Monday, December 26, 2016
More Online Shopping Means More Delivery Trucks
[ed. Glad someone is thinking about this.]
Two converging trends – the rise of e-commerce and urban population growth – are creating big challenges for cities. Online shoppers are learning to expect the urban freight delivery system to bring them whatever they want, wherever they want it, within one to two hours. That’s especially true during the holidays, as shipping companies hustle to deliver gift orders on time.
City managers and policymakers were already grappling with high demand and competing uses for scarce road, curb and sidewalk space. If cities do not act quickly to revamp the way they manage increasing numbers of commercial vehicles unloading goods in streets and alleys and into buildings, they will drown in a sea of double-parked trucks.
The Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics (SCTL) Center at the University of Washington has formed a new Urban Freight Lab to solve delivery system problems that cities and the business sector cannot handle on their own. Funders of this long-term strategic research partnership include the City of Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and five founding corporate members: Costco, FedEx, Nordstrom, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service.
The core problem facing cities is that they are trying to manage their part of a sophisticated data-powered 21st-century delivery system with tools designed for the 1800s – and they are often trying to do it alone. Consumers can order groceries, clothes and electronics with a click, but most cities only have a stripe of colored paint to manage truck parking at the curb. The Urban Freight Lab brings building managers, retailers, logistics and tech firms, and city government together to do applied research and develop advanced solutions.
We have reached the point where millions of people who live and work in cities purchase more than half of their goods online. This trend putting tremendous pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles. It also forces building operators to plan for the influx of online goods. A few years ago, building concierges may have received a few flower bouquets. Now many are sorting and storing groceries and other goods for hundreds of residents every week. (...)
SDOT recently published Seattle’s first draft Freight Master Plan, which includes high-level strategies to improve the urban goods delivery system. But before city managers act, they need evidence to prove which concepts will deliver results.
by Anne Goodchild and Barbara Ivanov, UW/The Conversation | Read more:
Two converging trends – the rise of e-commerce and urban population growth – are creating big challenges for cities. Online shoppers are learning to expect the urban freight delivery system to bring them whatever they want, wherever they want it, within one to two hours. That’s especially true during the holidays, as shipping companies hustle to deliver gift orders on time.
City managers and policymakers were already grappling with high demand and competing uses for scarce road, curb and sidewalk space. If cities do not act quickly to revamp the way they manage increasing numbers of commercial vehicles unloading goods in streets and alleys and into buildings, they will drown in a sea of double-parked trucks.The Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics (SCTL) Center at the University of Washington has formed a new Urban Freight Lab to solve delivery system problems that cities and the business sector cannot handle on their own. Funders of this long-term strategic research partnership include the City of Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and five founding corporate members: Costco, FedEx, Nordstrom, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service.
The core problem facing cities is that they are trying to manage their part of a sophisticated data-powered 21st-century delivery system with tools designed for the 1800s – and they are often trying to do it alone. Consumers can order groceries, clothes and electronics with a click, but most cities only have a stripe of colored paint to manage truck parking at the curb. The Urban Freight Lab brings building managers, retailers, logistics and tech firms, and city government together to do applied research and develop advanced solutions.
We have reached the point where millions of people who live and work in cities purchase more than half of their goods online. This trend putting tremendous pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles. It also forces building operators to plan for the influx of online goods. A few years ago, building concierges may have received a few flower bouquets. Now many are sorting and storing groceries and other goods for hundreds of residents every week. (...)
SDOT recently published Seattle’s first draft Freight Master Plan, which includes high-level strategies to improve the urban goods delivery system. But before city managers act, they need evidence to prove which concepts will deliver results.
by Anne Goodchild and Barbara Ivanov, UW/The Conversation | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Students Have Built A Coconut-Harvesting Robot
It’s a classic conundrum: Everyone wants coconuts, but no one wants to pick them.
Fear not, though. Students at Amrita University in Kerala have developed a solution—a coconut-harvesting robot.
The students began exploring this idea when a coconut farmer approached them about it in 2013, the Times of India reports. Three years later, they have unveiled their machine, which has grasping arms, a chunky torso, and several circular-sawblade appendages. (You can see some pictures of it here.)
Coconut harvesting is a field ripe for disruption. It’s hard, dangerous work—you either have to climb the tree and hang on while plucking the coconuts, or stand beneath it and saw them off with a long, blade-ended stick. The young people who would normally do it have lately been “taking up more ‘dignified’ professions,” the Times of India says.
Even those people who have stuck with the job are less than efficient: your average human can pick only 80 coconuts in a day. Instead, many farmers are using captive macaque monkeys, who can harvest up to 1600, NPR reported last year.
by Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura | Read more:
Fear not, though. Students at Amrita University in Kerala have developed a solution—a coconut-harvesting robot.The students began exploring this idea when a coconut farmer approached them about it in 2013, the Times of India reports. Three years later, they have unveiled their machine, which has grasping arms, a chunky torso, and several circular-sawblade appendages. (You can see some pictures of it here.)
Coconut harvesting is a field ripe for disruption. It’s hard, dangerous work—you either have to climb the tree and hang on while plucking the coconuts, or stand beneath it and saw them off with a long, blade-ended stick. The young people who would normally do it have lately been “taking up more ‘dignified’ professions,” the Times of India says.
Even those people who have stuck with the job are less than efficient: your average human can pick only 80 coconuts in a day. Instead, many farmers are using captive macaque monkeys, who can harvest up to 1600, NPR reported last year.
by Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura | Read more:
Image:PEXELS/CC0
Los Angeles Drivers on the 405 Ask: Was $1.6 Billion Worth It?
It is the very symbol of traffic and congestion. Interstate 405, or the 405, as it is known by the 300,000 drivers who endure it morning and night, is the busiest highway in the nation, a 72-mile swerving stretch of pavement that crosses the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles.
So it was that many Angelenos applauded when officials embarked on one of the most ambitious construction projects in modern times here: a $1 billion initiative to widen the highway. And drivers and others put up with no shortage of disruption — detours and delays, highway shutdowns, neighborhood streets clogged with cars — in the hopes of relieving one of the most notorious bottlenecks anywhere.
Six years after the first bulldozer rolled in, the construction crews are gone. A new car pool lane has opened, along with a network of on- and offramps and three new earthquake-resistant bridges.
But the question remains: Was it worth it?
“In the long term, it will make no difference to the traffic pattern,” said Marcia Hobbs, who has lived her whole life in Bel Air. “I haven’t noticed substantial cutbacks in traffic. As a matter of fact, I would say it was the opposite.”
The cost of the Sepulveda Pass project was supposed to be $1 billion. It has now reached $1.6 billion, after transit officials approved $300 million in new expenses last week.
Peak afternoon traffic time has indeed decreased to five hours from seven hours’ duration (yes, you read that right) and overall traffic capacity has increased. But congestion is as bad — even worse — during the busiest rush hours of 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., according to a study by the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
So it was that many Angelenos applauded when officials embarked on one of the most ambitious construction projects in modern times here: a $1 billion initiative to widen the highway. And drivers and others put up with no shortage of disruption — detours and delays, highway shutdowns, neighborhood streets clogged with cars — in the hopes of relieving one of the most notorious bottlenecks anywhere.Six years after the first bulldozer rolled in, the construction crews are gone. A new car pool lane has opened, along with a network of on- and offramps and three new earthquake-resistant bridges.
But the question remains: Was it worth it?
“In the long term, it will make no difference to the traffic pattern,” said Marcia Hobbs, who has lived her whole life in Bel Air. “I haven’t noticed substantial cutbacks in traffic. As a matter of fact, I would say it was the opposite.”
The cost of the Sepulveda Pass project was supposed to be $1 billion. It has now reached $1.6 billion, after transit officials approved $300 million in new expenses last week.
Peak afternoon traffic time has indeed decreased to five hours from seven hours’ duration (yes, you read that right) and overall traffic capacity has increased. But congestion is as bad — even worse — during the busiest rush hours of 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., according to a study by the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
by Adam Nagourney, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andrew Cullen
Friday, December 23, 2016
Islands of Mass Destruction
On a map of the world, the South China Sea appears as a scrap of blue amid the tangle of islands and peninsulas that make up Southeast Asia between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Its 1.4 million-square-mile expanse, so modest next to its aquatic neighbors, is nonetheless economically vital to the countries that border it and to the rest of us: More than $5 trillion in goods are shipped through it every year, and its waters produce roughly 12 percent of the world’s fish catch.
Zoom in, and irregular specks skitter between the Philippines and Vietnam. These are the Spratly Islands, a series of reefs and shoals that hardly deserved the name “islands” until recently. In the past three years, China, more than 500 miles from the closest of the Spratly reefs, has transformed seven of them into artificial land masses; as it’s reshaped coral and water into runways, hangars sized for military jets, lighthouses, running tracks, and basketball courts, its claim to sovereignty over the watery domain has hardened into an unsubtle threat of armed force.
Mobile signal towers on the newly cemented islands now beam the message, in Chinese and English, “Welcome to China” to cell phones on any ships passing within reach. But its latest moves, in the long-running dispute with its neighbors over the sea, the fish in it, and the oil beneath it, are anything but welcoming: China appears to have deployed weapons systems on all seven islands, and last week seized a U.S. Navy underwater drone.
In the run-up to all this, as most international observers watched the islands bloom in time-lapse on satellite photos, John McManus arrived with a film crew in February 2016, to document a less visible crisis under the water. To McManus, a professor of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami, the Spratlys aren’t just tiny chips out of a blue background on Google Maps; from dives there in the early 1990s, he remembers seeing schools of hammerhead sharks so dense they eclipsed the light. This time, he swam through miles of deserted dead coral—of the few fish he saw, the largest barely reached 4 inches.
“I’ve never seen a reef where you could swim for a kilometer without seeing a single fish,” he says. (...)
The first signs of what was to come appeared in late 2012. Satellite photos of reefs in the Spratlys showed mysterious arcs, like puffs of cartoon smoke, obscuring the darker areas of coral and rock. A colleague forwarded them to McManus, wondering if the shapes might be signs of muro-ami fishing, where fishermen pound large rocks into a reef, tearing up the coral to scare their prey out of hiding and up into a net above. Another theory, floated first in an article on the Asia Pacific Defense Forum, a military affairs website, explained the arcs as scars left by fishermen harvesting giant clams.
Giant clams are an important species in the rich reef systems of the Indo-Pacific waters; they anchor seaweed and sponges, shelter young fish, and help accumulate the calcium deposits that grow reefs over time. Underwater, the elegantly undulating shells part to reveal a mantle of flesh in rainbow hues: blue, turquoise, yellow, and orange—mottled and spotted with yet more colors. The largest can reach almost 5 feet across and weigh more than 600 pounds. Long hunted for their meat, they’re also prized in the aquarium market, though they’re protected by international law.
McManus found both theories implausible, particularly the giant clam one; the only method he’d ever heard of for fishing the hefty bivalves involved wrestling them by hand into the boat.
As McManus pondered this mystery, tensions in the South China Sea were flaring, with the Chinese fishermen of Tanmen as the tinder. Tanmen is a pinhead of a place on the coast of Hainan Island, China’s equivalent of Hawaii. Temperatures rarely drop below 60F, and blue skies contrast with the smoggy haze over much of the mainland. Tanmen was a subsistence fishing village until Hainan opened up to foreign investment and a Taiwanese entrepreneur arrived in 1990.
