Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Orvis H3: One Fly Rod to Rule Them All?
The lovely thing about fly-fishing is that the fishing itself is enough; the catching is a bonus. Casting a fly-line, like driving a golf ball, is such a tricky thing to do—such a complex physical equation—that there’s plenty of pleasure in the motions alone, getting the fly to where a fish might be.
On a cloudy May afternoon on Vermont’s Battenkill River, I wasn’t catching a thing, and neither were the Orvis employees hosting me on their home waters, but the casting was spectacular. In the chilly spring weather, the fish were sluggish and tucked up against the shoreline where they could ambush an unsuspecting minnow with little effort. Or that was the theory. Cast after cast, our big fur-wrapped hooks slapped into the water inches away from the bank. From across the river, under overhanging trees, over logjams, the rod I was using whipped through the air and plopped the fly into its intended pocket time and again.
The four guys bobbing along next to me and in the adjacent boat were doing the same—casting with uncanny accuracy, smoothly stripping the line back, and smiling. They had worked on a five-year project to ensure these lines flew straight.
This week, Orvis Company will unveil what it claims to be the finest fly-fishing rod ever made —dubbed the H3—in the biggest product launch in the company’s 161-year history. My comrades that day—Shawn Combs, Sam Orvis, Tom Rosenbauer, and Jesse Haller—all worked on the team that helped build it, so they had a reason for the smiles. The goal of the new rod is to make even an amateur angler instantly better, just by using it—the way shaped skis in the 1990s made it substantially easier for a generation of skiers to descend mountains with grace. By making it easier to pick up the sport, Orvis is hoping the rod will hook a whole new wave of people on fly-fishing, a somewhat fussy and meditative hobby with an aging, largely white male audience that hasn’t seen a major boost since Brad Pitt led the cast of A River Runs Through It in 1992. If all goes as planned, the $850 piece of hardware will shoot the company well beyond its current $350 million in annual revenue.
Making a Rod
Most contemporary fly rods are made in essentially the same way. Sheets of carbon fiber treated with a sticky resin are sandwiched in two layers and rolled around a metal tube before the cylinder is wrapped in cellophane tape and cooked hanging vertically like a sausage. Then comes the cooling, sanding, and painting.
What makes a rod great are the materials used and how exactly they are fitted together. Most critical is the angle at which the layers of carbon fiber cross-hatch, how finely the wand tapers to a point, and how snugly each lengthy section, or blank, fits inside another. Getting any of those wrong makes for a rod that’s too heavy, too bendy—or “slow” in fly-fishing terms—or one that vibrates like a spring when it is flexed and unloosed.
Traditionally, rod makers have relied on trial and error and years of experience to get the recipe right. Orvis, for example, used to build a prototype, put it against a whiteboard, bend it, and trace the outline with a magic marker. If the team didn’t like the curve, they started over.
In 2011, however, the company hired young engineer Shawn Combs to lead R&D on its fly rods. Combs, a native of Kentucky who was 34 at the time, is a gearhead with strong opinions about everything from fishing rods to skis. Most importantly, he’s an unabashed trout bum and a mechanical engineer who had most recently been devising ways to fuel nuclear submarines at a Navy lab in New York.
Under Combs, Orvis steered away from trial and error and tradition and started leaning more heavily on science. Instead of putting a prototype against a white board and bending it, the R&D team added weight to each section and measured its resistance by the inch. It spent close to $500,000 on new machines to cut carbon fiber more uniformly and wrap, sand, and paint each section. It hired an outside lab to measure and chart the oscillations of the rod tip when it was plucked like a guitar string. And when the company’s executives gathered to test prototypes, they no longer hollered their feedback across the casting pond; they diligently recorded it in a purpose-built app.
Orvis also secured a thermoplastic resin that allows its rodmakers to cook the rods at a much higher temperature than before, thanks to an anonymous executive at a defense contractor who happened to have a weakness for fly fishing. Orvis was able to buy a license to the resin because the outfitter wouldn’t be using the goo to craft helicopter blades the way the guy’s other customers would.
The finished product has more in common with a racecar than the bamboo poles that were once seminal to the sport (though Orvis still makes those, too). The entire process, from cutting the carbon to sliding it into a rod tube, takes eight days from start to finish and comprises 50 different sets of hands.
