Their Cars Are Their Beds

It’s almost bedtime. John Baird Jr., 47, smokes on the hood of his 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis sedan, his plaid sleeping bag neatly tucked in the trunk.

Kathleen McDermott, 81, slouches in the driver’s seat of her 2002 Ford Focus station wagon. Two angel statuettes stare from her dashboard into clothes and clutter behind her.

Scott Downey, 52, works a crossword puzzle on his phone inside a 2006 Chrysler Town & Country van that smells faintly like cats. Clothes hang on hooks in the back, and emergency supplies of ramen noodles and Vienna sausages sit out of plain view.

They are in a Home Depot parking lot, largely invisible among the subdivisions and sprawl of Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, the nation’s second-wealthiest community.

Sleeping in their cars, they are homeless but sort of not, a subset of a population officially classified as “unsheltered” and slowly shrinking in these suburbs of Washington, even as the number of people living in poverty continues to grow.

Each member of the trio spent decades living a more stable existence before family trauma or economic hardship led them to the streets.

Here, they help one another with errands and auto repairs, carpool to work or church, and check in on one another at night.

Just like their neighbors in the subdivisions around them.

Not the life he expected

After pulling into his usual sleeping spot off Route 50, Baird looks left, right and left again. There are other car dwellers parked nearby. The glare of laptop computers or lit cigarettes gives them away in the dark.

He pops the trunk and pulls out his sleeping bag and pillow, leaving the bags of family photos, medical records and other belongings undisturbed. After nearly 200,000 miles, his car has broken down a few times, and Baird’s tab at a nearby garage has ticked up to $1,800. But he is careful to keep the interior neat and uncluttered, clear of any obvious signs that he’s homeless.

Once the sleeping bag is unrolled onto the rear seat, Baird stretches out. A slight breeze blows through a partly opened window. The radio is on, a news anchor droning away, until he turns it off and shuts his eyes.

Baird grew up in Washington, D.C., with greater prospects, the son of a certified public accountant in a solidly middle-class Northwest neighborhood.

He always loved cars, and he worked at a gas station after high school before studying accounting at George Washington University. Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that causes intense dizzy spells and nausea, kept him from following in his father’s footsteps.

“I could turn my head too quickly and all of a sudden, boom — I’m on my back,” Baird said. “It can knock me out, like somebody hit me in the head with a baseball bat.”

He took a job as a mechanic for a Volkswagen dealership in Bethesda, Md., got married and had a son. When the marriage broke up, Baird inherited the Grand Marquis. Child-support payments and the monthly charges for the tools he rented ate up most of his paycheck. Soon, the sedan became his home.

He met Downey at the Lamb Center in Fairfax, which offers breakfast, showers, laundry and other services to the homeless. By then, Baird was working as a day laborer for a temp agency. The dizzy spells had worsened, and he could no longer comfortably duck his head beneath the hood of a car.

He and Downey began parking next to each other overnight in the Home Depot lot, where church volunteers pass out cartons of donated dinners six days a week. The two men agreed to watch out for each other. (...)

‘What makes a good neighbor?’

On warm evenings, Downey will sometimes stretch out on the asphalt of the Home Depot parking lot and nap. His body aches from all the driving he does and from sleeping in the driver’s seat of his van when the weather is too hot to sleep in the back.

He bought the vehicle in 2013 for his wife, Kay, who lives in a mobile home in Salisbury, Md., with her 11-year-old grandson. Downey travels there some weekends to visit — stop-and-go Friday traffic for 160 miles.

The couple met online in 2006 and married a year later. They worked as school bus drivers and lived at a mobile-home park in Fairfax City for three years.

Eventually, Kay became homesick and moved back to the Eastern Shore. Downey, who grew up in Burke, couldn’t find work there. He returned to Virginia, eventually taking the van with him.

“Even a room inside someone’s house costs $700,” he said. “I can’t afford that.”

Downey earns $9.25 an hour at an auto auction house in Sterling, driving new and used cars across a vast lot and cleaning them to prep them for sale. He says most of his paycheck goes toward the lot fee for the mobile home.

He has learned which churches serve the best free meals on which nights and how to blend in with the rest of suburbia. One night, he sat for hours in front of a computer in a public library, studiously catching up on the gospel music scene. He also frequents a local Marriott, sitting in a rear lobby charging his phone and using the hotel’s WiFi connection on his laptop.

Some weekends, Downey drives a van for New Hope Fellowship in Chantilly, ferrying homeless people who don’t have vehicles to the service. On a recent Sunday, the congregation included Baird and McDermott, as well as several other current and former car dwellers: a woman who used to sleep in her 1993 Toyota Corolla, a mother and son who live in their van, and a blind woman and her husband who have slept with a dog in their van for most of the past four years.

Pastor Pat Deavers’s sermon focused on the biblical parable of the good Samaritan, a story about helping a stranger in need.

“That’s really the question, isn’t it?” she said, her voice rising. “Who is our neighbor? And what makes a good neighbor?”

by Antonio Olivo, WP |  Read more:

Image: Sarah L. Voisin

Kurt Jackson, British, b.1961- 

Mussels from the beach, Hemmick; Line caught mackerel from Hayle

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Ralph Crane, Pearl Harbor, 1959
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Google Pixel Sounds Like the Android Phone of Our Dreams

[ed. See also: Here's Everything Google Announced Today]

It's fitting, in a way, that Google’s new Pixel phone resembles the iPhone. Apple’s world-changing gadget is the very device Google is aiming for. The 5-inch Pixel and 5.5-inch Pixel XL are meant to be the best, most powerful, most unified Android phones ever. They have best-in-class specs, best-in-class design, best-in-class everything. And for the first time, Google seems to want you to buy one.

