost any other bills, whether for retirees’ health care or teachers’ salaries.
But within months, Puerto Rico was saying it had run out of money, and the relationship between the impoverished United States territory and its unlikely saviors fell apart, setting up an extraordinary political and financial fight over Puerto Rico’s future.
On the surface, it is a battle over whether Puerto Rico should be granted bankruptcy protections, putting at risk tens of billions of dollars from investors around the country. But it is also testing the power of an ascendant class of ultrarich Americans to steer the fate of a territory that is home to more than three million fellow citizens.
The investors with a stake in the outcome are some of the wealthiest people in America. Many of them have also taken on an outsize role in financing political campaigns in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. They have put millions of dollars behind candidates of both parties, including Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Some belong to a small circle of 158 families that provided half of the early money for the 2016 presidential race.
To block proposals that would put their investments at risk, a coalition of hedge funds and financial firms has hired dozens of lobbyists, forged alliances with Tea Party activists and recruited so-called AstroTurf groups on the island to make their case. This approach — aggressive legal maneuvering, lobbying and the deployment of prodigious wealth — has proved successful overseas, in countries like Argentina and Greece, yielding billions in profit amid economic collapse.
The pressure has been widely felt. Senator Marco Rubio, whose state, Florida, has a large Puerto Rican population, expressed interest this year in sponsoring bankruptcy legislation for the island, says Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. Mr. Rubio’s staff even joined in drafting the bill. But this summer, three weeks after a fund-raiser hosted by a hedge-fund founder, Mr. Rubio broke with those backing the measure. Bankruptcy, he said, should be considered only as a “last resort.”
And this past week, House Republican leaders said any financial rescue for Puerto Rico may not come until the end of March.
The fight over the island’s future is stretching from the oceanside neighborhoods of San Juan, where a growing number of wealthy investors and financial professionals have migrated in recent years to exploit generous tax breaks, to Capitol Hill. Their efforts are being closely watched by financial institutions, labor unions and policy makers on the mainland, where many ordinary investors own Puerto Rican bonds through mutual funds.
Some warn that Puerto Rico could be a test case for the rest of the country, paving the way for troubled states like Illinois to escape unsustainable debts.
Stephen J. Spencer, a restructuring expert representing Puerto Rico bondholders including some hedge funds, said letting the government renege on agreements with hedge funds and other investors would set a dangerous precedent, undermining the integrity of the bond market.
“It’s really a wealth transfer from the bondholders to the municipalities,” Mr. Spencer said.
Others fear a different precedent: A handful of wealthy investors, they argue, are trying to rewrite the social contract of an entire United States territory. Puerto Rican officials say they have already cut public services and slashed central government spending by a fifth to keep ahead of payments to the hedge funds and financiers.
“What they are doing, by getting all the resources for themselves, is undermining the viability of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. “They want their money now, and they want to get the rules set so that they can make money for the next 20 years.”
A Bet on Resurgence
Along Ashford Avenue in San Juan’s Condado district, newly renovated hotels gleam beside shops like Gucci and Cartier. Slightly to the west are new high-rise condominiums, known as WeCo, or West Condado, by an enterprising real estate agent originally from Manhattan. Still farther west, not far from the Capitol in Old San Juan, a new development named the Paseo Caribe makes a more explicit pitch to potential buyers: “The Puerto Rico Advantage: Sun, Sand and Zero Taxes,” the development’s website promises.
This was supposed to help solve Puerto Rico’s problems. The commonwealth has been in a depression for over a decade. Pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers have fled the island, followed by young Puerto Ricans looking for jobs, draining the island’s work force and tax base. Forty percent of the island’s residents live in poverty.
Three years ago, in a bid to lure financial services firms and other employers, Puerto Rico’s governor at that time, Luis Fortuño, a Republican, signed laws intended to turn the island into a domestic tax haven. Americans who relocated to Puerto Rico, spent at least half a year there and brought their company with them would pay no federal income or capital gains taxes.
