Baby Boomers Are Downsizing — and the Kids Won’t Take the Family Heirlooms

For 30 years, Pat Fryzel stored her children’s memorabilia, and her grandmother’s, too. But when she and her husband downsized, from a large Winchester home to a two-bedroom Boston townhouse, there was no room for the American Girl dolls or Nana’s cake plates. So Fryzel asked her grown kids to collect what they wanted.

She was not met with much enthusiasm. “They said, ‘Take a picture and text it to us,’” recalled Fryzel, 64, a retired nurse practitioner.

For generations, adult children have agreed to take their aging parents’ possessions — whether they wanted them or not. But now, the anti-clutter movement has met the anti-brown furniture movement, and the combination is sending dining room sets, sterling silver flatware, and knick-knacks straight to thrift stores or the curb.

And feelings are getting hurt, as adult children who are eager to minimize their own belongings — and who may live in small spaces, and entertain less formally than their parents did — are increasingly saying “no thanks” to the family heirlooms. (...)

The cold math of downsizing can be seen in a 2016 profile of buyers and sellers from the Massachusetts Association of Realtors. From the ages of 18 to 54, when a person sells a house, the next home he or she buys is larger. When sellers hit 55, the homes they buy next are smaller.

But the square-footage numbers don’t capture what space means in emotional terms, in memories: the mahogany hutch Grandma inherited as a young bride, too big for the dining nook in her retirement community apartment; the books that have been like friends, too voluminous to take along; the kids’ art projects and book reports from long ago. (...)

“I have a lot of mementos from my grandmother that my mother foisted on me,” said Fine, 59. She dutifully stored them for three decades, in boxes she never opened, and while she doesn’t expect her daughter to take them, she’s now facing a quandary.

“How can you take these things to a consignment shop?” she asked. “It’s almost like a burden that we carry with us through life. Sometimes I wish we had less connection to our possessions.”

The burden is only likely to grow. The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to more than double, from 46 million to over 98 million by 2060, according to a 2016 report by the nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau.

by Beth Teitell, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock
[ed. No surprise here. I'm in the process of moving and the storage units in my town and the one I'm moving to are all booked (1200+ units).  Talk about a growth industry.]

How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All

As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild. It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating between two quantum states. Amazon’s price for a one-ounce jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you looked. Nearly a year later, as Thanksgiving 2016 approached, the price again began whipsawing between two different points, this time $3.36 and $4.69.

We live in the age of the variable airfare, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird computer glitch? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. “It’s most likely a strategy to get more data and test the right price,” Guru Hariharan explained, after I had sketched the pattern on a whiteboard.

The right price—the one that will extract the most profit from consumers’ wallets—has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. It’s also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price—and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. (Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers’ spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside.

It may come as a surprise that, in buying a seasonal pie ingredient, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping hath wrought. Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.

They have ample means to do so: the immense data trail you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart or swipe your rewards card at a store register, top economists and data scientists capable of turning this information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unparalleled in the history of economics.” In mid-March, Amazon alone had 59 listings for economists on its job site, and a website dedicated to recruiting them.

Not coincidentally, quaint pricing practices—an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices”—are yielding to far more exotic strategies.

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted how sophisticated these algorithms have become,” says Robert Dolan, a marketing professor at Harvard. “I certainly didn’t.” The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones Google recommends may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be, one study found. For shoppers, that means price—not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor—may become an increasingly unknowable thing. “Many moons ago, there used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the simplest of questions—what’s the true price of pumpkin-pie spice?—is subject to a Heisenberg level of uncertainty.

Which raises a bigger question: Could the internet, whose transparency was supposed to empower consumers, be doing the opposite?

by Jerry Useem, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Justin Fantl

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The Doctor Is In. Co-Pay? $40,000.

When John Battelle’s teenage son broke his leg at a suburban soccer game, naturally the first call his parents made was to 911. The second was to Dr. Jordan Shlain, the concierge doctor here who treats Mr. Battelle and his family.

“They’re taking him to a local hospital,” Mr. Battelle’s wife, Michelle, told Dr. Shlain as the boy rode in an ambulance to a nearby emergency room in Marin County. “No, they’re not,” Dr. Shlain instructed them. “You don’t want that leg set by an E.R. doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city.”

Within minutes, the ambulance was on the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for California Pacific Medical Center, one of San Francisco’s top hospitals. Dr. Shlain was there to meet them when they arrived, and the boy was seen almost immediately by an orthopedist with decades of experience.

For Mr. Battelle, a veteran media entrepreneur, the experience convinced him that the annual fee he pays to have Dr. Shlain on call is worth it, despite his guilt over what he admits is very special treatment.

“I feel badly that I have the means to jump the line,” he said. “But when you have kids, you jump the line. You just do. If you have the money, would you not spend it for that?”

