Monday, May 9, 2016
Kimchi Fried Rice, Korean Comfort Food
I had a problem with kimchi fried rice: Its name says garlic and chile and sour, yeasty ferments that will lay waste to your taste buds, but the usual reality is chewy grains and a hum of warmth. It’s like sidling up to a fireplace when you feel like being a smokejumper. But Grace Lee, a music marketer by day and kimchi-maker by night and weekend, set me straight on kimchi fried rice. In her version, the fire and tang of kimchi are mellowed out with butter, and the rice is scented with sesame oil and topped with a soft-fried egg. “It just tastes happy,” she said, and I finally understood the dish. It’s not tame — it’s food designed for comforting, continual spoon-to-mouth consumption. For Koreans who grew up making and eating it, there is no confusion about what it is supposed to be.
“It’s everyday comfort food for us; it’s what you make for your kids when they come home from school,” Lee said. I saw how kimchi fried rice becomes a companion for life, a taste that does not change. (...)
Ingredients
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ small onion, medium dice
1 cup roughly chopped kimchi (6 ounces)
2 tablespoons kimchi juice, or to taste
½ cup small-dice Spam, ham or leftover cooked meat
2 cups cooked, cooled rice(preferably short-grain)
2 teaspoons soy sauce, or to taste
1 teaspoon sesame oil, or to taste
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
2 eggs
Salt to taste
Crumbled or slivered nori (roasted seaweed) for garnish
Sesame seeds for garnish
3 tablespoons unsalted butter½ small onion, medium dice
1 cup roughly chopped kimchi (6 ounces)
2 tablespoons kimchi juice, or to taste
½ cup small-dice Spam, ham or leftover cooked meat
2 cups cooked, cooled rice(preferably short-grain)
2 teaspoons soy sauce, or to taste
1 teaspoon sesame oil, or to taste
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
2 eggs
Salt to taste
Crumbled or slivered nori (roasted seaweed) for garnish
Sesame seeds for garnish
Preparation
In a nonstick sauté pan or well-seasoned cast-iron skillet, melt butter over medium-low heat, and add onions. Cook, stirring, until the onions start to sizzle, about 2 minutes. Add kimchi and kimchi juice, and stir until it comes to a boil, about 3 minutes. Add Spam, and cook until sauce is nearly dried out, about 5 minutes.
Break up the rice in the pan with a spatula, and stir it to incorporate. Turn heat to medium. Cook, stirring, until the rice has absorbed the sauce and is very hot, about 5 minutes. Stir in soy sauce and sesame oil.
Taste, and adjust with more soy sauce, sesame oil or kimchi juice. Turn heat down slightly, but let the rice continue to cook, untouched, to lightly brown while you cook the eggs.
Place a small nonstick sauté pan over medium heat, and add the vegetable oil. When it is hot, add eggs, season with salt and fry to your desired doneness. Serve rice topped with fried eggs, nori and a sprinkle of sesame seeds.
by Francis Lam, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Davide Luciano for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Gozde Eker.
The End of a Mobile Wave
The mobile phone industry has had two waves - first voice and SMS and then the smartphone. The voice wave has taken it from zero to 5 billion people on earth with a mobile phone, and now close to 2 billion mobile phones are sold every year. In parallel, starting 9 years ago, the smartphone wave converted a larger and larger percentage of those phone sales to smartphones.
And since smartphones could be sold for higher average prices than feature phones, revenue grew even faster than unit sales. This was a great multiplier for the right companies - smartphones were a growing percentage of growing phone sales at growing prices.
All of this is now reaching an end - the wave is almost over.
By 2020 there'll be 6bn adults on earth and more than 5bn people with phones, and the last billion are necessarily the slowest and hardest to reach. Phone sales are a function of the install base and the replacement rate - the install base hasn’t got much more growth and the replacement rate is also starting to lengthen (or at least not shorten). So phone sales will slow. Then, most phone sales now are already smartphones (as seen in the chart above), so the conversion of phone sales to smartphone sales also hasn’t got much further to grow. The smartphone install base does have a lot of room to grow, but that's a function of replacement at close to existing volumes, and even that will be largely done in a few more years. Hence: smartphone sales growth is slowing down.
On one level this is just classic saturation - no industry can grow forever. But what happens next?
At the level of the consumer internet, it’s been clear for some time that Apple and Google won the platform war and that the important questions have moved up the stack - how far can Google and Facebook capture attention and intent, what other interaction models will emerge, how far Android and iOS can shape interaction and consumer behaviour, and so on.
For the hardware companies themselves, though (and that includes Apple), when you’re selling to everyone on earth (something the tech industry has never really done before), what do you do next? TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones, and so are watches and (to some extent) even tablets. VR and AR are some time away with unclear market size, though I think AR could in principle be the next ecosystem after the smartphone.
The obvious next market is cars, which in aggregate are much larger in revenue terms, and where a large part of the supply chain will be fundamentally remade by the shift to electric and (in due course) to autonomy. Cars are a Big Deal for the tech industry.
But it’s also interesting to think about the phone market itself, which isn’t going away any time soon (though AR may affect that in the next decade).