Private-equity magnates, hedge funds and investment advisers began moving to the island. They settled in Condado and a handful of coastal enclaves like the Dorado Beach Resort, where the billionaire investor Toby Neugebauer, who provided $10 million to the presidential campaign of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, bought a home.
John Paulson, the hedge fund investor and leading Republican donor, snapped up resort properties and fading resort hotels, betting on a resurgence. Puerto Rico, Mr. Paulson told an investor conference last year, would become “the Singapore of the Caribbean.” This spring, at his urging, the island even rented a booth at the hedge fund industry’s annual conference at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where two attractive women pitched Puerto Rico’s charms to guests.
It was not the first time that Puerto Rico had turned to Wall Street for help. For decades, the island had been borrowing money to pay its bills. Puerto Rico’s bonds were particularly attractive to mutual funds because they were exempt from federal, state and local taxes in all 50 states. But in 2013, after the island’s general obligation bonds were downgraded, they caught the attention of a different sort of investor: hedge funds specializing in distressed assets.
These funds began buying up the debt at a steep discount, confident that this was a bet they could not lose. Not only were the bonds guaranteed by the Puerto Rican Constitution, but under a wrinkle of federal law, the island’s public corporations and municipalities — unlike those of the 50 states — do not have bankruptcy as a recourse.
When the investment bank Lazard hosted a discussion for investors on Puerto Rico in October 2013, so many people showed up that some had to stand. By the next spring, as the island’s economic situation worsened, virtually no one else was willing to lend to Puerto Rico.
A round of spending cuts and tax increases by Gov. Alejandro GarcÃa Padilla, the Democrat who succeeded Mr. Fortuño, had not produced enough cash to keep up with the island’s earlier debts. A prospectus circulated for the March 2014 bond offering — which raised the $3.5 billion that Mr. GarcÃa Padilla hoped would buy time for a recovery — warned in boldface type of “significant risks.”
Nevertheless, some of the biggest hedge funds kept buying, drawn by the promise of what was a 20 percent return, based on the interest rate coupled with the tax exemption. Mr. Paulson’s firm purchased bonds in March 2014, as did Appaloosa Management, founded by David Tepper; Marathon Asset Management; BlueMountain Capital Management; and Monarch Alternative Capital, said Puerto Rico officials involved in the sale.
The recovery never arrived. The $3.5 billion ran out. And Puerto Rico now owes its creditors in excess of $70 billion, a bigger debt load than all but two states. As much as a third of it is owed to hedge funds, according to some estimates.
There were plenty of reasons for the hedge funds to like the deal: They would be earning, in effect, a 20 percent return. And under the island’s Constitution, Puerto Rico was required to pay back its debt before almost any other bills, whether for retirees’ health care or teachers’ salaries.
But within months, Puerto Rico was saying it had run out of money, and the relationship between the impoverished United States territory and its unlikely saviors fell apart, setting up an extraordinary political and financial fight over Puerto Rico’s future.On the surface, it is a battle over whether Puerto Rico should be granted bankruptcy protections, putting at risk tens of billions of dollars from investors around the country. But it is also testing the power of an ascendant class of ultrarich Americans to steer the fate of a territory that is home to more than three million fellow citizens.
The investors with a stake in the outcome are some of the wealthiest people in America. Many of them have also taken on an outsize role in financing political campaigns in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. They have put millions of dollars behind candidates of both parties, including Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Some belong to a small circle of 158 families that provided half of the early money for the 2016 presidential race.
To block proposals that would put their investments at risk, a coalition of hedge funds and financial firms has hired dozens of lobbyists, forged alliances with Tea Party activists and recruited so-called AstroTurf groups on the island to make their case. This approach — aggressive legal maneuvering, lobbying and the deployment of prodigious wealth — has proved successful overseas, in countries like Argentina and Greece, yielding billions in profit amid economic collapse.