The man, Zhan Dexiong, had run a business for years in Southeast Asia turning seashells into beads and handicrafts. Tanmen had a dozen small boats and no electricity, according to Zhan’s son, Zhan Yulong. It did have a cheap and abundant supply of all kinds of seashells, which the locals discarded after taking the meat out. The elder Zhan bought generators, moved machines from his factory in the Philippines, and set up the first foreign venture in town.
By the early 2000s, the success of that first factory had attracted copycats and spurred the creation of a special industrial zone devoted to shell processing. Over the next decade, Chinese consumers, avid buyers of jade and ivory, developed a taste for objets from those factories, intricate sculptures with giant clamshells as the medium. Although China listed giant clams as a protected species, Tanmen fishermen found a loophole, going after the large shells of long dead clams, buried within reefs. By 2012 the shells from giant clams, dead or alive, had become the most valuable harvest for the vessels sailing from Tanmen into the South China Sea. Boats regularly came home with 200-ton hauls, which could sell for 2,000 yuan ($290) a ton—big money in a place where the annual income for a fisherman was 6,000 yuan.
by Dune Lawrence and Wenxin Fan, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Howard Chew/Alamy
Zoom in, and irregular specks skitter between the Philippines and Vietnam. These are the Spratly Islands, a series of reefs and shoals that hardly deserved the name “islands” until recently. In the past three years, China, more than 500 miles from the closest of the Spratly reefs, has transformed seven of them into artificial land masses; as it’s reshaped coral and water into runways, hangars sized for military jets, lighthouses, running tracks, and basketball courts, its claim to sovereignty over the watery domain has hardened into an unsubtle threat of armed force.Mobile signal towers on the newly cemented islands now beam the message, in Chinese and English, “Welcome to China” to cell phones on any ships passing within reach. But its latest moves, in the long-running dispute with its neighbors over the sea, the fish in it, and the oil beneath it, are anything but welcoming: China appears to have deployed weapons systems on all seven islands, and last week seized a U.S. Navy underwater drone.
In the run-up to all this, as most international observers watched the islands bloom in time-lapse on satellite photos, John McManus arrived with a film crew in February 2016, to document a less visible crisis under the water. To McManus, a professor of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami, the Spratlys aren’t just tiny chips out of a blue background on Google Maps; from dives there in the early 1990s, he remembers seeing schools of hammerhead sharks so dense they eclipsed the light. This time, he swam through miles of deserted dead coral—of the few fish he saw, the largest barely reached 4 inches.
“I’ve never seen a reef where you could swim for a kilometer without seeing a single fish,” he says. (...)
The first signs of what was to come appeared in late 2012. Satellite photos of reefs in the Spratlys showed mysterious arcs, like puffs of cartoon smoke, obscuring the darker areas of coral and rock. A colleague forwarded them to McManus, wondering if the shapes might be signs of muro-ami fishing, where fishermen pound large rocks into a reef, tearing up the coral to scare their prey out of hiding and up into a net above. Another theory, floated first in an article on the Asia Pacific Defense Forum, a military affairs website, explained the arcs as scars left by fishermen harvesting giant clams.
Giant clams are an important species in the rich reef systems of the Indo-Pacific waters; they anchor seaweed and sponges, shelter young fish, and help accumulate the calcium deposits that grow reefs over time. Underwater, the elegantly undulating shells part to reveal a mantle of flesh in rainbow hues: blue, turquoise, yellow, and orange—mottled and spotted with yet more colors. The largest can reach almost 5 feet across and weigh more than 600 pounds. Long hunted for their meat, they’re also prized in the aquarium market, though they’re protected by international law.
McManus found both theories implausible, particularly the giant clam one; the only method he’d ever heard of for fishing the hefty bivalves involved wrestling them by hand into the boat.
As McManus pondered this mystery, tensions in the South China Sea were flaring, with the Chinese fishermen of Tanmen as the tinder. Tanmen is a pinhead of a place on the coast of Hainan Island, China’s equivalent of Hawaii. Temperatures rarely drop below 60F, and blue skies contrast with the smoggy haze over much of the mainland. Tanmen was a subsistence fishing village until Hainan opened up to foreign investment and a Taiwanese entrepreneur arrived in 1990.
The man, Zhan Dexiong, had run a business for years in Southeast Asia turning seashells into beads and handicrafts. Tanmen had a dozen small boats and no electricity, according to Zhan’s son, Zhan Yulong. It did have a cheap and abundant supply of all kinds of seashells, which the locals discarded after taking the meat out. The elder Zhan bought generators, moved machines from his factory in the Philippines, and set up the first foreign venture in town.
By the early 2000s, the success of that first factory had attracted copycats and spurred the creation of a special industrial zone devoted to shell processing. Over the next decade, Chinese consumers, avid buyers of jade and ivory, developed a taste for objets from those factories, intricate sculptures with giant clamshells as the medium. Although China listed giant clams as a protected species, Tanmen fishermen found a loophole, going after the large shells of long dead clams, buried within reefs. By 2012 the shells from giant clams, dead or alive, had become the most valuable harvest for the vessels sailing from Tanmen into the South China Sea. Boats regularly came home with 200-ton hauls, which could sell for 2,000 yuan ($290) a ton—big money in a place where the annual income for a fisherman was 6,000 yuan.
by Dune Lawrence and Wenxin Fan, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Howard Chew/Alamy
How We Got From Doc Brown to Walter White
The changing image of the TV scientist.
At the start of the fourth season of Breaking Bad, Walter White angrily watches an inexperienced meth cook make his trademark blue meth. Walter is afraid that mob boss Gus Fring is going to kill him, so he desperately explains that Fring can’t make the “product” without him. When the amateur cook, Victor, says he knows every step of the process, Walter snarls, “So, please, tell me. Catalytic hydrogenation—is it protic or aprotic? Because I forget. And if our reduction is not stereospecific, then how can our product be enantiomerically pure?”
Walter’s scientific knowledge saves him. The ruthless Fring slits Victor’s throat with a box cutter.
Over the course of Breaking Bad, Walter unravels from a frustrated chemistry teacher to a brutal criminal. But no matter how horrible he gets, viewers can’t help but relate to and care about him. Much of this sense of connection comes from lead actor Bryan Cranston’s skillful portrayal of a troubled family man, but it was Breaking Bad creator and head writer Vince Gilligan who conceived the character. He imagined a scientist who is mad without turning him into a mad scientist.
Part of Walter’s appeal is he knows his science. “Vince tried to get the chemistry correct as much as he could, just to make it more believable,” says Donna Nelson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. As Breaking Bad’s science advisor, Nelson helped him achieve that goal. (Her favorite scene in the series is Walter’s sarcastic rejoinder to Victor.) Although they were careful to never give viewers the exact or complete recipe for meth, the chemical reactions are real, and if someone were to synthesize methamphetamine by altering other chemical’s structures, they would indeed want to make sure the end product is enantiomerically pure: The three-dimensional structure of methamphetamine works on the brain in a certain way to get you high, but the enantiomer, or mirror image, of the same molecule does not.
Breaking Bad is among a host of acclaimed shows in recent times with scientists as protagonists. Westworld, Orphan Black, Masters of Sex, CSI, Bones, House, The Big Bang Theory, and several others have all written scientists as diverse and complex humans who have almost nothing in common with the scientists I saw in the 1980s movies I watched as a kid. Gone is the lone genius with a shed full of goofy contraptions and bubbling liquids. Today’s fictional researchers work in realistic labs, with high-tech equipment, and in teams with others. Their dialogue is scattered with words from the latest scientific literature, and they have so much depth and personality that they carry entire shows.
The change in TV offers insight into the image and impact of scientists today, say communication scholars. Although recent headlines may have been dominated by people who bend scientific facts into the molds of their personal ideologies, surveys reveal a deep public esteem for scientists. Viewers now want and demand their scientists to be realistic, and what the viewer wants, Hollywood delivers. As a result, scientists on screen have evolved from stereotypes and villains to credible and positive characters, due in part to scientists themselves, anxious to be part of the action and the public’s education. (...)
In 1985, George Gerbner, a communications professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, led a remarkably detailed study of scientist characters on TV and their impact on culture. Scientists were smart and rational, the report noted, but of all the occupational roles on TV, scientists were the least sociable. In fact, 1 in 6 scientists were portrayed as villains. All in all, the report stated, scientists “presented an image lacking in some respects only in comparison to doctors and other professionals than in absolute terms. But it is a somewhat foreboding image, touched with a sense of evil, trouble, and peril.” Apparently those characters had a negative impact on viewers, especially “heavy viewers,” people who watched four or more hours of TV a day, cultivating an unfavorable orientation toward science.
But things have been looking up for unsociable TV scientists touched with evil. A 2011 study by Anthony Dudo and colleagues, published in Communication Research, takes up where Gerbner and colleagues left off. The authors compared several professions portrayed in prime-time TV shows and found that in the period from 2000 to 2008, only 3 percent of scientist characters were considered “bad,” less than any other TV profession in that period. Portrayals of TV scientists, the authors noted, are mostly positive, and what’s more, heavy viewing can “enhance attitudes toward science for people who share common experiences.”
What happened? Roslynn Haynes, an adjunct associate professor at the School of English, Media and Performing Arts of the University of New South Wales, has studied the representation of scientists in fiction. The world has changed since the 1960s, she says, when one-dimensional mad scientists or goofy side characters ruled. We have different things to worry about these days: political corruption, terrorism, climate change. “We don’t need the scientists to be the bad guys anymore,” says Haynes. “There are so many other bad guys now.” She points out that scientists are now often the ones we turn to for solutions. “We know we need scientists to fix up the mess we’re making of the planet. If there’s any hope at all, it has to come from scientists who monitor the risk and are able to find ways to overcome that risk. Whereas before, scientists were seen as part of the risk.” (...)
At the start of the fourth season of Breaking Bad, Walter White angrily watches an inexperienced meth cook make his trademark blue meth. Walter is afraid that mob boss Gus Fring is going to kill him, so he desperately explains that Fring can’t make the “product” without him. When the amateur cook, Victor, says he knows every step of the process, Walter snarls, “So, please, tell me. Catalytic hydrogenation—is it protic or aprotic? Because I forget. And if our reduction is not stereospecific, then how can our product be enantiomerically pure?”
Walter’s scientific knowledge saves him. The ruthless Fring slits Victor’s throat with a box cutter.
Over the course of Breaking Bad, Walter unravels from a frustrated chemistry teacher to a brutal criminal. But no matter how horrible he gets, viewers can’t help but relate to and care about him. Much of this sense of connection comes from lead actor Bryan Cranston’s skillful portrayal of a troubled family man, but it was Breaking Bad creator and head writer Vince Gilligan who conceived the character. He imagined a scientist who is mad without turning him into a mad scientist.
Part of Walter’s appeal is he knows his science. “Vince tried to get the chemistry correct as much as he could, just to make it more believable,” says Donna Nelson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. As Breaking Bad’s science advisor, Nelson helped him achieve that goal. (Her favorite scene in the series is Walter’s sarcastic rejoinder to Victor.) Although they were careful to never give viewers the exact or complete recipe for meth, the chemical reactions are real, and if someone were to synthesize methamphetamine by altering other chemical’s structures, they would indeed want to make sure the end product is enantiomerically pure: The three-dimensional structure of methamphetamine works on the brain in a certain way to get you high, but the enantiomer, or mirror image, of the same molecule does not.Breaking Bad is among a host of acclaimed shows in recent times with scientists as protagonists. Westworld, Orphan Black, Masters of Sex, CSI, Bones, House, The Big Bang Theory, and several others have all written scientists as diverse and complex humans who have almost nothing in common with the scientists I saw in the 1980s movies I watched as a kid. Gone is the lone genius with a shed full of goofy contraptions and bubbling liquids. Today’s fictional researchers work in realistic labs, with high-tech equipment, and in teams with others. Their dialogue is scattered with words from the latest scientific literature, and they have so much depth and personality that they carry entire shows.