I spent some time chatting to Condor at MWC this spring. It's a subsidiary of an Algerian family-owned conglomerate, which began in the cement business and expanded into white goods - fridges and washing machines - and then televisions ('brown goods'). It built a nation-wide network of 150 stores to support that business. Then it got into the phone business, and last year it sold 3m phones, of which 2.8m were Android smartphones. The best-selling model retails for $80. It expects to reach sales of $1bn this year, and has around a third of the Algerian market.
Condor is possible because mobile phone technology became something that you could buy off the shelf - if you can make a TV, you can make a mobile phone or a smartphone, without needing deep understanding of how cellular technology works anymore, or writing your own OS. In parallel, the manufacturing base of the industry moved from factories you own yourselves to outsourced contracting. So, you can make phones, or get someone else to make them for you, or some combination of the two, with much lower barriers to entry. And if you come from the cement business, your idea of a great margin looks rather different to Sony's.
However, there's a big difference between making a phone and selling it. It’s all very well to put it in a shipping container in Shenzhen, but what happens after that? A lot of Apple's sales growth since 2007 has actually been about expanding distribution through mobile operators (which sell far more iPhones than Apple retail does), with the really big additions being Verizon Wireless and China Mobile. Indeed, the fact that it has now signed up all the operators that matter is one reason sales growth has slowed. In parallel, distribution was a big part of the Samsung story. It has effectively cloned Nokia: it offers every technology, frequency and specification, at every price point, for every operator, through every sales channel, and spends billions of dollars on sales and distribution to support that, of which a very large part will be sales commissions.
That is, with the tech available off the shelf, the barrier to entry has moved from the creation and manufacture of the phones themselves to sales, distribution, marketing and support, and a lot of the innovation in the handset business now is around how to address that. Which part of the value chain do you start from and try to leverage, and which parts you outsource? Someone has to make it, someone has to import it, someone has to put into shops, or market it for online sales, and (especially in developed markets) someone has to provide support if you smash the screen. But all of those are being disassembled and reassembled in different combinations.
Hence, at one end of the spectrum are Chinese companies that are just looking for distribution deals overseas, and will sell you a few thousand or tens of thousand with the brand of your choice printed on the back, and what happens after the shipping container (or suitcase) leaves Shenzhen is up to you. The next step along are those trying to create a brand of their own, often in parallel with selling phones under other people's brands. So I've met several companies that have a slick new consumer brand of their own with nicely designed handsets and a decent Android skin, and are thinking about how to take that abroad - what that sales and distribution might look like, and where it should be. One interesting illustration of this is Wiko, which has a double-digit share of the French market and is expanding in south-east Asia. The back of the phone says ‘Designed in France, Assembled in China’, but in fact Wiko seems to be majority owned by a Chinese company, Shenzhen Tinno Mobile Technology Company Ltd.
Sitting right next to Wiko are ever more companies starting from the other end - building brand, distribution and marketing locally, adding some design, and outsourcing the manufacturing. Wiley Fox in the UK comes from people with a background in mobile operators, selling a premium design at a mid-range price with a lightly skinned version of Android. BQ in Spain originates in ereaders, amongst other things. Blu in Latin America has built a huge business on distribution. And of course Google sells its own ’Nexus’ line, using a rarely-encountered custom build of Android and adding a small amount of marketing and distribution.
As the price for a good Android experience moves from $600 to $150 or $250, these companies can increasingly pass up operator subsidies, with burdens of inventory etc. that this imposes, and move straight to selling unsubsidised and online. The poster-child for this model is of course Xiaomi, which has pioneered an online-only flash sales model, backed by an attempt to build a passionate community around the brand and software experience. This has worked well in China but it's not clear how well it can be made to work elsewhere, and whether it can be built once and scaled globally or whether you need to do it one country at a time from scratch.
Then, coming from the other end of the spectrum, mobile operators are increasing buying in a selection of low-end smartphones than they sell (generally unsubsidised on prepay) under their own brand. Sometimes these have operator apps preloaded (if they've not given up on that yet), sometimes not. One could argue that the value being added here is really only distribution, and so one might see other companies with distribution getting into this, such as mass-market retailers. Some of these have already experimented with Android tablets, with mixed results (as of course they did with MVNOs).
This is all rather like the PC clone market of the 1980s - hundreds of undifferentiated companies fighting it out to sell commodity computers built with commodity components running a commodity operating system (though those companies mainly made the PCs themselves, where many phone brands do not). That world in due course led to companies like Dell - people who embraced the volume, low-margin commodity model and found an angle of their own. We’re starting to see equivalent model-creation now.
And since smartphones could be sold for higher average prices than feature phones, revenue grew even faster than unit sales. This was a great multiplier for the right companies - smartphones were a growing percentage of growing phone sales at growing prices.
All of this is now reaching an end - the wave is almost over.
By 2020 there'll be 6bn adults on earth and more than 5bn people with phones, and the last billion are necessarily the slowest and hardest to reach. Phone sales are a function of the install base and the replacement rate - the install base hasn’t got much more growth and the replacement rate is also starting to lengthen (or at least not shorten). So phone sales will slow. Then, most phone sales now are already smartphones (as seen in the chart above), so the conversion of phone sales to smartphone sales also hasn’t got much further to grow. The smartphone install base does have a lot of room to grow, but that's a function of replacement at close to existing volumes, and even that will be largely done in a few more years. Hence: smartphone sales growth is slowing down.
