Friday, April 8, 2016
The Yips
[ed. Here's Ernie Els experiencing the yips yesterday on the first hole of the first round of the Masters. Yips and shanks will drive you insane.]
Haney is tall and trim. He was an all-conference player at the University of Tulsa, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, but a few years after graduation he began having serious difficulty controlling his tee shots, which travelled unpredictable distances and were sometimes more than a hundred yards off-line. The problem became so severe, he told me, that between 1985 and 2002 he played fewer than ten rounds, even as he was building a national reputation as an instructor. “One morning, I went out alone with a carry bag and one of those eighteen-packs of cheap balls,” he wrote later. “I lost every one of them by the time I made the turn.” He studied videotapes of his swing, frame by frame, in the hope of discovering some fundamental flaw, and when no one was watching he hit hundreds of range balls, trying to straighten himself out. But the harder he worked the worse his problem became.
Haney was suffering from a much dreaded golf malady, which consists of an involuntary disruptive movement of the hands, wrists, or forearms. In the great majority of cases, it affects putting or chipping, both of which involve relatively small, relatively slow strokes, but, as in Haney’s case, it can infect full swings, too. Versions of it have been known over the years by many names, among them “freezing,” “the waggles,” “the staggers,” “the jerks,” “whiskey fingers,” and “the yips.” That last term is the one that’s used almost universally today. It was coined around the middle of the last century by the Scottish golfer Tommy Armour, a sufferer, who defined it as “a brain spasm that impairs the short game.” Bill Mehlhorn—a contemporary of Armour’s and a leading tour player in the nineteen-twenties—once had a short putt in a tournament in Florida, but he jabbed the ball so far past the hole that a competitor standing in the fringe on the far side of the green had to jump out of the way. Harry Vardon, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Tom Watson all developed the yips late in their careers. Johnny Miller, who was a tour superstar in the mid-nineteen-seventies and early eighties, developed such severe yips that watching him play was painful; a rebroadcast of a 1997 match between him and Jack Nicklaus included relatively few of his (many) putts, presumably because the producers had mercifully edited them out.
Golfers aren’t the only yippers. Cricket bowlers suffer a similar disability, which they also call the yips. In darts, the problem is “dartitis”; in snooker, “cueitis”; in archery, “target panic”; in gun shooting, “flinching”; in baseball pitching, “the creature,” “the monster,” and “Steve Blass disease” (after the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, who, in 1973, developed what turned out to be a career-ending inability to find the strike zone). In 1999, Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ second baseman, began flubbing routine plays to first base, and in one game threw a ball so far off target that it hit the mother of the ESPN sportscaster Keith Olbermann, in the stands. Knoblauch finished his career in left field, and what until that time had usually been called Steve Sax syndrome—after the Dodgers’ second baseman, who had the same problem for several years in the nineteen-eighties—became widely known as Knoblauch disease.
Even bad cases of the yips don’t always end sports careers—at least, not immediately. Miller won the 1976 British Open, at Royal Birkdale, even though he was afraid that, if he looked at his ball or at the head of his putter while making a stroke, he wouldn’t be able to putt at all, and so he placed a dab of red fingernail polish on the grip, below the position of his right thumb, and looked at that instead. Later, he sometimes putted with his eyes closed, or while looking at the hole instead of the ball. The German tour pro Bernhard Langer was able to control his yips by using his right hand to brace the shaft of his putter against his left forearm—and, when the problem returned, by switching to putters with longer shafts and anchoring them against his chest.
Hank Haney arrived at the peculiar swing I saw after deciding he needed to develop a technique that, while it might not be mechanically optimal, made him physically less able to hit the ball in the wrong direction. To reduce the mobility of his hands and wrists, he adopted an unconventional grip, holding the club mostly in his palms, rather than in his fingers. He had noticed that, on the few occasions when he couldn’t avoid demonstrating a shot with his driver, he was able to do so successfully if he looked at his audience, not the ball, while he swung—a feat that impressed his students but for him was an act of desperation. “That was something I discovered by trial and error,” he told me. “Focussing my eyes and my attention on something different—anything to not anticipate the hit, anything to not anticipate the moment of contact with the ball.” In his new swing, he glanced at the ball only briefly, at the very beginning of his routine; during the actual swing, he kept his eyes on the brim of his cap.
Athletes and sports fans have generally assumed that yipping and its variants are forms of performance anxiety, or choking. It’s true that nervous athletes often play poorly, and that yipping is most evident when the stakes are high, and that even serious sufferers are sometimes able to perform in practice or while playing alone. Yet many yippers are veterans of competition at the highest levels, who never showed a tendency to buckle under stress; many others are casual players who have trouble even when the pressure is low. Yipping also is usually extremely task-specific. Haney never stopped being a good putter. Knoblauch didn’t have a problem throwing from the outfield. Archers who can no longer hit a bull’s-eye often have no trouble shooting at bare bales of straw. If the yips and other sports-related movement problems are solely a matter of anxiety, why do they affect only certain motions? And how can a change of target, technique, or equipment sometimes make them go away?
by David Owen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Leo Espinosa
Thursday, April 7, 2016
Dox Populi: A Few Missing Links
What if they held a mammoth document leak and nobody came? That seems, with a slight allowance for hyperbole, the impact of the release of 2.6 terabytes of data from the inner sanctums of Mossack Fonseca, the high-rolling Panamanian law firm. Mossack Fonseca—which is, appropriately enough, the joint brainchild of a scion of an émigré Nazi family and a Panamanian lawyer-novelist—is maniacally dedicated to the instant incorporation of obliging shell companies for an elite clientele seeking to shelter their fortunes from revenue collectors in their economic homeland. More than 100 newsgathering outfits across the globe collaborated, under the aegis of the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to roll out the lead disclosures arising from the leak—a project that is still ongoing. But American news operations largely consigned these lurid revelations of how diligently the international political and economic power elite conceal their pelf from prying auditors to their back pages.
Indeed, the redoubtable hot-take maestros at Vox media leapt fearlessly into the fray to declare that, you know, when you really think about it, offshore tax shelters can be kind of cool—like when, for instance, wealthy dissidents in authoritarian countries use them to shield their fortunes from grasping strongmen! Of course, this enormously charitable view of things suffers a good deal from the actual material leaked about Mossack Fonseca’s enormous client base, which leans heavily toward authoritarian strongmen and their enablers, from Vladimir Putin to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Bashar al-Assad’s enterprising cousin-cum-financial fixer, Rami Makhlouf. It also didn’t help the slapdash case that Vox quisling—er, excuse me, “reporter”—Zack Beauchamp was hoping to make that he staked it largely on an interview with Yale political science professor Margaret Peters, who went out of her way to praise the transparent business climate of the authoritarian regime in Singapore, without bothering to disclose that Yale is partnering with the National University of Singapore in a glorified tax shelter of its own. (Indeed, Yale, like many an elite institution of higher learning, is a centuries-old master of tax dodging.) But hey, as Beauchamp cheerily assures us, “the relations between individuals, states, and offshore accounts isn’t as straightforward as we might think.”