The change in TV offers insight into the image and impact of scientists today, say communication scholars. Although recent headlines may have been dominated by people who bend scientific facts into the molds of their personal ideologies, surveys reveal a deep public esteem for scientists. Viewers now want and demand their scientists to be realistic, and what the viewer wants, Hollywood delivers. As a result, scientists on screen have evolved from stereotypes and villains to credible and positive characters, due in part to scientists themselves, anxious to be part of the action and the public’s education. (...)
In 1985, George Gerbner, a communications professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, led a remarkably detailed study of scientist characters on TV and their impact on culture. Scientists were smart and rational, the report noted, but of all the occupational roles on TV, scientists were the least sociable. In fact, 1 in 6 scientists were portrayed as villains. All in all, the report stated, scientists “presented an image lacking in some respects only in comparison to doctors and other professionals than in absolute terms. But it is a somewhat foreboding image, touched with a sense of evil, trouble, and peril.” Apparently those characters had a negative impact on viewers, especially “heavy viewers,” people who watched four or more hours of TV a day, cultivating an unfavorable orientation toward science.
But things have been looking up for unsociable TV scientists touched with evil. A 2011 study by Anthony Dudo and colleagues, published in Communication Research, takes up where Gerbner and colleagues left off. The authors compared several professions portrayed in prime-time TV shows and found that in the period from 2000 to 2008, only 3 percent of scientist characters were considered “bad,” less than any other TV profession in that period. Portrayals of TV scientists, the authors noted, are mostly positive, and what’s more, heavy viewing can “enhance attitudes toward science for people who share common experiences.”
What happened? Roslynn Haynes, an adjunct associate professor at the School of English, Media and Performing Arts of the University of New South Wales, has studied the representation of scientists in fiction. The world has changed since the 1960s, she says, when one-dimensional mad scientists or goofy side characters ruled. We have different things to worry about these days: political corruption, terrorism, climate change. “We don’t need the scientists to be the bad guys anymore,” says Haynes. “There are so many other bad guys now.” She points out that scientists are now often the ones we turn to for solutions. “We know we need scientists to fix up the mess we’re making of the planet. If there’s any hope at all, it has to come from scientists who monitor the risk and are able to find ways to overcome that risk. Whereas before, scientists were seen as part of the risk.” (...)
It didn’t take long for fictional on-screen scientists to catch up with this new attitude toward their profession. Eight years after Doc Emmett Brown sent his mad invention traveling through time in Back to the Future, scientists in Jurassic Park enthralled visitors with creatures from the past. But something was different now. Although Doc Brown’s chaotic goofiness was still acceptable for scientist characters in 1985, the paleontologists in Jurassic Park (1993) were held to a much higher standard. They did work that viewers recognized as having some root in reality: Dinosaurs, DNA, clean labs with professional lab notebooks. Although it’s not possible to retrieve viable DNA from dinosaur blood in a mosquito trapped in amber, the idea isn’t entirely implausible. Just this month, real paleontologists found a feathered, amber-encased dinosaur tail fragment, in which they detected traces of iron from its blood.
David Kirby, a senior lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester, and author of the 2011 book Lab Coats in Hollywood, points to Jurassic Park as the film that marked the start of the trend of scientific realism in movies. The film had incredible visual effects, and they brought in experts to get the scientific details in place. When the film was a box office success, other films tried to copy this attention to realistic detail. They saw that audiences liked it, so why not do the same?
It fit an ongoing trend of increased “realism” across all genres, explains Kirby. “When you’re talking about realism in the context of fiction, you’re not just talking about ‘Did they get the appropriate watch for a particular time period?’ or ‘Did they get the right equipment to do a piece of scientific work?’ The realism is all of it: the ways in which the characters act, the context in which they’re acting.” Filmmakers, Kirby says, “are paying attention to everything in terms of that realism, to try to convey the notion that this is taking place in a world that seems realistic.”
David Kirby, a senior lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester, and author of the 2011 book Lab Coats in Hollywood, points to Jurassic Park as the film that marked the start of the trend of scientific realism in movies. The film had incredible visual effects, and they brought in experts to get the scientific details in place. When the film was a box office success, other films tried to copy this attention to realistic detail. They saw that audiences liked it, so why not do the same?
It fit an ongoing trend of increased “realism” across all genres, explains Kirby. “When you’re talking about realism in the context of fiction, you’re not just talking about ‘Did they get the appropriate watch for a particular time period?’ or ‘Did they get the right equipment to do a piece of scientific work?’ The realism is all of it: the ways in which the characters act, the context in which they’re acting.” Filmmakers, Kirby says, “are paying attention to everything in terms of that realism, to try to convey the notion that this is taking place in a world that seems realistic.”
by Eva Amsen, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Breaking Bad
The Movie That Doesn’t Exist and the Redditors Who Think It Does
In the early Nineties, roughly around 1994, a now 52-year-old man named Don ordered two copies of a brand new video for the rental store his uncle owned and he helped to run.
“I had to handle the two copies we owned dozens of times over the years,” says Don (who wishes to give his first name only). “And I had to watch it multiple times to look for reported damages to the tape, rewind it and check it in, rent it out, and put the boxes out on display for rental.”
In these ways, the film Don is speaking of is exactly like the hundreds of others in his uncle’s shop. In one crucial way, however, it is not. The movie that Don is referring to doesn’t actually exist.
“It feels like a part of my childhood has now been stolen from me. How does a movie simply vanish from our history?”
This isn’t Don speaking, but another man – who he has never met – named Carl*. Carl, whose name has been changed because he wishes to remain anonymous, recalls watching a movie called Shazaam with his sister in the early Nineties, and has fond memories of discussing it with her over the last 20 years. In their recollections, the movie starred the American stand-up comedian Sinbad – real name David Adkins – as an incompetent genie who granted wishes to two young children.
“I’ve taken to Craigslist and have posted a bounty of $1,000 for anyone that can turn up a copy of this movie, whether it was ‘accidentally’ kept from Blockbuster or if someone made their own bootleg VHS copy. I want to be able to make it known that the movie is indeed real,” says Carl.
Meredith Upton, a 25-year-old videographer from Nashville, Tennessee, also remembers the same film. “Whenever I would see Sinbad anywhere in the media I would recall him playing a genie,” she says. “I remember the name of the film as Shazaam. I remember two children accidentally summoning a genie… and they try and wish for their dad to fall in love again after their mother’s passing, and Sinbad can’t [grant the wish].”
Don goes even further. Although he is not certain that the movie was called Shazaam, he has detailed scene-by-scene recollections of the film, which include the children wishing for a new wife for their father, the little girl wishing for her broken doll to be fixed, and the movie finale taking place at a pool party. Don says he remembers the film so vividly because customers would bring the video back to his rental store claiming it didn’t work, and he watched it multiple times to try and find the “problem with the tape”.
Meredith, Don, and Carl are three of hundreds of Redditors who have used the popular social news site to discuss their memories of Shazaam. Together they have scoured the internet to find evidence that the movie existed but each has repeatedly come up empty-handed. Sinbad himself has even taken to Twitter to deny that he ever played such a role.
How did this Reddit community grow? It all began in 2009. An anonymous individual took to the question-and-answer website Yahoo! Answers to pose its users a simple question. “Do you remember that sinbad movie?” they wrote. “Wasnt there a movie in the early 90s where sinbad the entertainer / comedian played a genie? … help its driving me nuts!”
At the time, nobody remembered the film, and it took another two years for somebody else to ask about it again online. Reddit user MJGSimple wrote on the site: “It’s a conspiracy! I swear this movie exists, anyone have a copy or know where I can find proof!” Replies to the post were sceptical, claiming MJGSimple simply had a false memory.
It wasn’t until last year that things took a dramatic turn.
On 11 August 2015, the popular gonzo news site VICE published a story about a conspiracy theory surrounding the children’s storybook characters the Berenstain Bears. The theory went like this: many people remember that the bears’ name was spelt “Berenstein” – with an “e” – but pictures and old copies proved it was always spelt with an “a”. The fact that so many people had the same false memory was seen as concrete proof of the supernatural.
“Berenstein” truthers believe in something called the “Mandela Effect”: a theory that a large group of people with the same false memory used to live in a parallel universe (the name comes from those who fervently believe that Nelson Mandela died while in prison). VICE’s article about the theory was shared widely, leading thousands of people to r/MandelaEffect, a subreddit for those with false memories to share their experiences.
It was there, just a few hours after the article was posted, that discussions of Shazaam – or the “Sinbad Genie movie” – took off.
“I was dumbfounded to see that there was no evidence of the movie ever being made,” says Carl. “I quickly searched the internet, scouring every way I know how to search, crafting Boolean strings into Google, doing insite: searches, and nothing. Not a damn thing.”
“I had to handle the two copies we owned dozens of times over the years,” says Don (who wishes to give his first name only). “And I had to watch it multiple times to look for reported damages to the tape, rewind it and check it in, rent it out, and put the boxes out on display for rental.”
In these ways, the film Don is speaking of is exactly like the hundreds of others in his uncle’s shop. In one crucial way, however, it is not. The movie that Don is referring to doesn’t actually exist.
“It feels like a part of my childhood has now been stolen from me. How does a movie simply vanish from our history?”This isn’t Don speaking, but another man – who he has never met – named Carl*. Carl, whose name has been changed because he wishes to remain anonymous, recalls watching a movie called Shazaam with his sister in the early Nineties, and has fond memories of discussing it with her over the last 20 years. In their recollections, the movie starred the American stand-up comedian Sinbad – real name David Adkins – as an incompetent genie who granted wishes to two young children.
“I’ve taken to Craigslist and have posted a bounty of $1,000 for anyone that can turn up a copy of this movie, whether it was ‘accidentally’ kept from Blockbuster or if someone made their own bootleg VHS copy. I want to be able to make it known that the movie is indeed real,” says Carl.
Meredith Upton, a 25-year-old videographer from Nashville, Tennessee, also remembers the same film. “Whenever I would see Sinbad anywhere in the media I would recall him playing a genie,” she says. “I remember the name of the film as Shazaam. I remember two children accidentally summoning a genie… and they try and wish for their dad to fall in love again after their mother’s passing, and Sinbad can’t [grant the wish].”
Don goes even further. Although he is not certain that the movie was called Shazaam, he has detailed scene-by-scene recollections of the film, which include the children wishing for a new wife for their father, the little girl wishing for her broken doll to be fixed, and the movie finale taking place at a pool party. Don says he remembers the film so vividly because customers would bring the video back to his rental store claiming it didn’t work, and he watched it multiple times to try and find the “problem with the tape”.
Meredith, Don, and Carl are three of hundreds of Redditors who have used the popular social news site to discuss their memories of Shazaam. Together they have scoured the internet to find evidence that the movie existed but each has repeatedly come up empty-handed. Sinbad himself has even taken to Twitter to deny that he ever played such a role.
How did this Reddit community grow? It all began in 2009. An anonymous individual took to the question-and-answer website Yahoo! Answers to pose its users a simple question. “Do you remember that sinbad movie?” they wrote. “Wasnt there a movie in the early 90s where sinbad the entertainer / comedian played a genie? … help its driving me nuts!”