On one level this is just classic saturation - no industry can grow forever. But what happens next?
At the level of the consumer internet, it’s been clear for some time that Apple and Google won the platform war and that the important questions have moved up the stack - how far can Google and Facebook capture attention and intent, what other interaction models will emerge, how far Android and iOS can shape interaction and consumer behaviour, and so on.
For the hardware companies themselves, though (and that includes Apple), when you’re selling to everyone on earth (something the tech industry has never really done before), what do you do next? TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones, and so are watches and (to some extent) even tablets. VR and AR are some time away with unclear market size, though I think AR could in principle be the next ecosystem after the smartphone.
The obvious next market is cars, which in aggregate are much larger in revenue terms, and where a large part of the supply chain will be fundamentally remade by the shift to electric and (in due course) to autonomy. Cars are a Big Deal for the tech industry.
But it’s also interesting to think about the phone market itself, which isn’t going away any time soon (though AR may affect that in the next decade).
I spent some time chatting to Condor at MWC this spring. It's a subsidiary of an Algerian family-owned conglomerate, which began in the cement business and expanded into white goods - fridges and washing machines - and then televisions ('brown goods'). It built a nation-wide network of 150 stores to support that business. Then it got into the phone business, and last year it sold 3m phones, of which 2.8m were Android smartphones. The best-selling model retails for $80. It expects to reach sales of $1bn this year, and has around a third of the Algerian market.
Condor is possible because mobile phone technology became something that you could buy off the shelf - if you can make a TV, you can make a mobile phone or a smartphone, without needing deep understanding of how cellular technology works anymore, or writing your own OS. In parallel, the manufacturing base of the industry moved from factories you own yourselves to outsourced contracting. So, you can make phones, or get someone else to make them for you, or some combination of the two, with much lower barriers to entry. And if you come from the cement business, your idea of a great margin looks rather different to Sony's.
However, there's a big difference between making a phone and selling it. It’s all very well to put it in a shipping container in Shenzhen, but what happens after that? A lot of Apple's sales growth since 2007 has actually been about expanding distribution through mobile operators (which sell far more iPhones than Apple retail does), with the really big additions being Verizon Wireless and China Mobile. Indeed, the fact that it has now signed up all the operators that matter is one reason sales growth has slowed. In parallel, distribution was a big part of the Samsung story. It has effectively cloned Nokia: it offers every technology, frequency and specification, at every price point, for every operator, through every sales channel, and spends billions of dollars on sales and distribution to support that, of which a very large part will be sales commissions.
That is, with the tech available off the shelf, the barrier to entry has moved from the creation and manufacture of the phones themselves to sales, distribution, marketing and support, and a lot of the innovation in the handset business now is around how to address that. Which part of the value chain do you start from and try to leverage, and which parts you outsource? Someone has to make it, someone has to import it, someone has to put into shops, or market it for online sales, and (especially in developed markets) someone has to provide support if you smash the screen. But all of those are being disassembled and reassembled in different combinations.
Hence, at one end of the spectrum are Chinese companies that are just looking for distribution deals overseas, and will sell you a few thousand or tens of thousand with the brand of your choice printed on the back, and what happens after the shipping container (or suitcase) leaves Shenzhen is up to you. The next step along are those trying to create a brand of their own, often in parallel with selling phones under other people's brands. So I've met several companies that have a slick new consumer brand of their own with nicely designed handsets and a decent Android skin, and are thinking about how to take that abroad - what that sales and distribution might look like, and where it should be. One interesting illustration of this is Wiko, which has a double-digit share of the French market and is expanding in south-east Asia. The back of the phone says ‘Designed in France, Assembled in China’, but in fact Wiko seems to be majority owned by a Chinese company, Shenzhen Tinno Mobile Technology Company Ltd.
Sitting right next to Wiko are ever more companies starting from the other end - building brand, distribution and marketing locally, adding some design, and outsourcing the manufacturing. Wiley Fox in the UK comes from people with a background in mobile operators, selling a premium design at a mid-range price with a lightly skinned version of Android. BQ in Spain originates in ereaders, amongst other things. Blu in Latin America has built a huge business on distribution. And of course Google sells its own ’Nexus’ line, using a rarely-encountered custom build of Android and adding a small amount of marketing and distribution.
As the price for a good Android experience moves from $600 to $150 or $250, these companies can increasingly pass up operator subsidies, with burdens of inventory etc. that this imposes, and move straight to selling unsubsidised and online. The poster-child for this model is of course Xiaomi, which has pioneered an online-only flash sales model, backed by an attempt to build a passionate community around the brand and software experience. This has worked well in China but it's not clear how well it can be made to work elsewhere, and whether it can be built once and scaled globally or whether you need to do it one country at a time from scratch.
Then, coming from the other end of the spectrum, mobile operators are increasing buying in a selection of low-end smartphones than they sell (generally unsubsidised on prepay) under their own brand. Sometimes these have operator apps preloaded (if they've not given up on that yet), sometimes not. One could argue that the value being added here is really only distribution, and so one might see other companies with distribution getting into this, such as mass-market retailers. Some of these have already experimented with Android tablets, with mixed results (as of course they did with MVNOs).
