New MIT Code Makes Web Pages Load 34 Percent Faster in Any Browser

Internet connections get faster but websites get more complex—and that means we often still have to wait an age for pages to load. Now, a new technique from MIT that helps browsers gather files more efficiently could change that.

“As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up,” explains Ravi Netravali, one of the researchers, in a press release. “Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time.” The new system, known as Polaris, was been developed by the University’s at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Loading a web page is an oddly complex business. Hit enter after a URL or click on a link and your browser busies itself gathering a series of objects—HTML files, JavaScript, pictures and who knows what else. Each object is evaluated, then added to the page you’re looking at. But that evaluation can result in having to fetch other, dependent objects—and browsers don’t know what those dependencies are until they’ve grabbed the first object. If they did, they’d be able to pull across more files in one go, reducing the amount of back-and-forth across the network, reducing the time it takes to load a page.

That’s where Polaris comes in. What it does is log all the dependancies and inter-dependancies on a web page. It compiles all of these into a graph for the page that a browser can use to download page elements more efficiently. The researchers liken it to the work of travelling salesperson:

When you visit one city, you sometimes discover more cities you have to visit before going home. If someone gave you the entire list of cities ahead of time, you could plan the fastest possible route. Without the list, though, you have to discover new cities as you go, which results in unnecessary zig-zagging between far-away cities... 

For a web browser, loading all of a page’s objects is like visiting all of the cities. Polaris effectively gives you a list of all the cities before your trip actually begins.

The team’s tested the the system on 200 different websites, including ESPN, Weather.com, and Wikipedia. On average, it was able to load web pages 34 percent faster than a standard browser. The work will be presented later this week at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.

The good news is that Polaris is written in JavaScript. That means that it could be introduced to any website—it’d just have to be running on the server in question, so it’d automatically kick in for any page load—and used with unmodified browsers.

by Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: Luis Llerena via Unsplash

The 12th Man Tradition

Earlier this month the Indianapolis Colts became the third NFL franchise to face the wrath of Aggie lawyers over the use of “12th Man” marketing terminology. In years past, the school has pried licensing fees out of the Buffalo Bills and the Seattle Seahawks for the use of the term, which they trademarked in 1990. No money changed hands this time around. The Colts simply agreed to stop using the words “12th Man” for merchandising purposes.

Today, any football team, college or pro, that refers to its fans as the 12th Man for commercial purposes can expect to hear from an Aggie lawyer tout suite. And per the tenets of trademark law, the cold hard facts are clear: A&M owns the “12th Man” trademark, and if they don’t enforce that trademark, the term could become generic, like “escalator,” “kerosene,” and “Aspirin.”

But there’s another possible argument for NFL teams who find themselves in court with the Ags could use: By the time the Aggies trademarked the “12th Man”—a reference to the team’s passionate fans—the term was already generic.

Or at least that’s a possibility vehemently promoted by a college football enthusiast who goes by the pseudonym “Randolph Duke.” Ahab had his white whale, Don Quixote had his windmills, Inspector Javert had his Jean Valjean, and Randolph Duke has the Fightin’ Texas Aggies 12th Man Tradition. Duke has spent a great many hours over the past three years working to debunk key elements of the Aggie 12th Man origin story, and thereby destroy the trademark. He has become a legend of college football message boards in the process, a hero to some (but not all) on Longhorn boards, a villain in Aggieland, and a source of amusement to neutral observers.

Duke shares his extensive research with every defendant the Aggies have sued. But he was never more active than in the run-up to the Colts settlement. For months, he had been crafting posts of many thousands of words stating his case, the crux of which is this: he believes that one of the pleadings in the Aggie lawsuit against the Colts was nothing short of “fraudulent,” an example of “public corruption” perpetrated by state employees.

And it all stems from this, paragraph 7, which reads thus:

Since as early as 1922, Texas A&M has used the mark 12th Man (hereinafter, the “12th Man Mark”) in connection with sporting events and numerous products and services. The 12th Man Mark was initially adopted in 1922 as a remembrance of a student at Texas A&M, E. King Gill, and his spirit of readiness to serve Texas A&M’s football team in time of need. The legend of E. King Gill grew, and the 12th Man Mark now identifies and distinguishes Texas A&M in connection with all of its athletic entertainment services and events, education-related services, and a wide variety of merchandise products for which Texas A&M and its licensees use the 12th Man Mark.

 Aggie Legend

To understand a key part of Randolph Duke’s argument, we need to dive into the origins of this treasured legend.

According to sacred Aggie text:

The tradition of the Twelfth Man was born on the second of January 1922, when an underdog Aggie team was playing Centre College, then the nation’s top ranked team. As the hard fought game wore on, and the Aggies dug deeply into their limited reserves, Coach Dana X. Bible remembered a squad man who was not in uniform. He had been up in the press box helping reporters identify players. His name was E. King Gill, and was a former football player who was only playing basketball. Gill was called from the stands, suited up, and stood ready throughout the rest of the game, which A&M finally won 22-14. When the game ended, E. King Gill was the only man left standing on the sidelines for the Aggies. Gill later said, “I wish I could say that I went in and ran for the winning touchdown, but I did not. I simply stood by in case my team needed me.” 