At the time, nobody remembered the film, and it took another two years for somebody else to ask about it again online. Reddit user MJGSimple wrote on the site: “It’s a conspiracy! I swear this movie exists, anyone have a copy or know where I can find proof!” Replies to the post were sceptical, claiming MJGSimple simply had a false memory.
It wasn’t until last year that things took a dramatic turn.
On 11 August 2015, the popular gonzo news site VICE published a story about a conspiracy theory surrounding the children’s storybook characters the Berenstain Bears. The theory went like this: many people remember that the bears’ name was spelt “Berenstein” – with an “e” – but pictures and old copies proved it was always spelt with an “a”. The fact that so many people had the same false memory was seen as concrete proof of the supernatural.
“Berenstein” truthers believe in something called the “Mandela Effect”: a theory that a large group of people with the same false memory used to live in a parallel universe (the name comes from those who fervently believe that Nelson Mandela died while in prison). VICE’s article about the theory was shared widely, leading thousands of people to r/MandelaEffect, a subreddit for those with false memories to share their experiences.
It was there, just a few hours after the article was posted, that discussions of Shazaam – or the “Sinbad Genie movie” – took off.
“I was dumbfounded to see that there was no evidence of the movie ever being made,” says Carl. “I quickly searched the internet, scouring every way I know how to search, crafting Boolean strings into Google, doing insite: searches, and nothing. Not a damn thing.”
by Amelia Tait, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives
Given that the average lifespan consists of only about 4,000 weeks, a certain amount of anxiety about using them well is presumably inevitable: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make infinitely ambitious plans, yet almost no time at all to put them into practice. The problem of how to manage time, accordingly, goes back at least to the first century AD, when the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote On The Shortness of Life. “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily, and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” he said, chiding his fellow citizens for wasting their days on pointless busyness, and “baking their bodies in the sun”.
Clearly, then, the challenge of how to live our lives well is not a new one. Still, it is safe to say that the citizens of first-century Rome didn’t experience the equivalent of today’s productivity panic. (Seneca’s answer to the question of how to live had nothing to do with becoming more productive: it was to give up the pursuit of wealth or high office, and spend your days philosophising instead.) What is uniquely modern about our fate is that we feel obliged to respond to the pressure of time by making ourselves as efficient as possible – even when doing so fails to bring the promised relief from stress.
The time-pressure problem was always supposed to get better as society advanced, not worse. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that within a century, economic growth would mean that we would be working no more than 15 hours per week – whereupon humanity would face its greatest challenge: that of figuring out how to use all those empty hours. Economists still argue about exactly why things turned out so differently, but the simplest answer is “capitalism”. Keynes seems to have assumed that we would naturally throttle down on work once our essential needs, plus a few extra desires, were satisfied. Instead, we just keep finding new things to need. Depending on your rung of the economic ladder, it’s either impossible, or at least usually feels impossible, to cut down on work in exchange for more time.
Arguably the first time management guru – the progenitor of the notion that personal productivity might be the answer to the problem of time pressure – was Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer hired in 1898 by the Bethlehem Steel Works, in Pennsylvania, with a mandate to improve the firm’s efficiency. “Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as labourers loaded 92lb [iron bars] on to rail cars,” writes Matthew Stewart, in his book The Management Myth. “There were 80,000 tons’ worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American war. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste here, he was certain.”
The Bethlehem workers, Taylor calculated, were shifting about 12.5 tons of iron per man per day – but predictably, when he offered a group of “large, powerful Hungarians” some extra cash to work as fast as they could for an hour, he found that they performed much better. Extrapolating to a full work day, and guesstimating time for breaks, Taylor concluded, with his trademark blend of self-confidence and woolly maths, that every man ought to be shifting 50 tons per day – four times their usual amount.
Workers were naturally unhappy at this transparent attempt to pay them the same money for more work, but Taylor was not especially concerned with their happiness; their job was to implement, not understand, his new philosophy of “scientific management”. “One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron,” wrote Taylor, is “that he shall be so stupid and phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type … he is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning for him.”
The idea of efficiency that Taylor sought to impose on Bethlehem Steel was borrowed from the mechanical engineers of the industrial revolution. It was a way of thinking about improving the functioning of machines, now transferred to humans. And it caught on: Taylor enjoyed a high-profile career as a lecturer on the topic, and by 1915, according to the historian Jennifer Alexander, “the word ‘efficiency’ was plastered everywhere – in headlines, advertisements, editorials, business manuals, and church bulletins.” In the first decades of the 20th century, in a Britain panicked by the rise of German power, the National Efficiency movement united politicians on left and right. (“At the present time,” the Spectator noted in 1902, “there is a universal outcry for efficiency in all the departments of society, in all aspects of life.”)
It is not hard to grasp the appeal: efficiency was the promise of doing what you already did, only better, more cheaply, and in less time. What could be wrong with that? Unless you happened to be on the sharp end of attempts to treat humans like machines – like the workers of Bethlehem Steel – there wasn’t an obvious downside.
But as the century progressed, something important changed: we all became Frederick Winslow Taylors, presiding ruthlessly over our own lives. As the doctrine of efficiency grew entrenched – as the ethos of the market spread to more and more aspects of society, and life became more individualistic – we internalised it. In Taylor’s day, efficiency had been primarily a way to persuade (or bully) other people to do more work in the same amount of time; now it is a regimen that we impose on ourselves. (...)
Time management promised a sense of control in a world in which individuals – decreasingly supported by the social bonds of religion or community – seemed to lack it. In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing, and time management can give you a valuable edge. Indeed, if you are among the growing ranks of the self-employed, as a freelancer or a worker in the so-called gig economy, increased personal efficiency may be essential to your survival. The only person who suffers financially if you indulge in “loafing” – a workplace vice that Taylor saw as theft – is you.
Above all, time management promises that a meaningful life might still be possible in this profit-driven environment, as Melissa Gregg explains in Counterproductive, a forthcoming history of the field. With the right techniques, the prophets of time management all implied, you could fashion a fulfilling life while simultaneously attending to the ever-increasing demands of your employer. This promise “comes back and back, in force, whenever there’s an economic downturn”, Gregg told me.
Especially at the higher-paid end of the employment spectrum, time management whispers of the possibility of something even more desirable: true peace of mind. “It is possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control,” the contemporary king of the productivity gurus, David Allen, declared in his 2001 bestseller, Getting Things Done. “You can experience what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’, and top athletes refer to as ‘the zone’.”
As Gregg points out, it is significant that “personal productivity” puts the burden of reconciling these demands squarely on our shoulders as individuals. Time management gurus rarely stop to ask whether the task of merely staying afloat in the modern economy – holding down a job, paying the mortgage, being a good-enough parent – really ought to require rendering ourselves inhumanly efficient in the first place.
Besides, on closer inspection, even the lesser promises of time management were not all they appeared to be. An awkward truth about Taylor’s celebrated efficiency drives is that they were not very successful: Bethlehem Steel fired him in 1901, having paid him vast sums without any clearly detectable impact on its own profits. (One persistent consequence of his schemes was that they seemed promising at first, but left workers too exhausted to function consistently over the long term.)
Likewise, it remains the frequent experience of those who try to follow the advice of personal productivity gurus – I’m speaking from years of experience here – that a “mind like water” is far from the guaranteed result. As with Inbox Zero, so with work in general: the more efficient you get at ploughing through your tasks, the faster new tasks seem to arrive. (“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” as the British historian C Northcote Parkinson realised way back in 1955, when he coined what would come to be known as Parkinson’s law.)
Then there’s the matter of self-consciousness: virtually every time management expert’s first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever. As for focusing on your long-term goals: the more you do that, the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them. Should you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is strikingly brief – then it’s time to set a new long-term goal. The supposed cure just makes the problem worse.
There is a historical parallel for all this: it’s exactly what happened when the spread of “labour-saving” devices transformed the lives of housewives and domestic servants across Europe and north America from the end of the 19th century. Technology now meant that washing clothes no longer entailed a day bent over a mangle; a vacuum-cleaner could render a carpet spotless in minutes.
Yet as the historian Ruth Cowan demonstrates in her 1983 book More Work for Mother, the result, for much of the 20th century, was not an increase in leisure time among those charged with doing the housework. Instead, as the efficiency of housework increased, so did the standards of cleanliness and domestic order that society came to expect. Now that the living-room carpet could be kept perfectly clean, it had to be; now that clothes never needed to be grubby, grubbiness was all the more taboo. These days, you can answer work emails in bed at midnight. So should that message you got at 5.30pm really wait till morning for a reply? (...)
At the very bottom of our anxious urge to manage time better – the urge driving Frederick Winslow Taylor, Merlin Mann, me and perhaps you – it’s not hard to discern a familiar motive: the fear of death. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it, on any meaningful timescale other than human life itself – that of the planet, say, or the cosmos – “we will all be dead any minute”. No wonder we are so drawn to the problem of how to make better use of our days: if we could solve it, we could avoid the feeling, in Seneca’s words, of finding life at an end just when we were getting ready to live. To die with the sense of nothing left undone: it’s nothing less than the promise of immortality by other means.
But the modern zeal for personal productivity, rooted in Taylor’s philosophy of efficiency, takes things several significant steps further. If only we could find the right techniques and apply enough self-discipline, it suggests, we could know that we were fitting everything important in, and could feel happy at last. It is up to us – indeed, it is our obligation – to maximise our productivity. This is a convenient ideology from the point of view of those who stand to profit from our working harder, and our increased capacity for consumer spending. But it also functions as a form of psychological avoidance. The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices – because there will be enough time for everything – the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.
Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days. “How we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”
Clearly, then, the challenge of how to live our lives well is not a new one. Still, it is safe to say that the citizens of first-century Rome didn’t experience the equivalent of today’s productivity panic. (Seneca’s answer to the question of how to live had nothing to do with becoming more productive: it was to give up the pursuit of wealth or high office, and spend your days philosophising instead.) What is uniquely modern about our fate is that we feel obliged to respond to the pressure of time by making ourselves as efficient as possible – even when doing so fails to bring the promised relief from stress.
The time-pressure problem was always supposed to get better as society advanced, not worse. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that within a century, economic growth would mean that we would be working no more than 15 hours per week – whereupon humanity would face its greatest challenge: that of figuring out how to use all those empty hours. Economists still argue about exactly why things turned out so differently, but the simplest answer is “capitalism”. Keynes seems to have assumed that we would naturally throttle down on work once our essential needs, plus a few extra desires, were satisfied. Instead, we just keep finding new things to need. Depending on your rung of the economic ladder, it’s either impossible, or at least usually feels impossible, to cut down on work in exchange for more time.Arguably the first time management guru – the progenitor of the notion that personal productivity might be the answer to the problem of time pressure – was Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer hired in 1898 by the Bethlehem Steel Works, in Pennsylvania, with a mandate to improve the firm’s efficiency. “Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as labourers loaded 92lb [iron bars] on to rail cars,” writes Matthew Stewart, in his book The Management Myth. “There were 80,000 tons’ worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American war. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste here, he was certain.”
The Bethlehem workers, Taylor calculated, were shifting about 12.5 tons of iron per man per day – but predictably, when he offered a group of “large, powerful Hungarians” some extra cash to work as fast as they could for an hour, he found that they performed much better. Extrapolating to a full work day, and guesstimating time for breaks, Taylor concluded, with his trademark blend of self-confidence and woolly maths, that every man ought to be shifting 50 tons per day – four times their usual amount.