The pressure has been widely felt. Senator Marco Rubio, whose state, Florida, has a large Puerto Rican population, expressed interest this year in sponsoring bankruptcy legislation for the island, says Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. Mr. Rubio’s staff even joined in drafting the bill. But this summer, three weeks after a fund-raiser hosted by a hedge-fund founder, Mr. Rubio broke with those backing the measure. Bankruptcy, he said, should be considered only as a “last resort.”
And this past week, House Republican leaders said any financial rescue for Puerto Rico may not come until the end of March.
The fight over the island’s future is stretching from the oceanside neighborhoods of San Juan, where a growing number of wealthy investors and financial professionals have migrated in recent years to exploit generous tax breaks, to Capitol Hill. Their efforts are being closely watched by financial institutions, labor unions and policy makers on the mainland, where many ordinary investors own Puerto Rican bonds through mutual funds.
Some warn that Puerto Rico could be a test case for the rest of the country, paving the way for troubled states like Illinois to escape unsustainable debts.
Stephen J. Spencer, a restructuring expert representing Puerto Rico bondholders including some hedge funds, said letting the government renege on agreements with hedge funds and other investors would set a dangerous precedent, undermining the integrity of the bond market.
“It’s really a wealth transfer from the bondholders to the municipalities,” Mr. Spencer said.
Others fear a different precedent: A handful of wealthy investors, they argue, are trying to rewrite the social contract of an entire United States territory. Puerto Rican officials say they have already cut public services and slashed central government spending by a fifth to keep ahead of payments to the hedge funds and financiers.
“What they are doing, by getting all the resources for themselves, is undermining the viability of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. “They want their money now, and they want to get the rules set so that they can make money for the next 20 years.”
A Bet on Resurgence
Along Ashford Avenue in San Juan’s Condado district, newly renovated hotels gleam beside shops like Gucci and Cartier. Slightly to the west are new high-rise condominiums, known as WeCo, or West Condado, by an enterprising real estate agent originally from Manhattan. Still farther west, not far from the Capitol in Old San Juan, a new development named the Paseo Caribe makes a more explicit pitch to potential buyers: “The Puerto Rico Advantage: Sun, Sand and Zero Taxes,” the development’s website promises.
This was supposed to help solve Puerto Rico’s problems. The commonwealth has been in a depression for over a decade. Pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers have fled the island, followed by young Puerto Ricans looking for jobs, draining the island’s work force and tax base. Forty percent of the island’s residents live in poverty.
Three years ago, in a bid to lure financial services firms and other employers, Puerto Rico’s governor at that time, Luis Fortuño, a Republican, signed laws intended to turn the island into a domestic tax haven. Americans who relocated to Puerto Rico, spent at least half a year there and brought their company with them would pay no federal income or capital gains taxes.
Private-equity magnates, hedge funds and investment advisers began moving to the island. They settled in Condado and a handful of coastal enclaves like the Dorado Beach Resort, where the billionaire investor Toby Neugebauer, who provided $10 million to the presidential campaign of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, bought a home.
John Paulson, the hedge fund investor and leading Republican donor, snapped up resort properties and fading resort hotels, betting on a resurgence. Puerto Rico, Mr. Paulson told an investor conference last year, would become “the Singapore of the Caribbean.” This spring, at his urging, the island even rented a booth at the hedge fund industry’s annual conference at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where two attractive women pitched Puerto Rico’s charms to guests.
It was not the first time that Puerto Rico had turned to Wall Street for help. For decades, the island had been borrowing money to pay its bills. Puerto Rico’s bonds were particularly attractive to mutual funds because they were exempt from federal, state and local taxes in all 50 states. But in 2013, after the island’s general obligation bonds were downgraded, they caught the attention of a different sort of investor: hedge funds specializing in distressed assets.