If you’ve ever owned an Android phone, I can all but promise that you didn’t own the best one. The best have almost always been Google’s own Nexus devices, from the Nexus One to the Nexus 6P. Nexuses (Nexii?) offered high-end hardware specs and (usually) refined design with truly current software, which is otherwise entirely too hard to come by in the Android world.

It sounds lovely, except you probably never knew about them. You’d walk into the Verizon or AT&T store when your contract was up, buy the best phone you could find, and never realize the wonderful world of unlocked devices you were missing. And no one could blame you.

Next time you walk into a Verizon store, at the very least, the Pixel and Pixel XL will await you. They’re the same price as the iPhone 7, starting at $649 for the small one and $769 for the big one. The Pixel features a 1080p screen, and you’ll get 1440 x 2160 from the XL. Both sport Snapdragon 821 processors, fingerprint sensors on the back, 4GB of RAM, 32 or 128GB of storage, and a big battery. Choose from three delightfully named colors: Really Blue, Very Silver, and Quite Black. (If you don’t love the look, slap on a customizable Live Case and go about your merry day.) Both phones are solid and sturdy, and a smidge heavier than I expected. And the plastic panel at the top of the phone’s back looks a little cheap next to the unibody design of some other devices. Still, though, in the few minutes I played with one, the Pixel looked and felt great.

The Looking Glass

Pixel arrives Daydream-ready for the best of Google’s new VR experiences. According to DxO Mark’s tests, the Pixel’s 12-megapixel camera surpasses the iPhone’s 12-megapixel shooter. Actually,it surpasses everyone’s camera. According to those tests, which the entire industry respects, Pixel features the best smartphone camera ever, so just for good measure Google also offers unlimited storage in Google Photos. Oh, and yes: Pixel comes with a headphone jack. Alas, Pixel is not waterproof, but beyond than that there’s nothing about it that will immediately turn you off.

Google worked with HTC to make the phones, but stressed that this isn’t the same relationship it has had with phone makers before, where they supplied the hardware and Google provided software and some design ideas. Even the name change seems to communicate a new way of thinking. Google selected and approved every square millimeter of these phones. HTC merely built them. They look a bit like the iPhone, especially in that they don’t really look like anything at all—they have the same inoffensiveness, a design that’s maybe hard to get excited about but definitely hard to dislike.

by David Pierce, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Google

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Sizing Up The Bubble

“In the ruin of all collapsed booms is to be found the work of men who bought property at prices they knew perfectly well were fictitious, but who were willing to pay such prices simply because they knew that some still greater fool could be depended on to take the property off their hands and leave them with a profit.”

Chicago Tribune, April 1890

Presently, the broad NYSE Composite Index is at a lower level than it set more than 2 years ago, in July 2014. Including dividends, the index has gained hardly 2%. Several indices dominated by large capitalization or speculative growth stocks, particularly the S&P 500, have performed better, but even here, the index is only a few percent above its December 2014 high. Over the past two years, the behavior of the stock market can be described less as an ongoing bull market than as the extended topping phase of what is now the third financial bubble since 2000.

The chart below [ed. on the right] shows the current setup in the context of monthly bars since 1995. After the third longest bull market advance on record, fresh deterioration in key trend-following components within our measures of market internals (see Support Drops Away) recently joined this extended, overvalued, overbought, overbullish peak, even as the S&P 500 hovers at the top of its monthly Bollinger bands (two standard deviations above the 20-period average) and cyclical momentum rolls over from a 9-year high. Taken together with other data, we continue to classify present conditions within the most hostile expected market return/risk profile we identify.

The great victory of the Federal Reserve in the half-cycle since 2009 was not ending the global financial crisis; the crisis actually ended in March 2009 with the stroke of a pen that changed accounting rule FAS157 and eliminated mark-to-market accounting for banks (instantly removing the specter of widespread insolvencies by allowing “significant judgment” in valuing distressed assets). The victory was not economic recovery; the trajectory of the economy since 2009 has been no different than the trajectory that could have been projected using wholly non-monetary variables. No, the great Pyrrhic victory of the Fed has been to enable the third most extreme financial bubble in history, on the basis of capitalization-weighted indices, and the single most extreme bubble in history from the standpoint of individual stocks.

Greater fools

Every financial bubble rests on the presumption that there is still some greater fool available to purchase overvalued assets, no matter how overvalued they might become. In the recent half cycle, central banks have intentionally extended this speculation by promising that they, themselves, could be relied upon to be those greater fools. Yet despite the most extreme version of these assurances in Japan, where the Bank of Japan has driven long-term interest rates to negative levels and has purchased stocks outright, the Nikkei 225 index is no higher than it was in November 2014. Indeed, the Nikkei is no higher than it was 30 years ago, having lost more than -60% of its value on three separate occasions, two of them in a period when interest rates were pegged at zero, and never rose above 1%. Investors have been lulled into believing that an endless horizon of weak growth, easy money, and zero interest rates is desirable, when it is actually a syndrome of flat-lining vital signs.

What will drive the next crisis is not some rate hike by central banks (whose activist interventions have essentially zero correlation with subsequent real economic outcomes). Instead, the collapse will emerge both naturally and inevitably, as the progression of the economic cycle takes its course, and investor preferences shift from risk-seeking to risk-aversion. Virtually any commonplace shock is now capable of being a pin-wielding butterfly on this increasingly vulnerable financial bubble. Debt defaults, insolvencies, and pension crises are already unavoidable. Year-over year growth in real GDP, real gross domestic income, durable goods orders, real retail sales, industrial production and other measures are all down to levels typically observed at the beginning of recessions. We won’t pound the tables about imminent recession until we observe fresh weakness in the equity market (even a 7-8% market loss would sharply raise our probability estimates), but it’s important to recognize that financial risks are already fully developed, and as in other bubbles, one usually finds “catalysts” to blame for a collapse only well after the downturn is in full-swing.