Workers were naturally unhappy at this transparent attempt to pay them the same money for more work, but Taylor was not especially concerned with their happiness; their job was to implement, not understand, his new philosophy of “scientific management”. “One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron,” wrote Taylor, is “that he shall be so stupid and phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type … he is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning for him.”
The idea of efficiency that Taylor sought to impose on Bethlehem Steel was borrowed from the mechanical engineers of the industrial revolution. It was a way of thinking about improving the functioning of machines, now transferred to humans. And it caught on: Taylor enjoyed a high-profile career as a lecturer on the topic, and by 1915, according to the historian Jennifer Alexander, “the word ‘efficiency’ was plastered everywhere – in headlines, advertisements, editorials, business manuals, and church bulletins.” In the first decades of the 20th century, in a Britain panicked by the rise of German power, the National Efficiency movement united politicians on left and right. (“At the present time,” the Spectator noted in 1902, “there is a universal outcry for efficiency in all the departments of society, in all aspects of life.”)
It is not hard to grasp the appeal: efficiency was the promise of doing what you already did, only better, more cheaply, and in less time. What could be wrong with that? Unless you happened to be on the sharp end of attempts to treat humans like machines – like the workers of Bethlehem Steel – there wasn’t an obvious downside.
But as the century progressed, something important changed: we all became Frederick Winslow Taylors, presiding ruthlessly over our own lives. As the doctrine of efficiency grew entrenched – as the ethos of the market spread to more and more aspects of society, and life became more individualistic – we internalised it. In Taylor’s day, efficiency had been primarily a way to persuade (or bully) other people to do more work in the same amount of time; now it is a regimen that we impose on ourselves. (...)
Time management promised a sense of control in a world in which individuals – decreasingly supported by the social bonds of religion or community – seemed to lack it. In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing, and time management can give you a valuable edge. Indeed, if you are among the growing ranks of the self-employed, as a freelancer or a worker in the so-called gig economy, increased personal efficiency may be essential to your survival. The only person who suffers financially if you indulge in “loafing” – a workplace vice that Taylor saw as theft – is you.
Above all, time management promises that a meaningful life might still be possible in this profit-driven environment, as Melissa Gregg explains in Counterproductive, a forthcoming history of the field. With the right techniques, the prophets of time management all implied, you could fashion a fulfilling life while simultaneously attending to the ever-increasing demands of your employer. This promise “comes back and back, in force, whenever there’s an economic downturn”, Gregg told me.
Especially at the higher-paid end of the employment spectrum, time management whispers of the possibility of something even more desirable: true peace of mind. “It is possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control,” the contemporary king of the productivity gurus, David Allen, declared in his 2001 bestseller, Getting Things Done. “You can experience what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’, and top athletes refer to as ‘the zone’.”
As Gregg points out, it is significant that “personal productivity” puts the burden of reconciling these demands squarely on our shoulders as individuals. Time management gurus rarely stop to ask whether the task of merely staying afloat in the modern economy – holding down a job, paying the mortgage, being a good-enough parent – really ought to require rendering ourselves inhumanly efficient in the first place.
Besides, on closer inspection, even the lesser promises of time management were not all they appeared to be. An awkward truth about Taylor’s celebrated efficiency drives is that they were not very successful: Bethlehem Steel fired him in 1901, having paid him vast sums without any clearly detectable impact on its own profits. (One persistent consequence of his schemes was that they seemed promising at first, but left workers too exhausted to function consistently over the long term.)
Likewise, it remains the frequent experience of those who try to follow the advice of personal productivity gurus – I’m speaking from years of experience here – that a “mind like water” is far from the guaranteed result. As with Inbox Zero, so with work in general: the more efficient you get at ploughing through your tasks, the faster new tasks seem to arrive. (“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” as the British historian C Northcote Parkinson realised way back in 1955, when he coined what would come to be known as Parkinson’s law.)
Then there’s the matter of self-consciousness: virtually every time management expert’s first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever. As for focusing on your long-term goals: the more you do that, the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them. Should you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is strikingly brief – then it’s time to set a new long-term goal. The supposed cure just makes the problem worse.
There is a historical parallel for all this: it’s exactly what happened when the spread of “labour-saving” devices transformed the lives of housewives and domestic servants across Europe and north America from the end of the 19th century. Technology now meant that washing clothes no longer entailed a day bent over a mangle; a vacuum-cleaner could render a carpet spotless in minutes.
Yet as the historian Ruth Cowan demonstrates in her 1983 book More Work for Mother, the result, for much of the 20th century, was not an increase in leisure time among those charged with doing the housework. Instead, as the efficiency of housework increased, so did the standards of cleanliness and domestic order that society came to expect. Now that the living-room carpet could be kept perfectly clean, it had to be; now that clothes never needed to be grubby, grubbiness was all the more taboo. These days, you can answer work emails in bed at midnight. So should that message you got at 5.30pm really wait till morning for a reply? (...)
At the very bottom of our anxious urge to manage time better – the urge driving Frederick Winslow Taylor, Merlin Mann, me and perhaps you – it’s not hard to discern a familiar motive: the fear of death. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it, on any meaningful timescale other than human life itself – that of the planet, say, or the cosmos – “we will all be dead any minute”. No wonder we are so drawn to the problem of how to make better use of our days: if we could solve it, we could avoid the feeling, in Seneca’s words, of finding life at an end just when we were getting ready to live. To die with the sense of nothing left undone: it’s nothing less than the promise of immortality by other means.
But the modern zeal for personal productivity, rooted in Taylor’s philosophy of efficiency, takes things several significant steps further. If only we could find the right techniques and apply enough self-discipline, it suggests, we could know that we were fitting everything important in, and could feel happy at last. It is up to us – indeed, it is our obligation – to maximise our productivity. This is a convenient ideology from the point of view of those who stand to profit from our working harder, and our increased capacity for consumer spending. But it also functions as a form of psychological avoidance. The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices – because there will be enough time for everything – the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.
Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days. “How we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”
by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Pete Gamlen
A Telephone Call
[ed. See also: Ladies in Waiting]
Please, God, let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now. I won't ask anything else of You, truly I won't. It isn't very much to ask. It would be so little to You, God, such a little, little thing. Only let him telephone now. Please, God. Please, please, please.
Please, God, let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now. I won't ask anything else of You, truly I won't. It isn't very much to ask. It would be so little to You, God, such a little, little thing. Only let him telephone now. Please, God. Please, please, please.
If I didn't think about it, maybe the telephone might ring. Sometimes it does that. If I could think of something else. If I could think of something else. Maybe if I counted five hundred by fives, it might ring by that time. I'll count slowly. I won't cheat. And if it rings when I get to three hundred, I won't stop; I won't answer it until I get to five hundred. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty.... Oh, please ring. Please."I'll call you at five, darling." "Good-by, darling.,' He was busy, and he was in a hurry, and there were people around him, but he called me "darling" twice. That's mine, that's mine. I have that, even if I never see him again. Oh, but that's so little. That isn't enough. Nothing's enough, if I never see him again. Please let me see him again, God. Please, I want him so much. I want him so much. I'll be good, God. I will try to be better, I will, If you will let me see him again. If You will let him telephone me. Oh, let him telephone me now.
Ah, don't let my prayer seem too little to You, God. You sit up there, so white and old, with all the angels about You and the stars slipping by. And I come to You with a prayer about a telephone call. Ah, don't laugh, God. You see, You don't know how it feels. You're so safe, there on Your throne, with the blue swirling under You. Nothing can touch You; no one can twist Your heart in his hands. This is suffering, God, this is bad, bad suffering. Won't You help me? For Your Son's sake, help me. You said You would do whatever was asked of You in His name. Oh, God, in the name of Thine only beloved Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, let him telephone me now.
I must stop this. I mustn't be this way. Look. Suppose a young man says he'll call a girl up, and then something happens, and he doesn't. That isn't so terrible, is it? Why, it's gong on all over the world, right this minute. Oh, what do I care what's going on all over the world? Why can't that telephone ring? Why can't it, why can't it? Couldn't you ring? Ah, please, couldn't you? You damned, ugly, shiny thing. It would hurt you to ring, wouldn't it? Oh, that would hurt you. Damn you, I'll pull your filthy roots out of the wall, I'll smash your smug black face in little bits. Damn you to hell.
No, no, no. I must stop. I must think about something else. This is what I'll do. I'll put the clock in the other room. Then I can't look at it. If I do have to look at it, then I'll have to walk into the bedroom, and that will be something to do. Maybe, before I look at it again, he will call me. I'll be so sweet to him, if he calls me. If he says he can't see me tonight, I'll say, "Why, that's all right, dear. Why, of course it's all right." I'll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he'll like me again. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
by Dorothy Parker, Classic Short Stories | Read more:
Image: via:
Invasion of the Agency Snatchers
“At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”
Those lines are from the opening voice-over in a great midcentury American movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Giant vegetable pods mysteriously arrive in a typical American town. Each takes over the identity of a local inhabitant, becoming an exact likeness except for the absence of emotion and of everything else that makes a person human. The town’s brave doctor tries to sound the alarm, but no one believes him, and it’s too late anyway. Trucks piled high with pods are rolling inexorably across the landscape.
The date was 1956. Many viewed the film as an allegory, although to what remains in dispute 60 years later. Some saw the soulless automatons that the pod people became as a reference to Communism. Others saw the target as McCarthyism. (The director, Don Siegel, denied any political message. “I think the world is populated by pods, and I wanted to show them,” he once explained.)
Personally, I see the Trump cabinet.
Stay with me and picture the first cabinet meeting. The white (almost all) men (almost all) sitting around the table will look like their predecessors, generations of them. But they won’t be the same as their predecessors, not at all. They will have been placed in their positions and handed the reins of power not to govern, but to destroy.
It’s not only Rick Perry, the former Texas governor whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has named to head the Department of Energy. Mr. Perry so disdained that department when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2011 that he blanked on its name when listing the federal agencies he wanted to abolish. It’s also Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma state attorney general, who has devoted his adult life to fighting environmental regulation in partnership with his financial backers in the oil industry, named to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s Tom Price, the congressman-doctor from Georgia who doesn’t believe the federal government has an affirmative role to play in health care, named as secretary of health and human services. Or another congressman, Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, a founder of the House Republicans’ Freedom Caucus who would rather shut down the government than pass a budget, named to be the White House budget director. It’s Wilbur Ross, named to head the Commerce Department after having made a fortune as an investor, buying and dismantling distressed industrial corporations. (Explain that to the voters who believed a Trump presidency would save their factory jobs.)
And it’s Ben Carson, at odds with the core mission of the Fair Housing Act insofar as he understands it, chosen as secretary of housing and urban development. And Betsy DeVos, named to head the Department of Education, for whom charter schools are the answer to the problems of public education.
Let’s not forget Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama good old boy, whose history of insensitive racial comments kept him from a Federal District Court seat in 1986, now picked to be attorney general. He’s Trent Lott without the charm. (You remember Trent Lott, the Mississippi senator who in 2002 lost his position as Senate majority leader for observing at the 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond, the longtime Republican senator from South Carolina, that the country could have avoided “all these problems” if only Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid for a segregationist third party had succeeded. In today’s America, that rhetorical gaffe might have propelled Senator Lott to the White House instead of out the door of the leadership suite.)