This gesture was more than enough for the Aggie Team. Although Gill did not play in the game, he had accepted the call to help his team. He came to be thought of as the Twelfth Man because he stood ready for duty in the event that the eleven men on the gridiron needed assistance. That spirit of readiness for service, desire to support, and enthusiasm helped kindle a flame of devotion among the entire student body; a spirit that has grown vigorously throughout the years. The entire student body at A&M is the Twelfth Man, and they stand during the entire game to show their support. The 12th Man is always in the stands waiting to be called upon if they are needed.

Much of the story is true. The Aggies did beat the highly-ranked Praying Colonels of Centre College in Dallas 22-14. E. King Gill did get summoned from the stands by Coach Bible, and ultimately, his services were not needed. After that things get murky, according to Duke. Here is his extremely detailed account of the game, but to make his long story short, it seems that Gill was not the lone man on the sideline when the final whistle blew. By Duke’s reckoning, A&M still had twenty healthy players by the time Gill came down from the stands, not twelve. The team had run out of substitute running backs, as mentioned in the one and only account of the game that mentions Gill by name.

So Gill was not the 12th man, but more like the 20th.

by John Nova Lomax, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: John Rivera/ICON Sportswire

Marcelo Argolo
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Sparrow beside Bamboo in Snow - Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942)
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Capitalism’s Capital

Robert Moses was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban surroundings. Almost singlehandedly, through chicanery, fraud and bullying, he created the modern infrastructure of the New York City area: expressways, tunnels and bridges, but also parks, beaches, swimming pools and high-rise housing projects. He envisioned an American version of Le Corbusier’s ideal city, cleansed of disorder and unpredictability, focused on cars rather than pedestrians, committed to an idea of urban public space as empty plazas dominated by glass towers. He aspired to be a master builder, and his achievements ranged from the elegant – the Art Deco bathhouses at Jones Beach on Long Island – to the catastrophic: the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which destroyed thriving neighbourhoods and displaced thousands of people.

By 1968, when Moses was finally forced from power, the catastrophes had become impossible to ignore. The bridges, tunnels and expressways had intensified traffic jams, not relieved them; the public transport system was perishing from neglect; the destroyed neighbourhoods and high-rise housing projects were all boarded-up windows, broken glass and drunks marinating in their own piss. Moses was becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong with modernist urban planning: its hostility to street life, its indifference to neighbourhood cohesion, its infatuation with cars and the comparatively well-off people who drove them.

The collapse of modernist grandiosity accelerated a swerve in urban planning towards the view articulated by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which promoted a new emphasis on protecting vital neighbourhoods and allowing for unpredictable social encounters in public spaces. This was a turn to a different modernism: the sort embodied in Stephen Dedalus’s definition of God as ‘a shout in the street’; the sort that celebrated spontaneity, improvisation and play. For half a century, Jacobs’s humane perspective has leavened the discourse of urban revitalisation while at the same time unleashing a flood of preppy bars and cleverly themed emporia – the benign but by now predictable markers of gentrification. Still Moses’s monuments remain: swooping ribbons of steel, clogged with cars; futuristic fantasies of speed, stuck in traffic; concrete embodiments of his modernist hubris.

While Moses’s utopia was crashing and burning, Robert Caro was writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. It was first published in 1974. New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy, social breakdown seemed imminent. Elite institutions manifested a siege mentality: on a visit to Columbia University’s Butler Library in the early 1970s, I remember noticing that the floor lamps were chained to the radiators; anything not secured, it seemed, was liable to be carried off. No wonder Caro connected Moses with ‘the fall of New York’. The master builder had become the architect of urban collapse. The Power Broker showed, in overwhelming detail, how Moses’s overreach led to disaster. In the dark days of the 1970s, the book was celebrated as a shrewd diagnosis of the city’s ills; now, when the city is leaking capital out of every pore, New York triumphalists have taken to questioning Caro’s critique, claiming it’s time to revisit Moses’s work. But in the end the revisiting does little to alter the critique.

*

Caro’s epigraph is from Sophocles: ‘One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.’ Or, in Moses’s case, Caro implies, to see how hollow the splendour has been. Moses spent most of his career awash in adulation. For nearly four decades, every print medium from the Times to the tabloids, from Fortune to Architecture Forum, agreed that he was a preternaturally gifted and dedicated public servant, a man above politics, above graft and greed, committed to Getting Things Done quickly and efficiently. And the things themselves – the parks, playgrounds and beaches, the bridges and parkways and expressways – either epitomised the grandeur of American aspiration, or enhanced the innocent pleasure of the American people at play, or both. Who could not admire such a man, working for peanuts or sometimes for nothing at all, transforming the city into a fitting capital for the richest and most powerful nation on earth? What’s not to like?

Caro spends 1200 pages answering that question in detail. The legend of Robert Moses the disinterested public servant was always ‘a gigantic hoax’, he writes. Moses knew how to manipulate the local and national media, but he was as dependent on graft and patronage as any old pol from Tammany Hall, for decades the home of the Democratic Party machine. Though he didn’t sup directly at the public trough, he had no scruples about ignoring or stretching the law to advance his agenda, creating no-show jobs for friends who could do him favours and no-bid contracts for compliant contractors, courting politicians with lavish entertainment at public expense – providing, on many such occasions at Jones Beach, martinis from one fountain, Manhattans from another, and music from Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the maestros of cheesy white pop. For the first decade or so of his career, Moses preserved his youthful attachment to the ideals of the Progressive movement – parks for the people, clean government by the competent – and pursued power for the sake of those ideals. But from 1934 on, after he was appointed parks commissioner by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he pursued power for the sake of more power.

by Jackson Lears, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Robert Moses

Surviving the Love Bomb

Colloquially speaking,“love bombing” is a coercive outpouring of support. Marketing teams love bomb customers. Politicians love bomb voters. Sirens love bomb sailors.