This is all rather like the PC clone market of the 1980s - hundreds of undifferentiated companies fighting it out to sell commodity computers built with commodity components running a commodity operating system (though those companies mainly made the PCs themselves, where many phone brands do not). That world in due course led to companies like Dell - people who embraced the volume, low-margin commodity model and found an angle of their own. We’re starting to see equivalent model-creation now.
by Benedict Evans | Read more:
Images: Andreessen Horowitz
When Men Wanted to Be Virile
For the past few weeks, I’ve had a book on my desk called “A History of Virility.” It’s a seven-hundred-page scholarly anthology, published by Columbia University Press and translated from the French by Keith Cohen, chronicling how Western masculinity has been transformed, successively, by Ancient Greece and Rome, encounters with barbarians, the medieval court, the Enlightenment, colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of childhood, mechanized warfare, Fascism, the labor movement, feminism, gay liberation, and so on. The book is the size of a telephone directory; its cover features a glowering, Brando-like Adonis in a tank top. It is, in short, a source of amusement to all who pass by, many of whom point to the word “virility” and say, “Ew.”
There’s no denying that “virility” is, nowadays, a strange and icky word, redolent of romance novels, nineteenth-century boarding schools, militarism, and misogyny. For most of history, though—as the book’s editors, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and George Vigarello, point out—it was normal to praise exemplary men as “virile.” In fact, only in the past century has the word “virility” been displaced by the more anodyne “masculinity” and “manliness.” This has left us with a tautology, since we must now describe male identity as “masculine.” It’s also created a mystery and a question. The mystery: What did “virility” mean in the first place? The question: Is there anything about it worth salvaging?
“A History of Virility” begins in the Greco-Roman world. It was the Ancient Greeks, the scholar Maurice Sartre writes, who developed the concept of andreia, or “maleness.” Andreia usually expressed itself through manly brawn or audacity on the battlefield, but it had other applications. Audacious women could possess andreia—Herodotus, for example, attributed it to Artemisa, the Amazon warrior-queen—and it could have a civic aspect, in the form of andreia politiké, or political courage. The Spartans didn’t just train their young men to fight; they taught them andreia politiké by quizzing them about current events. If a young Spartan couldn’t give a concise and spirited answer to a question like “Who is an excellent citizen and why?,” he’d face corporal punishment.
In Ancient Rome, virilitas, a more ambitious version of andreia politiké, migrated to the center of male identity. Manly sexuality was fundamental to Roman virility: the classicist Jean-Paul Thuillier notes that the word virilitas could refer quite simply to the “male organs.” (In Latin, vir can also mean just “man” or “husband.”) And yet virilitas wasn’t just about size. To possess Roman virility, the editors write, was to radiate not just sexual power but “virtue, accomplishment.” The virile man wasn’t just sexually “assertive,” “powerfully built,” and “procreative,” but also intellectually and emotionally “levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained”:
From our modern point of view, the strangest aspect of virilitas was that it was contrasted with manliness. Manliness and virility were separate, and even opposed, ways of being. Compared to virilitas, mere or “basic” manliness was a little contemptible. It was undisciplined and, worse, unearned, since, while men are born masculine, they must achieve virility through competition and struggle. Though this distinction now goes unspoken, it can still feel natural to us: watching the film “Gladiator,” for example, we readily recognize that Russell Crowe’s quiet, temperate, and deadly Maximus represents the virile ideal, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus is too undisciplined to have true virilitas. Commodus is strong, sexy, intelligent, and undeniably masculine—and yet his passions control him and lead him in idiosyncratic and undesirable directions. He’s a familiar figure: a man who represents the dangers of manliness without virility.
Virility, in short, unfolded within a tortured moral universe. There’s a sense in which, in the ancient world, manliness was the virile man’s original sin. A man might be taught to be virile; he might establish his virility through “accumulated proofs” (sexual power, career success, a tempered disposition, a honed intellect); and yet virility, the editors write, remained “an especially harsh tradition” in which “perfections tend[ed] always to be threatened.” There was something perverse about the cult of virility. Even as virile men were exalted, it was assumed that each had a fatal flaw—a sexual, physical, or temperamental weakness—which observers knew would be uncovered. Virility wasn’t just a quality or a character trait. It was a drama.
There’s no denying that “virility” is, nowadays, a strange and icky word, redolent of romance novels, nineteenth-century boarding schools, militarism, and misogyny. For most of history, though—as the book’s editors, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and George Vigarello, point out—it was normal to praise exemplary men as “virile.” In fact, only in the past century has the word “virility” been displaced by the more anodyne “masculinity” and “manliness.” This has left us with a tautology, since we must now describe male identity as “masculine.” It’s also created a mystery and a question. The mystery: What did “virility” mean in the first place? The question: Is there anything about it worth salvaging?“A History of Virility” begins in the Greco-Roman world. It was the Ancient Greeks, the scholar Maurice Sartre writes, who developed the concept of andreia, or “maleness.” Andreia usually expressed itself through manly brawn or audacity on the battlefield, but it had other applications. Audacious women could possess andreia—Herodotus, for example, attributed it to Artemisa, the Amazon warrior-queen—and it could have a civic aspect, in the form of andreia politiké, or political courage. The Spartans didn’t just train their young men to fight; they taught them andreia politiké by quizzing them about current events. If a young Spartan couldn’t give a concise and spirited answer to a question like “Who is an excellent citizen and why?,” he’d face corporal punishment.