These funds began buying up the debt at a steep discount, confident that this was a bet they could not lose. Not only were the bonds guaranteed by the Puerto Rican Constitution, but under a wrinkle of federal law, the island’s public corporations and municipalities — unlike those of the 50 states — do not have bankruptcy as a recourse.
When the investment bank Lazard hosted a discussion for investors on Puerto Rico in October 2013, so many people showed up that some had to stand. By the next spring, as the island’s economic situation worsened, virtually no one else was willing to lend to Puerto Rico.
A round of spending cuts and tax increases by Gov. Alejandro GarcÃa Padilla, the Democrat who succeeded Mr. Fortuño, had not produced enough cash to keep up with the island’s earlier debts. A prospectus circulated for the March 2014 bond offering — which raised the $3.5 billion that Mr. GarcÃa Padilla hoped would buy time for a recovery — warned in boldface type of “significant risks.”
Nevertheless, some of the biggest hedge funds kept buying, drawn by the promise of what was a 20 percent return, based on the interest rate coupled with the tax exemption. Mr. Paulson’s firm purchased bonds in March 2014, as did Appaloosa Management, founded by David Tepper; Marathon Asset Management; BlueMountain Capital Management; and Monarch Alternative Capital, said Puerto Rico officials involved in the sale.
The recovery never arrived. The $3.5 billion ran out. And Puerto Rico now owes its creditors in excess of $70 billion, a bigger debt load than all but two states. As much as a third of it is owed to hedge funds, according to some estimates.
by Jonathan Mahler adn Nicholas Confessore, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Christopher Gregory
The Psychology of Clickbait
This article will not restore your faith in humanity. Nor will it amaze, stun, delight, shock, charm, or in any literal or figurative way, blow your mind. What it will do—hopefully in a clear and intelligent way—is explain why people continually fall for clickbait. You know, like you just did a few seconds ago.
Whether you think it’s on the rise, obscurant and self-negating, not such a big deal, or the root of all evil, one thing is clear about clickbait: It’s increasingly hard to pin down. Some, like Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith, narrowly define it as an article that doesn’t deliver on its headline’s promise. Others think it means vapid listicles, quizzes, and Betteridge’s Law headlines. And then there are those who simply use it as shorthand for stuff they don’t like on the Internet.
Here’s what most people can agree on: Clickbait is annoying, but by god, it works—even when readers recognize it for what it is. The word’s substantial semantic drift may be behind some of this effectiveness. But a hefty helping of behavioral science is at play, too. As a number of new studies confirm, you can blame your clickbait habit on two things: the outsized role emotion plays in your intuitive judgements and daily choices, and your lazy brain.
Manufacturing Emotion
Clickbait doesn’t just happen on its own. Editors write headlines in an effort to manipulate you—or at least grab your attention—and always have. “Headless Body In Topless Bar,” and “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” wouldn’t exist if publications didn’t care about attracting eyeballs. The difference with clickbait is you’re often aware of this manipulation, and yet helpless to resist it. It’s at once obvious in its bait-iness, and somehow still effective bait.
Whether you think it’s on the rise, obscurant and self-negating, not such a big deal, or the root of all evil, one thing is clear about clickbait: It’s increasingly hard to pin down. Some, like Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith, narrowly define it as an article that doesn’t deliver on its headline’s promise. Others think it means vapid listicles, quizzes, and Betteridge’s Law headlines. And then there are those who simply use it as shorthand for stuff they don’t like on the Internet.Here’s what most people can agree on: Clickbait is annoying, but by god, it works—even when readers recognize it for what it is. The word’s substantial semantic drift may be behind some of this effectiveness. But a hefty helping of behavioral science is at play, too. As a number of new studies confirm, you can blame your clickbait habit on two things: the outsized role emotion plays in your intuitive judgements and daily choices, and your lazy brain.