But sociologists reserve the term for exhibitions of unconditional acceptance geared toward indoctrination. Military recruiters, for instance, might love bomb a potential recruit—first by emphasizing the military’s exclusivity, then by asking questions that presumably speak to the newcomer’s idealized self-image, implying that he is one of few eligible to join.

The recruiter says, “You can’t be in the military unless you’re very, very strong—like Hercules.” And then, “How long have you had such enormous and impressive muscles attached to your body?”

Cults do it, too. And like any organization eager to enlist worshippers, certain religious groups (especially historically young religions, such as Scientology, born-again Evangelicalism, or Mormonism, whose very existence depends on conversion) will love bomb probable converts by exaggerating similarities between the group and the other, always in a way that promises acceptance and forthcoming exaltation.

In general, such tactics work best on the lonely.

*

I had never been lonelier. I lived alone, had very few friends, and worked seventy hours a week, for very little money, under the management of a physically affectionate boss named Wally, who occasionally wept in front of me about strained relations with his wife.

Our company was Wally’s brainchild. He’d pitched it to investors as “a newspaper website (a newspaper, except it’s only online),” during a time when newspapers already had websites. His underlings included one full-time employee (me) as well as seven very exhausted, unpaid interns, who I assume (and hope) were independently wealthy because they all went to Sarah Lawrence, which is the most expensive college in the world. We were in a recession. Since graduating college, nearly everyone I knew had already been fired at least once. But acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans was often as easy as clicking a button that read, “I accept my award!” I felt lucky to have a job.

In general, the interns and I wrote articles that had no real angle, because the site had no niche, which in turn led to an online audience of about 20 or so people, mainly comprised of our parents. It had been funded, like my boss’s ranch house in the suburbs, entirely by his father.

Most days, Wally sat at his desk surfing the Internet, ignoring texts from his wife while the rest of us wrote terrible pieces that answered questions like, “Which bodily fluids can you send via mail?” I often caught him reading his own pieces, published years before, on online newspapers that people knew about. I thought he was very successful. My starting salary was one thousand dollars per month before taxes and the website’s profit margin remained steady at zero dollars. So, to supplement Wally’s slowly dwindling trust fund, the interns and I often jumped on unethical odd jobs for the “tutoring agency” with which we shared a Brooklyn office. The agency charged rich families in the tri-state area two hundred dollars an hour to consult on college applications, and we “ghost wrote” the personal essays for free in exchange for Wally’s office space.

“It has been a month now since the surgery,” I wrote in one such essay, under the byline of a girl who had recently undergone simple Lasik. “Occasionally, I hear my mom’s voice cautiously suggest that we add a few more colleges to my list—specifically, ones with amenities for the blind.”

I got into a lot of colleges that year.

Wally had to be home for dinner every night to eat with his family, but before he left us to our voluntary overtime, he always gave an extremely quiet motivational speech about how we had to keep the ship from going under.

“These projects might keep us afloat—Gupta, Abraham, Pinker,” Wally whispered, looking pale as he listed the names of college-bound, teenage clients we had never met, before slipping away to the elevators. “Please. I don’t want to lose my job.”

His reliance on us, and his perpetual fear of economic failure, made the interns and I feel grown up and important. It never occurred to me to ask for a raise, because I assumed that, if I did, Wally’s family would starve. Late at night, after Wally went home and the tutoring agency people turned out the lights, we talked in the dark, our faces lit by laptop screens, about what an “opportunity” it was to have the freedom to write what we wanted, and put it online—the word “exposure” was thrown around a lot, usually when Adderall was available—and we all agreed that Wally was a great guy for trusting us with his “brand.”

*

To save money I commuted four hours each day from a guesthouse in New Jersey that I’d found on Craiglist. I lived behind a towering, red-brick mansion for almost zero dollars. The guesthouse was the mansion’s miniature twin. Both resembled the dollhouses that I noticed in the cellar one day while doing my laundry.

My landlord was a pleasant-seeming woman named Maude, who liked to garden. She was petite, blonde and spritely, and lived in the Main House with her college-aged daughter, Elizabeth, who was home for the summer. She was more than willing to tell me about herself, which I liked, because often our stories contain secrets, and I adore secrets. I discovered that the mansion and the guesthouse and Maude’s ability to constantly garden had been secured through Maude’s thirty-odd years spent running what turned into a multi-million dollar corporate sweatshirt business, which she’d sold prior to the recession—a period during which few corporations needed swag because they’d all gone bankrupt. I found stacks of sweatshirts in every closet emblazoned with the names of economic casualties.

When I first arrived, Maude said that she and Elizabeth had just welcomed a houseguest named Salina—a former weight-loss instructor who had worked at a fat camp in Hawaii, and now lived in Salt Lake City, where she worked part time as a personal trainer. Maude alluded to the fact that Salina been contracted for the summer to help Elizabeth lose weight. I said I looked forward to meeting both of them. Maude smiled and disappeared inside.