In Ancient Rome, virilitas, a more ambitious version of andreia politiké, migrated to the center of male identity. Manly sexuality was fundamental to Roman virility: the classicist Jean-Paul Thuillier notes that the word virilitas could refer quite simply to the “male organs.” (In Latin, vir can also mean just “man” or “husband.”) And yet virilitas wasn’t just about size. To possess Roman virility, the editors write, was to radiate not just sexual power but “virtue, accomplishment.” The virile man wasn’t just sexually “assertive,” “powerfully built,” and “procreative,” but also intellectually and emotionally “levelheaded, vigorous yet deliberate, courageous yet restrained”:
The virile is not simply what is manly; it is more: an ideal of power and virtue, self-assurance and maturity, certitude and domination . . . . courage and “greatness” accompanied by strength and vigor.The Romans made virility more complex and demanding. The main challenge for Greek men who aspired to andreia had been insufficient brawniness: Maurice Sartre quotes a cutting description of an almost virile young man named Theagenes, who impressed with his “broad chest and shoulders,” but was ridiculed for, among other things, the “blond fuzz” on his cheeks. But Roman virilitas was even harder to achieve. A man with virilitas had to be tall, muscled, handsome, tanned, and well-endowed. (Roman men spent a lot of time naked at the baths.) He also had to be clever, energetic, confident, and politically engaged. But the defining quality of virilitas was self-control.Virilitas was an ethic of moderation, in which strong or “vigorous” powers were kept deliberately reined in, in the manner of a standing army. If a man became too aggressive, too emotional, or too brawny—too manly—his virilitas could be lost. For this reason, being a ladies’ man could compromise one’s virility. (“For the ancient Romans,” Thuillier writes, “giving in too often to the charms of women is in itself slightly effeminate.”) To be sexually powerful, you had to be in control of your desires.
From our modern point of view, the strangest aspect of virilitas was that it was contrasted with manliness. Manliness and virility were separate, and even opposed, ways of being. Compared to virilitas, mere or “basic” manliness was a little contemptible. It was undisciplined and, worse, unearned, since, while men are born masculine, they must achieve virility through competition and struggle. Though this distinction now goes unspoken, it can still feel natural to us: watching the film “Gladiator,” for example, we readily recognize that Russell Crowe’s quiet, temperate, and deadly Maximus represents the virile ideal, whereas Joaquin Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus is too undisciplined to have true virilitas. Commodus is strong, sexy, intelligent, and undeniably masculine—and yet his passions control him and lead him in idiosyncratic and undesirable directions. He’s a familiar figure: a man who represents the dangers of manliness without virility.
Virility, in short, unfolded within a tortured moral universe. There’s a sense in which, in the ancient world, manliness was the virile man’s original sin. A man might be taught to be virile; he might establish his virility through “accumulated proofs” (sexual power, career success, a tempered disposition, a honed intellect); and yet virility, the editors write, remained “an especially harsh tradition” in which “perfections tend[ed] always to be threatened.” There was something perverse about the cult of virility. Even as virile men were exalted, it was assumed that each had a fatal flaw—a sexual, physical, or temperamental weakness—which observers knew would be uncovered. Virility wasn’t just a quality or a character trait. It was a drama.
by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Dreamworks/AF Archive/Alarmy
Sunday, May 8, 2016
You Have to Have a Strategy
"You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that's never been the source of our progress. That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.
You have to go through life with more than just a passion for change – you have to have strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes. Change requires more than righteous anger. To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in customs."
Drug Shoot-up Rooms Get Serious Look
[ed. It's about time we stopped judging people for their addictions and actually started helping them.]
An alarming 47,000 American overdose deaths in 2014 - 60 percent from heroin and related painkillers like fentanyl - has pushed elected leaders from coast to coast to consider what was once unthinkable: government-sanctioned sites where users can shoot up under the supervision of a doctor or nurse who can administer an antidote if necessary."Things are getting out of control. We have to find things we can do for people who are addicted now," said New York state Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who is working on legislation to allow supervised injection sites that would also include space for treatment services. "The idea shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. I don't see anyone else coming up with anything new and innovative."
Critics of the war on drugs have long talked about the need for a new approach to addiction, but the idea of allowing supervised injection sites is now coming from state lawmakers in New York, Maryland and California, along with city officials in Seattle, San Francisco and Ithaca, New York, who note that syringe exchanges were once controversial but now operate in 33 states.
While such sites have operated for years in places such as Canada, the Netherlands and Australia, they face significant legal and political challenges in the U.S., including criticism that they are tantamount to waving a white flag at an epidemic that should be fought with prevention and treatment.
"It's a dangerous idea," said John Walters, drug czar under President George W. Bush. "It's advocated by people who seem to think that the way we should help sick people is by keeping them sick, but comfortably sick."
But proponents argue such sites are not so radical outside the U.S., pointing to examples where they offer not only a place to shoot up, but also health care, counseling and even treatment beds. In many cases, the users are there to shoot up heroin or dangerous opioids like fentanyl, though some take painkillers in pill form.
At Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, more than 5,900 people have overdosed since it opened in 2001. No one has died. It's the same at Insite in Vancouver, British Columbia. About 20 overdoses happen there every week, but the facility, which is jointly operated by a local nonprofit and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, has yet to record a death.