On a cloudy May afternoon on Vermont’s Battenkill River, I wasn’t catching a thing, and neither were the Orvis employees hosting me on their home waters, but the casting was spectacular. In the chilly spring weather, the fish were sluggish and tucked up against the shoreline where they could ambush an unsuspecting minnow with little effort. Or that was the theory. Cast after cast, our big fur-wrapped hooks slapped into the water inches away from the bank. From across the river, under overhanging trees, over logjams, the rod I was using whipped through the air and plopped the fly into its intended pocket time and again.
The four guys bobbing along next to me and in the adjacent boat were doing the same—casting with uncanny accuracy, smoothly stripping the line back, and smiling. They had worked on a five-year project to ensure these lines flew straight. This week, Orvis Company will unveil what it claims to be the finest fly-fishing rod ever made —dubbed the H3—in the biggest product launch in the company’s 161-year history. My comrades that day—Shawn Combs, Sam Orvis, Tom Rosenbauer, and Jesse Haller—all worked on the team that helped build it, so they had a reason for the smiles. The goal of the new rod is to make even an amateur angler instantly better, just by using it—the way shaped skis in the 1990s made it substantially easier for a generation of skiers to descend mountains with grace. By making it easier to pick up the sport, Orvis is hoping the rod will hook a whole new wave of people on fly-fishing, a somewhat fussy and meditative hobby with an aging, largely white male audience that hasn’t seen a major boost since Brad Pitt led the cast of A River Runs Through It in 1992. If all goes as planned, the $850 piece of hardware will shoot the company well beyond its current $350 million in annual revenue.
Making a Rod
Most contemporary fly rods are made in essentially the same way. Sheets of carbon fiber treated with a sticky resin are sandwiched in two layers and rolled around a metal tube before the cylinder is wrapped in cellophane tape and cooked hanging vertically like a sausage. Then comes the cooling, sanding, and painting.
What makes a rod great are the materials used and how exactly they are fitted together. Most critical is the angle at which the layers of carbon fiber cross-hatch, how finely the wand tapers to a point, and how snugly each lengthy section, or blank, fits inside another. Getting any of those wrong makes for a rod that’s too heavy, too bendy—or “slow” in fly-fishing terms—or one that vibrates like a spring when it is flexed and unloosed.
Traditionally, rod makers have relied on trial and error and years of experience to get the recipe right. Orvis, for example, used to build a prototype, put it against a whiteboard, bend it, and trace the outline with a magic marker. If the team didn’t like the curve, they started over.
In 2011, however, the company hired young engineer Shawn Combs to lead R&D on its fly rods. Combs, a native of Kentucky who was 34 at the time, is a gearhead with strong opinions about everything from fishing rods to skis. Most importantly, he’s an unabashed trout bum and a mechanical engineer who had most recently been devising ways to fuel nuclear submarines at a Navy lab in New York.
Under Combs, Orvis steered away from trial and error and tradition and started leaning more heavily on science. Instead of putting a prototype against a white board and bending it, the R&D team added weight to each section and measured its resistance by the inch. It spent close to $500,000 on new machines to cut carbon fiber more uniformly and wrap, sand, and paint each section. It hired an outside lab to measure and chart the oscillations of the rod tip when it was plucked like a guitar string. And when the company’s executives gathered to test prototypes, they no longer hollered their feedback across the casting pond; they diligently recorded it in a purpose-built app.
Orvis also secured a thermoplastic resin that allows its rodmakers to cook the rods at a much higher temperature than before, thanks to an anonymous executive at a defense contractor who happened to have a weakness for fly fishing. Orvis was able to buy a license to the resin because the outfitter wouldn’t be using the goo to craft helicopter blades the way the guy’s other customers would.
The finished product has more in common with a racecar than the bamboo poles that were once seminal to the sport (though Orvis still makes those, too). The entire process, from cutting the carbon to sliding it into a rod tube, takes eight days from start to finish and comprises 50 different sets of hands.
by Kyle Stock, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Randy Harris 
Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War
It’s time for bitcoin traders to batten down the hatches.
The notoriously volatile cryptocurrency, whose 150 percent surge this year has captivated everyone from Wall Street bankers to Chinese grandmothers, could be headed for one of its most turbulent stretches yet.
Blame the bitcoin civil war. After two years of largely behind-the-scenes bickering, rival factions of computer whizzes who play key roles in bitcoin’s upkeep are poised to adopt two competing software updates at the end of the month. That has raised the possibility that bitcoin will split in two, an unprecedented event that would send shockwaves through the $41 billion market.
While both sides have big incentives to reach a consensus, bitcoin’s lack of a central authority has made compromise difficult. Even professional traders who’ve followed the dispute’s twists and turns aren’t sure how it will all pan out. Their advice: brace for volatility and be ready to act fast once a clear outcome emerges.
“It’s a high-stakes game of chicken,” said Arthur Hayes, a former market maker at Citigroup Inc. who now runs BitMEX, a bitcoin derivatives venue in Hong Kong. “If you’re a trader, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what happens. Once there’s a definitive signal about what will be done, the price could move very quickly.”
Behind the conflict is an ideological split about bitcoin’s rightful identity. The community has bitterly argued whether the cryptocurrency should evolve to appeal to mainstream corporations and become more attractive to traditional capital, or fortify its position as a libertarian beacon; whether it should act more as an asset like gold, or as a payment system.
The seeds of the debate were planted years ago: To protect from cyber attacks, bitcoin by design caps the amount of information on its network, called the blockchain. That puts a ceiling on how many transactions it can process -- the so-called block size limit -- just as the currency’s growing popularity is boosting activity. As a result, transaction times and processing fees have soared to record levels this year, curtailing bitcoin’s ability to process payments with the same efficiency as services like Visa Inc.
To address this problem, two main schools of thought emerged. On one side are miners, who deploy costly computers to verify transactions and act as the backbone of the blockchain. They’re proposing a straightforward increase to the block size limit.
On the other is Core, a group of developers instrumental in upholding bitcoin’s bug-proof software. They insist that to ease blockchain’s traffic jam, some of its data must be managed outside the main network. They claim that not only would it reduce congestion, but also allow other projects including smart contracts to be built on top of bitcoin.
But moving data off the blockchain effectively diminishes the influence of miners, the majority of whom are based in China and who have invested millions on giant server farms. Not surprisingly, Core’s proposal, called SegWit, has garnered resistance from miners, the most vocal being Wu Jihan, co-founder of the world’s largest mining organization Antpool.
“SegWit is itself a great technology, but the reason it hasn’t taken off is because its interest doesn’t align with miners,” Wu said. (...)
The unprecedented level of endorsement is partly prompted by anxiety of bitcoin losing its dominant status to ethereum, a newer cryptocurrency whose popularity has soared thanks to its ability to run smart contracts and its more corporate-friendly approach.
by Lulu Yilun Chen and Yuji Nakamura, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via
The notoriously volatile cryptocurrency, whose 150 percent surge this year has captivated everyone from Wall Street bankers to Chinese grandmothers, could be headed for one of its most turbulent stretches yet.
Blame the bitcoin civil war. After two years of largely behind-the-scenes bickering, rival factions of computer whizzes who play key roles in bitcoin’s upkeep are poised to adopt two competing software updates at the end of the month. That has raised the possibility that bitcoin will split in two, an unprecedented event that would send shockwaves through the $41 billion market.
While both sides have big incentives to reach a consensus, bitcoin’s lack of a central authority has made compromise difficult. Even professional traders who’ve followed the dispute’s twists and turns aren’t sure how it will all pan out. Their advice: brace for volatility and be ready to act fast once a clear outcome emerges.“It’s a high-stakes game of chicken,” said Arthur Hayes, a former market maker at Citigroup Inc. who now runs BitMEX, a bitcoin derivatives venue in Hong Kong. “If you’re a trader, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what happens. Once there’s a definitive signal about what will be done, the price could move very quickly.”
Behind the conflict is an ideological split about bitcoin’s rightful identity. The community has bitterly argued whether the cryptocurrency should evolve to appeal to mainstream corporations and become more attractive to traditional capital, or fortify its position as a libertarian beacon; whether it should act more as an asset like gold, or as a payment system.
The seeds of the debate were planted years ago: To protect from cyber attacks, bitcoin by design caps the amount of information on its network, called the blockchain. That puts a ceiling on how many transactions it can process -- the so-called block size limit -- just as the currency’s growing popularity is boosting activity. As a result, transaction times and processing fees have soared to record levels this year, curtailing bitcoin’s ability to process payments with the same efficiency as services like Visa Inc.