Manufacturing Emotion
Clickbait doesn’t just happen on its own. Editors write headlines in an effort to manipulate you—or at least grab your attention—and always have. “Headless Body In Topless Bar,” and “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” wouldn’t exist if publications didn’t care about attracting eyeballs. The difference with clickbait is you’re often aware of this manipulation, and yet helpless to resist it. It’s at once obvious in its bait-iness, and somehow still effective bait.
by Brian Gardiner, Wired | Read more:
Image: Robbie Porter/Getty
Designing a Madonna Mega-Tour
When Madonna descended from the heavens in an illuminated cage at the start of her Rebel Heart show at London’s O2 arena last week, it was the start of a dazzling spectacle. She performed for two hours, changed her costume every ten minutes, and sashayed over every inch of the stage and a 100ft-long catwalk, thrust like an arrow into the audience in the shape of a cross tipped with a heart. There were warriors in kimonos, nuns on stripper poles, mechanics in a body shop and a “Last Supper” scene played out on a long carved table that, true to the star’s proclivities, was more orgy than re-enactment. And all that was in the first half hour.
“A Madonna show is very complex; one of the most complex,” explains Ric Lipson of Stufish Entertainment Architects, the London-based practice that designed the sets and staging for this show. And he would know. Stufish has designed tours for the likes of the Rolling Stones, U2, Lady Gaga and Pink Floyd as well as the closing ceremony for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. “Not only is Madonna one of the biggest acts, if not the biggest act, in the world,” he continues, “she also has a band, 20 dancers, a 130-strong crew and an attention to detail that is meticulous.” It’s big business, too. Lipson says constructing the Rebel Heart sets and staging cost at least $10m.
by Giovanna Dunmall, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Gathering At ‘The Fifty’
The package arrives by overnight mail for out-of-town guests — it is hand-delivered by team security personnel to those in the area — and contains a box holding an acrylic tray with the Cowboys star logo etched in the middle. Nestled inside the tray is a card requesting that the recipients join the Jones family “on the fifty” (as in yard line), along with tickets, a parking map and a parking pass.
All visitors receive valet privileges, but only some are afforded the luxury of driving beneath AT&T Stadium, to the base of an elevator that lifts them directly into the suite.
“It’s the most valuable thing we have,” said Jones’s daughter, Charlotte Jones Anderson, an executive vice president of the team. “Even better than the seat.”
There are 48 of those seats, terraced in three rows, and one of Anderson’s unofficial duties is teaming with her mother, Gene Jones, to determine how each is filled — who, exactly, is granted entry into one of the most exclusive spaces in the sporting realm.
Los Angeles does not have a football team, so on Cowboys game days, Hollywood comes to AT&T Stadium.As the irrepressible owner (and general manager) of the N.F.L.’s richest team, Jones wields considerable power on league matters, though he offers only occasional input on the composition of his own suite. His wife and daughter strive for a convivial atmosphere and a diverse crowd filled with business associates, arts patrons, political figures, celebrities, friends and family members.
“It’s always quite a puzzle to see that everyone does think that they’re the most important person in the room,” Anderson said. “You want to make sure that everyone has a great experience and not feel like they were slighted.”
That desire is reflected in subtle ways, like the menu — loaded with comfort foods like hot dogs and fried chicken and chicken fried steak — and the availability of household items, like safety pins and Tylenol. Spill on your shirt? Here’s some stain remover and a hair dryer. Feeling cold? We’ll fetch you a blanket.
A photographer roams the suite to shoot pictures of guests with members of the Jones family, and again at halftime, when two cheerleaders come up to pose with anyone interested. When visitors open gift bags that are passed out to them in the fourth quarter, they will find that one of those photos has been framed. Everyone receives a hat — the style changes every season — and a book detailing the art and architecture at the stadium.
“I knew it was going to be a neat, once-in-a-lifetime experience,” the “Today” show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, who attended the Nov. 1 game against Seattle, said in a telephone interview. “What you don’t know is just how exquisite an experience it is.”
Image: Allison V. Smith
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