The unexamined presumption in such recursive and rudderless counter-taking is that Beauchamp and his colleagues, or anyone else notionally tasked with reporting on the inner workings of wealth accumulation in our new millennial gilded age, thinks at all about offshore capital shelters. Far from being an exotic plaything of thuggish world leaders like Putin, or merely corrupt ones like Iceland’s ex-Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson (who laid the groundwork for his parliamentary exit on Tuesday in the wake of the news that he’d used Mossack Fonseca shell firms to conceal banking assets at the height of the global financial crisis), the phony incorporation trick is at the heart of America’s own decrepit, financialized, and top-heavy economic order.
That would be why, for example, Apple—which has surpassed merely industrial-age corporations like General Motors and Exxon as the most heavily capitalized company in the world—has routed sales through Ireland (while concertedly soaking its labor force in China). After depositing more than $200 billion in overseas accounts, the computer giant actually borrowed $17 billion in 2013 to finance a massive stock buyback to artificially spike its share prices—and thereby reap hundreds of millions for its lead shareholders to store in their tax-avoidant nest eggs. As finance scams go, the Apple ownership structure admittedly lacks the screwball ribaldry of Ukrainian President Poroshenko busily at work with Mossack Fonseca, worried about his private assets and providing a current utility billto document his home address, on the very day Russia was (again) invading Ukraine. But, structurally speaking, there’s no bright line to distinguish Tim Cook’s Cupertino tax dodges from the more downmarket variety east of the Black Sea.
Indeed, the reason that more American financiers and political figures aren’t named in the Panama Papers is that most of the elaborate ruses of Mossack Fonseca are perfectly legal within American borders, and indeed, the standard m.o., for the American financial sector. Nest-feathering American investors “mostly don’t go to Panama,” says Ken Silverstein, who published a major Mossack Fonseca expose for Vice in 2014. “Hey, Goldman Sachs has private banking systems all over the world.”
America has conspicuously refrained from adopting automated data-sharing protocols promulgated by the OECD to crack down on offshore tax havens—for the simple reason that more robust enforcement of global tax laws would impair the bottom line of the U.S. financial sector.
Indeed, the redoubtable hot-take maestros at Vox media leapt fearlessly into the fray to declare that, you know, when you really think about it, offshore tax shelters can be kind of cool—like when, for instance, wealthy dissidents in authoritarian countries use them to shield their fortunes from grasping strongmen! Of course, this enormously charitable view of things suffers a good deal from the actual material leaked about Mossack Fonseca’s enormous client base, which leans heavily toward authoritarian strongmen and their enablers, from Vladimir Putin to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Bashar al-Assad’s enterprising cousin-cum-financial fixer, Rami Makhlouf. It also didn’t help the slapdash case that Vox quisling—er, excuse me, “reporter”—Zack Beauchamp was hoping to make that he staked it largely on an interview with Yale political science professor Margaret Peters, who went out of her way to praise the transparent business climate of the authoritarian regime in Singapore, without bothering to disclose that Yale is partnering with the National University of Singapore in a glorified tax shelter of its own. (Indeed, Yale, like many an elite institution of higher learning, is a centuries-old master of tax dodging.) But hey, as Beauchamp cheerily assures us, “the relations between individuals, states, and offshore accounts isn’t as straightforward as we might think.”The unexamined presumption in such recursive and rudderless counter-taking is that Beauchamp and his colleagues, or anyone else notionally tasked with reporting on the inner workings of wealth accumulation in our new millennial gilded age, thinks at all about offshore capital shelters. Far from being an exotic plaything of thuggish world leaders like Putin, or merely corrupt ones like Iceland’s ex-Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson (who laid the groundwork for his parliamentary exit on Tuesday in the wake of the news that he’d used Mossack Fonseca shell firms to conceal banking assets at the height of the global financial crisis), the phony incorporation trick is at the heart of America’s own decrepit, financialized, and top-heavy economic order.
That would be why, for example, Apple—which has surpassed merely industrial-age corporations like General Motors and Exxon as the most heavily capitalized company in the world—has routed sales through Ireland (while concertedly soaking its labor force in China). After depositing more than $200 billion in overseas accounts, the computer giant actually borrowed $17 billion in 2013 to finance a massive stock buyback to artificially spike its share prices—and thereby reap hundreds of millions for its lead shareholders to store in their tax-avoidant nest eggs. As finance scams go, the Apple ownership structure admittedly lacks the screwball ribaldry of Ukrainian President Poroshenko busily at work with Mossack Fonseca, worried about his private assets and providing a current utility billto document his home address, on the very day Russia was (again) invading Ukraine. But, structurally speaking, there’s no bright line to distinguish Tim Cook’s Cupertino tax dodges from the more downmarket variety east of the Black Sea.
Indeed, the reason that more American financiers and political figures aren’t named in the Panama Papers is that most of the elaborate ruses of Mossack Fonseca are perfectly legal within American borders, and indeed, the standard m.o., for the American financial sector. Nest-feathering American investors “mostly don’t go to Panama,” says Ken Silverstein, who published a major Mossack Fonseca expose for Vice in 2014. “Hey, Goldman Sachs has private banking systems all over the world.”
America has conspicuously refrained from adopting automated data-sharing protocols promulgated by the OECD to crack down on offshore tax havens—for the simple reason that more robust enforcement of global tax laws would impair the bottom line of the U.S. financial sector.
by Chris Lehman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: David McLimans
A Corporate Tax Dodge Gets Harder
[ed. See also: Pfizer Faces Limited Options After Its Dead Deal With Allergan]
Pfizer never tried to hide the fact that its proposed $152 billion merger with Allergan, based in Ireland, would cut its tax bill in the United States. But even as it rushed to complete the biggest tax-avoidance deal in the history of corporate America, it continued to promote the strategic and economic benefits of the merger.
Any pretense to a motivation other than dodging taxes has now been wiped away. On Wednesday, just two days after the Obama administration introduced new rules to narrow the loopholes that the drug companies were exploiting, Pfizer announced that the deal with Allergan was off.
The new Treasury Department rules take aim at “inversions,” in which an American company merges with a foreign company in a low-tax nation to pass itself off as foreign and in that way cut its American taxes. Inverted companies are often described as having “moved abroad” or “renounced their citizenship.” But the only tie that an inverted company really cuts with the United States is the one that binds it to the Internal Revenue Service.
Such companies almost invariably keep their headquarters, officers and much of their business in the United States. Some 40 American companies have become inverted over the past five years, while tax laws have failed to keep pace with tax-avoidance strategies made possible by a complex mix of corporate offshore accounts and global capital flows.
