I Hate My Dogs (I Love My Dogs)

People react differently to our canine situation. From what they say, I glean information about their natures. Of course, one way or another, they judge us—our dogs provide a morality play all their own.

We’re a family of four, or of six: two adults and two kids (ages fourteen and eleven), with two dogs. They’re relatively small dogs, although not (we like to believe) obscenely so. Myshkin is a standard-sized, red, short-haired dachshund whose antiquity is in some dispute: she came to us as a puppy in the fall either of 1998 or of 1999, so long ago we can’t remember. Her junior consort, Bear, a rescue mutt, joined the family back in 2009, at which point he was said to be about eighteen months old. Part terrier and part min-pin, he’s toffee-colored, scruffy and professorial in aspect, with wiry legs and, once upon a time, amazing speed and agility. (Myshkin, incidentally, means “little mouse” in Russian, so we have, in name at least, two non-canine creatures; though only the first was named after the protagonist of The Idiot.)

At this point, Myshkin the matriarch, still silky and fine-featured, is deaf, blind, intermittently incontinent and increasingly weak on her pins. Her sturdy front legs splay and slide with the effort of standing, and her back legs have a way of collapsing. She ends up reclining—like the Queen of Sheba or a beached whale, depending on your perspective—in unlikely places, occasionally almost in her own excrement, which makes constant vigilance imperative. She’s so demented that half the time when you take her outside, she remains immobile but for her wagging tail, apparently unclear why she’s there.

Oh, and did I mention that she reeks? Not just a bit of dog-breath, or even the comparatively pleasant scent of wet dog. It’s a holistic foulness, emanating not just from her mouth, which smells like the garbage can behind the fishmonger’s (hence her nickname: Fishbin), but at this point from her entire body, which, in spite of frequent bathing, carries about it the odor of a dung-heap in hot weather. Her stench precedes her, and lingers in a room after she’s left. It’s hard to sit next to her, let alone take her on your lap, without gasping at the fecal, fishy gusts.

The worst of it, though, is her constant state of existential crisis, which has her either moaning or, more unnervingly, barking, for hours at a stretch. Dachshunds, though small dogs, have big dog barks: they bark loudly, deeply and resonantly, in a way that can’t be ignored. Our house isn’t big, so we’re never far from her barking. She’s barking right now, in fact. If the phone rings, you can’t hear what the caller says. If the radio or television is on, you won’t catch that either. But you can’t stop the barking: lift her onto the sofa; take her off again; check her water dish; take her outside; through it all, with but a few minutes’ respite, she will bark, and bark, and bark. And bark. Like a metronome. Sometimes, when we have dinner guests, we stash her, barking, in the car.

She was supercute as a puppy. We chose her from the litter because she was the first to run to us and nuzzle our ankles; though we quickly came to understand that food is her first and abiding passion, and she may simply have thought we had some to offer. Scent is the one sense really left to her, and she can still sniff out a candy bar in a closed handbag, or a cookie crumb underneath the fridge. It pleases her enormously to do so—the thrill of the hunt! And she can still thump her tail magnificently when caressed. We have adored her, and made much of her, lo these many years, and have overlooked some significant disadvantages (e.g., a lamentable penchant for coprophagia). Before we had kids, she slept on our bed; and latterly, in her great age, as she has taken up existential barking in the dead of night, she sleeps on our bed all over again, although now on a special (smelly) blanket at its foot, with a towel over her head. Myshkin rules the roost; but Bear, too, has his ways. He was, when first he came to us, runty but beautiful, and restless. He could run like a gazelle, and, in the early months, skittish, took any chance to do so: he chomped through leashes and harnesses, he opened doors with his snout, he darted and feinted and fled. Half a dozen times we had to enlist bands of strangers—at the reservoir; on our block; in the parking lot at Target—to help catch him. You felt you got him in the end only because he let you. He could jump, too: one leap up onto the kitchen table, if you weren’t looking, to eat a stick of butter. A single bound onto a wall, or down again. He was fearless.

I loved to walk him. I’ll confess: I was vain about it. He was so dapper and elegant, so handsome and swift. After years of plodding along beside the plump-breasted dowager Myshkin, whose little legs and long body have dignity and power but not much élan (I’ve always maintained that dachshunds really do understand the absurdity of life), I was delighted to dash around the block in minutes, witness to his graceful sashays. And I loved the compliments—he got so many compliments! A certain type of person loves a dachshund (“My grandmother used to have one of those; his name was Fritzie”); but anyone who tolerates dogs was taken by Bear. He had something about him, a star quality.