"A big fat zero," said Insite site coordinator Darwin Fisher.
Sydney's facility is tucked between a hostel and a Chinese restaurant in Kings Cross, the city's red-light district. Aside from the security guard posted just inside the front door, it looks like a typical health clinic.
At least two staffers, including a registered nurse, monitor the injection room. They are not allowed to administer drugs, though sterile needles are provided. If a patient overdoses, the nurse delivers the antidote Narcan, which quickly reverses the overdose.
After users get their fix, they head to a second room with a decidedly warmer feel. Colored Christmas lights hang from the ceiling; books and magazines line the shelves. Clients can relax with a cup of coffee or tea or talk to staff. Some stay for 15 minutes; others spend hours. They exit through a back door to protect their privacy.
by David Klepper, AP | Read more:
Image: Peter Dejong
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Panama Papers Source Offers Documents To Governments, Hints At More To Come
In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called “John Doe” behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.
Titled “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that “income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time” and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.
Süddeutsche Zeitung has authenticated that the statement came from the Panama Papers source. The statement in full:
The Revolution Will Be Digitized
John Doe
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain: why? And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. In the case of the island of Niue, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish. Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm’s shell companies, sometimes called “special purpose vehicles,” are just like cars. But used car salesmen don’t write laws. And the only “special purpose” of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.
Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known.
In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging. Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.
In that regard, I have a few thoughts.
For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.
The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.
In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.
That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.
In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers. In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners. The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide. And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data. It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.
And while it’s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it’s quite another to actually implement it. It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.
John Doe
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain: why? And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. In the case of the island of Niue, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish. Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm’s shell companies, sometimes called “special purpose vehicles,” are just like cars. But used car salesmen don’t write laws. And the only “special purpose” of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.
Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known.
In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging. Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.
In that regard, I have a few thoughts.
For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.
The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.
In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.
That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.
In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers. In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners. The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide. And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data. It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.
And while it’s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it’s quite another to actually implement it. It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.
by John Doe, ICIJ | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sine Cosine Tangent
He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten to twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home, he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.
What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.
He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”
Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up. (...)
Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”
Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers. (...)
Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jewelled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, the two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.
That was my father. Who was my mother?
She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it. She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door, and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.
Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “hanger.” Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.
I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.
When I was fourteen, I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
When she was at work, I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called, and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said, I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back? What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back? Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word “steep” was the whole point. Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort, but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles. Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth, because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, a fork, and a knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its development, the limp began to feel natural. At school, the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me, but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define “person,” I told myself. Define “human,” define “animal.”
What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”
Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up. (...)
Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”
Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers. (...)
Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jewelled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, the two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.
That was my father. Who was my mother?
She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it. She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door, and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.
Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “hanger.” Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.
I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.
When I was fourteen, I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
When she was at work, I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called, and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said, I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back? What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back? Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word “steep” was the whole point. Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort, but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles. Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth, because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, a fork, and a knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its development, the limp began to feel natural. At school, the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me, but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define “person,” I told myself. Define “human,” define “animal.”
by Don DeLillo, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Abbott Miller
Scallops With Lemon Caper Sauce Over Pasta
3 tablespoons olive oil1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Grated zest of one lemon
1 tablespoon capers, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 lb. fusille or penne
1 lb. bay scallops or halved sea scallops
2 tablespoons butter
1. In a medium bowl, combine 2 tablespoons olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, capers, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Blend well and set lemon caper sauce aside.
2. In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook fusille until tender but still firm, 10 to 12 minutes. Drain well.
3. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, toss scallops with remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil and 1/4 teaspoo each of salt and pepper. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add scallops and cook, turnng once, until lightly browned, 2 to 3 minutes. (Do not overcrowd pan. Cook in two batches if necessary, adding additional butter if needed.)
4. Turn pasta into large warmed bowl. Pour lemon caper sauce over pasta, add scallops, and toss. Serve at once. (Or chill for later serving).
via: 365 Ways to Cook Fish and Shellfish, by Charles Pierce
Image: [ed. The dish doesn't really look like this, but close enough. via:]
Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades
… You know throughout the years in business I found something which was I’d always ask why you do things and the answer you invariably get is oh that’s just the way it’s done. Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That’s what I found…
The quote above from just over 17 minutes into Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview is for me the greatest insight and the biggest idea in the whole movie. I find myself applying it to many things. You can, too. Just ask why?
In this column I’ll try applying the principle to one example of renewable energy — wind power. Why, when it comes to windmills, wind turbines, wind generators — whatever you want to call them — why are things done the way they are? The answers may surprise you.
I had a friend named Paul Lipps who died suddenly a few years ago, taking from the world a true genius when it came to many things but especially propellers and anti-propellers, which is what wind turbines are because rather than accelerate air they slow it down, taking power from the wind. At the time of his death I was trying to interest Paul in revolutionizing the wind turbine industry based entirely on asking why? We never got to do it, but we did answer some of the most important questions.
Paul Lipps designed propellers that looked unlike any others because he didn’t care how they looked, just how they functioned. His greatest success was in the Sport Biplane class at the Reno National Air Races, where one year the race plane for which he’d designed a propeller increased its top speed by 51 miles-per-hour with no change beyond the propeller. Nothing else was different from the year before. That race plane hasn’t lost a race… ever.