The impact of central bank intervention has already weakened progressively in recent years, because it relies on the ability of fools to constantly raise the ante. Pay 82 euros today for a bond that delivers 100 euros a decade from now, and you’ll make 2% annually on your money. Pay 100 euros today and you’ll get a return of zero. Immediately following the Brexit vote, central banks tried to extend that game as global economic conditions weakened. Pay 105 euros today for 100 euros a decade from now, and you’ll actually lose -0.5% annually, but investors will still accept a negative yield in the short-run if they’re convinced the central bank is willing to pay an even higher price that produces an evenmore negative yield.

The problem is that the central bank has to keep following through, which effectively means buying assets at prices that ensure central bank balance-sheet losses - these would essentially be government expenditures of funds that could otherwise be used to benefit the public. At that moment, monetary policy ceases to be monetary policy and becomesfiscal policy. In the past few weeks, both the BOJ and the ECB have flinched in their willingness to cross that rubicon. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is legally restricted to buying only government and government agency securities, and even its $4 trillion balance sheet pales in comparison to $300 trillion of global equities and bonds, along with about $1.5 quadrillion in derivatives, that have evidently been bid up on the expectation that central banks are the greater fools willing and able to buy all of it.

by John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Funds

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Next Big Tech Corridor? Between Seattle and Vancouver, Planners Hope

[ed. I-5 between Seattle and Vancouver is indeed a nightmare, but I don't think carving out a special lane for techies is the answer.]

Seattle and Vancouver are like fraternal twins separated at birth. Both are bustling Pacific Northwest coastal cities with eco-conscious populations that have accepted the bargain of dispiriting weather for much of the year in exchange for nearby ski slopes and kayaking and glorious summers.

Yet 140 miles of traffic-choked roads and an international border divide the two cities, keeping them farther apart than their geographic and cultural identities would suggest.

Now the political, academic and tech elite of both cities are looking for ways to bring them closer together, with the aim of continuing the growth of two of the most vibrant economies in North America.

“Vancouver has a lot more in common with Seattle than we do with Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, anywhere else in our country,” Christy Clark, the premier of British Columbia, said in an interview. “We should make the most of those cultural commonalities.”

Whether their grand vision of a “Cascadia innovation corridor” — which borrows its name from the region’s Cascade mountain range — ever materializes, leaders on both sides of the border have motives for getting cozier immediately. American tech icons like Microsoft, with voracious needs for global engineering talent, are expanding their Vancouver offices, partly because of Canada’s smoother immigration process.

For its part, Vancouver wants to bring more American technology companies to the city in hopes of spinning out future entrepreneurs who will expand its comparatively small base of technology companies. (...)

Last month, officials and executives from both cities huddled in a Vancouver hotel to discuss how to enable people, ideas and capital to flow more freely between them, as heedless of the international border separating the cities as a pod of orcas swimming in the sea.

At the Cascadia conference, Ms. Clark and Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, signed an agreement to deepen the ties between Vancouver and Seattle, including more research collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and Satya Nadella, its current chief executive, talked about globalization and education.

One proposal to deal with traffic between Vancouver and Seattle was for a high-speed rail line that would whisk travelers at more than 200 miles an hour between the cities in 57 minutes (it can take four hours or more by car). The details on financing the project — which could cost an estimated $30 billion or more — have not been worked out.

A group of Seattle techies proposed a cheaper alternative: a dedicated lane for autonomous vehicles on Interstate 5, the highway connecting Seattle to the Canadian border. The plan — which relies on autonomous vehicles that still need a lot of work — would not shave much time off the commute between the cities, but could make the ride less tedious by letting travelers work or watch a movie, said Tom Alberg, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle venture capital firm, and an author of the proposal.

by Nick Wingfield, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

SNL: Trump vs. Clinton Debate

[ed. This is so close to reality it's scary.]

Video: YouTube

Colombia Peace Deal Is Defeated, Leaving a Nation in Shock

[ed. See also: How Colombia's Voters Rejected Peace]

A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.

A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor, the government said.

The result was a deep embarrassment for President Juan Manuel Santos. Just last week, Mr. Santos had joined arms with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, who apologized on national television during a signing ceremony.

The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union. And it left the future of rebels who had planned to rejoin Colombia as civilians — indeed, the future of the war itself, which both sides had declared over — unknown.

Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.

Mr. Santos, who appeared humbled by the vote on television on Sunday, said the cease-fire that his government had signed with the FARC would remain in effect. He added that he would soon “convene all political groups,” especially those against the deal, “to open spaces for dialogue and determine how we will go ahead.”

Rodrigo Londoño, the FARC leader, who was preparing to return to Colombia after four years of negotiations in Havana, said he, too, was not interested in more war.

“The FARC reiterates its disposition to use only words as a weapon to build toward the future,” he said in a statement. “With today’s result, we know that our challenge as a political party is even greater and requires more effort to build a stable and lasting peace.”

The question voters were asked was simple: “Do you support the final agreement to end the conflict and construct a stable and enduring peace?”

by Julia Symmes Cobb and Nicholas Casey, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press

Being a Manager is Hard

Early in my career I really wanted to move into management, partially for the money of course, but also because I saw my boss doing seemingly irrational things, and thought if I was in charge I'd streamline everything, make better decisions, and get to the core of the job which is doing good IT stuff.

I had some fairly crappy bosses, but I also had good bosses. It wasn't until I got into an IT management role where I saw it from both sides. Being a technical manager I still do sysadmin work every single day, and I want nothing more than to do the best damn work possible. But instead I find myself pulled into other situations. These are situations where a typical sysadmin would say "This is a waste of time. While you're doing a bunch of stupid stuff we're not doing sysadmin work. You are a horrible manager."