I left early in the morning and returned late, so at first it didn’t seem strange to me that I hadn’t yet met Salina or Elizabeth. After being screamed at by strangers all day to walk faster, to get out of the way, to fuck off—or, occasionally, to go “touch butts with your sister” (shouted at me by a schizophrenic street person), stepping off the commuter train onto the sidewalk of Maude’s chirping, picket-fence little town felt like paradise. I was too intoxicated to harbor suspicion. She provided me with towels and Egyptian cotton bedding. The guesthouse lacked certain amenities, including a kitchen, so she hauled a microwave and mini-fridge into my room. I bought a book called The Adventures of Microwavable Cooking. I used the toilet as a garbage disposal and washed dishes in the gigantic shower in my private bathroom. Usually I took pride in these endeavors. I felt abstemious and handy. Maude welcomed, invited, intoxicated me. She wanted me to call her Auntie Maude.

But then weird things began happening to my body. I had grown up eating Hot Pockets, but after years of eating semi-normal college cafeteria food, my intestines had apparently gotten snobbish about Chef Boyardee, which is to say that the microwavable meals were giving me explosive diarrhea. I mentioned to Maude that I really missed cooking, and she said, “Fine—maybe you can use the Main House kitchen—we’ll talk about it.” I waited for our talk, and ate sandwiches. I knelt on the floor of the guest house with white bread and generic-brand Jiffy and Smuckers, and used whatever book I was reading as a cutting board. By the time I’d finish a novel, it was sticky with jelly.

“Stop by the Main House anytime—you know, to use the kitchen, cook, say, ‘Hi’,” Maude reiterated. “At the very least, come for dinner.”

I quickly tabulated how much money I could save per dinner. I considered the nutritional value of semi-regular meals that were neither microwavable nor freeze dried.

“How about now?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about it soon,” she said.

The guesthouse was not entirely mine. I slept in an enclave off the entryway, partially separated from the communal shoe rack by a walnut paneled room divider. Up the stairs from me: Maude’s office. Across the hallway: the living room that Maude used for her yoga practice. She came in at odd hours. Once I woke at two o’clock in the morning to see her silhouette in the doorway, backlit by the moon. “I can’t sleep so I’m going to do some Vinyasa,” she shout-whispered.

I tried to drag the room divider to fully block the sightlines between the front door and my bed, but once stretched wide enough, it always fell. No matter how I accordioned it, you could still see my coverlet. It was hard to focus on the work I brought home, knowing she could throw open the door at any moment, so I hung out a lot in the bathroom. I used the toilet as a desk and occasionally breaked from work to take long showers. The shower was bigger than my bed, and included a plastic bench that I could sit on while shampooing. In my mind, the only thing more luxurious than waiting for Wally to take his lunch break so I could re-watch one of two films involving my celebrity crush (an indie-film actor-director whom I’ll call Magnus), involved hunkering down on that waterproof chair. I stared into the shower blast and imagined myself as a naked queen on her throne, being carried on the backs of slaves through a thunderstorm, staring defiantly into the face of Rain Gods. Because I did not pay for water, wasting it made me feel wealthy. I flushed the toilet more than was strictly necessary, and began showering three times a day, anointing myself over and over again, just because.

by Kathleen Hale, Hazlit |  Read more:

Image: Jeremy Sorese

David Murobi
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Fasting Diets Are Gaining Acceptance

Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland, has not had breakfast in 35 years. Most days he practices a form of fasting — skipping lunch, taking a midafternoon run, and then eating all of his daily calories (about 2,000) in a six-hour window starting in the afternoon.

“Once you get used to it, it’s not a big deal,” said Dr. Mattson, chief of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences. “I’m not hungry at all in the morning, and this is other people’s experience as well. It’s just a matter of getting adapted to it.”

In a culture in which it’s customary to eat three large meals a day while snacking from morning to midnight, the idea of regularly skipping meals may sound extreme. But in recent years intermittent fasting has been gaining popular attention and scientific endorsement. (...)

Fasting to improve health dates back thousands of years, with Hippocrates and Plato among its earliest proponents. Dr. Mattson argues that humans are well suited for it: For much of human history, sporadic access to food was likely the norm, especially for hunter-gatherers. As a result, we’ve evolved with livers and muscles that store quickly accessible carbohydrates in the form of glycogen, and our fat tissue holds long-lasting energy reserves that can sustain the body for weeks when food is not available.

“From an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty clear that our ancestors did not eat three meals a day plus snacks,” Dr. Mattson said.

Across the world, millions of people fast periodically for religious and spiritual reasons. But some are now looking at the practice as a source of health and longevity. (...)

Dr. Mattson’s interest in intermittent fasting grew out of work on animals that showed that alternate-day fasting protected mice from strokes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and consistently extended their life spans by 30 percent. Dr. Mattson and his colleagues found that alternate-day fasting increased the production of proteins that protect brain cells, enhancing their ability to repair damaged DNA. Fasting, he said, acts as a mild stress that makes cells throughout the body stronger, shoring up their ability to adapt to later insults.

In this way, intermittent fasting is like exercise, which causes immediate stress and inflammation, but protects against chronic disease in the long run. Eating fruits and vegetables may have a similar effect. While very large doses of antioxidants can cause cancer in humans, moderate amounts of exposure can make cells more resilient, Dr. Mattson said.

by Anahad O'Connor, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gary Taxali

Ray LaMontagne

Yaki Onigiri (Grilled Rice Ball) with Miso Butter Sauce

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Visual Abyss

How black is the world's blackest material?

The world’s darkest material may have gotten even darker, defying even spectrometers, which cannot quantify its blackness.

Surrey NanoSystems’ Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array black, or Vantablack, was developed in 2014 as the blackest known substance on Earth. Vantablack was originally created for use on satellites, but its high light absorption and ability to convert the trapped light into heat have made it a desirable product across scientific and commercial domains.