When we sat down to invent a new type of wind turbine it all began with a single question why: why do large wind turbines invariably have three blades?
In the case of this question the answer wasn’t “because that’s the way it has always been done.” The answer was, instead, “because we have a mathematical proof that three turbine blades extract the most energy from the wind stream.”
“The most energy,” in this case refers to the maximal efficiency of any wind turbine as calculated in 1919 by Albert Betz of Germany. According to Betz’s Law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27ths or 59.3 percent of the wind energy passing through the turbine disk. So 59.3 percent is the best you can hope for… or is it? In practical terms the best commercial wind turbines reach 75-80 percent of the Betz limit or no more than 48 percent total efficiency.
Yes, but why three blades?
The conventional answer to this question is that three blades minimizes the shadow effect that each leading blade has on the blade that follows. You want more blades to reduce the starting torque required to get your turbine spinning (this is analogous to having more cylinders in an engine making it run smoother) but if you have too many blades the shadow effect hurts efficiency and drops the total yield. Three blades peak at about 48 percent efficient, which isn’t 59.3 percent but is near enough and happens to be the practical output I mentioned two paragraphs ago. So it must be right, right?
Put another way, Rotor power = 2π M n is proportional to the torque M acting on the shaft and the rotation frequency n. The tip speed ratio λ = vu / v1 from the ratio of tip speed vu of the rotor and the wind speed v1. Optimal tip speed ratio is 7-8 for the three-bladed rotors where they achieve a cp value of 48 percent. Four blade turbines have higher torque but lower tip speed ratios. Turbines with two blades have even higher tip speed ratios but lower torque. In the end, three-blade turbines command the sweet spot and so that’s what are built.
It all sounds good but everything is dependent on total belief in Betz’s Law and in the concept of blade shadows. Only Paul Lipps didn’t believe in blade shadows. The more blades the better in Lipps’s view because the turbine blades are in a moving column of air. And even Betz’s Law is incorrectly applied in these examples because what matters isn’t power efficiency per turbine so much as power production per acre of wind farm.
If you are building a wind farm, what counts above all else is how many kilowatt- or megawatt-hours per year can your wind farm produce and that’s a function that goes far beyond Betz and three blades.
Conventional wisdom says wind farms should have their turbines placed in such a way that they don’t interfere with each other, the fear being that placing one turbine too closely in the shadow of another will reduce the efficiency of the showed turbine. The rule of thumb, then, is that turbines be placed no closer than seven diameters apart. Keep that number in mind.
Now a word about computational fluid dynamics (CFD), super computers, and how wind fields are designed. You’d think it would be all about CFD but it isn’t. Turbines are designed with three blades and those blades should be as long as practically possible with the turbines mounted on towers that are as tall as possible to get out of ground effect and into faster-moving air. Oh, and turbines are placed seven diameters apart. That’s it, no CFD. This is because past experiments in CFD modeling wind farms haven’t gone very well. “It just doesn’t work,” we were told over and over again.
Shouldn’t that be a clue there’s something wrong with the popular methodology?
One other point to ponder is why, when you drive past a wind farm, very often the turbines aren’t turning at all? This is because they use alternators that consumer electrical power to energize their windings so there is no point in turning-on the alternator (energizing those windings) until there’s enough wind to generate a net positive amount of electricity. You can get around this by using permanent magnet generators instead of alternators, but those are more expensive, requiring rare earth magnets.
If you happen to drive past a wind farm in the middle of a storm you’ll further notice that the turbines are stopped then, too, to avoid damage from high winds and too-fast rotational speeds. The result of all this not starting and then stopping is that throughout the year an average workload of 23 percent is reached by inland wind farms, 28 percent for coastal farms and 43 for off-shore. Even offshore wind farms have their turbines actually generating electricity less than half of the time.
by Robert X. Cringely, I, Cingely | Read more:
Image: via:
The quote above from just over 17 minutes into Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview is for me the greatest insight and the biggest idea in the whole movie. I find myself applying it to many things. You can, too. Just ask why?
In this column I’ll try applying the principle to one example of renewable energy — wind power. Why, when it comes to windmills, wind turbines, wind generators — whatever you want to call them — why are things done the way they are? The answers may surprise you.
I had a friend named Paul Lipps who died suddenly a few years ago, taking from the world a true genius when it came to many things but especially propellers and anti-propellers, which is what wind turbines are because rather than accelerate air they slow it down, taking power from the wind. At the time of his death I was trying to interest Paul in revolutionizing the wind turbine industry based entirely on asking why? We never got to do it, but we did answer some of the most important questions.Paul Lipps designed propellers that looked unlike any others because he didn’t care how they looked, just how they functioned. His greatest success was in the Sport Biplane class at the Reno National Air Races, where one year the race plane for which he’d designed a propeller increased its top speed by 51 miles-per-hour with no change beyond the propeller. Nothing else was different from the year before. That race plane hasn’t lost a race… ever.
When we sat down to invent a new type of wind turbine it all began with a single question why: why do large wind turbines invariably have three blades?
In the case of this question the answer wasn’t “because that’s the way it has always been done.” The answer was, instead, “because we have a mathematical proof that three turbine blades extract the most energy from the wind stream.”