One late January evening in 2009, when my husband was out of town and a cousin was visiting, when I was in charge of the kids (then eight and five), the dinner, the dogs and life, I took Bear for his twilight round. (It should be said that we’ve never been able to walk both dogs simultaneously, because their ideas of “a walk” differ so vastly.) Regrettably, I was multitasking: I had the dog, the bag of poo, and some letters to mail, and I was on the phone to my parents, who were then alive but ailing, and to whom I spoke every evening without fail. I’d almost finished the round of the block, was up on the main road at the mailbox, when, while trying to manipulate the leash, the poo, the phone, the letters and the handle to the mailbox, I dropped the leash. It was the stretchy kind, its handle a large slab of red plastic; it made a noisy thud on the icy pavement.

Bear panicked, and bolted. I slammed my foot down on the leash. I was wearing clogs with ridged soles; the icy ground was uneven; and the leash, being the stretchy kind, was thin as a wire. I didn’t catch it with my shoe. I stomped again, and again: too late. Bear dashed out into the rush hour traffic. All my parents could hear down the dropped cell phone line was my long wail. (...)

I didn’t mention earlier that the handsome Bear came to us with a fatal flaw. We suspect it may be why he ended up in that kill shelter in Georgia in the first place, when someone had clearly bothered to teach him to sit, to stay, even to stand on his hind legs. Bear is a widdler. When the postman comes—or the UPS guy, or the FedEx truck; and because we’re book people, they, too, come almost daily—Bear erupts: he dashes to the door, hopping up and down in a fury; the hair on the back of his neck stands up; he roars for all he’s worth and bares his tiny fangs. Unlike Myshkin, who has a grown-up bark, Bear has an awful, little-dog shriek, an indignity. And then, when he’s danced around in his rage for a while, he all too often lifts his leg against a chair or sofa leg and sprinkles a few rebellious drops, just to make a point, sort of like flipping the finger at the guy at the door. (...)

So, to recap: we have the obstreperous, incessantly barking, stinky old deaf and blind dog who can’t really stand up; and the completely blind pisser. Whenever we travel anywhere, they stay in a wonderful (spectacularly smelly) old house in Reading, where dogs are free to roam and a bevy of loving young women tend to their needs. It’s like paying for a spa vacation for two extra kids. But we couldn’t ask anyone else to take care of them: one animal virtually can’t walk, the other ambles at his own sniffy pace (where once he looked always ahead and darted onward, Bear can now take half an hour to circle the block). One risks incontinence at unforeseen moments; the other, highly predictable in his incontinence, is virtually unstoppable. Myshkin needs to sleep with humans at night; Bear needs to go outside every three hours in the daytime. Who, we say, who could possibly put up with them?

As you can tell, we complain about our dogs. We berate the barking, perorate about the pissing, lament our enslavement, and throw up our hands at the bad smells. We curse when on our knees cleaning carpets; we curse when trying to quell the crazed barking at four in the morning; we curse when one or other of the dogs vomits yet again. My husband always jokes that a true vacation is when the dogs are in the kennel and we’re at home without them. But we also stroke them and kiss them and hug them and worry about them. (My husband is always concerned that they’re bored. Bear has grown quite stout from the snacks provided to alleviate his boredom, a beneficence I can’t condone.) When we’re in the house without them, we’re baffled by the silence, and amazed by the free space and time (separate walks amount to seven or eight outings a day). We have, it’s fair to say, a love-hate relationship with the animals.

This is where people have opinions. When you tell people about our canine situation, many can’t believe it. They see it as our moral failing that the dogs are still alive. “Get rid of them,” they urge scornfully. “What are you thinking?” We’ve been told that the dogs’ behavior is a reflection upon our characters, that were we better alpha dogs ourselves, our pack wouldn’t misbehave as they do. We’ve been told that we are weak, and that we owe it to our children to have these dogs put down. One friend even suggested that we’re heartless to keep Myshkin going when she’s lost so many of her faculties; although the vet, whom we visit repeatedly in hopes that she’ll tell us when it’s time, will give us divine dispensation, assures us that Myshkin is doing just great.

Then there are those on the other side. They don’t just forgive us, they pat us gently on the back, offer quiet encouragement—“Good for you” or “It must be tough.” Or they see it as hilarious, part of life’s wondrous absurdity. Sometimes people even see it as an act of Christian charity. Or as a case of do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Or just plain old love. We prefer this, needless to say, to contempt and derision.