The blackness of Vantablack is so extreme that it confounds the eye. “It is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. Shapes and contours are lost, leaving nothing but an apparent abyss,” Ian Johnston of The Independent wrote in 2014.

Vantablack is made up of “a ‘forest’ of aligned and equally spaced, high aspect-ratio carbon nanotubes,” according to Surrey NanoSystems’ product description. Photons entering the thicket of tubing become trapped in the microscopic system and are bounced between the carbon tubing, eventually becoming heat before dissipating. The scientific development company says that the composition of the tubes means that Vantablack coating is almost entirely made up of free space, making it extremely light, flexible, and durable - although applied pressure such as touch can damage the nanostructures.

by Ben Thompson, CSM |  Read more:

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The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise

[ed. See also: Amazon Echo Review (CNET)]

Many of the world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for the holy grail, a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget.

They have made digital watches and fitness trackers, all manner of computerized glasses and goggles, and more doodads to plug into your TV than there are shows to watch on it.

Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon — a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a humiliating flop.

This time it may be different. A bit more than a year after its release, the Echo has morphed from a gimmicky experiment into a device that brims with profound possibility. The longer I use it, the more regularly it inspires the same sense of promise I felt when I used the first iPhone — a sense this machine is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future.Photo

What is most interesting about the Echo is that it came out of nowhere. It isn’t much to look at, and even describing its utility is difficult. Here is a small, stationary machine that you set somewhere in your house, which you address as Alexa, which performs a variety of tasks — playing music, reading the news and weather, keeping a shopping list — that you can already do on your phone.

But the Echo has a way of sneaking into your routines. When Alexa reorders popcorn for you, or calls an Uber car for you, when your children start asking Alexa to add Popsicles to the grocery list, you start to want pretty much everything else in life to be Alexa-enabled, too.

In this way, Amazon has found a surreptitious way to bypass Apple and Google — the reigning monarchs in the smartphone world — with a gadget that has the potential to become a dominant force in the most intimate of environments: our homes.

If all this sounds over-the-top, read some of the reviews. On Amazon’s site, the Echo has racked up more stars than an Oscars party. Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers, but the company is investing big in Echo. It ran Super Bowl ads to push the device and last week it unveiled two new versions of the machine. One is a portable version of the Echo and the other is meant to plug into existing speaker systems.

Scot Wingo, the chairman of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce consulting firm, said the early signs suggested that the Echo was on a path to become Amazon’s next $1 billion business.

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

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Nootropics Survey

Nootropics are traditionally defined as substances that improve mental function. In practice they usually refer to psychoactive chemicals that are neither recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin, nor officially-endorsed psychiatric drugs like Prozac or Risperdal. Most are natural supplements, foreign medications available in US without prescription, or experimental compounds. They promise various benefits including clearer thinking, better concentration, improved mood, et cetera. You can read more about them here.

Although a few have been tested formally in small trials, many are known to work only based on anecdote and word of mouth. There are some online communities like r/nootropics where people get together, discuss them, and compare results. I’ve hung out there for a while, and two years ago, in order to satisfy my own curiosity about which of these were most worth looking into, I got 150 people to answer a short questionnaire about their experiences with different drugs.

Since then the field has changed and I wanted to get updated data. This year 850 (!) people agreed to fill out my questionnaire and rate various nootropics on a scale of 0 – 10 – thanks again to everyone who completed the survey. (...)

Some very predictable winners: Adderall is a prescription drug and probably doesn’t even qualify as a nootropic; I included it as a reference point, and it unsurprisingly did very well. LSD microdosing is the practice of taking LSD at one-tenth or less of the normal hallucinogenic dose; users say that it improves creativity and happiness without any of the typical craziness. Phenibut is a Russian anxiolytic drug of undenied effectiveness which is sort of notorious for building tolerance and addiction if used incorrectly. And modafinil is a prescription medication for sleep issues which makes users more awake and energetic. All of these are undeniably effective – but all are either addictive, illegal without prescription, or both.

I’m more interested by a second tier of winners, including tianeptine, Semax, and ashwagandha. Tianeptine is a French antidepressant available (legally? kind of a gray area) without prescription in the US; users say it both provides a quick fix for depression and makes them happier and more energetic in general. Semax is a Russian peptide supposed to improve mental clarity and general well-being. Ashwagandha might seem weird to include here since it’s all the way down at #15, but a lot of the ones above it had low sample size or were things like caffeine that everyone already knows about, and its high position surprised me. It’s an old Indian herb that’s supposed to treat anxiety.

The biggest loser here is Alpha Brain, a proprietary supplement sold by a flashy-looking company for $35 a bottle. Many people including myself have previously been skeptical that they can be doing much given how many random things they throw into one little pill. But it looks like AlphaBrain underperformed even the nootropics that I think of as likely placebo – things like choline and DMAE. It’s possible that survey respondents penalized the company for commercializing what is otherwise a pretty un-branded space, ranking it lower than they otherwise might have to avoid endorsing that kind of thing.

(I was surprised to see picamilon, a Russian modification of the important neurotransmitter GABA, doing so badly. I thought it was pretty well-respected in the community. As far as I can tell, this one is just genuinely bad.)

Finally, a note on addiction.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Slate Star Codex

Worm

[ed. I have no idea, but if you want to explore - have at it.]

Worm:

An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons.