So I want to try to provide some insight. Everything I'm typing below is completely made up, but is based on real events, so resist the urge to tell me that I suck, since none of this stuff happened exactly as written.

I get into the office on Monday morning, and see Mary sitting there, playing solitaire at her desk, for the 400th time. Mary is an absolutely horrible sysadmin. Words can not fully express how much she sucks, and the rest of the team is resentful she is there. Mary is a mid level sysadmin who was hired by previous management. Ben, a junior admin basically runs circles around her and is getting increasingly annoyed he does the same work as her yet she's mid level and makes more. I'm actively trying to get rid of Mary and if I do, I'll give her slot to Ben and pay him more.

The problem with Mary is that she is from an underrepresented race, and HR found out she sued her previous employer for discrimination, so even though she's horrible, we have to do this by the book. That means coaching, then a verbal warning, then a written warning, then a second written warning, and then finally termination. Each of these steps has a number of days associated with them, and if she manages to improve enough, the process restarts back to zero.

Mary has pissed off a huge number of customers so I had been holding her back, having her do less customer facing work and had her re-organize the storage room at once point. HR told me because I did that we have to start the process over again because she could claim in a lawsuit that I prevented her from doing her job. They understood why I did it, but I have to actually let her fail because that's the only way I can build a case against her. But if I let her fail, she's going to make a mess of things, break things, hurt IT's reputation, upset other departments, etc, so for the moment I'm just going to pretend I don't see her playing solitaire.

I've overheard water cooler discussion about how I suck since I can't deal with the Mary problem and I don't like hearing that, but I obviously can't lay all this stuff out for the whole team. They think I'm doing nothing, meanwhile I'm devoting a lot of time to trying to get rid of Mary. Time that could be spent doing good IT stuff.

Later that morning I have a 1 on 1 meeting with Rich. He's one of my best people. One of Rich's problems is that he never seems to take vacation time even though he really needs it. He seems to love working too much, but then complains about it later. Take some fucking vacation Rich. This particular Monday Rich comes to me saying he needs to take Friday off since last minute his wife has decided they're going to her cousin's wedding they weren't going to go to. Rich is in a predicament since he doesn't want to piss off his wife. I tell him the only problem is that he's scheduled to do an upgrade on Saturday (that we planned 3 months ago) and the prep work was going to be Friday. I want to help him out sine he never takes time off, but this is absolutely less than convenient.

I tell him I'll talk to Ben and see if he can do it but I'm a little nervous about it since Ben is still kind of junior. I obviously can't have Mary do it.

So I ask Ben and he complains he's already worked two Saturdays this month, and he's right, he has, but this upgrade has to happen. I manage to ply him by saying if he does this, I'll give him an extra night and meals in Vegas when he goes to the conference next month since we didn't make the reservations yet. He's excited about that.

He thinks I have so much power. I actually don't. That's against company policy, but if I say that there were no reasonably priced flights after the conference ends at noon on Friday and I found a deal on Saturday afternoon, the CFO's office isn't going to question me since I'm straight with money, and I'm not doing anything special to get him meals since you just automatically get meals if you're on a trip. So nobody knows what I'm doing and I get away with it.

Later that afternoon the CIO stops by my office. he's a good guy and cares about people but he can't tell what's going on from his high vantage point. He doesn't try to deliberately fuck us over, but it happens anyway. Turns out he and the CEO picked out some software, and somehow misunderstood the sales guys that it required no IT support. It actually requires 2 app servers, 2 web servers and a SQL database, and a load balancer. Some project marketing is doing requires it be set up by mid next week. Fuckity fuck fuck. I tell the CIO this is a problem, and he's very apologetic. I said I really should have been at the meetings. he said he was trying to save me time since he knew I was so busy and the sales guys insisted no IT support was needed. Turns out that's if you buy the "cloud" version...

So I talk to Rich about this. We can use VMs (we have capacity) and the existing F5 but this means the VMware upgrades Rich was going to work on will have to be pushed out until next month. He works miracles and gets all this stuff done in like 2 days and I'm appreciative.

Meanwhile he bitches to everyone later how I'm a shitty manager since I need to somehow lay down the law to the CIO/CEO. Never mind that the CIO is not someone I can control, and the CIO can't control the CEO even though he'd love to since he wants to personally strangle the CEO on a weekly basis.

Meanwhile John is off site working on a complex migration. He's at one of our branch offices set up with 2 laptops and some other equipment in a conference room. There is a very important marketing meeting in that room at 4 pm with outside people, but he's assured everyone he'll be out of there by 1:30, 2 at the latest. They're hesitant but let him use the room.

He's an amazing sysadmin but somehow finds himself in bad situations due to getting so focused on problems he misses out on everything else. He forgot to charge his iPhone last night and gets to work with it at about 50%, and makes a bunch of phone calls in the morning, and is now down to 2%. During a huge file copy at about 11 am, he decides to go grab lunch real quick.

Just his luck, the car breaks down. His phone is now dead. He's stranded somewhere and can't call since he took a country road to go find a wendy's.

At noon the marketing director calls me and says my guy went MIA. I said I'm sure he's at lunch don't worry he said he'd be back.

I call him. Phone is dead. Fuck. This is one of his big problems. We've discussed this a few times. I bought him a charger for his car. He doesn't use it.

I get increasingly irate phone calls from the marketing director at 1, at 2, at 2:30. This guy is missing off the face of the earth and she needs the room. At 2:30 I tell her she's just going to have to unplug everything and move it. This is going to piss off John but what else can we do right now?

He finally shows up at 3 pm having hitchhiked (that's so John) and becomes irate she unplugged his stuff since he had a script running on one of the laptops. She tells him to get out.

I then get this whole story the next day. I've got a guy (John) who expertly pulled off a migration we used to pay 30k to a consultant to do and he did it flawlessly, but he also pissed off someone 3 rungs higher on the food chain than him and yelled at her in front of an office of people. He thinks he should be given a bonus for the migration, but meanwhile I have to deal with the fact he let his phone go dead 3 times, and he yelled at someone. he thinks this woman deserved to be yelled at for her poor treatment and I'm required to defend him or I'm a weak manager. So this is going to be a fun conversation...

Meanwhile we've got a desktop support tech, Robert, who people suspect is drunk. They also complain he's slow and doesn't keep up with the workload. Well Robert has a possibly terminal disease but has chosen not to tell anyone. he has to get treatment twice a week. I'm not even fully aware of his situation since it's confidential but I've been told just a little bit. I can't legally tell anyone anything about this.

Not to mention the woman who is upset because Jason the sysadmin said to her "If you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" just meaning if she does him a favor he'll get to her problem sooner. He meant nothing. But for some reason she's upset now and that still has to be discussed with him even though he meant nothing.

There's no right answer to any of this stuff. In this fictional situation my main goal walking in Monday morning was the plan a vSphere upgrade, but that just didn't happen did it?

Sysadmins are people. Upper management is all people. Somehow we have to get all these people working together, and it's an interesting challenge every single day.

It's very easy to say someone sucks when you are missing a lot of the information. Even people who are doing a very good job are going to have issues you have to deal with. Some of the things your manager "deals" with you are things you don't even know were dealt with if he/she does a good job.

by crankysysadmin, Reddit | Read more:
Image: Flickr / Richard Masoner via:

Rebel Teens Are Killing America’s Clothing Giants

[ed. It's amazing (to me anyway) how some companies are built on the flimsiest of premises... like someone thought it might be a good idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars focusing on 'the “flirty tomboy,” a 14- to 17-year-old girl?' Good luck with that.]

Two years ago, Aéropostale Chief Executive Officer Julian Geiger shared his view of the adolescent shopper. “The teenager today wants to fit in,” he told analysts. “They want to fit in by wearing things that make them feel safe. If there’s a brand promise to Aéropostale, it’s that the teenager can wear our clothes, go to school, and not be teased or made fun of the way they look.”

It turned out he was wrong. After decades of battling rivals Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle, brands that sought to reposition themselves after realizing normal didn’t sell anymore, Aéropostale doubled down and ended up the ultimate loser in the teen fashion wars. More broadly, the bankruptcy of this giant of the American mall is a cautionary tale for other retailers, like Gap Inc. and its Banana Republic unit: Not only are teenagers happy to stand out these days—so are their parents.

Back in 2011, Aéropostale was riding high. Annual sales hit a peak of $2.4 billion and the company was profitable. Suddenly, it fell apart. Fickle teens didn’t want to be walking billboards of logo apparel. They flocked to trendier shops like Forever 21 and H&M to buy clothes with more personality. No one wants to be teased, sure. But that won’t sell clothes when kids think being ignored is worse.

Nowhere to turn

Aéropostale was caught in a trap. Teens didn’t want to wear logos anymore, but without its logo, Aéropostale lost its identity. Justina Sharp, a 19-year-old fashion blogger who runs the site A Bent Piece of Wire, said that once logos went out of style, there was nothing unique about Aéropostale that appealed to the teen.

“Aeropostale seems like somewhere your mom takes you for back to school shopping,” said Sharp. An Aéropostale spokesperson didn’t immediately provide a comment.

While A&F and American Eagle also strained to right their ships, Aéropostale was sinking. The New York-based company shed almost 40 percent of its sales in five years—nearly a billion dollars in revenue. Shares fell almost 98 percent, and the retailer managed to post just one quarter of positive comparative sales since its peak back in 2013. Finally in May, Aéropostale filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and shut down more than 150 stores.

The collapse ended an era of strife for Aéropostale. In the early 2010s, as teens began to shun logos, the company refused to shift with them at first. Seen as a cheaper alternative to A&F and its sister brand Hollister, which were surging to new highs in the mid and late 2000s, Aéropostale had lower margins and was the most exposed. As more teens drifted away, the company had little room to maneuver, and the moves it did make ended up making things worse.

Even in 2012, with sales ailing and teens moving away from logos, Aeropostale's Times Square flagship was still full of logo apparel.

High school uniform no more

The brand got its start almost 30 years ago as a uniform for preppy kids in Gen X high schools. Like its rivals, Aéropostale’s branded clothes signaled the wearer to be cool, conformist, and therefore acceptable in the suburban American high school. Now, with its name drained of that power, what else could it offer teens? Executives tried to copy the fast-fashion companies, like Zara and H&M, by offering similar, logo-less styles. It didn’t work, and even worse, the clothes were so different they pushed away the loyal shoppers who had stuck around. In its bid to survive, Aéropostale’s clothes lost their common design aesthetic, said Adheer Bahulkar, a partner at consulting firm A.T. Kearney’s retail practice. The brand’s identity was lost.

“There was a knee-jerk rush to reinvent themselves,” said Bahulkar. “People who loved their product couldn’t recognize it any more.”

In 2014, Geiger, the former CEO of cupcake shop Crumbs, was brought on to save Aéropostale. He tried to find a happy medium, selling fashion styles alongside the Aéropostale hoodies and T-shirt staples that had been typical of the label for the past decade. He rebranded the retailer Aero, with ads that promised teens that “We’ve changed.” Executives said they were trying to attract the “flirty tomboy,” a 14- to 17-year-old girl. On an earnings call early last year, Geiger was full of optimism. “Back-to-school will be a seminal period in which we will all see just how far we have come in the resurrection of one of America’s great young brands,” he said.

Back-to-school was a disaster. Aéropostale filed for bankruptcy before summer vacation.

by Kim Bashin, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

Life in the Air

Cessna 140
photo: markk

The George Plimpton Story

[ed. My life-long love of reading started with Paper Lion.]

Six books and several dozen Sports Illustrated articles into his journalistic career, George Plimpton still couldn’t type the words “participatory journalism” with a straight face. “‘Participatory journalism’—that ugly descriptive,” he writes in the first pages of Shadow Box (1977), sighing over his Underwood. Though he became nationally known as the subgenre’s paragon and the term pursued him into his obituaries, Plimpton was only a journalist in the sense that James Thurber was an illustrator and Robert Benchley a newspaper columnist. He went places, spoke to people, and wrote down his observations, but the reporting wasn’t the point. What was the point? The storytelling, the humanity, the comedy.

It was an odd match to begin with: for a writer of Plimpton’s background, journalism ranked on the literary hierarchy somewhere below light verse and pulp westerns. In George, Being George, Charles Michener, Plimpton’s editor at The New Yorker, explained:

Journalists were from a rougher background. They tended not to be Ivy League, white-shoe boys, which George was certainly the epitome of. When I came into that world, I was at Yale and people would say, “Why do you want to be a journalist? It’s sleazy. That isn’t for people like you.”

Journalism was not to be taken seriously, but comedy writing was even more of a joke. What was the president of the Harvard Lampoon, class of 1948, to do?

After two years at Cambridge, where Plimpton earned a master’s in English, he moved to Paris to run a fledgling literary quarterly, while working in secret on various novels he would later abandon; one began with a long set piece in which a fire breaks out at a society party. As contemporaries and friends—Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gay Talese—began to revitalize the journalistic form, placing themselves in the middle of the story and writing with the depth, nuance, and narrative richness of novelists, Plimpton saw an opening.

In 1956 he began writing for Sports Illustrated, which Henry Luce had founded two years earlier with the hope of targeting men of leisure. The editors had as much interest in hunting, boating, and polo as in the major spectator sports; the main athlete profiled in the debut issue was the Duke of Edinburgh, an enthusiastic amateur archer, cricketer, and high jumper. The first significant paid writing assignment of Plimpton’s career was a 30,000-word cover story, published over four consecutive issues, about Harold Vanderbilt’s passions for yachting and bridge.

The refined approach required refined authors. Sports Illustrated’s founding editor, Sid James, who had previously edited Ernest Hemingway at Life, sought novelists to serve as contributors: William Faulkner covered hockey and the Kentucky Derby, John Steinbeck wrote about fishing, Budd Schulberg about boxing, James T. Farrell was the roving baseball correspondent, and John P. Marquand wrote a series about country clubs. The editors also touted the return of Paul Gallico, who had been the highest-paid sportswriter in New York as a columnist for the Daily News before abandoning his post to write novels and screenplays (the best known today are The Poseidon Adventure and The Pride of the Yankees). Gallico got his start as a young journalist by sparring a round with Jack Dempsey, who knocked him out cold in about ten seconds. Gallico repeated the gag with many of the professional athletes he covered in order, he wrote, to understand more intimately “the feel” of the game. In the opening pages of Out of My League (1961), Plimpton writes of his admiration for Gallico:

He described, among other things, catching Herb Pennock’s curveball, playing tennis against Vinnie Richards, golf with Bobby Jones, and what it was like coming down the Olympic ski run six thousand feet above Garmisch—quite a feat considering he had been on skis only once before in his life…. I wondered if it would be possible to emulate Gallico, yet go further by writing at length and in depth about each sport and what it was like to participate.

Thus marks the first appearance of “participate” in Plimpton’s writing.

Little, Brown has published in attractive Skittles-colored editions a slightly eccentric selection of Plimpton’s works of sports journalism. The one for which he is best known, “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” which was the cover of Sports Illustrated’s April 1, 1985, issue and was later expanded into a novel, is omitted, perhaps because it is a work of fiction (though his other books, it should be noted, contain plenty of fiction). Also missing is One More July (1977), a conversation with the offensive lineman Bill Curry, and The X-Factor (1990), an inquiry into what distinguishes superstar athletes from mortals, a quality he discussed as early as the opening paragraph of his Vanderbilt piece. The new set includes the five books that Plimpton counted as works of “participatory journalism”—Out of My League, Paper Lion (1965), The Bogey Man (1968), Shadow Box, and Open Net (1985)—as well as Mad Ducks and Bears (1973), a weightless postscript to Paper Lion that mainly concerns the off-field hijinks of two Lions linemen, and One For the Record (1974), which follows Henry Aaron’s quest to beat Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. But all of Plimpton’s books were participatory in the sense that he is always tangibly present, his sensibility—beguiling, lyrical, charming, deeply funny—singing from every paragraph. The joy of these books comes less from sharing the company of Muhammad Ali or Alex Karras than—a point lost on his many imitators—from sharing the company of George Plimpton.

by Nathaniel Rich, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Larry Fink

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Aging and My Beauty Dilemma

When I was 21, I underwent breast reduction surgery, reducing my embarrassingly large chest to something that could at least fit inside a cardigan. Although there was some medical rationale for the procedure, the overwhelming reason was that I was sick and tired of every man on the planet being unable to look above my neck. Their fault, I know, not mine, and symptomatic of the baggage, both physical and psychological, women are forced to carry around with them. But once my own baggage was surgically removed, I felt amazing — lighter, prettier, healthier. Was this an indulgent move on my part? Maybe. Have I regretted it over the last 30 years? Not for a single moment. I had a problem, or at least what felt an awful lot like a problem, and I made it go away.

When it comes to aging, though, I’m torn. Because technically, growing older isn’t a problem; Mother Nature has it in for us all, reducing us to shriveled frames and crepey arms en route, eventually, to dust. And like most women in my liberal, feminist-leaning, highly educated peer group (I’m president of Barnard College in New York City), I am ideologically opposed to intervening in such a natural and inevitable process as simply getting on in years.

But like many of my peers, I am also a two-faced hypocrite, at least when it comes to parts of myself that may well benefit from a twinge of not-quite-so-natural intervention. Almost every woman I know colors her hair in some way, whether from a box or at a pricey salon. And these days, at least in Manhattan — and Los Angeles, London and even Paris, I suspect — many women will quietly confess to a shot of Botox from time to time, or a dose of filler to soften their smiles. It’s after that point that things become dodgy. Brow lifts. Estrogen. Tummy tucks. Cellfina cellulite treatment. Is it all a slippery slope to some kind of Kardashian hell? Or, like Propecia and Viagra — age-fighting interventions that men use and rarely take much criticism for — are they simply elements in a modern medicine chest, there for the picking? Does a little face-lift along the way constitute treason, or just a reasonable accommodation? I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that for women in certain professional or social circles, the bar of normal keeps going up. There are virtually no wrinkles on Hollywood stars or on Broadway actors; ditto for female entrepreneurs or women in the news media. There are few wrinkles on the women in Congress and even fewer on Wall Street. Chief executives, bankers, hospital administrators, heads of public relations firms and publishing houses, lawyers, marketers, caterers: Certain standards of appearance have long been de rigueur for women in these positions, from being reasonably fit and appropriately dressed to displaying attractive coifs and manicured nails. But more and more, these standards also now include being blond, dark- or red-haired and nearly wrinkle-free. Just saying no — to chemicals, peels, lasers and liposuction — becomes harder under these circumstances, even if no one wants to admit that’s the case.

What is more, as with so many issues that surround women and beauty and aging and sex, there is a paradox today that seems to strike women of the postfeminist generation with a particular force. In the bad old days — before women worked outside the home; before they lived much past their reproductive years; before there were Restylane and Juvéderm, Radiesse and Sculptra — the idea of halting aging or fading in its tracks was only a fantasy, the stuff of Ponce de Léon and the fountain of youth. No one did anything about it, much less worried about the moral implications of doing so. But today, women facing the onslaught of middle age are armed with an arsenal of age-fighting implements and, for many, a feminist-inspired philosophy that disdains using them.

It is a trivial dilemma, perhaps, but a painful one nevertheless. If a woman with some degree of professional success brags about or even comments upon her fabulous new filler or face-lift, she risks being derided as a traitor to the cause, someone silly enough to have spent the time and money to subject herself to an unnecessary, possibly dangerous, procedure. (When is the last time you heard a movie star tout her plastic surgeon? Or a leading executive thank her dermatologist?) By the same token, if that woman ignores the process of aging and eases more honestly into her inevitable wrinkles, belly fat and gray hair, she is liable to stand out as an anomaly within her personal and professional circles. In political science, we would refer to this as a collective action dilemma: Everyone is better off if nobody tummy-tucks and uses Botox, but once anyone starts, it gets harder to pull back from the practice.

So instead, an entire generation of feminist and postfeminist women who stormed the barricades of the American work force, planned their reproductive destinies, and even got their partners to fold the laundry occasionally are now engaged in an odd sort of collective self-delusion. Everyone (at least in certain high-profile or professional circles) is doing it, and very few are confessing, a fact that in some ways is more disturbing than the surge in the surgeries themselves. Because not only are we nipping, suctioning and using hormones, but we’re also feeling embarrassed about it, and lying. Neither of which was really the point of women’s liberation.

by Debora L. Spar, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Monica Ramos

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Everything You Need to Know About the Brangelina Divorce

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Venkatesh Rao: How the World Works

[ed. Tech analyst and author Venkatesh Rao recommends five books for a good understanding of how the world works, and why.]

What do you see as the commonality with these books and why do they explain ‘how the world works’?

I have a particular idea in mind when I say ‘how the world works.’ I mean forming what’s known as an ‘appreciative’ model of reality. The distinction I want to make here is between appreciative models and manipulative models — which is a distinction due to urbanist John Friedmann.

The idea is that a manipulative model of reality is something that allows you to do things. It’s based on skills or agency. An appreciative model is simply a satisfying understanding of the world. It may not necessarily allow you to do things—it may not allow you to build big companies or solve important problems like climate change—but it will give you an understanding of the world that satisfies you. That satisfaction, to people who seek knowledge, is very similar to the satisfaction that religious people get from having a religious idea in their head.

So all these books that we’re talking about offer you very rich and interesting and, in each case, somewhat counterintuitive appreciative models of significant chunks of experienced reality.

Obviously there’s no such thing as a single grand unified book that will give you a really satisfying model of every aspect of human experience that you might live through. But each of these books does a good job with a very big chunk of life as we experience it.

What do people do if they live their lives without this type of model?

There are two schools of thought here. One is the famous line that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ There are a lot of people—especially people who are prone to intellectualize things—who sincerely believe that the unexamined life is not worth living. The contrasting sentiment is that the unlived life is not worth examining. I don’t think any particular person has ever said that, but a lot of people like to flip it around and come up with that.

I tend not to be doctrinaire about it. I’m open to the idea that there are different personalities when it comes to this sort of thing. Some people have a great need for having an appreciative understanding of their own lived experience. Other people seem to get along just fine learning how to work the world and get along in it and succeed and make millions of dollars or whatever it is that they set out to do. They don’t seem to feel any particular lack or spiritual angst from not having an appreciative model of the world. I don’t necessarily think people miss out, just that there are certain types of people who are predisposed to feeling a certain angst if they don’t have this.

Let’s start off with the most concrete book on your list — Francis Fukuyama’s two book series on the way institutions and governments work. That’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011) followed by Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014).

Most of us, when we are first exposed to history in high school, learn an extremely dull, non-analytical version of history which is just one damned fact after another. It’s very unsatisfying. The way we are taught history also typically serves certain regional political purposes. In countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, it might be much more deliberately political. In liberal democracies, it’s a bit more open. History is taught with a genuine intent to foster some sort of critical appreciation and developing a sense of history. But it’s still pretty banal: this king then that king and so forth.

Once you re-engage with history as an adult—and by this I mean intellectually aware, curious people not professional historians—there are very few treatments of all of history that truly satisfy your urge to understand just how human society functions and how it came to function the way it does. What are the variety of ways in which it functions around the world? How is the system in China different from the system in the United States. How did they each get to be where they are? All of these are questions that you could call analytical history.

Francis Fukuyama is best known for his 1989 article declaring the end of history. He approaches the end of history from the perspective of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a precipitating event, but he’s coming from an intellectual tradition that goes back to Hegel. It’s a metaphysical thesis about history that holds together very coherently. His basic argument was that liberal democratic forms, as they exist in the West and certain other parts of the world like Japan and India, represent the end state of political evolution, in a certain sense. It’s not that history itself ends as in stops happening, but that a certain aspect of evolution ends. I like the biological analogy, that in the primordial soup there were a huge number of replicator molecules that could self-produce but at some point DNA became the dominant monopolistic molecule that became the basis of all life. In that sense, history ended when liberal democracy emerged as the global standard for governance.

Over the next 25 years, Fukuyama’s ideas were tested by the unfolding of history. Some people think that the events of the 1990s and 2000s proved him definitively wrong. Others think they proved him absolutely right. I happen to be in the second category. I think that events since he wrote that famous paper and book in 1989 have fundamentally proved him right.

This two-volume book is basically a very extended study of history from that starting point of ‘What happens if you look at history as a convergent evolutionary path that seems to end in liberal democracy? How did we get there?’

There are three basic pillars of liberal democracy that we are familiar with, the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive. He generalizes these into a strong state, the rule of law, and mechanisms for consent by individuals, so accountability mechanisms. He traces the evolution of these mechanisms around the world from as far back in recorded history as we can go and what he offers is a really nuanced story of how different pieces of the puzzle emerge in different parts of the world. For example, the idea of a strong central state with an impersonal bureaucracy and civil service examinations first emerged in China. The idea of a rule of law, as in a body of legal thinking that applies to rulers, just as it does to the ruled, did not emerge in China—a lack that still shows today—but it did emerge in India. And Europe was the first place where all three mechanisms came together for the first time: a rule of law, accountability, and a strong state.

So that is his basic framework. In between, there are very interesting chapters, about what happened in the Ottoman Empire, say. He traces how these three building blocks slowly develop, and how somewhere around the 18th century, in pre-modern Germany, the elements first began coming together in a way that we would recognize today as a modern, liberal democratic state. The first volume deals with that whole story until about 1800. The second volume deals with the story from 1800 to today and it covers all the things you would expect. (...)

What’s the role of the United States in all this?

The contribution of the United States to the evolution of governance is what Fukuyama calls ‘clientelism.’ His sense of the word clientelism is technically different from the way it is normally used, but it’s what we are seeing, for example, in the Trump campaign right now. That form of clientelism was pioneered by Andrew Jackson in the middle of the 19th century, and it has very peculiar characteristics. Unlike previous models of patronage, where elected, otherwise powerful, leaders used to guarantee their own support by handing out favors almost at an individual level, clientelism is the mechanism by which you hand out favors to large segments of the population that work for you in a democracy.

by Venkatesh Rao, Five Books |  Read more:

Image: Five Books 

Plan Bee

Seven types of bees once found in abundance in Hawaii have become the first bees to be added to the US federal list of endangered and threatened species.

The listing decision, published on Friday in the Federal Register, classifies seven varieties of yellow-faced or masked bees as endangered, due to such factors as habitat loss, wildfires and the invasion of non-native plants and insects.

The bees, so named for yellow-to-white facial markings, once crowded Hawaii and Maui but recent surveys found their populations have plunged in the same fashion as other types of wild bees – and some commercial ones – elsewhere in the United States, federal wildlife managers said.

Pollinators like bees are crucial for the production of fruits, nuts and vegetables and they represent billions of dollars in value each year to the nation’s agricultural economy, officials said.

Placing yellow-faced bees under federal safeguards comes just over a week since the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed adding the imperilled rusty patched bumble bee, a prized but vanishing pollinator once found in the upper midwest and north-eastern United States, to the endangered and threatened species list.

One of several wild bee species seen declining over the past two decades, the rusty patched bumble bee is the first in the continental United States formally proposed for protections.

The listing of the Hawaii species followed years of study by the conservation group Xerces Society, state government officials and independent researchers. The Xerces Society said its goal was to protect nature’s pollinators and invertebrates, which play a vital role in the health of the overall ecosystem.

The non-profit organization was involved in the initial petitions to protect the bee species, said Sarina Jepson, director of endangered species and aquatic programs for the Portland, Oregon-based group.

Jepson said yellow-faced bees could be found elsewhere in the world, but these particular species were native only to Hawaii and pollinate plant species indigenous to the islands.

The bees faced a variety of threats including “feral pigs, invasive ants, loss of native habitat due to invasive plants, fire, as well as development, especially in some for the coastal areas”, Jepson told Associated Press.

The bees could be found in a wide variety of habitats in Hawaii, from coastal environments to high-elevation shrub lands, she said. The yellow-faced bees pollinated some of Hawaii’s endangered native plant species. While other bees could potentially pollinate those species, many could become extinct if these bees were to die off entirely.

Hawaii-based entomologist Karl Magnacca said the bees “tend to favor the more dominant trees and shrubs we have here”, he said. “People tend to focus on the rare plants, and those are important, that’s a big part of the diversity. But the other side is maintaining the common ones as common. (The bees) help maintain the structure of the whole forest.”

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: John Kaia/AP