Really, of course, the difference is between those who believe that each of us controls our destiny and has a right to freedom; and those who don’t. The former contend that we have the right, even the responsibility, to exert our wills, certainly over dumb animals, in order to maintain order and keep healthy boundaries. It’s the only path to sanity, righteousness and good action; and keeping these dogs in our lives is just sentimental claptrap. On the other hand are those who feel that life is a mucky muddle, in which unforeseen situations arise, and possibly endure; and that we must care as best we can for those around us, whatever befalls them, with faith that a similar mercy may be shown us in due course.

by Claire Messud, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Alécio de Andrade
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Platforms

A platform is a system that enables other systems: A machine provides a platform for software; the software provides a platform for other software; that software might provide a platform for yet more software; and so on. The iPhone platform lets outside parties build and market apps like Uber; the Uber platform lets outside parties sign up to drive other Uber users for money. (...)

Somewhere between media and social media — between familiar ideas about politics and the news and the ones that underpin the world we live in today — platforms changed from responsibilities into abdications of responsibility. Claiming to provide a platform, in Silicon Valley, doesn’t demand defense. It is the defense. Platforms don’t cause problems; people do.

The closest thing the new world of platforms has to a foundational text is a business book called “Invisible Engines,” published in 2006, which examined and tried to define a nascent form of business: one that doesn’t just sell a good or service, but instead creates value by spawning entire ecosystems and economies. Nintendo and Sega, for example, allowed game developers to create and sell games that ran on their machines; smartphones let software companies connect with customers through app stores; eBay connects merchants and sellers, creating transactions but selling nothing itself. The book makes the prescient case that platforms will come to redefine our economy.

“The platform’s value is not necessarily what it does,” says Andrei Hagiu, a visiting associate professor at M.I.T. and one of the book’s authors, “but what it enables.” And what it enables can be enormous. It would be difficult to overstate the zeal that exists for platform companies in Silicon Valley. They represent staggering opportunities, the chance to create or remake entire industries and to preside over them indefinitely, with maximum control and minimum participation or liability. Airbnb has created a marketplace that overlaps substantially with the hotel business, but the properties it rents to users are owned by other users. (The company recently filed a federal lawsuit challenging a New York law that could result in fines against Airbnb for illegally listed properties; it agreed to drop the suit on the condition that fines be levied only against people listing property, not the company itself.) Uber created a sort of marketplace for transportation but doesn’t own its vehicles nor — it claims, over and over, in courts all across the globe — does it employ its drivers.

But the platform economies that are most developed and that have captured the most people — the ones that transact on attention, advertising and communication — are not immediately recognizable to their users as marketplaces. Facebook is not primarily understood among its billion and a half users as an attention brokerage, but that’s exactly what it is: a middleman between users and other users; between advertisers and users; between developers and users; between publishers and advertisers and their viewers and readers.

Participants successfully contribute to the broader marketplace by inducing other participants to engage more; beyond shares and followers, success is rewarded off-platform, with the conversion of attention into relationships, into advertising on websites, into sales or into influence and political power. Social platforms are the most extreme and advanced expression of what may be the defining corporate strategy of our time.

by John Herrman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Javier Jaén

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.

Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.

“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.

It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.
What is phishing?

Phishing uses an innocent-looking email to entice unwary recipients to click on a deceptive link, giving hackers access to their information or a network. In “spear-phishing,” the email is tailored to fool a specific person.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.

The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later. (...)

In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election.

Many of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election, while conceding that other factors — Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate; her private email server; the public statements of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important.

While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

by Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Watergate file cabinet and DNC server, Justin T. Gellerson

Smoked Salmon From Loch to Plate

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Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Lovers), 2015
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What The Camembert Rind Does For The Cheese Inside

For lovers of Camembert, the downy white rind is the tart bite that balances out the fat-laden, oozing, pungent layer inside.

For a group of Swiss bioengineers, that moldy rind is one of nature's greatest living surfaces, doing double duty as a shield and a cleaner. The rind allows the cheese's deep flavor and aroma to mature, but also defends it against microorganisms that could spoil it. The cheese repays the fungi on the rind by supplying it with nutrients.

So amazing is the rind that the scientists, who are interested in designing "smart," functional materials, used it as an inspiration to build their own living material. The researchers describe their work in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We were interested in how the fungi claims the whole cheese for itself," Lukas Gerber, a researcher at the Institute for Chemical and Bio-Engineering in Zurich and an author of the paper, tells The Salt. "So we took this concept of the fungi defending its food and combined it for the first time with artificial materials."

Gerber says that living materials modeled off cheese rinds could be useful to make products with self-sterilizing surfaces.

But how does Camembert even get its rind in the first place?

The cheese hails from the French province of Normandy, where various legends claim it came into being sometime between 1680 and 1791. (Normandy is "the mecca of bloomy white rinds," like Brie and Camembert, according to the famed Murray's cheese shop in New York.)

Its inventors, whoever they were, figured out that if you take whole, raw milk, curdle it with rennet, and then hand-ladle it into small, single molds without breaking the curd, you get an exceptional cheese.