The story, titled Worm, takes the form of a web serial, posted in bite-sized reads in much the same way that authors such as Mark Twain would release their works one chapter at a time in the days before full-fledged novels. Worm started in June 2011, updating twice a week, and finished in late November, 2013. It totals roughly 1,680,000 words; roughly 26 typical novels in length (or 10-11 very thick novels). The story updated on Tuesdays and Saturdays, with bonus chapters appearing on the occasional Thursday, as explained below.

The actual work is divided into a number of story arcs, each containing five to sixteen individual chapters. Interludes (side stories) are inserted between each story arc to showcase events from different perspectives or provide some background information that the reader wouldn’t get from Taylor’s point of view. Further interludes were released as bonus content when the audience reached specific donation goals, but these were found to distract from the core story (with a good reception, but still) and were paced out more in favor of additional main-story chapters.

Readers should be cautioned that Worm is fairly dark as fiction goes, and it gets far darker as the story progresses. Morality isn’t black and white, Taylor and her acquaintances aren’t invincible, the heroes aren’t winning the war between right and wrong, and superpowers haven’t necessarily affected society for the better. Just the opposite on every count, really. Even on a more fundamental level, Taylor’s day to day life is unhappy, with her clinging to the end of her rope from the story’s outset. The denizens of the Wormverse (as readers have termed it) don’t pull punches, and I try to avoid doing so myself, as a writer. There’s graphic language, descriptions of violence and sex does happen (albeit offscreen). It would be easier to note the trigger warnings that don’t apply than all the ones that do.

All in all, this probably isn’t a story for the sensitive or the young. I’d peg it with a PG-18 rating, but I think we all know that there’s kids who can handle that sort of thing and there’s adults who can’t. Use your best judgement and ask in the comments below if you’re still unsure.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, you can begin reading Taylor’s story here. Enjoy.

via:

Why Is Flying Still Expensive Even Though Fuel’s Gotten So Cheap?

The far-reaching consequences of the recent drop in oil prices have been a testimony to just how central crude is in American life: With cheap gasoline bringing more drivers onto the road, traffic deaths were up nearly 10 percentin the first nine months of 2015. Meanwhile, after remote towns in North Dakota surged with thousands ready to work the Bakken, the luxury apartments built to accommodate them are half-vacant now that demand has died down. And recycling companies have seen their business dry up as oil’s impact on the math of producing plastic has prompted manufacturers to just make their own.

But there’s one nook of the country’s economy where the plummeting price of oil hasn’t yet been felt: plane tickets.

Jet fuel—which accounts for a good portion of airlines’ expenses—currently costs about a third of what it did two years ago. Yet ticket prices have been declining much more modestly, falling roughly 3 percent per quarter over the last year.

How much do airlines stand to gain from a drop in oil prices? A good estimate, according to Volodymyr Bilotkach, a senior lecturer in economics at Newcastle University, is that fuel has typically made up about a third of airlines’ operating costs. As the price of fuel has dropped, it’s been taking up a smaller and smaller share of these expenses, to the point that now, he estimates, fuel only makes up about 15 percent of airlines’ spending (assuming their other costs have remained roughly equal).

A change of that magnitude greatly improves airlines’ bottom lines: Last year the four biggest U.S. carriers—American, Southwest, Delta, and United—brought in $22 billion in profits.

It’s not surprising that airlines would be slow to forfeit the gains they’ve seen from all those fuel savings, but, curiously, they haven’t been lowering ticket prices very much, which would be a natural way to start trying to steal customers from one another. Even some surcharges that were concocted when times were tighter—charging customers for sitting in aisle or window seats, for instance—still remain in place. Cruelly, even fees that were originally conceived to cover fuel costs have stuck around, even if they now go by different names.

So why isn’t a bigger chunk of these savings being passed onto travelers? This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen—there’s supposed to be at least one company that’s willing to lower its prices and cannibalize its competition’s customers.

But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, airlines are spending their money on buying new planes and on moves that please shareholders, such as share buybacks.

“There is not much competition left in the U.S. airline industry,” says Bilotkach. Over the past decade and a half, the industry has witnessed a ton of consolidation (most notably in mergers between Delta and Northwest, United and Continental, and American and U.S. Airways), which means that airlines are less likely to try to undercut one another on price. Yes, it’s true that a low number of carriers doesn’t necessarily imply that there’s a lack of competition—what matters is whether they’re competing on certain routes. But, Bilotkach says, it’s rare for two airlines compete directly on an a nonstop U.S. flight path.

There’s another reason that airlines aren’t competing fiercely on ticket prices: There’s a good deal of overlap in their ownership. For instance, the five biggest American fund managers together own about 17 percent of each American and Delta. As an analysis by José Azar, a senior associate at the consultancy Charles River Associates, found, ownership-overlaps like this cause tickets to be about 10 percent steeper than they would be otherwise.

Could any of this change? The Department of Justice launched an inquiry last summer (before it was clear that the precipitous fall in oil prices would last longer than a few months) into whether American airlines’ pricing decisions qualify as collusion. But to prove anything like that, federal prosecutors would need to find evidence that airlines coordinated with each other—which probably doesn’t exist. More likely, investigators will find a happily uncompetitive industry in which no formal coordination is necessary.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Kim Kyung Hoon / Reuters

Facebook is Eating the World

[ed. See also: More musings on media]

Something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many.

Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information, and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential risks.

Journalism is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but one of central interest to citizens.