Then there is Andrew F. Puzder, the fast-food executive and opponent of raising the minimum wage, chosen as secretary of labor. He is a longtime anti-abortion activist who, as a lawyer defending people charged with blocking access to abortion clinics, has offered a “defense of necessity,” namely that abortion itself is a greater offense than a clinic blockage. I shouldn’t omit Rex Tillerson, chosen as secretary of state after a career spent at Exxon Mobil supporting fossil fuel and cultivating connections with Russia. (Am I the only one to notice that Mr. Tillerson and Darren Woods, named by Exxon Mobil to succeed him as its president, appear in their corporate headshots as eerily exact likenesses?) President-elect Trump’s selection of his bankruptcy lawyer, David M. Friedman, a shill for the Israeli right wing, to be ambassador to Israel is eyebrow raising, to say the least, in that Mr. Friedman’s outspoken support of West Bank settlements and opposition to a two-state solution is at odds with longstanding United States policy.
Maybe there really are giant pods waiting for the moment when simulacra of actual cabinet officers slip into the seats behind those big desks. A smart piece by Michael D. Shear in The Times earlier this week referred to most of the Trump nominees as “disrupters” who “aim to unnerve Washington.” Disrupters, destroyers — the scale of the degradation that will occur is so astonishing that no one word is adequate to encompass it. (Mr. Perry, the has-been politician, as secretary of energy may represent the most head-snapping degradation of all, given that it was not so long ago that President Obama placed a Nobel laureate physicist, Steven Chu, in that highly sensitive position.) A great phrase from Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” comes to mind: “the surrealism that is at the heart of journalism.” At such a time as this, words fail and only images remain. That’s why I can’t get the giant pods out of my mind.
Those lines are from the opening voice-over in a great midcentury American movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Giant vegetable pods mysteriously arrive in a typical American town. Each takes over the identity of a local inhabitant, becoming an exact likeness except for the absence of emotion and of everything else that makes a person human. The town’s brave doctor tries to sound the alarm, but no one believes him, and it’s too late anyway. Trucks piled high with pods are rolling inexorably across the landscape.
The date was 1956. Many viewed the film as an allegory, although to what remains in dispute 60 years later. Some saw the soulless automatons that the pod people became as a reference to Communism. Others saw the target as McCarthyism. (The director, Don Siegel, denied any political message. “I think the world is populated by pods, and I wanted to show them,” he once explained.)Personally, I see the Trump cabinet.
Stay with me and picture the first cabinet meeting. The white (almost all) men (almost all) sitting around the table will look like their predecessors, generations of them. But they won’t be the same as their predecessors, not at all. They will have been placed in their positions and handed the reins of power not to govern, but to destroy.
It’s not only Rick Perry, the former Texas governor whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has named to head the Department of Energy. Mr. Perry so disdained that department when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2011 that he blanked on its name when listing the federal agencies he wanted to abolish. It’s also Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma state attorney general, who has devoted his adult life to fighting environmental regulation in partnership with his financial backers in the oil industry, named to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s Tom Price, the congressman-doctor from Georgia who doesn’t believe the federal government has an affirmative role to play in health care, named as secretary of health and human services. Or another congressman, Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, a founder of the House Republicans’ Freedom Caucus who would rather shut down the government than pass a budget, named to be the White House budget director. It’s Wilbur Ross, named to head the Commerce Department after having made a fortune as an investor, buying and dismantling distressed industrial corporations. (Explain that to the voters who believed a Trump presidency would save their factory jobs.)
And it’s Ben Carson, at odds with the core mission of the Fair Housing Act insofar as he understands it, chosen as secretary of housing and urban development. And Betsy DeVos, named to head the Department of Education, for whom charter schools are the answer to the problems of public education.
Let’s not forget Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama good old boy, whose history of insensitive racial comments kept him from a Federal District Court seat in 1986, now picked to be attorney general. He’s Trent Lott without the charm. (You remember Trent Lott, the Mississippi senator who in 2002 lost his position as Senate majority leader for observing at the 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond, the longtime Republican senator from South Carolina, that the country could have avoided “all these problems” if only Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid for a segregationist third party had succeeded. In today’s America, that rhetorical gaffe might have propelled Senator Lott to the White House instead of out the door of the leadership suite.)
Then there is Andrew F. Puzder, the fast-food executive and opponent of raising the minimum wage, chosen as secretary of labor. He is a longtime anti-abortion activist who, as a lawyer defending people charged with blocking access to abortion clinics, has offered a “defense of necessity,” namely that abortion itself is a greater offense than a clinic blockage. I shouldn’t omit Rex Tillerson, chosen as secretary of state after a career spent at Exxon Mobil supporting fossil fuel and cultivating connections with Russia. (Am I the only one to notice that Mr. Tillerson and Darren Woods, named by Exxon Mobil to succeed him as its president, appear in their corporate headshots as eerily exact likenesses?) President-elect Trump’s selection of his bankruptcy lawyer, David M. Friedman, a shill for the Israeli right wing, to be ambassador to Israel is eyebrow raising, to say the least, in that Mr. Friedman’s outspoken support of West Bank settlements and opposition to a two-state solution is at odds with longstanding United States policy.
Maybe there really are giant pods waiting for the moment when simulacra of actual cabinet officers slip into the seats behind those big desks. A smart piece by Michael D. Shear in The Times earlier this week referred to most of the Trump nominees as “disrupters” who “aim to unnerve Washington.” Disrupters, destroyers — the scale of the degradation that will occur is so astonishing that no one word is adequate to encompass it. (Mr. Perry, the has-been politician, as secretary of energy may represent the most head-snapping degradation of all, given that it was not so long ago that President Obama placed a Nobel laureate physicist, Steven Chu, in that highly sensitive position.) A great phrase from Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” comes to mind: “the surrealism that is at the heart of journalism.” At such a time as this, words fail and only images remain. That’s why I can’t get the giant pods out of my mind.
by Linda Greenhouse, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Allied Artists/Getty Images
One Problem for Democratic Leaders Is Democratic Voters
[ed. There's a lot to be learned including new attitudes toward Vladimir Putin and Wikileaks (and how quickly public opinion changes). More importantly, has anyone ever heard of the Industry Trade Advisory Committees and their roles in negotiating trade agreements? Not me. Editorial emphasis below:]
Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota and a candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, argues that Democrats “have to stand for a strong, populist economic message.” He warns that “the way the working class is always controlled is that it’s divided.” (...)Mark Muro, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, analyzed the differences between those communities that supported Hillary Clinton and those that backed Donald Trump. The findings of Muro and Sifan Liu, a Brookings research assistant, suggest that Democrats who are calling for a return to progressive populism will encounter more hurdles than they expect.
In their Nov. 29 essay, “Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs low-output America,” Muro and Liu determined that:
The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015.
In other words, the Clinton counties are the ones in which the economy is booming; they are hardly fertile territory for a worker insurrection.Muro enlarged on his findings in an email:
America’s most important, competitive, and often export-intensive industries — what we call its “advanced” industries — cluster tightly in such metro counties. Some 70 percent of these crown-jewel industries are concentrated in the 100-largest metros — the core of what Hillary won.In a separate February 2015 study, “America’s Advanced Industries,” Muro and four colleagues report that the 50 industries in this heavily high-tech sector are crucial to America’s future growth:
These industries encompass the nation’s “tech” sector at its broadest and most consequential. Their dynamism is going to be a central component of any future revitalized U.S. economy. As such, these industries encompass the country’s best shot at supporting innovative, inclusive, and sustainable growth.The importance of these industries does not stop there:
At the same time, the sector employs 80 percent of the nation’s engineers; performs 90 percent of private-sector R & D; generates approximately 85 percent of all U.S. patents; and accounts for 60 percent of U.S. exports. Advanced industries also support unusually extensive supply chains and other forms of ancillary economic activity. On a per worker basis, advanced industries purchase $236,000 in goods and services from other businesses annually, compared with $67,000 in purchasing by other industries. (...)
Democrats addressing trade and globalization concerns face not only a base sharply split over these issues, but also growing difficulties in the party’s traditional responses to employment dislocation. Both job training and education have become increasingly ineffective.
An August 2016 study by Robert G. Valletta, an economist at the Federal Reserve in San Francisco, “Recent Flattening in the Higher Education Wage Premium,” shows that since 2010 the steadily rising economic gains from completing college and, even more so, from a graduate degree, have leveled off.
The swelling number of workers with postsecondary education combined with the worldwide economic slowdown have resulted in a process economists call “skill downsizing.” Those with graduate degrees are forced to take jobs that a college graduate could do, college graduates are forced to take jobs that someone with less education could do, and so on down the line, leaving fewer and fewer good jobs for the newly trained or retrained.
What would a progressive approach to globalization look like? A call for a radical reform of the trade negotiation process to curb the leverage of corporate and special interests is one Democratic alternative.
This leverage has been institutionalized through the creation of Industry Trade Advisory Committees that grant special access to trade negotiations to corporations ranging from pharmaceuticals to aerospace, energy to investment banks, steel to textiles.
Two critics of current trade policy, Jared Bernstein, a former economics adviser to Vice President Biden, and Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, wrote a September 2016 essay for the American Prospect, “The New Rules of the Road: A Progressive Approach to Globalization” in which they acknowledge some basic facts:
Conciliation along these lines has become more difficult as international competition crosses national boundaries, indifferent to domestic regulation and legislation. The 2016 election demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that ducking and weaving around the anguish of displaced workers guarantees sustained minority status.
The nation’s displaced work force includes not only the white working class but millions of Hispanics and African-Americans who are loyal to the Democratic Party. Effective and muscular policies focused on reversing the devastation that globalized trade, automation and competition with foreign workers have inflicted on middle and lower income Americans are essential to encourage defecting whites to return to Democratic ranks — and they are also crucial for reviving Election Day enthusiasm among the nation’s growing population of minority voters. In this regard, the political desires of the two groups are not irreconcilable.
An August 2016 study by Robert G. Valletta, an economist at the Federal Reserve in San Francisco, “Recent Flattening in the Higher Education Wage Premium,” shows that since 2010 the steadily rising economic gains from completing college and, even more so, from a graduate degree, have leveled off.
The swelling number of workers with postsecondary education combined with the worldwide economic slowdown have resulted in a process economists call “skill downsizing.” Those with graduate degrees are forced to take jobs that a college graduate could do, college graduates are forced to take jobs that someone with less education could do, and so on down the line, leaving fewer and fewer good jobs for the newly trained or retrained.
What would a progressive approach to globalization look like? A call for a radical reform of the trade negotiation process to curb the leverage of corporate and special interests is one Democratic alternative.
This leverage has been institutionalized through the creation of Industry Trade Advisory Committees that grant special access to trade negotiations to corporations ranging from pharmaceuticals to aerospace, energy to investment banks, steel to textiles.
Two critics of current trade policy, Jared Bernstein, a former economics adviser to Vice President Biden, and Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, wrote a September 2016 essay for the American Prospect, “The New Rules of the Road: A Progressive Approach to Globalization” in which they acknowledge some basic facts:
Despite Trump’s nostalgia for a bygone era when the United States was insulated from global trade, stopping or slowing trade is not at issue. Global trade volumes — imports plus exports — have grown from 25 percent of global GDP in the mid-1960s to 60 percent today. In the United States, that same metric has grown from 10 percent to 30 percent.Bernstein and Wallach go on to point out that trade agreements
are not mainly about cutting tariffs to expand trade nor are they about jobs, growth, and incomes here in the United States. Rather, they’re about setting expansive “rules of the road” that determine who wins and who loses.The problem is not with trade itself, which the authors recognize is both desirable and inevitable, but lies instead in the design of the negotiation process:
With 500 official U.S. trade advisers representing corporate interests having been given special access to the policy process while the public, press, and largely Congress have been shut out, it is not surprising that corporate interests have thoroughly captured the negotiating process and ensured they are the ‘winners’ under these rules.Bernstein and Wallach make a potentially constructive attempt to deal with one aspect of the Democratic Party’s key dilemma: the struggle to prevail in national elections while accommodating the conflicting interests of diverse constituencies — including the conflict between the Sanders-Warren-Ellison wing and the free-trade wing.