Increasingly, it is a question being asked in hospitals and doctor’s offices, especially in wealthier enclaves in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and New York. And just as a virtual velvet rope has risen between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else on airplanes, cruise ships and amusement parks, widening inequality is also transforming how health care is delivered.

Money has always made a big difference in the medical world: fancier rooms at hospitals, better food and access to the latest treatments and technology. Concierge practices, where patients pay several thousand dollars a year so they can quickly reach their primary care doctor, with guaranteed same-day appointments, have been around for decades.

But these aren’t the concierge doctors you’ve heard about — and that’s intentional.

Dr. Shlain’s Private Medical group does not advertise and has virtually no presence on the web, and new patients come strictly by word of mouth. But with annual fees that range from $40,000 to $80,000 (more than 10 times what conventional concierge practices charge), the suite of services goes far beyond 24-hour access or a Nespresso machine in the waiting room.

Indeed, as many Americans struggle to pay for health care — or even, with the future of the Affordable Care Act in question on Capitol Hill, face a loss of coverage — this corner of what some doctors call the medical-industrial complex is booming: boutique doctors and high-end hospital wards. (...)

For patients, a limit of no more than 50 families per doctor eliminates the rushed questions and assembly-line pace of even the best primary care practices. House calls are an option for busy patients, and doctors will meet clients at their workplace or the airport if they are pressed for time.

In the event of an uncommon diagnosis, Private Medical will locate the top specialists nationally, secure appointments with them immediately and accompany the patient on the visit, even if it is on the opposite coast.

Meanwhile, for virtually everyone else, the typical wait to see a doctor is getting longer.

by Nelson D. Schwartz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chris B. Murray

Retirees Flock to Latin America to Live an Upper-Class Lifestyle on $1,500 a Month

To casual visitors, this colonial town in southern Ecuador looks like it was torn from the pages of history. With its cobbled streets, soaring cathedrals and bustling markets, it exudes a lazy, old world charm.

But Cuenca is also on the cutting edge of a very modern trend: providing a safe haven for U.S. retirees who have found themselves unwilling — or unable — to live out their golden years at home.

The growing wave of ex-pat seniors is not only upending notions about retirement in the hemisphere but reshaping the face of communities throughout the Americas. And the trend is expected to grow as waves of baby boomers exit the workforce ill-prepared for retirement.

There’s no accurate way to measure the phenomenon, but the Social Security Administration was sending payments to 380,000 retired U.S. workers living abroad in 2014 — up 50 percent from a decade ago.

In the Americas, records show that seniors are flocking to Canada, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador.

Best known for the Galapagos and providing asylum in its London embassy to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Ecuador is home to 2,850 retirees receiving benefits, according to the U.S. government. But that number doesn’t tell the full picture. The city of Cuenca recently conducted a census that found its municipality alone was home to almost 10,000 foreign retirees, most of them Americans from Texas and Florida. (...)

In Cuenca, a city of about 350,000 people, they’ve found robust public transportation, an extensive museum network, solid healthcare and markets bursting with fresh fruits and produce. It’s a place where their two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath apartment costs less than $400 a month. They’ve found that for about $1,500 a month, they can live a solidly upper-class lifestyle, dining out frequently and traveling. (...)

If there is a real driving force for retirees, it’s healthcare. Although the Trump administration has said it will leave Medicare untouched, its desire to scrap the Affordable Care Act amid rising premiums has created anxiety among seniors, said Prescher with International Living.

“Look at what retirees [in the U.S.] are facing,” he said. “They have a fixed income, maybe their investments haven’t been doing that well and now nobody knows what public healthcare will look like in the United States.”

“In the face of that … if you can live in a place where you can cut your cost of living in half while getting access to high quality healthcare, you have to think seriously about it,” he added. (...)

Cuenca’s survey of retirees found that most were either paying for healthcare out-of-pocket or had private healthcare. But some are reliant on Ecuador’s public healthcare system. Foreigners only need to pay into the system for three months before they have access to full benefits.

Because Medicare doesn’t cover most costs abroad, the Herrons, for example, were paying $84 a month to belong to the public healthcare system. When Michael, a 76-year-old retired IT worker-turned-novelist, recently ended up in the emergency room for a cardiac issue, the total bill was $133. In the past, the same procedure in the United States had been billed to his insurance company at $186,000.

Crespo, the city official, said the retirees are pumping money into the economy, but there are growing concerns over how they might be affecting the healthcare system.

“We’ve heard about cases where someone night need brain or heart surgery that might cost $300,000 in the United States and they have the operation here for $300 because they had paid into the system for three months,” she said. “The price differences are abysmal.”