The Treasury had to act to stop inversions because Congress, still in the grip of an anti-tax Republican majority, won’t. One of the new rules effectively denies tax benefits in new mergers that involve companies that have recently inverted. That scotches the Pfizer and Allergan deal because Allergan, when it was still known as Actavis, an American company, inverted to Ireland in 2013.
The new rules will also clamp down on a practice known as earnings stripping, in which a multinational reduces its American tax bill by having its American subsidiary borrow money from a foreign parent company and then deduct the interest on that loan against its earnings, which cuts its tax bill.
Worse, cash can also be lent to a foreign parent from American profits stashed abroad that are supposed to be taxed when they are repatriated to the United States. Such loans essentially allow foreign-held profits to be used tax-free. American companies could avoid tax on as much as $1 trillion in foreign-held profits by this strategy.
Pfizer never tried to hide the fact that its proposed $152 billion merger with Allergan, based in Ireland, would cut its tax bill in the United States. But even as it rushed to complete the biggest tax-avoidance deal in the history of corporate America, it continued to promote the strategic and economic benefits of the merger.
Any pretense to a motivation other than dodging taxes has now been wiped away. On Wednesday, just two days after the Obama administration introduced new rules to narrow the loopholes that the drug companies were exploiting, Pfizer announced that the deal with Allergan was off.
The new Treasury Department rules take aim at “inversions,” in which an American company merges with a foreign company in a low-tax nation to pass itself off as foreign and in that way cut its American taxes. Inverted companies are often described as having “moved abroad” or “renounced their citizenship.” But the only tie that an inverted company really cuts with the United States is the one that binds it to the Internal Revenue Service.Such companies almost invariably keep their headquarters, officers and much of their business in the United States. Some 40 American companies have become inverted over the past five years, while tax laws have failed to keep pace with tax-avoidance strategies made possible by a complex mix of corporate offshore accounts and global capital flows.
The Treasury had to act to stop inversions because Congress, still in the grip of an anti-tax Republican majority, won’t. One of the new rules effectively denies tax benefits in new mergers that involve companies that have recently inverted. That scotches the Pfizer and Allergan deal because Allergan, when it was still known as Actavis, an American company, inverted to Ireland in 2013.
The new rules will also clamp down on a practice known as earnings stripping, in which a multinational reduces its American tax bill by having its American subsidiary borrow money from a foreign parent company and then deduct the interest on that loan against its earnings, which cuts its tax bill.
Worse, cash can also be lent to a foreign parent from American profits stashed abroad that are supposed to be taxed when they are repatriated to the United States. Such loans essentially allow foreign-held profits to be used tax-free. American companies could avoid tax on as much as $1 trillion in foreign-held profits by this strategy.
by Editorial Board, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Heads of State
A Programming Language For Living Cells
MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.
Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."
Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.
The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.
No experience needed
Over the past 15 years, biologists and engineers have designed many genetic parts, such as sensors, memory switches, and biological clocks, that can be combined to modify existing cell functions and add new ones.
However, designing each circuit is a laborious process that requires great expertise and often a lot of trial and error. "You have to have this really intimate knowledge of how those pieces are going to work and how they're going to come together," Voigt says.
Users of the new programming language, however, need no special knowledge of genetic engineering.
"You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That's what's really different about this," Voigt says. "You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence."
by Anne Trafton, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Janet Iwasa
Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.
"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."Voigt and colleagues at Boston University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this language, which they describe in the April 1 issue of Science, to build circuits that can detect up to three inputs and respond in different ways. Future applications for this kind of programming include designing bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor, or creating yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up.
The researchers plan to make the user design interface available on the Web.
No experience needed
Over the past 15 years, biologists and engineers have designed many genetic parts, such as sensors, memory switches, and biological clocks, that can be combined to modify existing cell functions and add new ones.
However, designing each circuit is a laborious process that requires great expertise and often a lot of trial and error. "You have to have this really intimate knowledge of how those pieces are going to work and how they're going to come together," Voigt says.
Users of the new programming language, however, need no special knowledge of genetic engineering.
"You could be completely naive as to how any of it works. That's what's really different about this," Voigt says. "You could be a student in high school and go onto the Web-based server and type out the program you want, and it spits back the DNA sequence."
by Anne Trafton, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Janet Iwasa
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
The Shark's Collapse, 20 Years Later
[ed. It's Master's week! So many great memories, but Greg Norman's collapse in 1996 still ranks as one of the most painful sporting events I've ever witnessed in my life (his loss to Larry Mize in 1987 on an unbelievable chip-in was one of the saddest). The extraordinary class he exhibited after that loss is still the thing I remember the most, though.]
“Your grandfather was a wonderful golfer,” she said to me.
My dad, who had played the most with Grandpa, remembered differently.
“He was terrible,” he whispered. “He could never get the ball in the air.”
It was only in college that I started to dabble in the game, occasionally stealing off with my roommates with one set of clubs among us. We would drive 20 minutes off campus in New Hampshire to play a dinky nine-hole course named Rockingham, where no hole back then measured more than 300 yards, there were only a handful of trees, and where even in my earliest tear-up-the-turf days as a golfer, it was hard not to break 50. You could get around Rockingham in little more than an hour, so one April afternoon in our senior year, still groggy from whatever damage we had incurred the night before, we agreed we’d sneak in a round before dark. Until then the Masters was on TV, and Greg Norman had a six-shot lead, so we settled into the couches of our grungy apartment, nursed our hangovers, and prepared to watch the man nicknamed the Great White Shark cruise to his first green jacket.
I had no particular attachment to Greg Norman, or really any golfer at that point. But Norman was an inviting figure—chiseled and confident, with an unabashed swagger—and I had paid enough attention to golf to know that the Masters was something that had narrowly eluded him for years. I was looking forward to watching him finally break through—right up until the point it was apparent he wouldn’t. It’s probably strange to admit that the moment that truly sold me on golf was one defined by someone else’s misery. We all have a dark side. But the enjoyment for me was not so much derived from Norman’s collapse. In fact, if at one point we thought we were going to wait until after the CBS telecast to head to the golf course, we eventually deemed his public writhing too painful to witness. When Norman splashed his tee shot in the water on the par-3 16th, all but assuring the Masters title for Nick Faldo, we decided we’d had enough; my roommate Sully clicked the TV off in disgust, and four of us filed out the door and headed to Rockingham. I was disappointed for Norman, but I remained fascinated, my head spinning like it is when you walk out of a movie filled with so many plot twists you need to confirm with others everything that happened.
Until then I was unaware golf could do that. It hadn’t occurred to me that the golf swing was essentially a living organism that could get up and leave you at a time of its choosing, or that someone who had navigated a course so skillfully one moment could flail helplessly the next.