“The most energy,” in this case refers to the maximal efficiency of any wind turbine as calculated in 1919 by Albert Betz of Germany. According to Betz’s Law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27ths or 59.3 percent of the wind energy passing through the turbine disk. So 59.3 percent is the best you can hope for… or is it? In practical terms the best commercial wind turbines reach 75-80 percent of the Betz limit or no more than 48 percent total efficiency.
Yes, but why three blades?
The conventional answer to this question is that three blades minimizes the shadow effect that each leading blade has on the blade that follows. You want more blades to reduce the starting torque required to get your turbine spinning (this is analogous to having more cylinders in an engine making it run smoother) but if you have too many blades the shadow effect hurts efficiency and drops the total yield. Three blades peak at about 48 percent efficient, which isn’t 59.3 percent but is near enough and happens to be the practical output I mentioned two paragraphs ago. So it must be right, right?
Put another way, Rotor power = 2π M n is proportional to the torque M acting on the shaft and the rotation frequency n. The tip speed ratio λ = vu / v1 from the ratio of tip speed vu of the rotor and the wind speed v1. Optimal tip speed ratio is 7-8 for the three-bladed rotors where they achieve a cp value of 48 percent. Four blade turbines have higher torque but lower tip speed ratios. Turbines with two blades have even higher tip speed ratios but lower torque. In the end, three-blade turbines command the sweet spot and so that’s what are built.
It all sounds good but everything is dependent on total belief in Betz’s Law and in the concept of blade shadows. Only Paul Lipps didn’t believe in blade shadows. The more blades the better in Lipps’s view because the turbine blades are in a moving column of air. And even Betz’s Law is incorrectly applied in these examples because what matters isn’t power efficiency per turbine so much as power production per acre of wind farm.
If you are building a wind farm, what counts above all else is how many kilowatt- or megawatt-hours per year can your wind farm produce and that’s a function that goes far beyond Betz and three blades.
Conventional wisdom says wind farms should have their turbines placed in such a way that they don’t interfere with each other, the fear being that placing one turbine too closely in the shadow of another will reduce the efficiency of the showed turbine. The rule of thumb, then, is that turbines be placed no closer than seven diameters apart. Keep that number in mind.
Now a word about computational fluid dynamics (CFD), super computers, and how wind fields are designed. You’d think it would be all about CFD but it isn’t. Turbines are designed with three blades and those blades should be as long as practically possible with the turbines mounted on towers that are as tall as possible to get out of ground effect and into faster-moving air. Oh, and turbines are placed seven diameters apart. That’s it, no CFD. This is because past experiments in CFD modeling wind farms haven’t gone very well. “It just doesn’t work,” we were told over and over again.
Shouldn’t that be a clue there’s something wrong with the popular methodology?
One other point to ponder is why, when you drive past a wind farm, very often the turbines aren’t turning at all? This is because they use alternators that consumer electrical power to energize their windings so there is no point in turning-on the alternator (energizing those windings) until there’s enough wind to generate a net positive amount of electricity. You can get around this by using permanent magnet generators instead of alternators, but those are more expensive, requiring rare earth magnets.
If you happen to drive past a wind farm in the middle of a storm you’ll further notice that the turbines are stopped then, too, to avoid damage from high winds and too-fast rotational speeds. The result of all this not starting and then stopping is that throughout the year an average workload of 23 percent is reached by inland wind farms, 28 percent for coastal farms and 43 for off-shore. Even offshore wind farms have their turbines actually generating electricity less than half of the time.
by Robert X. Cringely, I, Cingely | Read more:
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Friday, May 6, 2016
Kelly Slater's 'Perfect' Artificial Wave
The wave curls, whip-fast and flawless; it goes on, and on, and on. Inside it, surfing in the barrel of the wave – the feeling, the high, that surfers yearn for – is Nat Young, an American pro-surfer, ranked ninth in the world.
Above him, a drone films his run – 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. It was the longest barrel of his life. Young had never surfed a wave like this before. Yet this was 110 miles from the ocean, in California farm country in a specially constructed, exquisitely engineered freshwater pool. And it was perfect. “It’s an awesome feeling,” Young told the Guardian.
The pool was built by 11-time World Surf League champion Kelly Slater, who for 10 years had been focused on an idea that many thought was impossible – building a machine which could reproduce the ideal wave, and create it on command.
Few people thought it was possible. But in December, after two years of construction in near perfect secrecy, Slater released an extraordinary video of his machine in action. The excitement the video caused in the surfing community is hard to overstate. “That thing basically broke the internet,” said Craig Brokensha, surf forecaster for surfing news site Swellnet.
In that video, the wave curls over silently, dark and mysterious in the early morning light. The water from which it rises is glass-flat; the wave’s curling edge is smooth, sharp, almost sculptural. “It is,” Brokensha said, “almost too perfect.” (...)
Young said the narrowness of the pool – 700 yards long, but only 40 or so yards wide – struck him when he saw it in person. “My first impression, when I saw the first wave come through, was disbelief,” he said. “It’s a flat pond, and then, all of a sudden, you’re watching a perfect wave.”
Slater’s machine is powered entirely with solar energy, and the wave itself is created with a specially shaped foil or plough, which is pulled along mechanically beneath the surface, shaping the wave and pushing it forward.
by Nicky Woolf, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Vimeo
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