Congresswoman Soliz said the legislature is planning on doing a comprehensive study of how foreign retirees might be straining public resources.

by Jim Wyss, Charlotte Observer | Read more:
Image: Jim Wyss

Océanic Surcouf 1956 
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The Loneliness of Donald Trump

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for.

Thinking of him, I think of Pushkin’s telling of the old fairytale of The Fisherman and the Golden Fish. After being caught in the old fisherman’s net, the golden fish speaks up and offers wishes in return for being thrown back in the sea. The fisherman asks him for nothing, though later he tells his wife of his chance encounter with the magical creature. The fisherman’s wife sends him back to ask for a new washtub for her, and then a second time to ask for a cottage to replace their hovel, and the wishes are granted, and then as she grows prouder and greedier, she sends him to ask that she become a wealthy person in a mansion with servants she abuses, and then she sends her husband back. The old man comes and grovels before the fish, caught between the shame of the requests and the appetite of his wife, and she becomes tsarina and has her boyards and nobles drive the husband from her palace. You could call the husband consciousness—the awareness of others and of oneself in relation to others—and the wife craving.

Finally she wishes to be supreme over the seas and over the fish itself, endlessly uttering wishes, and the old man goes back to the sea to tell the fish—to complain to the fish—of this latest round of wishes. The fish this time doesn’t even speak, just flashes its tail, and the old man turns around to see on the shore his wife with her broken washtub at their old hovel. Overreach is perilous, says this Russian tale; enough is enough. And too much is nothing.

The child who became the most powerful man in the world, or at least occupied the real estate occupied by a series of those men, had run a family business and then starred in an unreality show based on the fiction that he was a stately emperor of enterprise, rather than a buffoon barging along anyhow, and each was a hall of mirrors made to flatter his sense of self, the self that was his one edifice he kept raising higher and higher and never abandoned.

I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.

“They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich couple at the heart of The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing. (...)

Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.

We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way. The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.

Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation.

by Rebecca Solnit, LitHub |  Read more:

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Vincent van Gogh, The Plain near Auvers
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Administration Returns Copies of Report on C.I.A. Torture to Congress

Senators, spies and a president spent years in a pitched battle over how the history is told of one of the most controversial chapters of America’s campaign against terrorism, the detention and interrogation of prisoners in secret C.I.A. jails.

But recent moves by the Trump administration have increased the likelihood that much of what is known about the macabre humiliations that unfolded in those jails around the world will remain hidden from public view.

Congressional officials said on Friday that the administration has begun returning to Congress copies of a 6,700-page Senate report from 2014 about the C.I.A. program. The move raises the possibility that most of the copies could be locked in Senate vaults indefinitely or even destroyed — and increases the risk that future government officials, unable to read the report, will never learn its lessons.

The classified report is the result of a lengthy investigation into the program by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, telling the story of how — in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — the C.I.A. began capturing terrorism suspects and interrogating them in secret prisons beyond the reach of the American judicial and military legal systems. The central conclusion of the report is that the spy agency’s interrogation methods — including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other kinds of torture — were far more brutal and less effective than the C.I.A. described to policy makers, Congress and the public.

The Trump administration’s decision honors the request of the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, who has decried the report for being shoddy and excessively critical of the C.I.A. and the George W. Bush administration. The F.B.I., the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A. and the agency’s inspector general have returned their copies of the report, said American officials who asked not to be named to discuss the status of those classified copies.

The report is the most comprehensive accounting of the Bush-era program that exists. A declassified executive summary was made public in December 2014, and it laid bare some of the worst excesses of the war on terrorism, drawing broad condemnation both inside the United States and abroad.

Officials who played important roles in the C.I.A. detention program remain at the agency, including its newly appointed deputy director, Gina Haspel, and the former head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, Michael D’Andrea. Mr. D’Andrea recently assumed control of the agency’s Iran operations.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which was run by Democrats when the executive summary was released, sent copies of the entire report to at least eight federal agencies, asking that they incorporate it into their records — a move that would have made the documents subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. That law, which allows citizens, the news media and other groups to request access to information held by the federal government, does not apply to congressional records.

The agencies all refused to add the report to their records, and instead kept their copies locked up, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the C.I.A. for access to the full report.

by Mark Mazzetti, Mathew Rosenberg and Charlie Savage, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Doug Mills/The New York Times
[ed. Shameful.]

Ryuichi Sakamoto

The U.S. Has Forgotten How to Do Infrastructure

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias points out, the problem with high infrastructure costs is that they force us to debate the wrong things. If costs were reasonable, even skeptics would probably agree to fix roads and build better trains. But when the price of maintaining high-quality infrastructure is ridiculously high, the issue gets divided into two camps -- a pro-building contingent that advocates biting the bullet and overspending to maintain transportation networks, and an anti-building group that throws up its hands at the price tag. When this is the debate, the country loses either way, because it ends up either spending too much money or living with potholed roads and trains that never arrive.