But that, I learned later, was Greg Norman. There were times when he appeared unflappable, looking, as Dan Jenkins wrote in Golf Digest, “like the guy you send out to kill James Bond.” You wouldn’t cast a character like Norman, broad-shouldered and blond, with that Australian accent, to play the victim. And yet on so many occasions even before that Sunday, he was.
To say no golfer lost more than Norman is imprecise, because there are scores of professional golfers who don’t even sniff a chance to win major tournaments. And besides, Norman won plenty—90 times around the world, including two Open Championships. Before Tiger Woods, Norman’s 331 weeks atop the world ranking was a record. We should all be such losers.
Still, if you define losing as standing alluringly close to a prize and failing to capture it, then Norman lost. If losing is when the prevailing emotion afterward is regret, then Norman was in a class of his own.
by Sam Weinman, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How Reporters Pulled Off the Panama Papers, the Biggest Leak in Whistleblower History
When Daniel Ellsberg photocopied and leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, those 7,000 pages of top secret Vietnam War documents represented what was then the biggest whistleblower leak in history—a couple dozen megabytes if it were contained in a modern text file. Almost four decades later, WikiLeaks in 2010 published Cablegate, a world-shaking, 1.73 gigabyte collection of classified State Department communications that was almost a hundred times bigger.
If there’s some Moore’s Law of Leaks, however, it seems to be exponential. Just five years have passed since WikiLeaks’ Cablegate coup, and now the world is grappling with a whistleblower megaleak on a scale never seen before: 2.6 terabytes, well over a thousandfold larger.
On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, released stories on the Panama Papers, a gargantuan collection of leaked documents exposing a widespread system of global tax evasion. The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets.
“This is pretty much every document from this firm over a 40-year period,” ICIJ director Gerard Ryle told WIRED in a phone call, arguing that at “about 2,000 times larger than the WikiLeaks state department cables,” it’s indeed the biggest leak in history.
Neither the ICIJ nor any of the reporters it’s worked with have made the leaked data public. But the scandal resulting from their reporting has already touched celebrities, athletes, business executives and world leaders. The documents trace $2 billion of hidden money tied to Vladimir Putin through accounts held in the names of family members and his celebrated musician friend Sergei Roldugin. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson is facing demands from the previous Icelandic prime minister that he resign after the Mossack Fonseca documents showed that Gunnlaugsson may have failed to disclose ownership of a stake in certain Icelandic banks under the government’s rules for officials. And the leaks drag FIFA officials back into the news, showing that even an ethics lawyer for the world soccer body hadfinancial ties to another FIFA official already accused of corruption.
But beyond those revelations—and there will likely be more as the reporting around the Panama Papers continues—the leak represents an unprecedented story in itself: How an anonymous whistleblower was able to spirit out and surreptitiously send journalists a gargantuan collection of files, which were then analyzed by more than 400 reporters in secret over more than a year before a coordinated effort to go public.
If there’s some Moore’s Law of Leaks, however, it seems to be exponential. Just five years have passed since WikiLeaks’ Cablegate coup, and now the world is grappling with a whistleblower megaleak on a scale never seen before: 2.6 terabytes, well over a thousandfold larger.On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, released stories on the Panama Papers, a gargantuan collection of leaked documents exposing a widespread system of global tax evasion. The leak includes more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that, according to analysis of the leaked documents, appears to specialize in creating shell companies that its clients have used to hide their assets.
“This is pretty much every document from this firm over a 40-year period,” ICIJ director Gerard Ryle told WIRED in a phone call, arguing that at “about 2,000 times larger than the WikiLeaks state department cables,” it’s indeed the biggest leak in history.
Neither the ICIJ nor any of the reporters it’s worked with have made the leaked data public. But the scandal resulting from their reporting has already touched celebrities, athletes, business executives and world leaders. The documents trace $2 billion of hidden money tied to Vladimir Putin through accounts held in the names of family members and his celebrated musician friend Sergei Roldugin. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson is facing demands from the previous Icelandic prime minister that he resign after the Mossack Fonseca documents showed that Gunnlaugsson may have failed to disclose ownership of a stake in certain Icelandic banks under the government’s rules for officials. And the leaks drag FIFA officials back into the news, showing that even an ethics lawyer for the world soccer body hadfinancial ties to another FIFA official already accused of corruption.
But beyond those revelations—and there will likely be more as the reporting around the Panama Papers continues—the leak represents an unprecedented story in itself: How an anonymous whistleblower was able to spirit out and surreptitiously send journalists a gargantuan collection of files, which were then analyzed by more than 400 reporters in secret over more than a year before a coordinated effort to go public.
by Andy Greenberg, Wired | Read more:
Image: Naqiewe/Getty Images
Money For Nothing
In a single night, Scott Disick—the runt of the Kardashian litter, the fuckup father of Kourtney's three children—makes more money doing nothing than most Americans earn in an entire year. Disick is a man routinely mocked on national television for being the one without any skills in a family of people who are famous for not really having any skills. But in 2016, he represents both the luckiest beneficiary and the most tragicomic casualty of the booming club-appearance economy. All he has to do to earn his check is walk through the door at 1OAK in Las Vegas and not leave for one hour.
And yet the club-appearance gig is a giant knot in Disick's life that seems to only tangle and tighten like a noose. He began booking these appearances a few years back, presumably so he could gain some agency beyond the grip of Kris Jenner and have something to call his “job.” For a while, this was working out nicely for him. He was gaining enough notoriety thanks to Keeping Up with the Kardashians that his appearance fee rose to impressive numbers: He could pull $70,000 or $80,000 a night in the U.S. At one high point, he scored a $250,000 deal for a series of appearances in the UK.
But in Disick's case, all that time spent in nightclubs exacerbated his already-problematic drinking and alleged drugging habits, which put him on shaky ground with his family. This made him come off like even more of a loser on the show, which in turn probably made him even more desperate for validation outside of the E! network. Hence, more club appearances, more bad behavior, more humiliation on national TV, more need for outside validation… This is the extended EDM remix of the song that never ends.
Eventually Disick's petulant shenanigans started to get old, and everyone realized that he was deeply troubled. And so the bad press has knocked his appearance fee down a notch. Although not so low that Disick is conflicted about doing the work: His new 1OAK contract requires him to appear eight times at the club in 2016. (...)
You may not think that hanging out in a nightclub four nights a week qualifies as work, but it does, at least as far as the IRS is concerned. “They have to go to the airport, get on a plane, go to the hotel, get ready,” says Sujit Kundu of SKAM Artist, a Los Angeles-based company that brokers club appearances for its celebrity clients. “Sometimes an hour-long club appearance can take two whole days.”