The internet and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work, while at the same time helping to make the business of publishing journalism an uneconomic venture.

Two significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention to:

First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.

Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.

Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.

The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized.

There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies are failing.

The mobile revolution is behind much of this.

Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded.

The design and capabilities of our phones (thank you Apple), favor apps, which foster different behavior. Google did recent research through its Android platform that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, and of those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of our time is spent on a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is far greater than any other social platform.

The majority of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.

So let’s recap:

1. People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything.
2. They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter.
3. The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.

The competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse”—Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in Microsoft)—are engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies, platforms, and even ideologies will win.

In the last year, journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict.

In the past year, Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice, BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up to all publishers in April. Apple and Google quickly followed suit, launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete stories about events.

It is very good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.

At the same time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly into apps and new systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile audiences, Apple announced it would allow ad-blocking software to be downloaded from its App store.

In other words, if as a publisher your alternative to going onto a distributed platform is to make money through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block all ads and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook, are largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the already very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might be getting independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course, one might add that publishers had it coming from weighing down their pages with intrusive ads nobody wanted in the first place.

There are three alternatives for commercial publishers.

One is to push even more of your journalism straight to an app like Facebook and its Instant Articles where ad blocking is not impossible but harder than at the browser level. As one publisher put it to me, “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on the revenue and traffic from one distributor, are very high.

The second option is to build other businesses and revenues away from distributed platforms. Accept that seeking a vast audience through other platforms is not only not helping you but actively damaging your journalism, so move to a measurement of audience engagement rather than scale.

Membership or subscription are most commonly considered in this context. Ironically, the prerequisites for this are having a strong brand identity that subscribers feel affinity towards. In a world where content is highly distributed, this is far harder to achieve than when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in the handful of cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up the shortfall in advertising.

The third is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all, so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or “sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has grown to nearly a quarter of all digital display advertising in the US. In fact, digitally native companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, and hybrids like Vice, have disrupted the failing publishing model by essentially becoming advertising agencies—which are themselves in danger of failing. What I mean by this is that they deal directly with advertisers, they make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we see scattered all over our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all those people who have previously “liked” or shared other material from that publisher.

The logical answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest in their own destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app has to be compliant with the distribution standards of others in order to work. And investing in maintaining your own presence comes at a time when advertising (particularly in print) is under pressure, and online advertising is not growing either. The critical balance between destination and distribution is probably the hardest investment decision traditional publishers have to make right now.

Publishers are reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four times the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go “all in” on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism and stories that work on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production capacity, technology capacity, and even advertising departments, and delegating it all to third-party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat.

This is a high-risk strategy: You lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination.

With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online everyday, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this.

In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news. If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into the internal working of these systems.

There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.

We are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable.

We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.

For this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that this is the outcome of their engineering success.

by Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: AP

Taxicab Confessions
Image: Romina Diaz-Brarda, New York Cabs

The Church Collection Plate Goes Digital

Dylan Ciamacco, 25, first went to the Los Angeles outpost of international megachurch C3 as a teen. His mom thought a lot of the young people there—in skinny jeans, chunky sweaters, and leather jackets—dressed like him. He’d emerged recently from a “sick” (as in awesome) atheist phase, he says, mocking himself, and was looking to go back to church.

A typical service, Ciamacco says, opens with a band that would fit in at the Coachella festival, were it not for the Jesus lyrics: “What a savior, my Redeemer/Friend of sinners, one like me.” (In one podcast, a pastor, sermonizing about society’s obsession with markers of achievement, uses an Internet-approved term of endearment to channel his audience, asking, “When am I going to get my own bae?”) At the end, a member of the “worship team” will call on parishioners to tithe and pass the collection plate. But not all people reach into their wallet. Many take out their phone instead.

Ciamacco gives each week, using the Tithe.ly app. It takes fewer than five taps, and built-in geolocation means he can contribute at any of the 1,000 churches that subscribe—a feature that’s especially useful around holidays like Easter, when many people travel. Tithe.ly lets worshipers set up automatic recurring payments, but because Ciamacco’s paycheck fluctuates with his work as a freelance video producer, he tithes on demand—usually about 10 percent of whatever he’s brought in.

Although churches are saying a collective hallelujah that a new generation of devotees is filling pews, a youthful congregation has its limitations. Twentysomethings might find religion, but not a lot of them have found that six-figure job. They don’t carry cash—and what, exactly, is a personal check? Still, about a quarter of them use mobile payment apps such as PayPal and Venmo regularly, according to a recent Accenture survey. And enormously popular services such as Seamless, Uber, and Amazon.com have normalized one-tap payments—91 percent of millennials use their phone to buy something at least once a month, market-research firm Statista says.

Tithe.ly is one of a handful of apps leveraging that spending behavior for the good of the church. Pushpay, which about 3,000 congregations employ, works similarly; worshipers decide whether to donate to a general budget or a specific program the institution designates. Another, EasyTithe, features a text-to-give option. It also provides technology for a Square-like credit card reader to await the faithful in church lobbies. Regardless of which app a congregation chooses, the point is convenience. “We call it frictionless giving,” says Dean Sweetman, Tithe.ly’s co-founder and a former minister at C3 Atlanta. He designed the app with C3’s wallet-light clientele in mind: “We see people giving all times of day and night. Nothing stands in the way.

by Rebecca Greenfield, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Brandon Celi

Joe Cool

Today's consumerism is riddled with elaborate and often meaningless choices: Which brand of pasta should you buy? Would that be best with Ragu, Amy’s Organic, or Muir Glen marinara sauce? Should that be accompanied by Kraft or DiGiorno preshredded parmesan? Who cares.