The U.S. is in the grips of exactly this sort of dilemma. For some mysterious reason, the same mile of road or train track costs a lot more to build in the U.S. than in other rich countries like France or Japan. When it comes to trains, the disparity is particularly egregious. During the past few years, people who pay attention to this problem have catalogued a list of potential culprits. But none of these is really satisfying.

One popular villain is union labor. The Davis-Bacon Act, passed in 1931, mandates that infrastructure workers get paid locally prevailing wages, which usually means the wages that union members would receive. Some studies have claimed that this law and other union-friendly policies drive up costs in the U.S.

But unions probably don’t help explain the yawning gap between the U.S. and other rich countries. The reason is that places like France have some of the strongest unions in the world. Strikes by rail workers are commonplace. Yet France’s trains cost much less.

Japan is another counterexample. The median salary for a Japanese construction worker in 2014 was about 4 million yen a year, which at current exchange rates is roughly $36,000. Construction workers in the U.S. make about the same -- an average of $37,890 in 2016. Now, it’s possible that the average Japanese worker is capable of building much more in an hour than the average American worker, meaning U.S. laborers could still be overpaid in the relative sense. But it seems unlikely that the difference is that huge. The numbers are pretty clear -- high wages aren’t the big culprit in U.S. costs.

Another bogeyman is land-acquisition costs. People think of China’s authoritarian government forcing millions of people to move in order to build dams and highways, and assume this must be why it can get things done so much more cheaply than in the democratic U.S.

But this is also probably a red herring. As transit blogger Alon Levy notes, land-acquisition costs are much higher in Japan, where eminent domain laws are weaker. So much for the U.S. being the land of property rights! And yet, somehow, Japan still lays train track much more cheaply.

Explanations based on geography -- the U.S. is too spread out, or New York City is too dense -- also fail to stand up to scrutiny. Cumbersome environmental impact reviews are a possible culprit, but it’s hard to believe that countries such as France would be so willing to pave over their natural beauty and slaughter endangered species that their trains would cost only half as much as America’s as a result.

There is reason to suspect that high U.S. costs are part of a deeper problem. For example, construction seems to take a lot longer in the U.S. than in other countries. In China, a 30-story building can be completed in only 15 days. In Japan, giant sinkholes get fully repaired in one week. Even in the U.S. of a century ago, construction was pretty fast -- the Empire State Building went up in 410 days.

Yet today, it takes the U.S. many years to spend the money that Congress allocates for infrastructure. New buildings seem to linger half-built for months or years, with construction workers often nowhere to be found. Subways can take decades. Even in the private sector, there are problems -- productivity in the homebuilding sector has fallen in recent decades.

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money.

by Noah Smith, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Frank Polich/Bloomberg

Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio

Blue blazers. Blue checked shirts. Collar open. No tie. Brown shoes. Black shoes. Or Nike shoes. New, new, all new. Soft leather satchels with bold brass zippers. Good cufflinks. Good watches. Better than you know. Hundred dollar haircuts. Straight razored shaves. Shaped cuticles. Manicured nails. Clean, soft, tailored. New. Talking boisterously in the check-in line at the Bellagio. “I have to be in Palm Beach. Everyone is in Palm Beach.” Pencil skirts. High heels. Rolling out of bed at five a.m. for spin class before the markets open, day after day after day. “I can get a lot of business done in Palm Beach. Where am I supposed to be—in exile?”

Rich people go to Vegas to spend money. Really rich people go to Vegas to learn how to make money. Each spring, as fat tourists sweat out on Las Vegas Boulevard, taking pictures of dancing fountains and wandering aimlessly into undifferentiated warehouses of slot machines and gaping at Chanel stores they cannot afford and being physically and financially sucked dry by this hot, abominable desert Babylon, the people who Know How Things Work gather in the other Vegas: the airy, cool, marble-floored conference rooms of The Bellagio, where silver coffee urns and platters of croissants sit on the patio next to the pool, and maroon-jacketed security guards keep out the general public. This is the SALT Conference, where the hedge fund industry gathers to talk about money and politics, all while voraciously sucking its own dick. If you have ever wondered whether there really is a cabal of elites plotting in private to rule the world, wonder no more. Here they are.

SALT is short for “Skybridge Alternatives,” but that could be replaced by any number of combinations of pseudo-profound finance jargon: Strategic Alternative Liquid Tranches; Superior Alpha Limited Trading; Standard Accelerated LIBOR Taxation. It all fits. (...)