Somehow lots of people decide the excruciating toll is worth it. Not just reality-TV stars, but also DJs, rappers, Insta-famous models, fledgling socialites, and a select group of actors. Some of the club-appearance economy's biggest draws, like DJ/rapper/party personality Lil Jon, fall into a hazy, lucrative middle ground (appearing and briefly performing). Jon even works weekends. On one Saturday night in early December, he heads down from his suite at the Wynn in Las Vegas and strolls into Surrender, one of the casino's many nightclubs, where he takes his customary perch at a VIP table. He partied a little too hard last night, so he'll need a minute to morph into the Lil Jon who has been paid handsomely to be here tonight. He still hasn't taken off his sunglasses. Over the din, his road manager gestures to him with a bottle of tequila, doing a little Let's party dance. Jon smiles, brings his palms together, and holds them next to his face like a contented baby: I'm sleepy. No thanks.
I am here to watch Lil Jon do his job. His job is to party.
And yet the club-appearance gig is a giant knot in Disick's life that seems to only tangle and tighten like a noose. He began booking these appearances a few years back, presumably so he could gain some agency beyond the grip of Kris Jenner and have something to call his “job.” For a while, this was working out nicely for him. He was gaining enough notoriety thanks to Keeping Up with the Kardashians that his appearance fee rose to impressive numbers: He could pull $70,000 or $80,000 a night in the U.S. At one high point, he scored a $250,000 deal for a series of appearances in the UK.But in Disick's case, all that time spent in nightclubs exacerbated his already-problematic drinking and alleged drugging habits, which put him on shaky ground with his family. This made him come off like even more of a loser on the show, which in turn probably made him even more desperate for validation outside of the E! network. Hence, more club appearances, more bad behavior, more humiliation on national TV, more need for outside validation… This is the extended EDM remix of the song that never ends.
Eventually Disick's petulant shenanigans started to get old, and everyone realized that he was deeply troubled. And so the bad press has knocked his appearance fee down a notch. Although not so low that Disick is conflicted about doing the work: His new 1OAK contract requires him to appear eight times at the club in 2016. (...)
You may not think that hanging out in a nightclub four nights a week qualifies as work, but it does, at least as far as the IRS is concerned. “They have to go to the airport, get on a plane, go to the hotel, get ready,” says Sujit Kundu of SKAM Artist, a Los Angeles-based company that brokers club appearances for its celebrity clients. “Sometimes an hour-long club appearance can take two whole days.”
Somehow lots of people decide the excruciating toll is worth it. Not just reality-TV stars, but also DJs, rappers, Insta-famous models, fledgling socialites, and a select group of actors. Some of the club-appearance economy's biggest draws, like DJ/rapper/party personality Lil Jon, fall into a hazy, lucrative middle ground (appearing and briefly performing). Jon even works weekends. On one Saturday night in early December, he heads down from his suite at the Wynn in Las Vegas and strolls into Surrender, one of the casino's many nightclubs, where he takes his customary perch at a VIP table. He partied a little too hard last night, so he'll need a minute to morph into the Lil Jon who has been paid handsomely to be here tonight. He still hasn't taken off his sunglasses. Over the din, his road manager gestures to him with a bottle of tequila, doing a little Let's party dance. Jon smiles, brings his palms together, and holds them next to his face like a contented baby: I'm sleepy. No thanks.
I am here to watch Lil Jon do his job. His job is to party.
by Carrie Battan, GQ | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Millennials Are Being Dot.Conned by Cult-Like Tech Companies
Tech startups love millennials. Tasty, tasty millennials who get underpaid, overworked, churned up and turned into nourishment for venture capitalists. Millennials are the Soylent Green of the tech world.
As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books).
Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.” Today he’s a writer for HBO’s brilliant tech comedy “Silicon Valley,” but in between he blogged for a Boston tech company called HubSpot and wrote this book about it.
How worried was HubSpot about what secrets would emerge in the book? Very. At the company, three top execs were implicated in a scheme to suppress the book, which led to an FBI investigation of alleged extortion and email hacking. The FBI closed its investigation with no charges filed. But two lost their jobs and a third, the CEO, was reprimanded. In a press release, HubSpot said the personnel actions were taken “in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript of a book involving the company.”
HubSpot comes across as a kind of kindergarten cult that plies its young charges with parties, toys, naps, playtime — and not much pay. A huge chunk of potential compensation at tech startups comes in the form of stock options, which could turn out to be worth nothing but are certainly worth nothing if employees get so burned out that they leave before the options vest.
This is part of the plan. Tech firms basically operate like South African gold-mining operations, with confident young Tame Impala fans being the bodies thrown into the pit to break their backs digging up nuggets. All of the IPO gold, though, goes straight into the pockets of their masters topside. (...)
“HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes,” says Lyons, “but rather sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that has still never turned a profit.”
Inside HubSpot’s colorful offices — orange, the official color, is everywhere, as is the company logo, which to Lyons looks like a sprocket with three phalluses sticking out of it — fun is mandatory. Workers, many in shorts and flip-flops, are inordinately proud of the “candy wall” where they can fill up on free snacks. Dogs roam the halls. Occasionally, amid a slave-ship galley of workers hunched over laptops, a Nerf-ball war breaks out. Conference rooms contain beanbag chairs. (...)
Yet HubSpot and many similar tech startups have certainly found a winning formula: a handful of founders and venture capitalists get rich — HubSpot, after its 2014 IPO, sports a value of $1.5 billion — without making a dime in profit.
As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books).
Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.” Today he’s a writer for HBO’s brilliant tech comedy “Silicon Valley,” but in between he blogged for a Boston tech company called HubSpot and wrote this book about it.
How worried was HubSpot about what secrets would emerge in the book? Very. At the company, three top execs were implicated in a scheme to suppress the book, which led to an FBI investigation of alleged extortion and email hacking. The FBI closed its investigation with no charges filed. But two lost their jobs and a third, the CEO, was reprimanded. In a press release, HubSpot said the personnel actions were taken “in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript of a book involving the company.”HubSpot comes across as a kind of kindergarten cult that plies its young charges with parties, toys, naps, playtime — and not much pay. A huge chunk of potential compensation at tech startups comes in the form of stock options, which could turn out to be worth nothing but are certainly worth nothing if employees get so burned out that they leave before the options vest.
This is part of the plan. Tech firms basically operate like South African gold-mining operations, with confident young Tame Impala fans being the bodies thrown into the pit to break their backs digging up nuggets. All of the IPO gold, though, goes straight into the pockets of their masters topside. (...)
“HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes,” says Lyons, “but rather sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that has still never turned a profit.”
Inside HubSpot’s colorful offices — orange, the official color, is everywhere, as is the company logo, which to Lyons looks like a sprocket with three phalluses sticking out of it — fun is mandatory. Workers, many in shorts and flip-flops, are inordinately proud of the “candy wall” where they can fill up on free snacks. Dogs roam the halls. Occasionally, amid a slave-ship galley of workers hunched over laptops, a Nerf-ball war breaks out. Conference rooms contain beanbag chairs. (...)