When the cheeses come out of the the mold, they are coated with Penicillium candidum mold and put on the shelf to age for a few weeks. At 30 to 35 days, the cheese has reached "a point," the French expression for perfect ripeness.

I've never tasted a true, raw milk Camembert — one made for the French. Here in the U.S. we only import Camembert that has been pasteurized — a requirement by U.S. food safety officials for cheese to be sold here. But I'm intrigued by the mushroom aroma the real thing is said to have. One cheese columnist poetically described a superior Camembert as having "hints of garlic, barnyard and ripe laundry."

by Eliza Barclay, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Lukas Gerber
[ed. Been on a Camembert kick lately.]

[ed. The perfect spot.]

Memo to Jeff Bezos: Super-Chickens

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, recently took some heat when the New York Times exposed working conditions and the corporate culture at his firm. ‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of the working environment, sink or swim. Amazon is not alone. Some of the leading recent startups have competitive employment requirements, a survival of the fittest approach. They want the best and push out the rest. It’s a simple notion to strengthening your company and the most efficient way to assemble optimally performing groups, organizations, and sports teams. Or at least that has been the dominant rhetoric behind models of group productivity within both the business and sporting industries. Stack-ranking and other business practices of individual selection have been widespread, from General Electric to Microsoft, and is a standard modus operandi in sports teams including the focus of this piece, the European soccer team, Real Madrid. However, the wisdom behind the application of these models, both in business and sport, is under scrutiny. To begin to see why, we turn to evolutionary biology.

In 1996, evolutionary biologist William Muir conducted a series of unusual experiments at Purdue University. Muir was looking to explore the various methods of group productivity with regards to egg production. He wanted to create a group of ‘Super-Chickens’ who would produce more eggs than any other coop. He followed the logic that many employers today tout: take the best individuals, put them in a group together, and then let the magic happen. Muir selected the most productive hens from each cage and bred the next generation from them. Muir also identified the cages that collectively were more productive at laying eggs in comparison to other cages. He then continued to selectively breed using these two separate groups and observed the levels of production.

The outcome of this study was striking; selecting the best group cages produced hens that thoroughly outperformed the line of individually more productive ‘Super-Chickens’. For the cage-selected line, after just five generations, the number of eggs per hen catapulted from 91 to 237, the mortality rate of the group crashed from 68% to 9%, and the hens also displayed improved wellbeing as a function of the reductions of pecking and negative social interactions.

The Super-Chicken group did not fare so well. In fact, this line of hens had some other, rather less desirable qualities. They presented signs of aggression, violence, dysfunction and waste. There was an extremely high prevalence of fatal cannibalistic pecking within the group and general agonistic behaviors. Those in the cage who did not die from these cannibalistic attacks (there was an 89% mortality rate) were left with severe feather loss, life-threatening abrasions and other serious physical injuries. The hens were more intent on fighting amongst each other than doing anything productive! Hopefully that doesn’t sound like any workplaces you know…

So what happened? Why did the best egg-layers from the first generation yield something akin to the Gremlins of the eponymously named 80s movie? What Muir realized was that instead of identifying the most efficient hens, he had identified the hens that successfully conveyed the appearance of being the most productive. Those hens that individually produced the most did so by being adept at aggressively suppressing the other hens from laying eggs. Taking the more productive individuals meant taking the more aggressive hens. Breeding repeatedly from those which were most productive actually favored those which were most aggressive. Placing these hens together in cages led to extreme violence (only three of these psychotic hens actually survived!). Muir ended up running out of the Super-Chickens and had no choice but to end monitoring them and only continue with the other group. Ultimately, the process of selecting at the individual level took to an extreme the challenge of cooperation arising from individuals selected for selfishness.

The behaviour of the psychotic hens fits rather well with the normative assumptions of classical economic and game theory, which suggest that individuals will act selfishly in situations that afford them the opportunity. In group situations, individuals are consistently expected to identify, and act on, the dominant Nash strategy—the strategy that cannot be beaten. Just think of the classic ‘tragedy of the commons’, where people are predicted to free-ride on and exploit the contributions of others to a shared resource. Furthermore, the selfish actions of the Super-Chickens also support the theme of much evolutionary psychology from the 1960’s, which was based on the principle that individual interests will always outweigh the interests of the group.Given an opportunity to benefit from the efforts of others, selection will favor those which seize the day.

However, the behaviour of the best group hens is not so easily explained by such classical theories. Nor are the endless examples of people who act selflessly and contribute to shared resources, thus prioritizing the group’s interests over their own (public television funding, charities, etc.). Intrigued by this conundrum, behavioural economists, Robyn Dawes and Richard Thaler, investigated why it is that people violate these principles of selfishness. Their primary conclusion was that, in general, the greater the incentive for group co-operation, the more likely the group is to work together. In addition to this, the recent re-examination of multilevel selection theory’s contribution to our understanding of group processes, after its wide rejection around the 1960’s, provides an explanation as to how in situations of between-group competition, altruistic groups can outperform selfish groups and lead to the favored selection of altruistic group members. Individuals do not rampantly exploit the commons; grazing commons as a shared community resource has often worked well. You just need the right incentives.

This mismatch of incentives for individuals within a group is most certainly an area of concern for managers of all kinds. The relevance of these findings for management strategies in industry has gained some recent publicity, mainly following a popular TED talk by Margaret Heffernan which referenced Muir’s original experiments with specific focus on how traditional ‘pecking orders’ may not be the most productive organizational structure.

The Bezos, Ballmers and other top CEOs of the business industry are not alone in being troubled by the issues associated with building optimal teams. In team sports, the level of incentives for both the individual and the collective (team) reach unparalleled heights. Let us use soccer as an example. Teams are assembled with the sole purpose of challenging other teams for recognition and achievement. Yet within teams, players compete to be in the starting lineup, since squads are commonly comprised of 25 or more players but only 11 can play at a time. Furthermore, the most highly demanded players are able to hold sports clubs to ransom, with top players receiving over £300,000 ($434,385) a week in salary (e.g., Wayne Rooney, who plays for Manchester United in the English soccer top division).

As such, the modern world of sports provides researchers with a domain where they can explore which theoretical frameworks of group behaviour hold in practice. For instance, Swaab et al., established that while adding talented individuals to a group does initially result in improved performance, this relationship is non-linear and that, crucially, after a certain point the addition of too many talented individuals to a group has an inverse effect on group performance. Research on salary allocation shows one mechanism why this can occur, finding that pay inequality is linked to detrimental issues within teams, such that teams with highly unequal salary structures tend to also elicit more negative affect for their members, which can then lead to greater within-group problems. Furthermore, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan – concerned with the aforementioned ‘mismatch of incentives’ within hockey teams – concluded that as the number of selfish players increases, so too does the likelihood for the other players to adopt the selfish behaviors. Similar to how the selfish behaviors of the Super-Chicken’s resulted in reduced productivity and negative intergroup dynamics, studies such as these have illuminated how, in sports too, critical numbers of selfish and talented individuals can negatively impact a team’s cohesiveness and output.

To observe whether the same line of reasoning is applied to assembling sports teams as was adopted by Muir in his chicken experiment, and that is also widely advocated within industry, soccer (commonly known as ‘football’ in many countries) offers a useful feature to explore the pursuit of super-chickens, its global player transfer system. In comparison to the heavily regulated draft systems in place in the NFL, NBA and MLB, soccer allows a transfer system of players from club to club (franchise) that operates more or less as a free market* and which affords comparisons with standard employment practices (due largely to the European Court of Justice’s 1995 “Bosman ruling” and the legal requirement for free movement of workers within the European Union). Transfers usually involve the trading of a player for cash compensation. The latest record was just established this summer: £89,000,000 (about $117,761,000/€104,750,428) for Paul Pogba to transfer from the Italian club, Juventus, to Manchester United in England.

Perhaps the best analogy of the Super-Chicken approach in football is the notorious ‘Galactico’ policy at Real Madrid, developed by Real Madrid’s president Florintino Perez in 2000, who sought to endow his club with the world’s best, and most famous, soccer players in order to achieve instant sporting and commercial success. To provide you with both a sense of the scale of the Galactico policy, and Real Madrid’s commitment to it, between 2000 and 2013 Real Madrid consecutively broke their own previously held world records for transfer fees spent on a player.

The main issue for Real Madrid over this period has been that this aggressive policy of high profile recruitment has not exactly delivered the sporting success they would have expected. The Spanish league in which they compete is historically dominated by two teams: Real Madrid and Barcelona. Since Real Madrid embarked on this strategy they have seen a return of 18 major trophies for an expenditure of £924 million ($1.22 billion /€1.11 billion). Meanwhile for the same period, their main rivals, Barcelona have recorded 28 major trophies at a cost of £641 million ($847 million/€769 million). Having to watch their main rivals claim 10 more trophies at just over two thirds of the cost is clearly not what Perez had in mind with his Galactico policy. While many have opined on the differences between these two Spanish giants, a prevalent theme of much discussion on the two clubs is the recruitment policy. Barcelona are routinely praised for their unrelenting focus on developing young players from their academy, ‘La Masia’, and instilling in them a philosophy of teamwork, intelligence and commitment. The Director of La Masia has explained that, for Barcelona, when it comes to a star performer, “we try to give him focus without losing that spontaneity. He mustn’t lose that individuality, but he has to know he’s playing in a collective sport” (my emphasis). Barcelona’s club motto “Més que un club” – (More than a club) serves as a powerful statement of how their values and recruitment model differs from their Spanish rivals. In contrast, Real Madrid have had a high turnover of players, with many expensive signings being moved on to a new club, for a discount, a year or two later. Being a big signing in one year was no guarantee of avoiding an ignominious departure soon afterwards.

Upon review, the Galactico policy of acquiring (or selecting for) top players by paying extraordinarily large sums of money appears either likely to endow players with a ‘Super-Chicken’ label, or is likely to attract players with a pre-existing tendency to benefit individually at the expense of the team. Indeed, while the chance to sign for Real Madrid is a flattering opportunity for any player, the likely stack- ranking environment would seem more likely to attract certain traits. Accordingly, the relatively disappointing return of trophies and high turnover rate of world class players may be a consequence of the nature of the players recruited, or the behaviors which are coerced out of players by the high incentives to be the most productive or stand out performer. The high salaries, the media attention, and the risk of being sold to make way for the next galactico who is available on the market puts great pressure on players to perform in a way that justifies their fees and maintains their marketability. This could lead to a number of complex and counterproductive social dynamics within the group, much like the agonistic behaviors of Muir’s Super-Chickens.

by Alistair Thorpe and Rick O’Gorman, Evonomics | Read more:
Image: Super Chicken, Memo Angeles

[ed. Perhaps you've noticed a perplexing paucity of posts lately (and dumb alliterations). Sorry. Beyond threatening nearly every functional institution in the world (not to mention, you know, basic human existence), Trump is making it extremely difficult to find much of anything worth posting about that doesn't include him; which (credit where credit is due), the media slavishly enables. I'll keep working on it but have to say... it's getting personal now. I think his whole agenda is based on undermining this blog.] 

Pro Bowl Adding Dodgeball

The NFL will attempt to invigorate the Pro Bowl by adding a dodgeball game between their players.

No, this is not a joke.

This is real.

The league announced Monday they are adding a skills competition to what they are calling a “re-imagined” Pro Bowl week leading up to the actual Pro Bowl on 29 January. The skills or as it might be better said “skills” competition will take place three days before year-end exhibition game between the NFL’s all-stars and will be run by the producers of the TV shows American Ninja Warrior and Hell’s Kitchen.

While there is extreme potential to turn the Pro Bowl into a sideshow so absurd that the whole idea of an all-star game might be killed for good, the Pro Bowl has been something of a joke for some time. Played for most of its ignominious history in Hawaii, players treated the game and the week before it as a vacation, making the game something of a glorified flag football contest. So many players drop out each year, creating such a deep pool of replacements that the idea of being a Pro Bowler has been devalued in the last two decades.

The NFL has long struggled to find footing for the game, at times moving it to the mainland, playing it either a week before or a week after the Super Bowl and finally eliminating league designations in favor of two teams chosen pick-up style. None of these novelties have worked. The Pro Bowl has remained an afterthought for fans. Ratings have languished and the whole concept has seemed to be a farce. There was probably nothing else for the NFL to do than let reality TV producers take charge.

In addition to dodgeball, the “skills” competition will feature relay races, a game in which players will throw balls at moving targets and a best hands contest. The league said the night will include “quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, linemen, linebackers and defensive backs”, presumably eliminating kickers and punters.

by Les Carpenter, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett/REX features

Sears Transformed America. It Deserves to Die With Dignity.

Listening to a Sears earnings call in 2016 is like realizing that the twinkling light you're admiring in the night sky is from a star that died 50 years ago.

Sears Holdings Corp. lost $748 million last quarter amid falling sales, an even worse performance than the dismal losses of the period a year earlier. There is no obvious reason that the business might improve. And yet executives are still discussing how important its shopper loyalty program is "to the future and growth of the company," as if the company were going to have growth, and shoppers and a future.

We can argue about whether the current problems date back to the Great Recession or to the 2005 merger with Kmart, in which some bright strategist decided that the solution to the problems of two struggling retailers with badly dated business models was to lash them together and hope that somehow these two rotted timbers could hold each other up. But this is a distraction, because in fact, the seeds of this decline were planted decades ago, during the last time Sears needed to reinvent itself, in the aftermath of World War II.

Sears was the Wal-Mart of its era, that era being the 1890s to the 1930s. The company used economies of scale to become the comprehensive retailer to the large segment of the population that lived in small towns with few retail options. Then, as now, smaller local retailers might resent it, but the "wishbook," aka the Sears Roebuck catalog selling spices and plows and player pianos and seemingly everything else, could be found in almost every farmhouse in America.

Eventually, the firm moved into brick-and-mortar retail. World War II left the company in trouble. With inventories and cash low because of wartime shortages, Sears embarked on an audacious expansion plan, building new stores and investing heavily in the automobile suburbs that were springing up everywhere. This decision by Sears helped create the retail landscape that many of us remember from our childhood: the massive suburban shopping mall, anchored by a giant Sears store.

That Sears store might not have a plow, but it could sell you tires for your car, a refrigerator for your kitchen, and makeup for your 16-year-old daughter's first dance. It was an impressive act of reinvention, at the kind of crisis point that often drives previous titans of industry out of business.

But however brilliant this move was at the time, it has heavy costs now. Retailers have a lot of assets: brand, human talent and of course their physical inventory. But ultimately every major brick-and-mortar retailer's biggest asset is geography -- as the real estate brokers like to say, "location, location, location." Geography saved Sears, for a time, but now its biggest asset is an albatross.

The malls that Sears anchored for decades now seem to be slowly dying. They, like Sears itself, are suffering from online competition. Companies in this situation are often urged to find a new business model, but when your core asset is prime locations that are no longer so prime, that's hard advice to follow.

Not that Sears hasn't tried. In its most recent earnings release, the company presented cheerily arranged facts and figures that aimed to soften, but could not hide, the fact that the company has not turned a profit in years. During the earnings call, the chief financial officer, Jason Hollar, spoke almost lovingly of all the stores they were planning to close: "As we reduce our overall store base, we believe we will inevitably end up with stores that are profitable, operate at a small loss, or have a clear path to profitability."

This rosy forecast is, of course, eminently evitable. It could be evited pretty darn quick. Closing stores can be the path back to profitability for fundamentally sound businesses that expanded too quickly, or into the wrong areas. But it is precisely Sears's basic competitive strengths that have been badly impaired by the changing retail landscape, so there's no obvious profitable core that the company can shrink back to.

by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg |  Read more:

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Joan Miró, Harlequin’s Carnival. 1924
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The $21,000 First Class Airplane Seat

YouTube Biggest Viral Videos of 2016

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[ed. Speaking of which, I just got done reading Ready Player One. Highly recommended.] 

Maybe the Answer Is That He Can't Divest

Since Donald Trump's surprise election one month ago, there's been a bubbling conversation about the mammoth conflicts of interest he will have if he is running or even owning his far flung business enterprises while serving as the head of state. I've suggested that the whole notion of 'conflicts of interest' doesn't really capture what we're dealing with here, which is really a pretty open effort to leverage the presidency to expand his family business. But a couple things came together for me today which make me think we've all missed the real issue.

Maybe he can't divest because he's too underwater to do so or more likely he's too dependent on current and expanding cash flow to divest or even turn the reins over to someone else.

Late this afternoon we got news that Trump will remain as executive producer of The Apprentice, now starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That is, quite simply, weird. The presidency is time consuming and complicated, even for the lazier presidents. Does Trump really need to do this? Can he do it, just in terms of hours in the day? Of course, it may simply be a title that entitles him to draw a check. But does he need the check that bad?

The idea that Trump is heavily leveraged and reliant on on-going cash flow to keep his business empire from coming apart and collapsing into bankruptcy was frequently discussed during the campaign. But it's gotten pretty little attention since he was elected.

Here's something else.

After Trump got into that scuffle with Boeing, reporters asked about his ownership of Boeing stock. Trump replied that he'd already sold that stock. So there was no problem. But there's a bit more to it than that.

According to his spokesman, Trump sold all of his stock back in June, a portfolio which his disclosures suggest was worth as much as $38 million. Trump told Matt Lauer that he sold the stock because he was confident he'd win and "would have a tremendous ... conflict of interest owning all of these different companies" while serving as President.

Now, c'mon. Donald Trump sold off all his equities more than six months before he could become president because he was concerned about conflicts of interest? Please. That doesn't pass the laugh test.

But consider this. During the primaries Donald Trump loaned his campaign roughly $50 million. Over the course of the spring, as it became increasingly likely he'd be the nominee, that loan became increasingly conspicuous. Donors were wary of donating big money because they didn't want him to use it to pay himself back for that loan. Many suggested that he might not actually be able to part with that money. It became a big issue and Trump refused to forgive the loans.

It was only in June that Trump finally gave in and forgave the loan; this was confirmed in the June FEC disclosure that came out in late July. Who knows why Trump sold off all his stock holdings? Maybe he just had a feeling. Maybe he thought the market was too hot. Maybe he just had a spasm of prospective ethical concern. But let's be honest. The most obvious explanation is that forgiving that debt from his campaign required him — through whatever mix of contingencies — to free up more cash, either for the campaign or personal expenses or perhaps to have a certain amount of cash on hand because of terms of other debts. It does not seem plausible at all that the timing is coincidental.

Since we don't have Trump's tax returns, there's just a huge amount we don't know about his businesses. What we do know is that Trump appears to wildly exaggerate the scale of his wealth and exhibit a stinginess that is very hard to square with a man of the kinds of means he claims. A heavily leveraged business, one that is indebted and dependent on cash flow to keep everything moving forward, can be kind of like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it dies.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

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[ed. Love this picture. Romney looks like anal sex is on the desert menu (if it wasn't already an appetizer.]

Bob Dylan - 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature Banquet Speech

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I've been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It's probably buried so deep that they don't even know it's there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn't anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I've been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I've made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it's my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I'm grateful for that.

But there's one thing I must say. As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all,

Bob Dylan |  Read more:

Image: Rolling Stone

A Diner Waitress Whose Kindness Made Regular Customers Into Lifelong Friends

Lark Shellhamer left home at 15 and never finished school, but she's the best waitress I've ever known.

Her section fills in the early morning when the Village Inn remains mostly empty. The franchise diner in Midtown Anchorage has become a community of her regulars.

"She makes everybody happy," said Sandy Smart. "That's how you're supposed to be."

Sandy sits at her usual table for two hours every weekday morning, sipping coffee and nibbling an English muffin. I use her first name because this is a place of first names. Everyone calls her Grandma Sandy, including Lark and her two sons, Blaze and Cruz, also longtime waiters here.

Lark starts work at 5 a.m. The restaurant operates 24 hours except for weekends after the bars close. Some of the first customers are strippers after finishing their night's work and Bible study group members before starting their days.

Lark said the key to her success is treating them all with equal kindness.

My daughter Becky and I began coming in last year when my son was beginning school an hour earlier. Lark recognized us the second time we came in. The third time, she met us at the table with our coffee and hot chocolate ready.

We began looking forward to Lark's smile and energy. She zips around the dining room like a hyperactive middle-schooler, making sudden turns and stops, hugging customers and dropping into their booths to talk about kids or football, and then speeding off to deliver another big tray of comfort food.

Lark grew up in Eagle River. At 15 she dated a 19-year-old boyfriend who had received a lump of cash in an inheritance. When her mother gave her an ultimatum, Lark left. The couple flew to a random city, Dallas, and spent the inheritance on drugs. Lark ended up on her own, addicted to crack on the streets of Dallas.

Her first job was waiting tables in a Texas IHOP. She got clean. She eventually quit even coffee and soda.

Just before Christmas 27 years ago, Lark returned to Anchorage, pregnant, and three days later applied for a job at Village Inn. She has been there ever since, earning a living and raising her sons.

"I've been here busting my butt," she said. "I've never lied to them. They know how hard I've worked getting out of it."

One of her first Village Inn regulars came to the hospital when the baby was born, bringing Cruz a blanket she had made. She did the same for Blaze. That woman is too old to drive now, but friends help bring her in to breakfast to see Lark sometimes.

Early on Thursday, Nicholle Mills came in to write Christmas cards. She tries to arrive before it's busy to get as much of Lark's time as possible. They share advice on raising kids.

Josh Nelisnick and Joel Hoffenkamp came in after 7:30 a.m. and ordered sandwiches. They work overnight stocking shelves at Sam's Club. This habit has lasted nine years.

"Honestly, the food wasn't that good when we started coming here," Josh said. But the service made up for it.

Every summer, Lark throws a block party in her Eagle River neighborhood for them and her other Village Inn regulars. She hires a live band and sets up horseshoes and kids' games. Josh texted her one night about a great deal at Sam's on a bouncy house, so she's adding that.

Josh and Lark took their co-workers, from both Village Inn and Sam's Club, out bar-hopping one St. Patrick's Day. On Thursday, she knelt at the table with Josh and Joel to sign them up to jump into Goose Lake with her and another server for the Special Olympics Polar Plunge.

"This is pretty much my social life," Josh said.

Barb and Ruth Piotrowski came in with a card and gift for Lark, a pair of earrings. Lark makes Christmas baskets for her regulars. Ruth has been in Anchorage 69 years. She raised Barb here in the house where she still lives on Cordova Street.

"How long have we been coming here, Lark?" Barb asked.

Lark said, "I've got to think how old the kids are."

The answer turned out to be 20 years.

by Charles Wohlforth, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Images: Loren Holmes

Galina Petrova-Džiaukštienė, Women Cleaning Fish, 1969.
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