You cannot afford to invest in any of these hedge funds. But these people were happy to sit on stage for three days and expound on their biggest bets and convictions about business and economic trends to an audience of their competitors. Do you want to know what the world’s most high-priced investment talent is betting on now? Here, I can tell you: The end of the retail industry as we know it. The decline of shopping malls. Machine learning in every industry. Neural networks. A headlong rush into the roboticization of everything. Artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars. Commercial real estate is overpriced. Moderate macroeconomic growth continuing for the foreseeable future. Selling portions of the broadcast spectrum. Short Tesla. Long Sarepta Therapeutics. And buy the HMMJ ETF to capture a good portion of the marijuana market in Canada, though recreational weed in America is considered too risky of an investment for this crowd. At least one thing is still left for the little guy. For the moment.

In practice, three days of “Alternative Alchemy: An Investor’s Guide to Shifting Global Paradigms” and “Investment Insights From the Titans of Finance” lacks the poetry associated with the softer liberal arts. The price of investment glory is grinding boredom. “Closed end funds ... leverage ... dividend yields ... ETFs ... cap ex ... M&A deals ... beta ... tranches ... residential mortgage credit ... legacy markets ... embedded options ... defensive in the CLO space ... compensated for risk ... cohorts of capital ... capital ... capital .... CAPITAL.” These phrases echoed everywhere, from the stage to the vast meeting room where younger hedge fund worker ants were assigned to sit at coffee tables and pitch their ideas to potential investors, like an awful version of speed dating in which the only thing you could discuss is “structured credit.” All of the younger men looked like Jared Kushner, and all the younger women looked like Ivanka Trump might look if she had to work 14-hour days. Their lives stretched out in front of them, down the Bellagio’s gaudy, carpeted halls. They could fall in love over credit strategies, have a marriage announcement in the New York Times at 26 and a scandalous divorce announcement in the New York Post at 44. Until then, they could manically shake hands with each other in the SALT Conference reception area, where a brand new silver Mclaren supercar was on display, its batwing door swept up so everyone in a tailored blue suit could sit in the molded leather driver’s seat and snap a selfie. (...)

Here they are—The establishment! The elites! They’re all here! The specter of Donald Trump hung over the SALT Conference like a heavy cloud that threatened to burst open at any moment. This was simultaneously the crowd that Trump had campaigned against, and the crowd that held fundraisers for him, and the crowd that he was making it his business to help, and the crowd that his ineptitude and idiotic mistakes threatened to severely harm. Average people often think that this sort of high finance crowd is engaged in nuanced alchemy that surpasseth all understanding. But anyone can understand these people if you can grasp one thing: When the money gets big enough, finance and economics and politics are all the same thing. They are ways to measure risk. When you run five or ten or a hundred billion dollars, your overriding concern in life is that pile of money—growing it, yes, but, more fundamentally, preserving it. Geopolitics therefore become just another business risk to be measured alongside interest rates and consumer trends, and judged based on the threat it poses to your money. Climate change? A risk. War in North Korea? A risk. Donald Trump’s insanity? A risk. What normal people think of in moral or ideological terms, those who control all the world’s wealth think of simply in terms of risk. Almost anything can be tolerated, if it allows them to make more money with less risk. This is the logic of capitalism.

If you scrape a few inches below the surface of many very rich and successful people who imagine themselves to be worthy of praise and emulation, you find a governing philosophy that cares nothing for humanity. We all grasp this, on some level, but it considered impolite to bring up in friendly settings. Investors imagine that their “business” and “personal” behaviors can be separated, but of course what they do in business ends up having vastly more impact than whatever small, nice things they do in their personal lives. This erasure of the borders between politics and finance is actually an erasure of the power of anything so quaint as morality. The SALT Conference, where these financial titans gather in comfort, is the place to witness this up close. For example: at one point David Rubenstein, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group, gave a talk about his expectations for what would be happening in Washington in the near term. Rubenstein is one of the most powerful men in private equity, an unassuming billionaire and D.C. wise man who has provided many powerful political figures a nice place to work after they leave government. He knows what is happening. First, he spent several minutes explaining why the Republican tax reform package was unlikely to pass this year. “No one here should assume you’re gonna get a big tax cut soon,” he told the disappointed crowd. “For those who are looking for relief from Congress, you should look elsewhere.”

Later, he wrapped up his talk with an earnest plea for everyone there “if you can afford to come to this conference you are in the top one-tenth of one percent, and you should feel blessed,” he said—to think about what they can do to “give back.” In our age of great inequality, Rubenstein said, he has found much greater satisfaction in giving away money than in making it. He encouraged everyone else there to do the same.

The cognitive dissonance between the business portion of his speech and the personal part perfectly encapsulates the problem. First, he delivered valuable inside knowledge to a crowd of the extremely rich that was all premised on the unspoken assumption that everyone in the room wanted and expected to get a substantial tax cut; then, he bemoaned inequality. There is a 100% likelihood that any substantial Republican tax reform bill of the sort that attendees of the SALT Conference want will exacerbate the inequality problem. One hundred percent. It is certain. And yet it is taken as a given that this crowd will throw its ample political muscle behind achieving that goal. Then, they will talk about how to give back—perhaps, like David Rubenstein, they could pay to repair the Washington Monument. Nice and patriotic. As they do that, they will be accruing millions of dollars of gains thanks to tax cuts, as social programs for the poor accrue equivalent losses. Perhaps they will donate a basketball court to the inner city later to make up for it. This is the logic of capitalism at work. The fact that we feel no collective sense of surprise at all of this goes to show just how well capitalism covers its own tracks.

by Hamilton Nolan, The Concourse | Read more:
Image: uncredited

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[ed. What could go wrong... ?]

When the Left Turns on Its Own

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.

A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.

Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening. Perhaps there’s a case to be made that a white-free day could be a useful way to highlight the lack of racial diversity, particularly at a proudly progressive school like Evergreen. Yet reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen.

For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The video of that exchange — “You’re supporting white supremacy” is one of the more milquetoast quotes — must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr. Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is “the truth,” the students chortle.

Following the protest, college police, ordered by Evergreen’s president to stand down, told Mr. Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety on campus. In the end, Mr. Weinstein held his biology class in a public park. Meantime, photographs and names of his students were circulated online. “Fire Bret” graffiti showed up on campus buildings. What was that about safe spaces?

Watching the way George Bridges, the president of Evergreen, has handled this situation put me in mind of a line from Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Mr. Bloom was writing about administrators’ reaction to student radicals in the 1960s, but he might as well be writing about Evergreen: “A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”

At a town hall meeting, Mr. Bridges described the protestors as “courageous” and expressed his gratitude for “this catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.” Of course, there was also pablum about how “free speech must be fostered and encouraged.” But if that’s what Mr. Bridges really believes, why isn’t he doing everything in his power to protect a professor who exercised it and condemn the mob that tried to stifle him?

by Bari Weiss, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Lisa Pemberton/The Olympian
[ed. "Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services"?]

How to Find a Lost Cell Phone

So you’ve lost your phone. We’ve all been there. It was just in your pocket a minute ago — and now it’s gone, lost to the phone fairies, forgotten between the seats of your couch, or misplaced somewhere during your busy day. Maybe it’s just in your other coat, or maybe it’s already in the hands of someone who found it on the sidewalk. Either way, all you want to do is get it back.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to get a hold of your missing phone. If it’s a smartphone (or even a tablet) running iOS, Android, or even Windows Phone, chances are good it already has the software needed to hunt it down — or there’s an app you can install to track your phone. Here’s our guide on how to find your phone or a similar device, including the old-fashioned way if you still own an aging flip phone.
Smartphones

If your lost phone happens to be a smartphone, all three of the major smartphone platform providers (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) now include phone retrieval technology in their smartphones, just in case you ever end up losing it but forget to install a “find my phone” app. Usually, the way these apps work is through the account associated with your device. For Android devices this is your Google account, for iPhones this is your iCloud account, and for Windows Phones this is your Microsoft account. All three allow you to remotely lock and wipe your phone, make it ring, and set up special messages to alert whoever finds it.

Of course, these features are only as good as your phone’s battery. If your smartphone dies, it’s about as easy to find as your wallet or anything else you might misplace.

We also recommend caution when communicating with anyone who has found your smartphone. Be careful to avoid giving away any personal information, such as your home address, until you know you’re dealing with someone you can trust. Stick with sending phone numbers or email addresses to communicate how the good Samaritan can return your phone. Here’s how each of the three operating systems work.

How to find a lost Android phone

Android not only offers Google’s proprietary service for finding and managing your device remotely, but also a number of third-party apps designed for finding your smartphone. The easiest to use is Find My Device, which is built directly into your Android smartphone through Google Play Services — it can also be used in a browser or downloaded from the Google Play Store. Most devices running Android 2.3 or later should be able to use this feature. Using the feature is as easy as searching “Where is my phone” in Google, which will prompt the service to start looking for your smartphone. We’ve previously written about Find My Device and its ability to call you, set up a new password, and make your phone ring from afar, along with the variety of other functions it uses for notification purposes. While you can configure Find My Device ahead of time, the service should be available in the event you lose or misplace your phone. It will use Wi-Fi or GPS to help you hunt down your device.

To verify your Android smartphone has the Find My Device feature turned on, go to Settings > Google > Security and make sure Remotely locate this device and Allow remote lock and erase are turned on in the Android Device Manager section.

If you can’t find your smartphone, you can always wipe it to prevent sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands. Your device will need an internet connection, however, and enough juice to communicate with you. In Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google also introduced Factory Reset Protection (FRP). It’s designed to prevent would-be thieves from being able to steal your phone, wipe it, and then use it or sell it. If you factory reset a phone with FRP enabled and try to set it up as a new device, you’ll be prompted to enter the user name and password for the last Google account that was registered on the device, and if you can’t, the phone will remain locked.

There are also third-party apps that you can install to help you find your phone. Cerberus Anti-theft is a great app that can be installed remotely, allowing you to obtain more information regarding the whereabouts of your phone. It provides a number of additional features, such as more granular control on how you track your device, screenshots of what your device is doing, photos from the camera to possibly catch the would-be thief, and other, more detailed notifications that Find My Device doesn’t offer. If your device is rooted, there are even more features available to prevent someone from resetting or turning off your device until you can recover it.

Another option for select Samsung smartphones is the Find My Mobile service. It can be used to locate a missing phone, lock it down, or wipe it completely. You’ll need a Samsung account, though, and the Remote Controls options enabled on your phone. To check and see if Find My Mobile is available for your smartphone, go to Settings > Security. If you see Find My Mobile in the menu, you can use the service; enable the Remote Controls options via Settings > Security > Find My Mobile > Remote controls.

by Joshua Sherman, Digital Trends |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Remembering David Lewiston, 1929–2017

Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought; carrying a small (but not that small) portable tape recorder, twenty or thirty reels of quarter-inch tape, a couple of microphones, cables, a week’s supply of batteries, a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts. The shirts have been lost to time and forgotten laundries—but the tapes, the recordings from those travels, still circulate fifty years on, filling listeners with pleasure and astonishment.

David Lewiston was born in London in 1929 and graduated from Trinity College of Music in 1953. Already interested in the spiritual teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Lewiston moved to New York City to study piano and composition with Thomas DeHartmann, Gurdjieff’s aide-de-camp and musical collaborator, and an esteemed composer in his own right. From the Gurdjieff work, Lewiston learned about the many uses of solitude; from his studies with DeHartmann, who had helped Gurdjieff transcribe and notate Eastern hymns and dervish melodies, he learned to hear and appreciate music outside of the Western canon. These proved useful as Lewiston began traveling, but neither talent helped him support himself as a young musician in New York, and he reinvented himself as a financial journalist, working on staff for Forbes and then for an in-house journal of the American Bankers Association, a magazine so dull it practically walked to the trash bin and threw itself away.

Was he bored?

“Of course I was bored! It was awful,” he told me once.

And so in 1966, he took a short sabbatical: borrowed a couple of good microphones and a few hundred dollars, bought a small Japanese tape recorder on a layover in Singapore, and landed in Bali, hoping to make some field recordings.

“It really was as vague as all that. I stumbled into it. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a career in mind. It was an adventure.” (...)

“These weren’t professional musicians. They might have been wonderful musicians, but this wasn’t their job. They were farmers or shepherds or craftsmen, so I had to make the recording sessions enjoyable for them, they had to feel appreciated. Sometimes by having plenty of beer or wine—though not so much that they’d fall asleep—and sometimes by simply paying attention. You always want to be paid, but it doesn’t always have to be with money. Musicians play differently when they know that someone’s really listening. I’ve been in a room where someone is playing piano, and maybe they’re distracted, their mind is somewhere else. And a composer or a very good player or just a keen listener will walk into that room and start to pay close attention to their sound, to the shading of the notes … and even if the player can’t see them, they’ll feel them there, they can sense them there, and the level of playing will come up a notch. Or more.

“Also, I didn’t just focus on the recordings. It had to be about the whole experience. If someone made a mistake or the wind knocked over a microphone, I wouldn’t stop and say take two. I couldn’t stop things that way, I needed the musicians to be deeply inside the music, and so I would wait until a whole performance was over and just say, ‘My, that was marvelous! What was that second piece? Could I hear that again?’ And just hope that the wind wouldn’t knock things over and that this time the genggung player wouldn’t fart.”

Lewiston’s first trip to Bali only lasted ten days, and when he returned to New York, he tried to figure out what to do with the tapes he’d recorded. Looking through records at Sam Goody, he noticed a few albums of music from Bulgaria, Japan, and Tahiti on the Nonesuch label, and he wrote down their address with a borrowed pen and got in touch with them. And when they heard his tapes, they flipped.

Those recordings were edited down into a single album, given the lovely title Music from the Morning of the World, and released in 1967 as one of the first albums on the newly launched Nonesuch Explorer Series.

People who stumbled onto it in the sixties or seventies still tend to glow and almost blush when that album is mentioned, as if it was a secret door they walked through and never quite returned from, like a first and unexpected kiss, like a half-remembered fuck in the early hours of dawn, with foghorns in the distance. It took a strange and unfamiliar music and brought it into focus, with no thought of taming it, no effort made to popularize or present it as tame or simply exotic. It came at you with the rush of A Love Supreme or Picasso’s Guernica, all good and evil, noise and silence, and everything that was left out of Western music and everything that was hidden in the shadows of your church or your past suddenly present and shining and alive.

by Brian Cullman, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

No Contest

It’s not hard to see why reality TV is popular with television production companies: It is cheap to make. Instead of depending on conventional writers and actors, reality shows rely more on recording and editing technology itself, which allows vast amounts of footage to be captured and pared down into satisfying, formulaic narratives. But what do these formulas consist of, and what makes them so compelling?

Reality TV has two basic genres, according to media scholar June Deery: docusoap, which primarily revolves around interpersonal relationships and lifestyles — shows like the Real Housewives and Big Brother franchises, or Duck Dynasty and the Kardashian shows — and competition, which explicitly pits participants against one another in what are typically elimination contests, using rewards and punishments to orient, motivate, and rationalize their behavior. But in certain respects, this distinction between genres is superficial. Regardless of whether participants are playing a literal game, in both reality genres they are ultimately competing against one another for attention and screen time.

That kind of attention can propel a reality-TV cast member into future career opportunities: more appearances on more shows, lucrative product endorsements, and even their own lines of products, as with the Kardashians’ media and merchandise empire or LA Ink star Kat Von D’s makeup line. Reality TV is an engine for turning attention into money not merely in the form of advertisements in and around the shows, but also across the participants’ lives, what the shows turn into platforms. This makes garnering attention the driving force behind the shows and their governing ethos — the model for how one should live and what one should want.

Competitive reality TV might seem like a meritocratic alternative to the attention-grabbing instigation and ham-fisted melodrama of reality soaps. The format often exchanges screaming matches and backbiting for tests of skill and strength. These shows trade on the idea that hard work and individual talent eventually triumph, within competitions that ostensibly place all contestants on a fair, equal footing. But often the shows are less interested in celebrating merit than in re-creating an ideology of ruthless individualism in our living rooms and Twitter hashtags. These shows, by design, present individualism as an inherent part of human sociality: Manipulation, not cooperation, allows participants to effectively compete, whether in the context of winning challenges or gaining audience attention. Competition and conflict both reflect reality TV’s insistence on individuated narratives, reflecting the common wisdom this is what audiences want to see, and thus what advertisers are willing to pay for.

But why would audiences default to wanting to watch individuals pitted against each other? Such a formula may be popular because of how it conforms to our life experiences under an individualist and competitive model of capitalism. These principles become sense-making mechanisms, offering a way to understand and interpret our experience of culturally dominant narratives about the necessity of competition. As political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Undoing the Demos, our current neoliberal order is grounded in “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms” and grounds individual subjectivity in notions of entrepreneurship. We are accordingly all market actor competing to increase the value of our human capital in the workplace, the educational system, and even the dating realm. Our lives, too, can be conceived as platforms, and our experiences relevant only insofar as they enhance the value of our skill sets for potential employers.

Individualism can only be a winning strategy in a system designed to reward it. This is as true of reality TV as it is of neoliberal society more generally. (...)

Enter The Great British Bake Off. It is a competition with winners and losers, yet unlike other reality TV competitions, the contestants generally accommodate each other and even assist each other at times, freeing up counter space for their beignets when needed. The bakers on the show copy each other all the time, and no one seems to mind. They look around the room to see what others are doing, getting hints on proper technique from the open floor plan, with no complaints from the other competitors. In seven seasons, there has been only one serious charge of sabotage — “bingate,” when a competitor took another baker’s ice cream out of the freezer for too long, causing it to melt — but that seems likely to have been an unfortunate accident.

While reality TV judges are often merciless, Bake Off’s hosts Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood are supportive, encouraging, and gentle with criticism. The show’s presenters, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, cheer the contestants on and lend a hand when needed. In the conventional “confessional” asides, contestants are without the usual snark and disdain for other competitors. They may be nervous, proud, disappointed, or even a bit jealous, but they are never mean. Rather than relying on conflict and cruelty, Bake Off entertains audiences through charm, pleasant and relatable characters whom you can’t help but root for, and baking that showcases contestants’ skill rather than their ability to stir up drama. It offers an alternative to universalizing narratives of competitive individualism grounded in economic rationality, instead making cooperation and civility not only consumable but explanatory. The show is not just pleasing to watch; it offers a gratifying model of the human experience.

by Britney Summit-Gil, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Harry Gruyaert, Magnum Photos

Dear Fed, It’s Not “Really Hard to Spot Bubbles”

Dear Fed, It’s Not “Really Hard to Spot Bubbles”

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