Like the show “Silicon Valley,” “Disrupted” nails the workings of spastic, hypocritical, delusional tech culture, notably:
• Ridiculously grandiose claims. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Lyons was told in training. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives.”
An exec claims that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are jealous and that HubSpot has the best marketing team in the world. Lyons notes, “I’ve spent years covering Silicon Valley, and before coming to HubSpot I’d never heard of the company.” Cheerleaders inside the company keep calling its products “magical.”
The product, Lyons says, is a chunk of buggy marketing software for businesses that HubSpot has yet to turn a profit selling. “Our customers,” Lyons notes dryly, “include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers.”
Every month, he notes, HubSpot’s customers send out more than 1 billion email pitches. More spam = changing the world! Join the spamolution! At HubSpot conferences, attendees are taught tricks like using misleading subject lines in spam to trick people into opening the message — lines like, “fwd: your holiday plans.” (...)
• An all-pervading sinister air. Calling HubSpot a “startup cult” and comparing it to Scientology, Lyons notes that employees have to wear rubber bracelets containing transponders, which are needed to lock and unlock doors when moving around HQ. Which means, of course, that the Company is tracking you at all times. The Company also gives employees a lengthy, pseudoscientific, entirely scary-sounding personality test (devised by a crackpot whose claim to fame was creating the Wonder Woman comics). All of this sounds kinda like the bizarre questionnaire Scientologists take while grasping tin cans.
So eager are innocent young bunnies to comply with the unique language, rituals and culture of this happy-face corporate police state that “drinking the Kool-Aid,” while a trite phrase in Silicon Valley, is scarily apposite. “What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?” asks Lyons. “Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults.”
A 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that describes HubSpot culture (one slide says “team > individual”) describes “a kind of corporate utopia . . . where people don’t worry about work-life balance because work is their life.” No one, Lyons emphasizes, ever jokes about any of this stuff.
• Unyielding death-grip on childhood. The company’s chief technology officer announces he’s bringing a teddy bear to meetings and invites everyone else to do the same. On Halloween, everyone comes to work in a wacky costume so the company can do a group photo captioned, “We dare to be different.”
To convey the feeling that life means carrying on campus goofiness indefinitely, training sessions are held by “marketing professors” and “faculty” belong to “HubSpot Academy.” Beer taps are installed in the kitchen. The worst thing you can say is that “at my last company, we used to do it this way,” because that implies you’re a grownup with experience instead of a peppy little lamb seeing the world with fresh, dewy eyes.
After serving as technology editor for Newsweek, and with decades’ experience, Lyons finds his intern-age boss is a guy with only one previous job (an entry-level gig doing sales for Google). (...)
• Ridiculously grandiose claims. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Lyons was told in training. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives.”
An exec claims that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are jealous and that HubSpot has the best marketing team in the world. Lyons notes, “I’ve spent years covering Silicon Valley, and before coming to HubSpot I’d never heard of the company.” Cheerleaders inside the company keep calling its products “magical.”
The product, Lyons says, is a chunk of buggy marketing software for businesses that HubSpot has yet to turn a profit selling. “Our customers,” Lyons notes dryly, “include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers.”
Every month, he notes, HubSpot’s customers send out more than 1 billion email pitches. More spam = changing the world! Join the spamolution! At HubSpot conferences, attendees are taught tricks like using misleading subject lines in spam to trick people into opening the message — lines like, “fwd: your holiday plans.” (...)
• An all-pervading sinister air. Calling HubSpot a “startup cult” and comparing it to Scientology, Lyons notes that employees have to wear rubber bracelets containing transponders, which are needed to lock and unlock doors when moving around HQ. Which means, of course, that the Company is tracking you at all times. The Company also gives employees a lengthy, pseudoscientific, entirely scary-sounding personality test (devised by a crackpot whose claim to fame was creating the Wonder Woman comics). All of this sounds kinda like the bizarre questionnaire Scientologists take while grasping tin cans.
So eager are innocent young bunnies to comply with the unique language, rituals and culture of this happy-face corporate police state that “drinking the Kool-Aid,” while a trite phrase in Silicon Valley, is scarily apposite. “What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?” asks Lyons. “Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults.”
A 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that describes HubSpot culture (one slide says “team > individual”) describes “a kind of corporate utopia . . . where people don’t worry about work-life balance because work is their life.” No one, Lyons emphasizes, ever jokes about any of this stuff.
• Unyielding death-grip on childhood. The company’s chief technology officer announces he’s bringing a teddy bear to meetings and invites everyone else to do the same. On Halloween, everyone comes to work in a wacky costume so the company can do a group photo captioned, “We dare to be different.”
To convey the feeling that life means carrying on campus goofiness indefinitely, training sessions are held by “marketing professors” and “faculty” belong to “HubSpot Academy.” Beer taps are installed in the kitchen. The worst thing you can say is that “at my last company, we used to do it this way,” because that implies you’re a grownup with experience instead of a peppy little lamb seeing the world with fresh, dewy eyes.
After serving as technology editor for Newsweek, and with decades’ experience, Lyons finds his intern-age boss is a guy with only one previous job (an entry-level gig doing sales for Google). (...)
Yet HubSpot and many similar tech startups have certainly found a winning formula: a handful of founders and venture capitalists get rich — HubSpot, after its 2014 IPO, sports a value of $1.5 billion — without making a dime in profit.
by Kyle Smith, NY Post | Read more:
Image: Getty
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” – Albert Camus
via:
Teaching Men to Be Emotionally Honest
Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you’re a man: ‘I’m a man!’ ” The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. “I’m a man!” he barks through tears and gritted teeth.
The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself.
This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called “Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity,” what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences.
Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes.
In many ways, the young men who take my seminar — typically, 20 percent of the class — mirror national trends. Based on their grades and writing assignments, it’s clear that they spend less time on homework than female students do; and while every bit as intelligent, they earn lower grades with studied indifference. When I asked one of my male students why he didn’t openly fret about grades the way so many women do, he said: “Nothing’s worse for a guy than looking like a Try Hard.”
In a report based on the 2013 book “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools,” the sociologists Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann observe: “Boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure. In fact, boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these cultural activities are often denigrated as un-masculine by preadolescent and adolescent boys.”
Throughout elementary school and beyond, they write, girls consistently show “higher social and behavioral skills,” which translate into “higher rates of cognitive learning” and “higher levels of academic investment.”
It should come as no surprise that college enrollment rates for women have outstripped men’s. In 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, 63 percent of females and 61 percent of males enrolled in college right after high school; by 2012, the percentage of young women had increased to 71, but the percentage of men remained unchanged.
By the time many young men do reach college, a deep-seated gender stereotype has taken root that feeds into the stories they have heard about themselves as learners. Better to earn your Man Card than to succeed like a girl, all in the name of constantly having to prove an identity to yourself and others.
The course “Real Men Smile,” which examines how the perceptions of masculinity have and haven’t changed since the 18th century, grew out of a provocative lecture by Michael Kimmel, the seminal researcher and author in the growing field of masculine studies.
Dr. Kimmel came to my campus, Towson University, in 2011 to discuss the “Bro Code” of collegiate male etiquette. In his talk, he deconstructed the survival kit of many middle-class, white male students: online pornography, binge drinking, a brotherhood in which respect is proportional to the disrespect heaped onto young women during hookups, and finally, the most ubiquitous affirmation of their tenuous power, video games.
As Dr. Kimmel masterfully deflected an outpouring of protests, the atmosphere grew palpably tense. A young man wearing fraternity letters stood up. “What you don’t get right is that girls are into hooking up as much as we are; they come on to us, too,” he said. Dr. Kimmel shook his head, which left the student clearly rattled.
His voice quavering, the young man stammered something unexpected from a frat brother, about how women can be as insensitive and hurtful as guys. He sounded like a victim himself. But afterward, when I asked him if he had reached out to any of his guy friends for advice or solace, he stared at me, incredulous, his irises two small blue islands amid a sea of sclera. “Nah, I’ve got this,” he said.
The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself.This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called “Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity,” what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences.
Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes.
In many ways, the young men who take my seminar — typically, 20 percent of the class — mirror national trends. Based on their grades and writing assignments, it’s clear that they spend less time on homework than female students do; and while every bit as intelligent, they earn lower grades with studied indifference. When I asked one of my male students why he didn’t openly fret about grades the way so many women do, he said: “Nothing’s worse for a guy than looking like a Try Hard.”
In a report based on the 2013 book “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools,” the sociologists Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann observe: “Boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity than with anatomy, hormones or brain structure. In fact, boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these cultural activities are often denigrated as un-masculine by preadolescent and adolescent boys.”
Throughout elementary school and beyond, they write, girls consistently show “higher social and behavioral skills,” which translate into “higher rates of cognitive learning” and “higher levels of academic investment.”
It should come as no surprise that college enrollment rates for women have outstripped men’s. In 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, 63 percent of females and 61 percent of males enrolled in college right after high school; by 2012, the percentage of young women had increased to 71, but the percentage of men remained unchanged.
By the time many young men do reach college, a deep-seated gender stereotype has taken root that feeds into the stories they have heard about themselves as learners. Better to earn your Man Card than to succeed like a girl, all in the name of constantly having to prove an identity to yourself and others.
The course “Real Men Smile,” which examines how the perceptions of masculinity have and haven’t changed since the 18th century, grew out of a provocative lecture by Michael Kimmel, the seminal researcher and author in the growing field of masculine studies.
Dr. Kimmel came to my campus, Towson University, in 2011 to discuss the “Bro Code” of collegiate male etiquette. In his talk, he deconstructed the survival kit of many middle-class, white male students: online pornography, binge drinking, a brotherhood in which respect is proportional to the disrespect heaped onto young women during hookups, and finally, the most ubiquitous affirmation of their tenuous power, video games.
As Dr. Kimmel masterfully deflected an outpouring of protests, the atmosphere grew palpably tense. A young man wearing fraternity letters stood up. “What you don’t get right is that girls are into hooking up as much as we are; they come on to us, too,” he said. Dr. Kimmel shook his head, which left the student clearly rattled.
His voice quavering, the young man stammered something unexpected from a frat brother, about how women can be as insensitive and hurtful as guys. He sounded like a victim himself. But afterward, when I asked him if he had reached out to any of his guy friends for advice or solace, he stared at me, incredulous, his irises two small blue islands amid a sea of sclera. “Nah, I’ve got this,” he said.
by Andrew Reiner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ben Wiseman
Monday, April 4, 2016
How a Small Tech Site Found a New Way for Publishers to Get Paid
[ed. If you've never visited the Wirecutter, you should really check it out.]
Lam’s website, the Wirecutter, has become a Consumer Reports for the digital age, albeit with a unique model -- it posts in-depth reviews of gadgets, embeds links to buy them on e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, and takes a cut of the sales. The site has a staff of about 60 and posts only a few dozen articles a month, yet it’s profitable. Last year, the Wirecutter drove $150 million in e-commerce transactions, Lam said.
“We move as much product as a place 10 times bigger than us in terms of audience,” Lam said in an interview. “That’s because people trust us. We earn that trust by having such deeply-researched articles.”In recent months, several publishers including BuzzFeed Inc. and Hearst Corp. have started testing the Wirecutter’s strategy, known as affiliate marketing, as the traditional model of driving clicks to boost advertising dollars comes under pressure.
Some publishers have seen their U.S. Internet traffic growth flatten as the Web matures and websites proliferate. Meanwhile, more readers are adopting “ad blockers” to avoid annoying marketing messages that slow loading speeds and drain phone batteries. And brands are increasingly buying online display advertising -- such as banner ads -- via automated exchanges, creating an abundance of supply that depresses prices that publishers can charge, said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research.
“Publishers know that advertising is a difficult business to be in if you’re not named Facebook and Google,” Wieser said. “You can grow your audience, but in a deflationary environment, you have to run just to stand still.”
Lam sees less conflict of interest in profiting from the sale of products he recommends than in traditional Web advertising. The Wirecutter, which does carry some ads, has an incentive to help readers buy the best gadgets because it doesn’t get paid if they return them, while many media outlets get paid by posting “click bait” that disappoints readers, he said.
“If someone buys something off our site that we recommend, and they hate it, we get nothing,” Lam said. “So the more we help readers the better our business does.” (...)
When Lam started the Wirecutter in 2011, his strategy wasn’t completely new. Bloggers had supported themselves for years by reviewing products and taking a cut of sales. The Wirecutter was the first mainstream outlet to make that its primary model, said Lam, a former editor at Gawker’s technology site Gizmodo and Conde Nast’s Wired magazine.
Unlike many digital media startups, the Wirecutter has no outside investors. And its traffic is relatively small: it had 622,000 unique U.S. visitors in February, according to ComScore, a fraction of major tech websites like the Verge. The Wirecutter isn’t focused on traffic. It wants readers to buy products it recommends, so it takes its time, Lam said.
Each Wirecutter post takes between 20 to 200 hours of research and testing. In many cases, the site enlists the help of engineers, chemists and scientists. While reviewing the best bike locks, it received input from an actual bike thief, according to the company’s website. While testing waterproof iPhone cases, one of its employees swam a quarter of a mile in the ocean. The Wirecutter recently expanded its profile by teaming with the New York Times to test ways to preserve smartphone battery life and Wi-Fi routers.