Conciliation along these lines has become more difficult as international competition crosses national boundaries, indifferent to domestic regulation and legislation. The 2016 election demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that ducking and weaving around the anguish of displaced workers guarantees sustained minority status.
The nation’s displaced work force includes not only the white working class but millions of Hispanics and African-Americans who are loyal to the Democratic Party. Effective and muscular policies focused on reversing the devastation that globalized trade, automation and competition with foreign workers have inflicted on middle and lower income Americans are essential to encourage defecting whites to return to Democratic ranks — and they are also crucial for reviving Election Day enthusiasm among the nation’s growing population of minority voters. In this regard, the political desires of the two groups are not irreconcilable.
by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Pew Research Center/NY Times
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Red Flags Waving
“Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!”
- Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
There are several instances across history when valuations have broken well-beyond their historical norms, as the speculative “animal spirits” of investors have scrambled off like greased pigs at a rodeo. Those speculative episodes were typically concluded by one of two events: 1) a combination of overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions appearing as a joint syndrome, or 2) deteriorating uniformity and widening dispersion of market internals across a broad range of individual securities, industries, sectors, and security-types, indicating a subtle shift among investors toward risk-aversion (when investors are risk-seeking, they tend to be indiscriminate about it).
Indeed, in market cycles across history, those two events were regularly “stuck together,” in the sense that overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes were typically either accompanied or closely followed by deterioration in market internals. That regularity turned out to be our Achilles Heel in the half-cycle since 2009. After admirably navigating previous complete market cycles, I insisted on stress-testing our methods against Depression-era data in 2009. The resulting methods picked up the fact that overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes were consistently associated with market losses across history, and we responded by taking a hard-negative market outlook when they appeared. The problem in the half-cycle since 2009 was that zero interest rates - and specifically short-term interest rates below about 10 basis points - acted as a kind of “solvent” that separated the two events, and encouraged yield-seeking speculation by investors long after extreme overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions had emerged. In the presence of zero-interest rate policy, one had to wait for market internals to deteriorate explicitly before adopting a hard-negative market outlook.
We presently observe the third most overvalued extreme in history based on the most reliable valuation measures we identify, in the presence of 1) the most extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndrome we identify, and 2) explicitly deteriorating market internals. Based on a composite of measures best correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history, other two competing extremes were 1929 and 2000.
After more than three decades as a professional investor, it’s become clear that when investors are euphoric, they are incapable of recognizing euphoria itself. Presently, we hear inexplicable assertions that somehow euphoria hasn’t taken hold. Yet in addition to the third greatest valuation extreme in history for the market, the single greatest valuation extreme for the median stock, and expectations for economic growth that are inconsistent with basic arithmetic, both the 4-week average of advisory bullishness and the bull-bear spread are higher today than at either the 2000 or 2007 market peaks. In the recent half-cycle, extreme bullish sentiment and deteriorating market internals also preceded the near-20% decline in 2011, yet extreme bullish sentiment was also uneventful on a few occasions when interest rates were in the single digits and market internals were intact. That distinction is critical. The zero-rate “solvent” that allowed overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes to detach from deteriorating market internals and downside risk is now gone, and investors should understand that subtlety.
As a side note, among popular alternatives, Investors Intelligence publishes one of the better surveys of bullish/bearish sentiment, while the AAII survey is far noisier. For our part, we focus on a slightly different balance, between trend-sensitive and value-conscious investor groups. As I detailed in Lessons From the Iron Law of Equilibrium:
“When prices are unusually elevated relative to the norm, it’s almost always because trend-followers (and other price-insensitive buyers) are ‘all in.’ Those positions are - and in fact have to be - offset by equal and opposite underweights by value-conscious investors. A sudden increase in the desired holdings of trend-sensitive traders has to be satisfied by inducing a price increase large enough to give value-conscious investors an incentive to sell. Conversely, a sudden decrease in the desired holdings of trend-sensitive traders has to be satisfied by inducing a price decline large enough to give value-conscious investors an incentive to buy. Any tendency of investors to buy on greed and sell on fear obviously amplifies this process.
“From this perspective, (and one can show this in simulation), what we’re really interested in is not the balance between bulls and bears per se, but the balance of sentiment between trend-sensitive and value-conscious investors. Market tops emerge when trend-followers are beating their chests while value-conscious investors are nursing bruises from their shorts. Market bottoms are formed when trend-followers wouldn’t even touch the market, and value-conscious investors are bleeding from all of the falling knives they’ve accumulated.”
Valuation update
Over a century ago, Charles Dow wrote “To know values is to comprehend the meaning of movements in the market.” To offer a long-term and full-cycle perspective of current market conditions, I published a chart last week of the ratio of nonfinancial market capitalization to corporate gross value added, including estimated foreign revenues (what I’ve called MarketCap/GVA), and a second chart relating that measure to the actual 12-year S&P 500 total returns that have followed. From present valuation extremes, we expect 12-year S&P 500 total returns averaging just 0.8% annually, with a likely interim market collapse over the completion of this cycle on the order of 50-60%. Valuations are poor tools to gauge near-term market outcomes, but they are both invaluable and brutally honest about potential consequences over the complete market cycle. They also offer a consistent framework to understand market fluctuations. Recall for example, my April 2007 estimate of a 40% loss to fair-value, and then following that 40% loss, my late-October 2008 comment observing that stocks had become undervalued. Over the complete market cycle, valuation is quite a strong suit for us.
Similarly, as I wrote at the March 2000 bubble peak:
“Investors have turned the market into a carnival, where everybody ‘knows’ that the new rides are the good rides, and the old rides just don’t work. Where the carnival barkers seem to hand out free money for just showing up. Unfortunately, this business is not that kind - it has always been true that in every pyramid, in every easy-money sure-thing, the first ones to get out are the only ones to get out... One of the things that you may have noticed is that our downside targets for the market don’t simply slide up in parallel with the market. Most analysts have an ingrained ‘15% correction’ mentality, such that no matter how high prices advance, the probable maximum downside risk is just 15% or so (and that would be considered bad). Factually speaking, however, that’s not the way it works... The inconvenient fact is that valuation ultimately matters. That has led to the rather peculiar risk projections that have appeared in this letter in recent months. Trend uniformity helps to postpone that reality, but in the end, there it is... Over time, price/revenue ratios come back into line. Currently, that would require an 83% plunge in tech stocks (recall the 1969-70 tech massacre). The plunge may be muted to about 65% given several years of revenue growth. If you understand values and market history, you know we’re not joking.”
As it happened, the S&P 500 lost half of its value by the October 2002 low, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index lost an oddly precise 83% of its value.
With regard to the advancing half-cycle since 2009, I can be reasonably criticized for my insistence on stress-testing our methods in response to the global financial crisis (which we anticipated, but that also produced outcomes that were "out of sample" from a post-war perspective). My well-intended fiduciary inclination inadvertently shot us in the foot, because the resulting approach to classifying market return/risk profiles embedded a regularity of both Depression-era and post-war market cycles that, in this cycle, was disrupted by zero-interest rate policy. Our mid-2014 adaptations resolved that issue. Though I’m convinced that our methods have ultimately come out stronger, the criticism is legitimate, as is criticism about the time it took to disentangle and address the underlying issue. That said, investors are entirely misguided if they believe that those challenges in this cycle give them a "free pass" to ignore obscene valuations. If investors rule out the potential for the S&P 500 to lose 50-60% of its value over the completion of this cycle, they’re actually ruling out an outcome that would be wholly run-of-the-mill from a historical perspective, given current valuation extremes. They’re also ignoring that my previous risk estimates in prior cycles were devastatingly correct.
Disciplined investing isn't easy (and whenever it seems like it is, you're about to learn a costly lesson). The market has been in a more than two-year top-formation with internals lagging the major indices, with investors chasing high-beta stocks (those with amplified sensitivity to market fluctuations), and with rather shallow corrections from a full-cycle perspective. All of that has been a headwind for value-conscious hedged-equity strategies, but it won’t prevent the completion of this market cycle. Indeed, our impression is that the recent swing by investors from active to passive investment strategies represents nothing but performance-chasing, at a point where valuations imply historically low prospective 12-year returns for a conventional portfolio mix. If history is a guide, nobody will remember the patience, discipline, and tolerance for frustration that were required to avoid or to benefit from the 50-60% market loss that we estimate over the completion of this cycle. A focus on market internals may help, but even the less-extended 2000 and 2007 peaks were frustrating for us. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote decades ago about the Great Crash, “Only a durable sense of doom could survive such discouragement.” Meanwhile, distinguish full-cycle outcomes from immediate outcomes. They can often be two quite different objects. (...)
Emphatically, our pointed concerns about market risk would quickly ease to a neutral outlook if our measures of market internals were to become favorable. Again, the reason is that overvaluation typically gives way to sharp market losses only during segments of the market cycle when investors have subtly shifted toward risk-aversion. Since risk-seeking speculators tend to be indiscriminate about that speculation, the best measure we’ve found to infer those risk-seeking or risk-averse preferences is the uniformity or divergence of market action across a broad range of internals.
So while our long-term (10-12 year) expectations for S&P 500 returns remain near zero, and we now expect a 50-60% market retreat over the completion of this cycle (an outcome that would be only run-of-the-mill from present valuation extremes), our expectations about more immediate market outcomes will remain heavily driven by the quality of market action we observe at each point in time. Presently, those measures are hostile, which is why we’ve got red flags waving, but a shift toward favorable uniformity across our measures of market internals would defer those concerns. Put simply, market conditions don’t forecast or require a near-term market collapse. Rather, they are currently permissive of a market collapse, and on average, market returns under such conditions have historically been quite negative until those conditions have cleared.
by John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Hussman Funds | Read more:
- Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
There are several instances across history when valuations have broken well-beyond their historical norms, as the speculative “animal spirits” of investors have scrambled off like greased pigs at a rodeo. Those speculative episodes were typically concluded by one of two events: 1) a combination of overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions appearing as a joint syndrome, or 2) deteriorating uniformity and widening dispersion of market internals across a broad range of individual securities, industries, sectors, and security-types, indicating a subtle shift among investors toward risk-aversion (when investors are risk-seeking, they tend to be indiscriminate about it).
Indeed, in market cycles across history, those two events were regularly “stuck together,” in the sense that overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes were typically either accompanied or closely followed by deterioration in market internals. That regularity turned out to be our Achilles Heel in the half-cycle since 2009. After admirably navigating previous complete market cycles, I insisted on stress-testing our methods against Depression-era data in 2009. The resulting methods picked up the fact that overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes were consistently associated with market losses across history, and we responded by taking a hard-negative market outlook when they appeared. The problem in the half-cycle since 2009 was that zero interest rates - and specifically short-term interest rates below about 10 basis points - acted as a kind of “solvent” that separated the two events, and encouraged yield-seeking speculation by investors long after extreme overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions had emerged. In the presence of zero-interest rate policy, one had to wait for market internals to deteriorate explicitly before adopting a hard-negative market outlook.We presently observe the third most overvalued extreme in history based on the most reliable valuation measures we identify, in the presence of 1) the most extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndrome we identify, and 2) explicitly deteriorating market internals. Based on a composite of measures best correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history, other two competing extremes were 1929 and 2000.
After more than three decades as a professional investor, it’s become clear that when investors are euphoric, they are incapable of recognizing euphoria itself. Presently, we hear inexplicable assertions that somehow euphoria hasn’t taken hold. Yet in addition to the third greatest valuation extreme in history for the market, the single greatest valuation extreme for the median stock, and expectations for economic growth that are inconsistent with basic arithmetic, both the 4-week average of advisory bullishness and the bull-bear spread are higher today than at either the 2000 or 2007 market peaks. In the recent half-cycle, extreme bullish sentiment and deteriorating market internals also preceded the near-20% decline in 2011, yet extreme bullish sentiment was also uneventful on a few occasions when interest rates were in the single digits and market internals were intact. That distinction is critical. The zero-rate “solvent” that allowed overvalued, overbought, overbullish extremes to detach from deteriorating market internals and downside risk is now gone, and investors should understand that subtlety.
As a side note, among popular alternatives, Investors Intelligence publishes one of the better surveys of bullish/bearish sentiment, while the AAII survey is far noisier. For our part, we focus on a slightly different balance, between trend-sensitive and value-conscious investor groups. As I detailed in Lessons From the Iron Law of Equilibrium:
“When prices are unusually elevated relative to the norm, it’s almost always because trend-followers (and other price-insensitive buyers) are ‘all in.’ Those positions are - and in fact have to be - offset by equal and opposite underweights by value-conscious investors. A sudden increase in the desired holdings of trend-sensitive traders has to be satisfied by inducing a price increase large enough to give value-conscious investors an incentive to sell. Conversely, a sudden decrease in the desired holdings of trend-sensitive traders has to be satisfied by inducing a price decline large enough to give value-conscious investors an incentive to buy. Any tendency of investors to buy on greed and sell on fear obviously amplifies this process.
“From this perspective, (and one can show this in simulation), what we’re really interested in is not the balance between bulls and bears per se, but the balance of sentiment between trend-sensitive and value-conscious investors. Market tops emerge when trend-followers are beating their chests while value-conscious investors are nursing bruises from their shorts. Market bottoms are formed when trend-followers wouldn’t even touch the market, and value-conscious investors are bleeding from all of the falling knives they’ve accumulated.”
Valuation update
Over a century ago, Charles Dow wrote “To know values is to comprehend the meaning of movements in the market.” To offer a long-term and full-cycle perspective of current market conditions, I published a chart last week of the ratio of nonfinancial market capitalization to corporate gross value added, including estimated foreign revenues (what I’ve called MarketCap/GVA), and a second chart relating that measure to the actual 12-year S&P 500 total returns that have followed. From present valuation extremes, we expect 12-year S&P 500 total returns averaging just 0.8% annually, with a likely interim market collapse over the completion of this cycle on the order of 50-60%. Valuations are poor tools to gauge near-term market outcomes, but they are both invaluable and brutally honest about potential consequences over the complete market cycle. They also offer a consistent framework to understand market fluctuations. Recall for example, my April 2007 estimate of a 40% loss to fair-value, and then following that 40% loss, my late-October 2008 comment observing that stocks had become undervalued. Over the complete market cycle, valuation is quite a strong suit for us.
Similarly, as I wrote at the March 2000 bubble peak:
“Investors have turned the market into a carnival, where everybody ‘knows’ that the new rides are the good rides, and the old rides just don’t work. Where the carnival barkers seem to hand out free money for just showing up. Unfortunately, this business is not that kind - it has always been true that in every pyramid, in every easy-money sure-thing, the first ones to get out are the only ones to get out... One of the things that you may have noticed is that our downside targets for the market don’t simply slide up in parallel with the market. Most analysts have an ingrained ‘15% correction’ mentality, such that no matter how high prices advance, the probable maximum downside risk is just 15% or so (and that would be considered bad). Factually speaking, however, that’s not the way it works... The inconvenient fact is that valuation ultimately matters. That has led to the rather peculiar risk projections that have appeared in this letter in recent months. Trend uniformity helps to postpone that reality, but in the end, there it is... Over time, price/revenue ratios come back into line. Currently, that would require an 83% plunge in tech stocks (recall the 1969-70 tech massacre). The plunge may be muted to about 65% given several years of revenue growth. If you understand values and market history, you know we’re not joking.”
As it happened, the S&P 500 lost half of its value by the October 2002 low, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index lost an oddly precise 83% of its value.
With regard to the advancing half-cycle since 2009, I can be reasonably criticized for my insistence on stress-testing our methods in response to the global financial crisis (which we anticipated, but that also produced outcomes that were "out of sample" from a post-war perspective). My well-intended fiduciary inclination inadvertently shot us in the foot, because the resulting approach to classifying market return/risk profiles embedded a regularity of both Depression-era and post-war market cycles that, in this cycle, was disrupted by zero-interest rate policy. Our mid-2014 adaptations resolved that issue. Though I’m convinced that our methods have ultimately come out stronger, the criticism is legitimate, as is criticism about the time it took to disentangle and address the underlying issue. That said, investors are entirely misguided if they believe that those challenges in this cycle give them a "free pass" to ignore obscene valuations. If investors rule out the potential for the S&P 500 to lose 50-60% of its value over the completion of this cycle, they’re actually ruling out an outcome that would be wholly run-of-the-mill from a historical perspective, given current valuation extremes. They’re also ignoring that my previous risk estimates in prior cycles were devastatingly correct.
Disciplined investing isn't easy (and whenever it seems like it is, you're about to learn a costly lesson). The market has been in a more than two-year top-formation with internals lagging the major indices, with investors chasing high-beta stocks (those with amplified sensitivity to market fluctuations), and with rather shallow corrections from a full-cycle perspective. All of that has been a headwind for value-conscious hedged-equity strategies, but it won’t prevent the completion of this market cycle. Indeed, our impression is that the recent swing by investors from active to passive investment strategies represents nothing but performance-chasing, at a point where valuations imply historically low prospective 12-year returns for a conventional portfolio mix. If history is a guide, nobody will remember the patience, discipline, and tolerance for frustration that were required to avoid or to benefit from the 50-60% market loss that we estimate over the completion of this cycle. A focus on market internals may help, but even the less-extended 2000 and 2007 peaks were frustrating for us. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote decades ago about the Great Crash, “Only a durable sense of doom could survive such discouragement.” Meanwhile, distinguish full-cycle outcomes from immediate outcomes. They can often be two quite different objects. (...)
Emphatically, our pointed concerns about market risk would quickly ease to a neutral outlook if our measures of market internals were to become favorable. Again, the reason is that overvaluation typically gives way to sharp market losses only during segments of the market cycle when investors have subtly shifted toward risk-aversion. Since risk-seeking speculators tend to be indiscriminate about that speculation, the best measure we’ve found to infer those risk-seeking or risk-averse preferences is the uniformity or divergence of market action across a broad range of internals.
So while our long-term (10-12 year) expectations for S&P 500 returns remain near zero, and we now expect a 50-60% market retreat over the completion of this cycle (an outcome that would be only run-of-the-mill from present valuation extremes), our expectations about more immediate market outcomes will remain heavily driven by the quality of market action we observe at each point in time. Presently, those measures are hostile, which is why we’ve got red flags waving, but a shift toward favorable uniformity across our measures of market internals would defer those concerns. Put simply, market conditions don’t forecast or require a near-term market collapse. Rather, they are currently permissive of a market collapse, and on average, market returns under such conditions have historically been quite negative until those conditions have cleared.
by John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Hussman Funds | Read more:
Image: Bill Waterson
$4,000 for Slicing a Leg of Spanish Cured Ham
[ed. Follow your dream.]
Florencio Sanchidrián has been slicing Iberian ham (jamon) for the last three decades and today his name is synonymous with the Spanish delicacy. The 55-year-old is regarded as the world’s best ham slicer in the world, and he charges accordingly for his services – a reported $4,000 to slice a leg of ham.
Born in the city of Avila, Spain, Sanchidrián trained as a professional bullfighter in his youth, but eventually put his red cape away and moved to Barcelona to work as a waiter. One day, he started cutting ham and simply fell in love with it. He started taking jamon slicing courses, and before long, he was winning slicing competitions as well as national and international awards. Florencio is now known as an ambassador of Iberian ham around the world, and he tours the five continents “with a leg of ham under his arm” at least once or twice a year.
Floren, as he likes to be called, has sliced ham for a number of celebrities, including President Barrack Obama, Robert De Niro, or David Beckham, and for his majesty King Juan Carlos of Spain. He has performed his jamon-slicing art at the Oscars, Hollywood private parties and at casinos in Las Vegas and Macau. Throughout the year, he follows the Formula 1 circuit, cutting ham for VIPs in the paddocks and lounges of the top racing teams.
Slicing machines are apparently out of the question, as far as jamon enthusiasts are concerned, as heat generated by the friction can alter the taste of the ham and melt the fat, thus ruining the whole experience. But while professional ham slicers are present at any decent cocktail party or event in Spain, they usually make around $250 per ham leg. That’s not nearly enough for them to make a living, which is why most of them have multiple jobs. Florencio Sanchidrián, on the other hand, charges around $4,000 for cutting a leg of ham, a process that takes him around an hour and a half to complete.
He considers jamon slicing an art form – part cutting skill, part storytelling. While he masterfully cuts slices of ham thin enough to see through, he entertains his audience by giving them information about the pig’s breeding, the history of Iberian ham and the type of jamon they are about to enjoy. It’s an artistic performance, and people are crazy about it. At least crazy enough to pay him $4,000 for it.
h/t Marginal Revolution
Florencio Sanchidrián has been slicing Iberian ham (jamon) for the last three decades and today his name is synonymous with the Spanish delicacy. The 55-year-old is regarded as the world’s best ham slicer in the world, and he charges accordingly for his services – a reported $4,000 to slice a leg of ham.
Born in the city of Avila, Spain, Sanchidrián trained as a professional bullfighter in his youth, but eventually put his red cape away and moved to Barcelona to work as a waiter. One day, he started cutting ham and simply fell in love with it. He started taking jamon slicing courses, and before long, he was winning slicing competitions as well as national and international awards. Florencio is now known as an ambassador of Iberian ham around the world, and he tours the five continents “with a leg of ham under his arm” at least once or twice a year.Floren, as he likes to be called, has sliced ham for a number of celebrities, including President Barrack Obama, Robert De Niro, or David Beckham, and for his majesty King Juan Carlos of Spain. He has performed his jamon-slicing art at the Oscars, Hollywood private parties and at casinos in Las Vegas and Macau. Throughout the year, he follows the Formula 1 circuit, cutting ham for VIPs in the paddocks and lounges of the top racing teams.
Slicing machines are apparently out of the question, as far as jamon enthusiasts are concerned, as heat generated by the friction can alter the taste of the ham and melt the fat, thus ruining the whole experience. But while professional ham slicers are present at any decent cocktail party or event in Spain, they usually make around $250 per ham leg. That’s not nearly enough for them to make a living, which is why most of them have multiple jobs. Florencio Sanchidrián, on the other hand, charges around $4,000 for cutting a leg of ham, a process that takes him around an hour and a half to complete.
He considers jamon slicing an art form – part cutting skill, part storytelling. While he masterfully cuts slices of ham thin enough to see through, he entertains his audience by giving them information about the pig’s breeding, the history of Iberian ham and the type of jamon they are about to enjoy. It’s an artistic performance, and people are crazy about it. At least crazy enough to pay him $4,000 for it.
by Spooky, Oddity Central | Read more:
Image: Escuela Superior de Corte de Jamonh/t Marginal Revolution
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