As psychologist Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less argues, too much consumer choice can be demotivating rather than empowering or exciting — the direct opposite of what the core values of mainstream American consumerism would lead you to expect. Choice, Schwartz explains, “enables us to control our destinies and to come close to getting exactly what we want out of any situation. Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being.” But the “fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.” More choice comes with a cost: a haunting fear that we will choose wrong. Clinging to all the choices means we never seem to make any. Anxiety never gives way to clarity. Is this what it means to live your best life? Oprah would never agree with that.

Citing a series of studies into optional paralysis, Schwartz writes that having many options may discourage consumers because it “forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don’t buy the product. Or if they do, the effort that the decision requires detracts from the enjoyment derived from the results.”

If choice is demotivating, can its absence encourage more consumption? Would a uniform generic option be a source of liberation, as the theoretical premises of normcore would have it? If we have less choice, do we, paradoxically enough, experience more flexibility? In learning to more easily adapt to where we’re at and who we’re with rather than forever searching for short-lived ways to be “unique,” may we actually experience something closer to a better life?

Trader Joe’s is on board with going generic. It doesn’t want to burden you with unnecessary choices between redundant products battling noisily for your attention; it instead offers a curated selection of mainly store-brand versions of everything a health-conscious consumer might need, from organic brown-rice-and-quinoa fusilli pasta to organic garden lasagna, that promise to be consistently good enough, if not especially outstanding.

Unlike with other American big-box grocery stores (and Trader Joe’s parent company, the German supermarket chain Aldi), where store brands tend to connote “no frills” cheapness and inferiority, Trader Joe’s generic goods have succeeded in conveying quality, familiarity, and originality all through the brand itself. Rather than ask the consumer to choose among different brands, the Trader Joe’s consumer just has to pick which products they like most. This strategy appears to work. In a recent survey, TJ’s customers were the most satisfied of any grocery stores, despite the crowds of harried customers, crowded parking lots, and long checkout lines one often encounters there.

But the lines and packed lots themselves can be reassuring, that you have come to the right place, that you are adapting to what “everyone else” is doing. It seems like the only option, just like its limited product choices. Trader Joe’s overall in-store aesthetic tries to consolidate these genteel inconveniences into a nostalgic evocation of old-time neighborhood mom ‘n pop stores: the mini-coffee bar with its free samples, the pseudo-cultured feel provided by the “ethnic” and very not-PC types of not-white Joe’s on store-brand packaging, like Trader Giotto (Italian foods) and Trader Ming (Chinese food) and Trader Jose’s (Mexican-ish) — note there is no African-American Joe. Everything at TJ’s is suggestive of a time when life was supposedly simpler, more traditional (e.g. homogeneous) — long before the big-box superstore, parking lots the size of football fields, and the proliferation of brands in the aisles and on social media.

As part of this strategy, the company is reticent about advertising: It restricts its marketing mainly to its almanac-like “Fearless Flyer” circular that conjures quaint images of old letterpresses and coupon-clipping grandmas. No social media, no email marketing, few radio ads, no television or newspaper ads. Part of Trader Joe’s appeal is that customers always already seem to know they are supposed to shop there, that they belong.

This runs counter to current brand-management strategy. Whereas other brands are joining platforms like WhatsApp or sliding into consumers’ DMs to try to maximize engagement, Trader Joe’s privileges the IRL, restricting its brand to in-store experiences and refusing to participate in social media. (...)

Though Trader Joe’s lack of social-media presence can be disconcerting to some of the store’s most fervent fans, it retains its particular appeal by playing hard to get. Social-media messaging would only muddle the company’s effort to sell its massively popular corporate brand as a neighborhood secret.

From the start, in 1967, “Trader Joe” Coulombe devised his “low-priced gourmet-cum-health-food store” with an “unemployed PhD student” in mind as the ideal customer. As he explained in 1985 to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he foresaw that this would be a “growing category.” Coulombe anticipated that these savvy, well-educated types would be alienated by mainstream advertising techniques, particularly ones that targeted an ignorance or lack in the consumer with products that were supposed to somehow fix it. Trader Joe’s customers would be presumed to already fully know who they are and what they want — imported cheeses, organic foods, relatively healthy prepared meals, international delicacies, microbrews, California wines — they only lacked means. Selling two-buck chuck to the broke graduate student became emblematic of Trader Joe’s philosophy: good-enough wine at a bargain price for those wise enough to be in the know. If Trader Joe’s started advertising, seeming to put everyone in the know, the wine might not seem so drinkable all of a sudden.

Trader Joe’s rejection of social media extends this approach. If Trader Joe’s were to join social media and chat with consumers, would that not just create the feeling of a fake, forced relationship? The right sort of customer craving the right sort of authenticity doesn’t need to vicariously latch on to brands on social media to feel complete. They aren’t slaves to Facebook or Twitter either. They have a “real” relationship with Trader Joe’s, grounded in going to the store, being there, being present. Trader Joe’s will not tweet at you. The only way to be recognized by Trader Joe’s is to have the cheery cashiers remember your name, to riff on Seinfeld-isms with some bearded guy serving samples of kung pao chicken with a side of brown rice. At Trader Joe’s, it’s IRL or nothing.

by Alicia Eler, TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited