Friday, November 18, 2016
Responsible Hedonists
For nearly half a century, the San Francisco Bay Area has loomed in the American imagination as the destination for social permissiveness. Berkeley is the haven of unwashed, drum-circling hippies and left-wing academics. Oakland incubates radicals who convene vegan potlucks in moldering punk houses and lob Molotov cocktails during protests. And San Francisco is the epicenter of free and queer love, the home of Haight-Ashbury, Harvey Milk’s beloved Castro District, and sex-positive feminist Annie Sprinkle’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
But if sex is still free in the Bay Area, little else is. (...)
Bay Area class polarization constitutes the backdrop for journalist Emily Witt’s new book Future Sex, a series of forays into the area’s sex-based subcultures in the years after the financial crash. The book had its origin in a personal moment of truth: After the end of a relationship, Witt found herself contending with a thirtysomething sexual malaise. Waiting in a clinic for a chlamydia test, she realized that she was disenchanted with her new routine of informal sex with “nonboyfriends,” but equally unsettled by the thought of heterosexual monogamy as the natural termination of her dating life. After deciding to use “the West Coast and journalism as alibis” for checking out freer forms of love and sex, she absconded to San Francisco to explore her options. As Witt puts it early in the book: “When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.”
In San Francisco, Witt is surprised by what she finds: Love is both freer and more constrained than she had imagined. She attends a live humiliation-porn shoot at the warehouse studio of Kink.com and tries a high-end sexual therapy called “orgasmic meditation.” She plumbs the depths of the webcam site Chaturbate, on which performers masturbate with toy trains for strangers, among other activities, and samples drugs with tech-industry polyamorists at sex parties and in the orgy dome at Burning Man.
Witt’s journey into the Bay Area’s sexual underground has been described as a memoir, but none of her experiences pave the way to a personal epiphany. Instead, they allow her to act as a kind of ethnographer of the Bay Area affluent. An upwardly mobile urbanite with the time and the means to experiment, Witt’s sojourn in San Francisco finds her visiting the same coffee shops as Google managers and yoga practitioners who discuss “coregasms” It’s a group with a high incidence of overlap with the subcultures she explores. Her role as a participant-observer means that they all serve as opportunities to uncover something about her own desires, but they also allow her to peer into the social lives and sexual practices of the elite at the turn of the millennium. While Future Sex may have been started as an effort to find sexual and romantic authenticity outside of traditional relationships, the resulting document is just as much about how class and money operate as determining (if not always immediately visible) forces even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. (...)
Future Sex is framed as a work of self- exploration, and Witt’s overarching mission—to locate her desires on the axis of 21st-century sexual freedom—is meant to unify the book’s chapters, several of which have been previously published as stand-alone magazine pieces. But this presumed motivation fades somewhat in these darkly funny and perceptive field studies. “Voyeur” implies a bit too much sexual intention for Witt’s project; in venturing into these scenes, she isn’t a Peeping Tom so much as a curious shopper. Her deadpan delivery makes Future Sex a work of social observation and, at times, even a kind of nonfiction comedy of manners. Behind her adventures seems to lurk the question: Are the rich simply gentrifying once-countercultural forms of living and partying, or have some modes of experimentation always been compatible with a certain degree of affluence?
Witt notes that Burning Man—which bills itself, among other things, as a “creative autonomous zone”—happens to suit the masters of the universe very well: Out in the desert, one can enter the orgy dome on Saturday and return to one’s job at Facebook on Monday. “The $400 ticket price,” she notes, “was as much about the right to leave what happened at Burning Man behind as it was to enter in the first place.” (...)
One of Witt’s chapters, “Polyamory,” examines how some young people are attempting to achieve this kind of utopian future in their everyday lives. But even with deliberate sexual promiscuity—which should theoretically be free—economic and social capital present certain benefits.
Witt’s polyamorist subjects, Elizabeth and Wes, are a young, hyper-successful tech couple representative of a new crop of Bay Area residents who “had grown up eating sugar-free cereal, swaddled in Polar Fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles.” These young adults, having graduated from prestigious colleges and landed high-paying jobs working 70 hours a week, now consume expensive groceries and patronize “coffee shops where the production of espresso was ritualized to resemble a historic reenactment of the hardships of nineteenth-century pioneer life.” (...)
For Elizabeth and Wes, this “modified commitment” includes sex parties, nights spent with other lovers, and eventually inviting their co-worker and friend Chris into the arrangement. And for Witt as an observer, it represents something encouraging, if not downright desirable. “I envied their community of friends,” she confesses, and “the openness with which they shared their attractions.”
Yet this openness can, at times, also seem like strenuous work. It relies upon a highly ordered system of rules, codes, earnestness, shared Google Docs, reading lists, and “the treatment of feelings as individual specimens, wrapped in cotton and carefully labeled.” And the Taylorized way the polyamorists organize their experimentation by night uncannily mirrors their output for their tech employers during the day. As Witt puts it, “It was as if the precocity they showed in their professional lives extended into an extreme pragmatism about sex.”
This, she soon realizes, is one of the signature features of this new phase in Bay Area licentiousness. The ethos of Witt’s polyamorists, if not the practice itself, is endemic to the Silicon Valley set: “When they talked about their coworkers in the Bay Area, Chris and Wes sometimes discussed the culture of ‘hyperbolic optimism,’ which they defined as a genuine commitment to the idea that all things were possible.”
“Responsible hedonism” is another Bayism that circulates “only half-jokingly” among their peers, and is perhaps no better exemplified than when Elizabeth throws a lavish loft sex party—complete with satin sheets and artful photographs of the host penetrating herself with a dildo—but first purchases liability insurance for the stripper pole. It turns out that free love can sometimes cost quite a lot.
But if sex is still free in the Bay Area, little else is. (...)
In San Francisco, Witt is surprised by what she finds: Love is both freer and more constrained than she had imagined. She attends a live humiliation-porn shoot at the warehouse studio of Kink.com and tries a high-end sexual therapy called “orgasmic meditation.” She plumbs the depths of the webcam site Chaturbate, on which performers masturbate with toy trains for strangers, among other activities, and samples drugs with tech-industry polyamorists at sex parties and in the orgy dome at Burning Man.Witt’s journey into the Bay Area’s sexual underground has been described as a memoir, but none of her experiences pave the way to a personal epiphany. Instead, they allow her to act as a kind of ethnographer of the Bay Area affluent. An upwardly mobile urbanite with the time and the means to experiment, Witt’s sojourn in San Francisco finds her visiting the same coffee shops as Google managers and yoga practitioners who discuss “coregasms” It’s a group with a high incidence of overlap with the subcultures she explores. Her role as a participant-observer means that they all serve as opportunities to uncover something about her own desires, but they also allow her to peer into the social lives and sexual practices of the elite at the turn of the millennium. While Future Sex may have been started as an effort to find sexual and romantic authenticity outside of traditional relationships, the resulting document is just as much about how class and money operate as determining (if not always immediately visible) forces even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. (...)
Future Sex is framed as a work of self- exploration, and Witt’s overarching mission—to locate her desires on the axis of 21st-century sexual freedom—is meant to unify the book’s chapters, several of which have been previously published as stand-alone magazine pieces. But this presumed motivation fades somewhat in these darkly funny and perceptive field studies. “Voyeur” implies a bit too much sexual intention for Witt’s project; in venturing into these scenes, she isn’t a Peeping Tom so much as a curious shopper. Her deadpan delivery makes Future Sex a work of social observation and, at times, even a kind of nonfiction comedy of manners. Behind her adventures seems to lurk the question: Are the rich simply gentrifying once-countercultural forms of living and partying, or have some modes of experimentation always been compatible with a certain degree of affluence?
Witt notes that Burning Man—which bills itself, among other things, as a “creative autonomous zone”—happens to suit the masters of the universe very well: Out in the desert, one can enter the orgy dome on Saturday and return to one’s job at Facebook on Monday. “The $400 ticket price,” she notes, “was as much about the right to leave what happened at Burning Man behind as it was to enter in the first place.” (...)
One of Witt’s chapters, “Polyamory,” examines how some young people are attempting to achieve this kind of utopian future in their everyday lives. But even with deliberate sexual promiscuity—which should theoretically be free—economic and social capital present certain benefits.
Witt’s polyamorist subjects, Elizabeth and Wes, are a young, hyper-successful tech couple representative of a new crop of Bay Area residents who “had grown up eating sugar-free cereal, swaddled in Polar Fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles.” These young adults, having graduated from prestigious colleges and landed high-paying jobs working 70 hours a week, now consume expensive groceries and patronize “coffee shops where the production of espresso was ritualized to resemble a historic reenactment of the hardships of nineteenth-century pioneer life.” (...)
For Elizabeth and Wes, this “modified commitment” includes sex parties, nights spent with other lovers, and eventually inviting their co-worker and friend Chris into the arrangement. And for Witt as an observer, it represents something encouraging, if not downright desirable. “I envied their community of friends,” she confesses, and “the openness with which they shared their attractions.”
Yet this openness can, at times, also seem like strenuous work. It relies upon a highly ordered system of rules, codes, earnestness, shared Google Docs, reading lists, and “the treatment of feelings as individual specimens, wrapped in cotton and carefully labeled.” And the Taylorized way the polyamorists organize their experimentation by night uncannily mirrors their output for their tech employers during the day. As Witt puts it, “It was as if the precocity they showed in their professional lives extended into an extreme pragmatism about sex.”
This, she soon realizes, is one of the signature features of this new phase in Bay Area licentiousness. The ethos of Witt’s polyamorists, if not the practice itself, is endemic to the Silicon Valley set: “When they talked about their coworkers in the Bay Area, Chris and Wes sometimes discussed the culture of ‘hyperbolic optimism,’ which they defined as a genuine commitment to the idea that all things were possible.”
“Responsible hedonism” is another Bayism that circulates “only half-jokingly” among their peers, and is perhaps no better exemplified than when Elizabeth throws a lavish loft sex party—complete with satin sheets and artful photographs of the host penetrating herself with a dildo—but first purchases liability insurance for the stripper pole. It turns out that free love can sometimes cost quite a lot.
by J.C. Pan, The Nation | Read more:
Image: Reno Gazette-Journal / AP
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Ronnie Earl
[ed. My personal favorite showcasing Ronnie's acoustic mastery: Song for a Sun (turn up the volume).]
Alaska's Oil Cash Now Comes With Automatic Voter Registration
[ed. Very few good results ever come out of an Alaskan election, but this is one of them.]
The same day Alaskans delivered their state to Donald Trump, they voted nearly two to one to embrace a progressive new voter-registration reform.
Under the new law, passed by referendum Tuesday, Alaskans who sign up to receive their annual payouts from the state’s oil wealth trust will also automatically be added to the state's voter rolls.
The vote makes Alaska the sixth state to have approved some form of automatic voter registration. Just two years ago, there were none.
"We should take advantage of any opportunity to cut waste and stop forcing people to fill out more and more forms," the state's U.S. senator, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, said in a statement celebrating the result.
More than 63 percent of Alaskans voted in favor of automatic registration, thanks in part to its almost comically broad range of supporters—including Sullivan, the Democrat he ousted in 2014, the state's other current U.S. senator, the state AARP and ACLU, BP, the Alaska Conservation Voters, unions, and industry groups.
“We have certain community members that need to cross rivers and drive 30 miles or 60 miles to a voting location,” Kim Reitmeier, the executive director of the Alaska Native business group ANCSA Regional Association and a co-chair of the campaign for the initiative, said in an interview in June. “Automatic voter registration is taking one step out of our crazy busy lives and trying to make it a little easier.”
Supporters say the law—which will give Alaskans the chance to opt out of being added to the rolls, rather than restrict voting to those who opt in by getting themselves registered—could create one of the most complete and accurate U.S. state voter registries of all time.
That’s because, rather than register people through the DMV, as other AVR states do, Alaska's new system will use the state’s Personal Fund Dividend Division, which handles its annual oil-wealth payouts. Not everyone gets a driver’s license, but in Alaska, almost nobody neglects to sign up each year to get their free dividend check.
Alaska's oil cash is unique, but its passage Tuesday of automatic registration underscores voting-rights advocates’ larger ambitions—to spread the policy beyond blue states and from the DMV to a wider range of agencies with access to citizens’ data. (...)
While all the automatic-registration systems before Alaska’s have been limited to using the DMV, advocates hope future states' laws will go further to automatically register citizens at agencies frequented by some nondrivers. A bill proposed last year in Maryland would have used social service agencies and the state’s Obamacare exchange but died in the state senate.
Not everyone is enthused. Republican governors in New Jersey and Illinois have vetoed their Democratic legislatures’ bills this year, citing concerns about fraud. While top elected Republicans embraced the referendum, and the Alaska GOP stayed neutral, some of its activists came out against it. “There are people out there who don’t know diddly squat about our country,” former state party chairman Peter Goldberg told the Alaska Dispatch News last month. “And I’m not comfortable with people that are totally ignorant about our system voting.”
Progressives say such arguments are undemocratic. “There’s no law that says that there should be a test of effort, availability, time, patience, and intelligence in order to vote,” says City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, who in the 1980s co-founded an advocacy group that helped pass the 1993 federal law requiring state agencies to give citizens more opportunities to register to vote, as when they're at the DMV. (States’ compliance with that law has fallen far short of supporters’ hopes.)
Automating voter registration, says Piven, would make it harder for governments to use registration requirements to disenfranchise would-be voters, as they’ve been doing since such requirements first became widespread after the Civil War. (One 1908 New York law, for example, created an obstacle for Jews by requiring voters to register in person either on a Saturday or on Yom Kippur.)
Many supporters see the new spate of automatic voter-registration bills being introduced at the state level as a sharp contrast to the much larger volume of new voting restrictions passed since the GOP’s 2010 down-ballot romp and the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act.
by Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: John Moore/Getty Images
The same day Alaskans delivered their state to Donald Trump, they voted nearly two to one to embrace a progressive new voter-registration reform.
Under the new law, passed by referendum Tuesday, Alaskans who sign up to receive their annual payouts from the state’s oil wealth trust will also automatically be added to the state's voter rolls.The vote makes Alaska the sixth state to have approved some form of automatic voter registration. Just two years ago, there were none.
"We should take advantage of any opportunity to cut waste and stop forcing people to fill out more and more forms," the state's U.S. senator, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, said in a statement celebrating the result.
More than 63 percent of Alaskans voted in favor of automatic registration, thanks in part to its almost comically broad range of supporters—including Sullivan, the Democrat he ousted in 2014, the state's other current U.S. senator, the state AARP and ACLU, BP, the Alaska Conservation Voters, unions, and industry groups.
“We have certain community members that need to cross rivers and drive 30 miles or 60 miles to a voting location,” Kim Reitmeier, the executive director of the Alaska Native business group ANCSA Regional Association and a co-chair of the campaign for the initiative, said in an interview in June. “Automatic voter registration is taking one step out of our crazy busy lives and trying to make it a little easier.”
Supporters say the law—which will give Alaskans the chance to opt out of being added to the rolls, rather than restrict voting to those who opt in by getting themselves registered—could create one of the most complete and accurate U.S. state voter registries of all time.
That’s because, rather than register people through the DMV, as other AVR states do, Alaska's new system will use the state’s Personal Fund Dividend Division, which handles its annual oil-wealth payouts. Not everyone gets a driver’s license, but in Alaska, almost nobody neglects to sign up each year to get their free dividend check.
Alaska's oil cash is unique, but its passage Tuesday of automatic registration underscores voting-rights advocates’ larger ambitions—to spread the policy beyond blue states and from the DMV to a wider range of agencies with access to citizens’ data. (...)
While all the automatic-registration systems before Alaska’s have been limited to using the DMV, advocates hope future states' laws will go further to automatically register citizens at agencies frequented by some nondrivers. A bill proposed last year in Maryland would have used social service agencies and the state’s Obamacare exchange but died in the state senate.
Not everyone is enthused. Republican governors in New Jersey and Illinois have vetoed their Democratic legislatures’ bills this year, citing concerns about fraud. While top elected Republicans embraced the referendum, and the Alaska GOP stayed neutral, some of its activists came out against it. “There are people out there who don’t know diddly squat about our country,” former state party chairman Peter Goldberg told the Alaska Dispatch News last month. “And I’m not comfortable with people that are totally ignorant about our system voting.”
Progressives say such arguments are undemocratic. “There’s no law that says that there should be a test of effort, availability, time, patience, and intelligence in order to vote,” says City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, who in the 1980s co-founded an advocacy group that helped pass the 1993 federal law requiring state agencies to give citizens more opportunities to register to vote, as when they're at the DMV. (States’ compliance with that law has fallen far short of supporters’ hopes.)
Automating voter registration, says Piven, would make it harder for governments to use registration requirements to disenfranchise would-be voters, as they’ve been doing since such requirements first became widespread after the Civil War. (One 1908 New York law, for example, created an obstacle for Jews by requiring voters to register in person either on a Saturday or on Yom Kippur.)
Many supporters see the new spate of automatic voter-registration bills being introduced at the state level as a sharp contrast to the much larger volume of new voting restrictions passed since the GOP’s 2010 down-ballot romp and the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act.
by Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: John Moore/Getty Images
How to Actually Win a Fist Fight
It has to be said, first sentence, first paragraph: the best way to win a fist fight is not to get into one in the first place.
No shit, Sherlock.
Every single mens’ magazine who has ever attempted to publish an article like this has started (and ended) exactly that way and is usually devoid of any real information – sometimes because someone on the editorial staff wanted to avoid putting the periodical at risk for a lawsuit; other times because the author has absolutely no clue what they’re talking about, so they cop out with this “Verbal Judo Wins The Day!” crap. In fact, that’s precisely why I wrote this guide in the first place.
It’s common sense – avoid fighting if at all possible. No one likes to get hit (and if you do, there’s no need to go crawling pubs to find it. There’s any number of clubs filled with rubber-suited men and women who will give you a safety word and a few bruises for the right price…). But sometimes, diplomacy erodes to a good old fashioned bust-up, or worse, your opponent is just a big bully who’s looking to drive a knuckle into your nose. In either case, you are – at some point in your life – going to be called upon to defend yourself.
So… What to do? Well, I can’t promise that the following information will turn you into a hands-of-steel cage fighter who can handle any MMA bruiser in a back-alley match… In fact, if you’re actually in NEED of the information in this article, I can guarantee you that a trained martial artist or fighter will destroy you. But all things being equal, if you’re simply an untrained person who’s facing a bully, or someone looking to simply get the basics under your belt in case something gnarly goes down, I can assure you that you’re way better off knowing this stuff than not.
Note: This guide has been on the net in some form or another for 9 years now. In that time, I’ve gotten lots and lots of feedback. I’ve decided to incorporate my notes on that feedback throughout this latest version. I’ve formatted those side notes like this — bold “Note:” and italic text — so you can tell at a glance which sections have been argued over (and over and over and over), and why I’ve decided to go with the advice that you read here.
Some things before we begin:
First, you need to know a few things:
You are going to get hit.
When you get hit, it does not feel good.
Knowing and accepting those two things as fact will free your mind up enough to begin thinking about much more important stuff, like strategy and technique. If you’re petrified with fear over how much it’s going to hurt when the big bad guy hits you, you’re going to be out of focus. Thus, you’ll be much more vulnerable to taking damage than if you can just accept the reality of the situation and move past it… And perhaps, walk into the situation with a bit of confidence.
Confidence CANNOT be overvalued in a fight situation. If you walk in knowing you will win, your chances of winning are far greater… If for no other reason than the fact that you will gain a psychological edge on your opponent. If you don’t have confidence, fake it. Seriously, it’s important. (...)
Your Stance
Your stance is the way you stand and position yourself during a fight. It’s by far the most important part of your actual fighting technique. Your base – the position of your feet and legs – determines how much power you can deliver in a blow. You should keep your feet about shoulder width apart, with your “strong” foot slightly forward (note: if you are a trained fighter, this advice might sound suspect, but follow me here: if you’ve never fought before, you have no idea what a “power hand” even is, much less how to use it. The main goal is to keep from being dragged around or pushed over, and a slightly even stance with strong foot forward is far more stable for a novice in a street fight). Your knees should NEVER be locked – keep them slightly bent, but not so much so that you feel a strain in your upper legs.
As far as your “guard” goes, there are any number of techniques and positions that you could adopt, but the most simple is your strong hand in front of your face, your weak hand slightly below it guarding your chin, and your elbows very slightly pointed outward guarding your chest.
Never, EVER drop your guard. Keep your hands in front of your vital areas at ALL times, unless actively delivering a blow or in the midst of grappling with someone.
Keep your chin tucked to your chest as much as possible, and ALWAYS keep your eyes up and on your opponent. You will find that, if you take away the chin and neck as targets, your chances of becoming disabled (knocked out or unable to breathe) are reduced by an order of magnitude. We’ll cover more of this in “Taking A Punch” – for now, you just need to know how to stand.
No shit, Sherlock.
Every single mens’ magazine who has ever attempted to publish an article like this has started (and ended) exactly that way and is usually devoid of any real information – sometimes because someone on the editorial staff wanted to avoid putting the periodical at risk for a lawsuit; other times because the author has absolutely no clue what they’re talking about, so they cop out with this “Verbal Judo Wins The Day!” crap. In fact, that’s precisely why I wrote this guide in the first place.
It’s common sense – avoid fighting if at all possible. No one likes to get hit (and if you do, there’s no need to go crawling pubs to find it. There’s any number of clubs filled with rubber-suited men and women who will give you a safety word and a few bruises for the right price…). But sometimes, diplomacy erodes to a good old fashioned bust-up, or worse, your opponent is just a big bully who’s looking to drive a knuckle into your nose. In either case, you are – at some point in your life – going to be called upon to defend yourself.So… What to do? Well, I can’t promise that the following information will turn you into a hands-of-steel cage fighter who can handle any MMA bruiser in a back-alley match… In fact, if you’re actually in NEED of the information in this article, I can guarantee you that a trained martial artist or fighter will destroy you. But all things being equal, if you’re simply an untrained person who’s facing a bully, or someone looking to simply get the basics under your belt in case something gnarly goes down, I can assure you that you’re way better off knowing this stuff than not.
Note: This guide has been on the net in some form or another for 9 years now. In that time, I’ve gotten lots and lots of feedback. I’ve decided to incorporate my notes on that feedback throughout this latest version. I’ve formatted those side notes like this — bold “Note:” and italic text — so you can tell at a glance which sections have been argued over (and over and over and over), and why I’ve decided to go with the advice that you read here.
Some things before we begin:
- I’m giving advice based entirely on my own experiences and training. There are as many opinions on fighting techniques, stances and behaviors are there are people fighting in the world, and really, there’s no “right” and “wrong” – simply “effective” and “ineffective”.
- My advice is intended specifically for inexperienced people for whom there is no escape from a fighting situation. Flight is not an option. Training is non-existent.
- The entire goal of the guide is to keep instruction minimal and intuitive – stuff you can readily recall when you’re in a dangerous situation, and stuff that won’t set a beginner / inexperienced person up for failure. “Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face” is true for a reason. Panic makes thinking tough.
First, you need to know a few things:
You are going to get hit.
When you get hit, it does not feel good.
Knowing and accepting those two things as fact will free your mind up enough to begin thinking about much more important stuff, like strategy and technique. If you’re petrified with fear over how much it’s going to hurt when the big bad guy hits you, you’re going to be out of focus. Thus, you’ll be much more vulnerable to taking damage than if you can just accept the reality of the situation and move past it… And perhaps, walk into the situation with a bit of confidence.
Confidence CANNOT be overvalued in a fight situation. If you walk in knowing you will win, your chances of winning are far greater… If for no other reason than the fact that you will gain a psychological edge on your opponent. If you don’t have confidence, fake it. Seriously, it’s important. (...)
Your Stance
Your stance is the way you stand and position yourself during a fight. It’s by far the most important part of your actual fighting technique. Your base – the position of your feet and legs – determines how much power you can deliver in a blow. You should keep your feet about shoulder width apart, with your “strong” foot slightly forward (note: if you are a trained fighter, this advice might sound suspect, but follow me here: if you’ve never fought before, you have no idea what a “power hand” even is, much less how to use it. The main goal is to keep from being dragged around or pushed over, and a slightly even stance with strong foot forward is far more stable for a novice in a street fight). Your knees should NEVER be locked – keep them slightly bent, but not so much so that you feel a strain in your upper legs.
As far as your “guard” goes, there are any number of techniques and positions that you could adopt, but the most simple is your strong hand in front of your face, your weak hand slightly below it guarding your chin, and your elbows very slightly pointed outward guarding your chest.
Never, EVER drop your guard. Keep your hands in front of your vital areas at ALL times, unless actively delivering a blow or in the midst of grappling with someone.
Keep your chin tucked to your chest as much as possible, and ALWAYS keep your eyes up and on your opponent. You will find that, if you take away the chin and neck as targets, your chances of becoming disabled (knocked out or unable to breathe) are reduced by an order of magnitude. We’ll cover more of this in “Taking A Punch” – for now, you just need to know how to stand.
by Joe Peacock, JP's Website Thing | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
The Perks of Being a Professional Protester
“Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”
— Donald Trump on Twitter
— Donald Trump on Twitter
George Soros is at every protest with a huge sack of cash. The money is amazing — he just gives it to you when you show up, and says, “Here is the cash! Thanks, my faithful protesting employees. My name is George Soros. This is happening in real life, you are not dreaming, and this is not an insane lie your president-elect is making up. I’m in multiple cities and countless college campuses across the country at once handing out money. Don’t ask how it’s possible, just take my cash!”
Some people grab a reasonable amount of money from the bag, like five or ten million dollars, but others can be greedy and take close to a billion. No biggie though, because Soros still has enough money to go around. He is a criminal wanted in a thousand countries across the world, but we don’t care because he’s paying us.
Luckily, there’s no one at the protest who is furious and terrified that a racist demagogue has taken power; a man who took days to denounce the hate crimes across the country being committed in his name, and who is pursuing deeply racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ policies, that put marginalized people’s lives at risk. The people who feel that way are really unprofessional, and I haven’t seen them at any protests. Even if they showed up, they probably wouldn’t be interested in the cold hard cash that us professional protestors crave.
Sure, sometimes things can get a little wild. Police brutality and militarization is very real, but it all comes with the territory. That’s why George pays us the big bucks. We’re professionals!
After a few “hard days” of protesting we hit the spa to kickback and relax. All of the robes are embroidered with the words PROFESSIONAL PROTESTER on them — super classy. I normally go for a hot stone treatment and a two-hour couples massage with one of my fellow protesters. Sure, it’s a little indulgent, but we just made five million dollars so why not live it up a little?
Later on, we usually engage in some retail therapy, buying high-end “street” clothes and fancy signage for future protests. I’m always on the hunt for an outfit that screams, I’ve been put up to this by the liberal elite and am being paid for my time here!
One of the slightly confusing things about professionally protesting is that sometimes you’ll hear about rallies in support of Donald Trump, done by people who aren’t being paid by anyone. Yes — incredibly, some people are gathering without getting paid. Crazy, right? That’s why it’s important for us pro protesters to focus on the money and not be distracted by rallies run by legitimate but non-paying organizations that support Trump, like the UFC and the KKK.
Possibly the best perk about being paid to protest is that it lets you feel like you actually support marginalized people, even if in the past you’ve criticized Black Lives Matter, denied the existence of systemic racism, or have never spoken out about sexism, homophobia, or transphobia in your life. And on top of that you get paid for it. It’s as easy as putting on a safety pin!
Some people grab a reasonable amount of money from the bag, like five or ten million dollars, but others can be greedy and take close to a billion. No biggie though, because Soros still has enough money to go around. He is a criminal wanted in a thousand countries across the world, but we don’t care because he’s paying us.
Luckily, there’s no one at the protest who is furious and terrified that a racist demagogue has taken power; a man who took days to denounce the hate crimes across the country being committed in his name, and who is pursuing deeply racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ policies, that put marginalized people’s lives at risk. The people who feel that way are really unprofessional, and I haven’t seen them at any protests. Even if they showed up, they probably wouldn’t be interested in the cold hard cash that us professional protestors crave.Sure, sometimes things can get a little wild. Police brutality and militarization is very real, but it all comes with the territory. That’s why George pays us the big bucks. We’re professionals!
After a few “hard days” of protesting we hit the spa to kickback and relax. All of the robes are embroidered with the words PROFESSIONAL PROTESTER on them — super classy. I normally go for a hot stone treatment and a two-hour couples massage with one of my fellow protesters. Sure, it’s a little indulgent, but we just made five million dollars so why not live it up a little?
Later on, we usually engage in some retail therapy, buying high-end “street” clothes and fancy signage for future protests. I’m always on the hunt for an outfit that screams, I’ve been put up to this by the liberal elite and am being paid for my time here!
One of the slightly confusing things about professionally protesting is that sometimes you’ll hear about rallies in support of Donald Trump, done by people who aren’t being paid by anyone. Yes — incredibly, some people are gathering without getting paid. Crazy, right? That’s why it’s important for us pro protesters to focus on the money and not be distracted by rallies run by legitimate but non-paying organizations that support Trump, like the UFC and the KKK.
Possibly the best perk about being paid to protest is that it lets you feel like you actually support marginalized people, even if in the past you’ve criticized Black Lives Matter, denied the existence of systemic racism, or have never spoken out about sexism, homophobia, or transphobia in your life. And on top of that you get paid for it. It’s as easy as putting on a safety pin!
by Colin Stokes, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: via:
On Vagueness
Imagine a heap of sand. You carefully remove one grain. Is there still a heap? The obvious answer is: yes. Removing one grain doesn’t turn a heap into no heap. That principle can be applied again as you remove another grain, and then another… After each removal, there’s still a heap, according to the principle. But there were only finitely many grains to start with, so eventually you get down to a heap with just three grains, then a heap with just two grains, a heap with just one grain, and finally a heap with no grains at all. But that’s ridiculous. There must be something wrong with the principle. Sometimes, removing one grain does turn a heap into no heap. But that seems ridiculous too. How can one grain make so much difference? That ancient puzzle is called the sorites paradox, from the Greek word for ‘heap’.
There would be no problem if we had a nice, precise definition of ‘heap’ that told us exactly how many grains you need for a heap. The trouble is that we don’t have such a definition. The word ‘heap’ is vague. There isn’t a clear boundary between heap and no heap. Mostly, that doesn’t matter. We get along well enough applying the word ‘heap’ on the basis of casual impressions. But if the local council charged you with having dumped a heap of sand in a public place, and you denied that it amounted to a heap, whether you had to pay a large fine might depend on the meaning of the word ‘heap’.
More important legal and moral issues also involve vagueness. For instance, in the process of human development from conception to birth to maturity, when is there first a person? In a process of brain death, when is there no longer a person? Such questions matter for the permissibility of medical interventions such as abortion and switching off life-support. To discuss them properly, we must be able to reason correctly with vague words such as ‘person’.
You can find aspects of vagueness in most words of English or any other language. Out loud or in our heads, we reason mostly in vague terms. Such reasoning can easily generate sorites-like paradoxes. Can you become poor by losing one cent? Can you become tall by growing one millimetre? At first, the paradoxes seem to be trivial verbal tricks. But the more rigorously philosophers have studied them, the deeper and harder they have turned out to be. They raise doubts about the most basic logical principles.
Traditionally, logic is based on the assumption that every statement is either true or false (and not both). That’s called bivalence, because it says that there are just two truth-values, truth and falsity. Fuzzy logic is an influential alternative approach to the logic of vagueness that rejects bivalence in favour of a continuum of degrees of truth and falsity, ranging from perfect truth at one end to perfect falsity at the other. In the middle, a statement can be simultaneously half-true and half-false. On this view, as you remove one grain after another, the statement ‘There is a heap’ becomes less and less true by tiny steps. No one step takes you from perfect truth to perfect falsity. Fuzzy logic rejects some key principles of classical logic, on which standard mathematics relies. For example, the traditional logician says, at every stage: ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’: that’s an instance of a general principle called excluded middle. The fuzzy logician replies that when ‘There is a heap’ is only half-true, then ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’ is only half-true too.
At first sight, fuzzy logic might look like a natural, elegant solution to the problem of vagueness. But when you work through its consequences, it’s less convincing. To see why, imagine two heaps of sand, exact duplicates of each other, one on the right, one on the left. Whenever you remove one grain from one side, you remove the exactly corresponding grain from the other side too. At each stage, the sand on the right and the sand on the left are exact grain-by-grain duplicates of each other. This much is clear: if there’s a heap on the right, then there’s a heap on the left too, and vice versa.
Now, according to the fuzzy logician, as we remove grains one by one, sooner or later we reach a point where the statement ‘There’s a heap on the right’ is half-true and half-false. Since what’s on the left duplicates what’s on the right, ‘There’s a heap on the left’ is half-true and half-false too. The rules of fuzzy logic then imply that the complex statement ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ is also half-true and half-false, which means that we should be equally balanced between accepting and rejecting it. But that’s absurd. We should just totally reject the statement, since ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ entails that there is a difference between what’s on the right and what’s on the left – but there is no such difference; they are grain-by-grain duplicates. Thus fuzzy logic gives the wrong result. It misses the subtleties of vagueness.
by Timothy Williamson, Aeon | Read more:
Image:mrhayata/Flickr
There would be no problem if we had a nice, precise definition of ‘heap’ that told us exactly how many grains you need for a heap. The trouble is that we don’t have such a definition. The word ‘heap’ is vague. There isn’t a clear boundary between heap and no heap. Mostly, that doesn’t matter. We get along well enough applying the word ‘heap’ on the basis of casual impressions. But if the local council charged you with having dumped a heap of sand in a public place, and you denied that it amounted to a heap, whether you had to pay a large fine might depend on the meaning of the word ‘heap’.More important legal and moral issues also involve vagueness. For instance, in the process of human development from conception to birth to maturity, when is there first a person? In a process of brain death, when is there no longer a person? Such questions matter for the permissibility of medical interventions such as abortion and switching off life-support. To discuss them properly, we must be able to reason correctly with vague words such as ‘person’.
You can find aspects of vagueness in most words of English or any other language. Out loud or in our heads, we reason mostly in vague terms. Such reasoning can easily generate sorites-like paradoxes. Can you become poor by losing one cent? Can you become tall by growing one millimetre? At first, the paradoxes seem to be trivial verbal tricks. But the more rigorously philosophers have studied them, the deeper and harder they have turned out to be. They raise doubts about the most basic logical principles.
Traditionally, logic is based on the assumption that every statement is either true or false (and not both). That’s called bivalence, because it says that there are just two truth-values, truth and falsity. Fuzzy logic is an influential alternative approach to the logic of vagueness that rejects bivalence in favour of a continuum of degrees of truth and falsity, ranging from perfect truth at one end to perfect falsity at the other. In the middle, a statement can be simultaneously half-true and half-false. On this view, as you remove one grain after another, the statement ‘There is a heap’ becomes less and less true by tiny steps. No one step takes you from perfect truth to perfect falsity. Fuzzy logic rejects some key principles of classical logic, on which standard mathematics relies. For example, the traditional logician says, at every stage: ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’: that’s an instance of a general principle called excluded middle. The fuzzy logician replies that when ‘There is a heap’ is only half-true, then ‘Either there is a heap or there isn’t’ is only half-true too.
At first sight, fuzzy logic might look like a natural, elegant solution to the problem of vagueness. But when you work through its consequences, it’s less convincing. To see why, imagine two heaps of sand, exact duplicates of each other, one on the right, one on the left. Whenever you remove one grain from one side, you remove the exactly corresponding grain from the other side too. At each stage, the sand on the right and the sand on the left are exact grain-by-grain duplicates of each other. This much is clear: if there’s a heap on the right, then there’s a heap on the left too, and vice versa.
Now, according to the fuzzy logician, as we remove grains one by one, sooner or later we reach a point where the statement ‘There’s a heap on the right’ is half-true and half-false. Since what’s on the left duplicates what’s on the right, ‘There’s a heap on the left’ is half-true and half-false too. The rules of fuzzy logic then imply that the complex statement ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ is also half-true and half-false, which means that we should be equally balanced between accepting and rejecting it. But that’s absurd. We should just totally reject the statement, since ‘There’s a heap on the right and no heap on the left’ entails that there is a difference between what’s on the right and what’s on the left – but there is no such difference; they are grain-by-grain duplicates. Thus fuzzy logic gives the wrong result. It misses the subtleties of vagueness.
by Timothy Williamson, Aeon | Read more:
Image:mrhayata/Flickr
NFL Games Are Taking Too Long – Here Are Eight Ways to Speed Things Up
Regular-season NFL games don’t get much more entertaining than the Dallas Cowboys’ 35-30 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday. There were seven lead changes, four in the last eight minutes. The Cowboys scored the winning touchdown with nine seconds remaining.
But now for the flip side: because there were 13 scoring plays, the game took 3 hours, 18 minutes to complete on the Fox network. More than three hours of that time were consumed by replays, analysis, Erin Andrews’ sideline reports and, yes, roughly 110 commercials.
The Guardian kept a stopwatch on Sunday’s game to deduct that the actual athletic competition – including kickoffs that resulted in touchbacks and plays negated by penalties – consumed almost exactly 15 minutes, or one-quarter of the 60 minutes on the game clock.
The action was terrific, with rookie Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott throwing touchdown passes of 83 and 50 yards. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was not to be outdone, faking a clock-stopping spike, then flinging a go-ahead touchdown pass with 42 seconds left.
Still, there were 30 commercial interruptions during the broadcast, with many commercials coming in “pods,” which the league calls those 2min, 20sec clusters of five or six ads that detractors say kill any sort of flow. Fans may feel like they’re enduring a game. (...)
Here, then, are eight ways to tighten the stretches of non-action:
1) Faster and fewer video reviews. Late in the first half on Sunday, an apparent 23-yard Pittsburgh pass play was reversed after a review dragged on for more than three minutes. But Troy Aikman, the ex-quarterback turned Fox commentator, had already said: “That looks pretty easy for me to determine it’s incomplete.” A replay official in the booth or even at NFL headquarters could have easily been used to make that call quicker.
2) Shave time between plays. The NFL mandates a maximum of 40 seconds between the end of a play and the snap of the ball for the next play. Sunday’s Cowboys-Steelers game included 125 official plays from scrimmage and seven punts, so even reducing the between-play limit to 35 seconds might have reduced the time of that game up to 12 minutes.
3) Running the clock earlier after incomplete passes. This would be a radical adjustment, but stopping the clock on incomplete passes until the next snap makes no sense any more, since the NFL has plenty of footballs, and no one has to chase down a loose ball to resume play. So how about running the clock after spotting the ball at the line of scrimmage?
This would alter the strategy of a losing quarterback spiking the ball late in the game to kill the clock, of course, but incomplete passes chew up a surprising amount of real time.
4) No more two-minute warnings. The two-minute warning was said to be devised as a way for the scoreboard operator to sync time with the on-field official who kept time, but the scoreboard has been official for nearly 50 years, and the two-minute warning was kept as a break for commercials. College football somehow survives without them, and its games are even longer.
5) Eliminate the chain gang. NFL officials have said they don’t want to do this because it is such a traditional part of the game, but the technology now exists to use some form of laser beams for quicker and more accurate measurements – and remove the need to stop the clock until the chain gang can hustle up to the new line of scrimmage after a long play.
But now for the flip side: because there were 13 scoring plays, the game took 3 hours, 18 minutes to complete on the Fox network. More than three hours of that time were consumed by replays, analysis, Erin Andrews’ sideline reports and, yes, roughly 110 commercials.
The Guardian kept a stopwatch on Sunday’s game to deduct that the actual athletic competition – including kickoffs that resulted in touchbacks and plays negated by penalties – consumed almost exactly 15 minutes, or one-quarter of the 60 minutes on the game clock.The action was terrific, with rookie Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott throwing touchdown passes of 83 and 50 yards. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was not to be outdone, faking a clock-stopping spike, then flinging a go-ahead touchdown pass with 42 seconds left.
Still, there were 30 commercial interruptions during the broadcast, with many commercials coming in “pods,” which the league calls those 2min, 20sec clusters of five or six ads that detractors say kill any sort of flow. Fans may feel like they’re enduring a game. (...)
Here, then, are eight ways to tighten the stretches of non-action:
1) Faster and fewer video reviews. Late in the first half on Sunday, an apparent 23-yard Pittsburgh pass play was reversed after a review dragged on for more than three minutes. But Troy Aikman, the ex-quarterback turned Fox commentator, had already said: “That looks pretty easy for me to determine it’s incomplete.” A replay official in the booth or even at NFL headquarters could have easily been used to make that call quicker.
2) Shave time between plays. The NFL mandates a maximum of 40 seconds between the end of a play and the snap of the ball for the next play. Sunday’s Cowboys-Steelers game included 125 official plays from scrimmage and seven punts, so even reducing the between-play limit to 35 seconds might have reduced the time of that game up to 12 minutes.
3) Running the clock earlier after incomplete passes. This would be a radical adjustment, but stopping the clock on incomplete passes until the next snap makes no sense any more, since the NFL has plenty of footballs, and no one has to chase down a loose ball to resume play. So how about running the clock after spotting the ball at the line of scrimmage?
This would alter the strategy of a losing quarterback spiking the ball late in the game to kill the clock, of course, but incomplete passes chew up a surprising amount of real time.
4) No more two-minute warnings. The two-minute warning was said to be devised as a way for the scoreboard operator to sync time with the on-field official who kept time, but the scoreboard has been official for nearly 50 years, and the two-minute warning was kept as a break for commercials. College football somehow survives without them, and its games are even longer.
5) Eliminate the chain gang. NFL officials have said they don’t want to do this because it is such a traditional part of the game, but the technology now exists to use some form of laser beams for quicker and more accurate measurements – and remove the need to stop the clock until the chain gang can hustle up to the new line of scrimmage after a long play.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial
[ed. So much angst over the last election and people wondering/second-guessing now what to do to blunt the results or make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Here's a start: get off Facebook. It's poison disguised as community. It's corporate business disguised as your friend. It's crack for psychological vulnerabilities you never knew existed. Yes your real friends use it and it feels wonderful to be connected and share, but you're being used and manipulated and sold (to advertisers, Wall Street) and it's killing rational discourse and traditional news sources that actually spend money to produce (and fact check) the news that Facebook profits off of. Is that too hard, quitting Facebook? Then look in the mirror at one of the prinicipal sources of your discontent. Here's an idea: if you really want to protest this election start with Facebook, then start hitting all the other capitalist manipulators and elite one-percenters where it really matters: in their pocketbooks. Forget dumb marches, and ironic posterboard signs, and meaningless editorials, and reorganizing a failed political party and system that acts in no one's interests but its own (as an aside... it's amazing that younger generations who hold the reins of technology and chafe under Boomers' lingering influence still cling to the same outdated protest game plan). Get real. Bernie and Elizabeth or Joe or anyone else isn't going to come save you if they have to work within that system. Let's have rolling boycotts of Facebook, and Walmart, and Comcast, and GE, and Exxon, and the banks, and anything Koch brothers related, and all the other companies that are killing our economy. Organize it and select a different corporation each month - or two, or however long it takes to make a dent in their balance sheets. Believe me, that's the only way you're going to get anyone's attention. Then people might realize they don't need to work within the system to effect a true populist revolution (call it a crowdsourced revolution). It starts with sacrifice. But if you can't even make that effort then all the whining and hand-wringing in the world won't make a bit of difference. See also: Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power.]
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Donald J. Trump’s supporters were probably heartened in September, when, according to an article shared nearly a million times on Facebook, the candidate received an endorsement from Pope Francis. Their opinions on Hillary Clinton may have soured even further after reading a Denver Guardian article that also spread widely on Facebook, which reported days before the election that an F.B.I. agent suspected of involvement in leaking Mrs. Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.
There is just one problem with these articles: They were completely fake.
The pope, a vociferous advocate for refugees, never endorsed anyone. The Denver Guardian doesn’t exist. Yet thanks to Facebook, both of these articles were seen by potentially millions of people. Although corrections also circulated on the social network, they barely registered compared with the reach of the original fabrications.
This is not an anomaly: I encountered thousands of such fake stories last year on social media — and so did American voters, 44 percent of whom use Facebook to get news.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.
He is also contradicting Facebook’s own research.
In 2010, researchers working with Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users in the United States right before the midterm elections. One group was shown a “go vote” message as a plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on “I voted.” Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election, the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds of thousands of voters.
In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks.
All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has “no influence.”
The problem with Facebook’s influence on political discourse is not limited to the dissemination of fake news. It’s also about echo chambers. The company’s algorithm chooses which updates appear higher up in users’ newsfeeds and which are buried. Humans already tend to cluster among like-minded people and seek news that confirms their biases. Facebook’s research shows that the company’s algorithm encourages this by somewhat prioritizing updates that users find comforting. (...)
Content geared toward these algorithmically fueled bubbles is financially rewarding. That’s why YouTube has a similar feature in which it recommends videos based on what a visitor has already watched.
It’s also why, according to a report in BuzzFeed News, a bunch of young people in a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro-Trump websites full of fake news. Their fabricated article citing anonymous F.B.I. sources claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted, for example, got more than 140,000 shares on Facebook and may well have been viewed by millions of people since each share is potentially seen by hundreds of users. Even if each view generates only a fraction of a penny, that adds up to serious money.
Of course, fake news alone doesn’t explain the outcome of this election. People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.
After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left.
The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.
Only Facebook has the data that can exactly reveal how fake news, hoaxes and misinformation spread, how much there is of it, who creates and who reads it, and how much influence it may have. Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers. It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records.
----
Donald J. Trump’s supporters were probably heartened in September, when, according to an article shared nearly a million times on Facebook, the candidate received an endorsement from Pope Francis. Their opinions on Hillary Clinton may have soured even further after reading a Denver Guardian article that also spread widely on Facebook, which reported days before the election that an F.B.I. agent suspected of involvement in leaking Mrs. Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.
There is just one problem with these articles: They were completely fake.
The pope, a vociferous advocate for refugees, never endorsed anyone. The Denver Guardian doesn’t exist. Yet thanks to Facebook, both of these articles were seen by potentially millions of people. Although corrections also circulated on the social network, they barely registered compared with the reach of the original fabrications.
This is not an anomaly: I encountered thousands of such fake stories last year on social media — and so did American voters, 44 percent of whom use Facebook to get news.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, believes that it is “a pretty crazy idea” that “fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way.” In holding fast to the claim that his company has little effect on how people make up their minds, Mr. Zuckerberg is doing real damage to American democracy — and to the world.He is also contradicting Facebook’s own research.
In 2010, researchers working with Facebook conducted an experiment on 61 million users in the United States right before the midterm elections. One group was shown a “go vote” message as a plain box, while another group saw the same message with a tiny addition: thumbnail pictures of their Facebook friends who had clicked on “I voted.” Using public voter rolls to compare the groups after the election, the researchers concluded that the second post had turned out hundreds of thousands of voters.
In 2012, Facebook researchers again secretly tweaked the newsfeed for an experiment: Some people were shown slightly more positive posts, while others were shown slightly more negative posts. Those shown more upbeat posts in turn posted significantly more of their own upbeat posts; those shown more downbeat posts responded in kind. Decades of other research concurs that people are influenced by their peers and social networks.
All of this renders preposterous Mr. Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook, a major conduit for information in our society, has “no influence.”
The problem with Facebook’s influence on political discourse is not limited to the dissemination of fake news. It’s also about echo chambers. The company’s algorithm chooses which updates appear higher up in users’ newsfeeds and which are buried. Humans already tend to cluster among like-minded people and seek news that confirms their biases. Facebook’s research shows that the company’s algorithm encourages this by somewhat prioritizing updates that users find comforting. (...)
Content geared toward these algorithmically fueled bubbles is financially rewarding. That’s why YouTube has a similar feature in which it recommends videos based on what a visitor has already watched.
It’s also why, according to a report in BuzzFeed News, a bunch of young people in a town in Macedonia ran more than a hundred pro-Trump websites full of fake news. Their fabricated article citing anonymous F.B.I. sources claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted, for example, got more than 140,000 shares on Facebook and may well have been viewed by millions of people since each share is potentially seen by hundreds of users. Even if each view generates only a fraction of a penny, that adds up to serious money.
Of course, fake news alone doesn’t explain the outcome of this election. People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons, but their information diet is a crucial part of the picture.
After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg claimed that the fake news was a problem on “both sides” of the race. There are, of course, viral fake anti-Trump memes, but reporters have found that the spread of false news is far more common on the right than it is on the left.
The Macedonian teenagers found this, too. They had experimented with left-leaning or pro-Bernie Sanders content, but gave up when they found it wasn’t as reliable a source of income as pro-Trump content. But even if Mr. Zuckerberg were right and fake news were equally popular on both sides, it would still be a profound problem.
Only Facebook has the data that can exactly reveal how fake news, hoaxes and misinformation spread, how much there is of it, who creates and who reads it, and how much influence it may have. Unfortunately, Facebook exercises complete control over access to this data by independent researchers. It’s as if tobacco companies controlled access to all medical and hospital records.
Investors Bet on Farmed Kelp
[ed. See also: The Caribbean is Running Out of Coconuts.]
In the remote waters of Larsen Bay, off the coast of Kodiak Island, an experiment is underway. Two types of kelp are strung on lines in the ocean waters, and researchers, investors and commercial fishermen are all watching to see if they grow.
Erik O'Brien, a commercial fisherman, planted the kelp last month. He's one of three Alaska kelp farmers working with a California-based company that's investing in the project.
The experiment could represent the start of a fledgling kelp farm industry in Alaska. But O'Brien isn't sure yet whether the venture will pan out.
"There's way more questions than answers," O'Brien said.
In late October, O'Brien headed out to Larsen Bay. After six months of working through the state process, he had received his permit and planted sugar kelp and ribbon kelp on 4,600 feet of line.
In a few days, after some equipment malfunctions, O'Brien and his team got the lines in the water. It was slow going — much slower than anticipated, he said.
A few weeks later, a storm blew through the bay. He's pretty sure the kelp survived. He's been told the buoys are still floating.
Now, he'll wait to see if it all pays off. He's hoping for 25,000 pounds flourishing on the lines by spring.
Globally, seaweed production is booming. Commercial seaweed markets were valued at $10 billion in 2015, and are projected to more than double by 2024, according to a Grand View Research report released in April.
As a food, seaweed is touted for its health benefits. It has a range of other applications as well — including, potentially, in the global carbon trading markets. (...)
Sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima, a type of Kombu) has an "umami" flavor — a fifth flavor profile in the human palette, defined as meaty and savory. Kelp's glutamic acid (a type of amino acid) is the basis of flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
Like other seaweeds, kelp offers nutritional benefits.
"People are into that now with food," Perry said. Blue Evolution's new website sells seaweed pasta and seaweed seasonings, marketed as a "superfood seaweed."
It could potentially be used as a biofuel, Perry said, or in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
There's also potential profit in kelp as a carbon offset. Kelp removes carbon dioxide — a contributor to climate change — from the ocean. Carbon offsets work when one company that creates carbon emissions buys into another that removes carbon from the atmosphere.
As Perry put it: "They cut me a check if I weigh the seaweed and have a good formula for how much carbon is embedded in it."
There's no federal mandate for buying carbon offsets in the U.S. But the global carbon trading market was $53 billion in 2015, according to Carbon Pulse.
In the remote waters of Larsen Bay, off the coast of Kodiak Island, an experiment is underway. Two types of kelp are strung on lines in the ocean waters, and researchers, investors and commercial fishermen are all watching to see if they grow.
Erik O'Brien, a commercial fisherman, planted the kelp last month. He's one of three Alaska kelp farmers working with a California-based company that's investing in the project.
The experiment could represent the start of a fledgling kelp farm industry in Alaska. But O'Brien isn't sure yet whether the venture will pan out."There's way more questions than answers," O'Brien said.
In late October, O'Brien headed out to Larsen Bay. After six months of working through the state process, he had received his permit and planted sugar kelp and ribbon kelp on 4,600 feet of line.
In a few days, after some equipment malfunctions, O'Brien and his team got the lines in the water. It was slow going — much slower than anticipated, he said.
A few weeks later, a storm blew through the bay. He's pretty sure the kelp survived. He's been told the buoys are still floating.
Now, he'll wait to see if it all pays off. He's hoping for 25,000 pounds flourishing on the lines by spring.
Globally, seaweed production is booming. Commercial seaweed markets were valued at $10 billion in 2015, and are projected to more than double by 2024, according to a Grand View Research report released in April.
As a food, seaweed is touted for its health benefits. It has a range of other applications as well — including, potentially, in the global carbon trading markets. (...)
Sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima, a type of Kombu) has an "umami" flavor — a fifth flavor profile in the human palette, defined as meaty and savory. Kelp's glutamic acid (a type of amino acid) is the basis of flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
Like other seaweeds, kelp offers nutritional benefits.
"People are into that now with food," Perry said. Blue Evolution's new website sells seaweed pasta and seaweed seasonings, marketed as a "superfood seaweed."
It could potentially be used as a biofuel, Perry said, or in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
There's also potential profit in kelp as a carbon offset. Kelp removes carbon dioxide — a contributor to climate change — from the ocean. Carbon offsets work when one company that creates carbon emissions buys into another that removes carbon from the atmosphere.
As Perry put it: "They cut me a check if I weigh the seaweed and have a good formula for how much carbon is embedded in it."
There's no federal mandate for buying carbon offsets in the U.S. But the global carbon trading market was $53 billion in 2015, according to Carbon Pulse.
by Laurel Andrews, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Beau Perry / Blue Evolution
World’s Biggest Real Estate Frenzy Is Coming to a City Near You
If they were anywhere else in Beijing, the five young women in cowboy hats and matching red, white, and blue costumes would look wildly out of place.
But here at the city’s biggest international property fair -- a frenetic gathering of brokers, developers and other real estate professionals all jockeying for the attention of Chinese buyers -- the quintet of wannabe Texans fits right in. As they promote Houston townhouses (“Yours for as little as $350,000!”), a Portugal contingent touts its Golden Visa program and the Australian delegation lures passersby with stuffed kangaroos.
Welcome to ground zero for the world’s largest cross-border residential property boom. Motivated by a weakening yuan, surging domestic housing costs and the desire to secure offshore footholds, Chinese citizens are snapping up overseas homes at an accelerating pace. They’re also venturing further afield than ever before, spreading beyond the likes of Sydney and Vancouver to lower-priced markets including Houston, Thailand’s Pattaya Beach and Malaysia’s Johor Bahru.
The buying spree has defied Chinese government efforts to restrict capital outflows and shows little sign of slowing after an estimated $15 billion of overseas real estate purchases in the first half. For cities in the cross-hairs, the challenge is to balance the economic benefits of Chinese demand against the risk that rising home prices spur a public backlash.
“The Chinese have managed to accumulate very large amounts of wealth, and the opportunities to deploy that capital in their own market are somewhat restricted,” said Richard Barkham, the London-based chief global economist at CBRE Group Inc., the world’s largest commercial property brokerage. “China has more than a billion people. Personally, I think we have just seen a trickle.” (...)
It adds up to the world’s biggest-ever wave of overseas residential property investment, according to Susan Wachter, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who specializes in real estate markets. While Japan had a similar boom in the 1980s, it was mainly focused on commercial buildings, Wachter said.
Today’s Chinese buyers have a long list of reasons to flock overseas. The yuan’s slump is eroding their purchasing power, while returns on local financial assets -- including stocks, bonds and wealth-management products -- are shrinking as the $11 trillion economy slows. (...)
“Properties in Shanghai are ridiculously expensive,” Chen Feng, 38, said as he evaluated prospects at a property fair in Shanghai in September, lured by television commercials for the event the night before. “With the amount of money it takes to buy a small apartment here, I can buy a building of apartments in many places in the world.”
by Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam, and Dingmin Zhang, Bloomberg News | Read more:
Image: Getty
But here at the city’s biggest international property fair -- a frenetic gathering of brokers, developers and other real estate professionals all jockeying for the attention of Chinese buyers -- the quintet of wannabe Texans fits right in. As they promote Houston townhouses (“Yours for as little as $350,000!”), a Portugal contingent touts its Golden Visa program and the Australian delegation lures passersby with stuffed kangaroos.
Welcome to ground zero for the world’s largest cross-border residential property boom. Motivated by a weakening yuan, surging domestic housing costs and the desire to secure offshore footholds, Chinese citizens are snapping up overseas homes at an accelerating pace. They’re also venturing further afield than ever before, spreading beyond the likes of Sydney and Vancouver to lower-priced markets including Houston, Thailand’s Pattaya Beach and Malaysia’s Johor Bahru.The buying spree has defied Chinese government efforts to restrict capital outflows and shows little sign of slowing after an estimated $15 billion of overseas real estate purchases in the first half. For cities in the cross-hairs, the challenge is to balance the economic benefits of Chinese demand against the risk that rising home prices spur a public backlash.
“The Chinese have managed to accumulate very large amounts of wealth, and the opportunities to deploy that capital in their own market are somewhat restricted,” said Richard Barkham, the London-based chief global economist at CBRE Group Inc., the world’s largest commercial property brokerage. “China has more than a billion people. Personally, I think we have just seen a trickle.” (...)
It adds up to the world’s biggest-ever wave of overseas residential property investment, according to Susan Wachter, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who specializes in real estate markets. While Japan had a similar boom in the 1980s, it was mainly focused on commercial buildings, Wachter said.
Today’s Chinese buyers have a long list of reasons to flock overseas. The yuan’s slump is eroding their purchasing power, while returns on local financial assets -- including stocks, bonds and wealth-management products -- are shrinking as the $11 trillion economy slows. (...)
“Properties in Shanghai are ridiculously expensive,” Chen Feng, 38, said as he evaluated prospects at a property fair in Shanghai in September, lured by television commercials for the event the night before. “With the amount of money it takes to buy a small apartment here, I can buy a building of apartments in many places in the world.”
by Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam, and Dingmin Zhang, Bloomberg News | Read more:
Image: Getty
Monday, November 14, 2016
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Leonard Cohen feat. Sonny Rollins
Who By Fire
And who by fire, who by water,
who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
who in your merry merry month of may,
who by very slow decay,
and who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
and who by avalanche, who by powder,
who for his greed, who for his hunger,
and who shall I say is calling?
And who by brave assent, who by accident,
who in solitude, who in this mirror,
who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
who in mortal chains, who in power,
and who shall I say is calling?
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