No gadget is too obscure for reviewing, Lam said, citing a “really random” piece his site did on the best windshield wipers.
“You wouldn’t think it makes a difference,” said Lam, who realized he didn’t have streaks on his windshield in a year. “I didn’t know that windshield wipers could annoy me so little.”
by Gerry Smith, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Wirecutter
The Next Big Thing
Asked to name an event that has reshaped finance in recent years, bankers will point to the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15th 2008, the nadir of the financial crisis. Fintech types are more likely to mention something that happened six weeks later. On October 31st 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous cryptography buff whose real identity remains a mystery, unveiled a project he dubbed bitcoin, “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party”. It described what appeared to be a robust framework for a currency that could run without the backing of any government. Enthusiasts proclaimed that finance was about to enter the era of crypto-currencies. Since the need for a trusted third party has traditionally been a large part of the banks’ raison d’être, this could mean that in future they will no longer be required—potentially a much more radical change than the other inroads fintech has made on their business.
Six-and-a-half years on, the bankers may feel they can relax a little. Interest in bitcoin has waned. After spiking at $1,100 in November 2013, its value has dropped to $225 (see chart). A few online retailers and trendy coffee bars accept it, but its yo-yoing value is one reason why its use in the legitimate economy is barely measurable (though it remains a favourite with drug-dealers). The general public has not forsaken cash or credit cards.
Interest in the underlying mechanics of the currency, however, has continued to grow. The technological breakthroughs that made bitcoin possible, using cryptography to organise a complex network, fascinate leading figures in Silicon Valley. Many of them believe parts of Mr Nakamoto’s idea can be recycled for other uses. The “blockchain” technology that underpins bitcoin, a sort of peer-to-peer system of running a currency, is presented as a piece of innovation on a par with the introduction of limited liability for corporations, or private property rights, or the internet itself.
In essence, the blockchain is a giant ledger that keeps track of who owns how much bitcoin. The coins themselves are not physical objects, nor even digital files, but entries in the blockchain ledger: owning bitcoin is merely having a claim on a piece of information sitting on the blockchain.
The same could be said of how a bank keeps track of how much money is kept in each of its accounts. But there the similarities end. Unlike a bank’s ledger, which is centralised and private, the blockchain is public and distributed widely. Anyone can download a copy of it. Identities are protected by clever cryptography; beyond that the system is entirely transparent.
As well as keeping track of who owns bitcoin today, the blockchain is a record of who has owned every bitcoin since its inception. Units of currency are transferred from one party to another as part of a new “block” of transactions added to the existing chain—hence the name. New blocks are tacked on to the blockchain every ten minutes or so, extending it by a few hundred lines (it is already over 8,000 times the length of the Bible).
The proposed transactions contained in new blocks do not have to be approved by some central arbiter, as in conventional banking. Rather, a large number of computers dedicate themselves to keeping the system running. Rewards are high enough for vast data centres across the world to want to participate. Known as “miners”, they authenticate transactions by reaching a consensus on what the latest version of the blockchain should look like. In exchange, they are given newly minted bitcoin.
Chaining blocks together sequentially prevents anyone spending the same bitcoin twice, a bane of previous digital currencies. And the system is beyond tampering by any one party. Unlike a bank ledger, which can be altered by its owner (or a government), the blockchain cannot be changed without simultaneously overwriting all of the thousands of copies used by the miners at any one time. The definitive version of the blockchain is whatever a majority of the participating computers accepts. None of them is connected to any centralised organisation. There is no bitcoin central bank to sway them. To overwhelm the system, someone would need to control 51% of the computing capacity of the 10,000 or so “miners”—not impossible but unlikely.
This system of consensus by distributed co-operation sounds complicated, but it allows something of value to be transferred from one person to another without a middleman to verify the transaction. Fans think this is a way of changing the centralised, institution-dominated shape of modern finance. It is genuinely new. The question is whether it is useful.
Six-and-a-half years on, the bankers may feel they can relax a little. Interest in bitcoin has waned. After spiking at $1,100 in November 2013, its value has dropped to $225 (see chart). A few online retailers and trendy coffee bars accept it, but its yo-yoing value is one reason why its use in the legitimate economy is barely measurable (though it remains a favourite with drug-dealers). The general public has not forsaken cash or credit cards.Interest in the underlying mechanics of the currency, however, has continued to grow. The technological breakthroughs that made bitcoin possible, using cryptography to organise a complex network, fascinate leading figures in Silicon Valley. Many of them believe parts of Mr Nakamoto’s idea can be recycled for other uses. The “blockchain” technology that underpins bitcoin, a sort of peer-to-peer system of running a currency, is presented as a piece of innovation on a par with the introduction of limited liability for corporations, or private property rights, or the internet itself.
In essence, the blockchain is a giant ledger that keeps track of who owns how much bitcoin. The coins themselves are not physical objects, nor even digital files, but entries in the blockchain ledger: owning bitcoin is merely having a claim on a piece of information sitting on the blockchain.
The same could be said of how a bank keeps track of how much money is kept in each of its accounts. But there the similarities end. Unlike a bank’s ledger, which is centralised and private, the blockchain is public and distributed widely. Anyone can download a copy of it. Identities are protected by clever cryptography; beyond that the system is entirely transparent.
As well as keeping track of who owns bitcoin today, the blockchain is a record of who has owned every bitcoin since its inception. Units of currency are transferred from one party to another as part of a new “block” of transactions added to the existing chain—hence the name. New blocks are tacked on to the blockchain every ten minutes or so, extending it by a few hundred lines (it is already over 8,000 times the length of the Bible).
The proposed transactions contained in new blocks do not have to be approved by some central arbiter, as in conventional banking. Rather, a large number of computers dedicate themselves to keeping the system running. Rewards are high enough for vast data centres across the world to want to participate. Known as “miners”, they authenticate transactions by reaching a consensus on what the latest version of the blockchain should look like. In exchange, they are given newly minted bitcoin.
Chaining blocks together sequentially prevents anyone spending the same bitcoin twice, a bane of previous digital currencies. And the system is beyond tampering by any one party. Unlike a bank ledger, which can be altered by its owner (or a government), the blockchain cannot be changed without simultaneously overwriting all of the thousands of copies used by the miners at any one time. The definitive version of the blockchain is whatever a majority of the participating computers accepts. None of them is connected to any centralised organisation. There is no bitcoin central bank to sway them. To overwhelm the system, someone would need to control 51% of the computing capacity of the 10,000 or so “miners”—not impossible but unlikely.
This system of consensus by distributed co-operation sounds complicated, but it allows something of value to be transferred from one person to another without a middleman to verify the transaction. Fans think this is a way of changing the centralised, institution-dominated shape of modern finance. It is genuinely new. The question is whether it is useful.
by The Economist | Read more:
Image: Satoshi Kamayashi
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)