To address this problem, two main schools of thought emerged. On one side are miners, who deploy costly computers to verify transactions and act as the backbone of the blockchain. They’re proposing a straightforward increase to the block size limit.
On the other is Core, a group of developers instrumental in upholding bitcoin’s bug-proof software. They insist that to ease blockchain’s traffic jam, some of its data must be managed outside the main network. They claim that not only would it reduce congestion, but also allow other projects including smart contracts to be built on top of bitcoin.
But moving data off the blockchain effectively diminishes the influence of miners, the majority of whom are based in China and who have invested millions on giant server farms. Not surprisingly, Core’s proposal, called SegWit, has garnered resistance from miners, the most vocal being Wu Jihan, co-founder of the world’s largest mining organization Antpool.
“SegWit is itself a great technology, but the reason it hasn’t taken off is because its interest doesn’t align with miners,” Wu said. (...)
The unprecedented level of endorsement is partly prompted by anxiety of bitcoin losing its dominant status to ethereum, a newer cryptocurrency whose popularity has soared thanks to its ability to run smart contracts and its more corporate-friendly approach.
by Lulu Yilun Chen and Yuji Nakamura, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. For a primer on blockchain technology (and how it could revolutionize finance, contracts, internet transactions, corporate tasks and more), read here, here and here.]
11 Habits Of People With Concealed Depression
If you’re reading this post, you’re either trying to better understand someone you love, or you relate directly to these habits. Depression is something that often remains unnoticed for years. Someone with concealed depression is a person fighting his inner demons without you even knowing. They might be diagnosed or undiagnosed, sharing their struggles or keeping them hidden. The problem arises when we stop trying to understand each other. We think everyone carries their heart on their sleeve, but wounds are not something a person openly reveals to people not willing to take a closer look.
They constantly make efforts to appear fine, and maybe even seem exponentially happy and upbeat.
The notion that people suffering from depression all possess a negative personality is false. Depression is not just a mood, it’s a mental imbalance. People often learn to feign moods, so as to appear happy and normal. But personalities are all different, and those with depression often try hard to emanate positivity, regardless of what they’re suffering on the inside. The feeling that they’re bringing others down, makes matters even worse, so depressed people often simply hide their true feelings.
They may have habitual remedies.
Depression is treated in various ways, including therapy and medication. But, in addition to this, there are certain lifestyle changes and habits that people with depression learn to ease their everyday state-of-mind. Things like exercising, listening to music, walking, driving, anything that can distract them from being concentrated on their emotions. Hidden depression has a lot to do with the things people do to personally overcome their demons.
They may have abnormal sleeping and eating habits.
It may seem insignificant, but the consequences are dire. People living with depression often display only little signs. Sleeping too much or too little is the most commonly known symptom of depression. It’s the same with food, and food and sleep are essential for your body’s health. They’re also thing that your mind controls. Depression causes you to be in a state of helplessness, and experiencing a bit of control is sometimes all a person can do. Sleep may be impossible, or it may be the only escape. The same goes for food.
They may interpret substances differently.
A person battling depression, probably knows exactly what they’re taking to ease their pain. Alcohol is a depressant, and prolonged periods of drinking can cause such a low mental state, that it makes them unable to handle normal situations. They know caffeine and sugar raise the mood, and so does medicine, and they also know what doesn’t mix well. And they know all this because they try to alter their state of mind purposefully, and it requires a much greater effort than it does for other people.
They constantly make efforts to appear fine, and maybe even seem exponentially happy and upbeat.
The notion that people suffering from depression all possess a negative personality is false. Depression is not just a mood, it’s a mental imbalance. People often learn to feign moods, so as to appear happy and normal. But personalities are all different, and those with depression often try hard to emanate positivity, regardless of what they’re suffering on the inside. The feeling that they’re bringing others down, makes matters even worse, so depressed people often simply hide their true feelings.
They may have habitual remedies.
Depression is treated in various ways, including therapy and medication. But, in addition to this, there are certain lifestyle changes and habits that people with depression learn to ease their everyday state-of-mind. Things like exercising, listening to music, walking, driving, anything that can distract them from being concentrated on their emotions. Hidden depression has a lot to do with the things people do to personally overcome their demons.
They may have trouble with abandonment.
If you’ve gone through it, you know the struggle, and you also know what a burden it is for the people around you. Sometimes when you let someone get close enough to sense your struggle, they walk away. It’s not exactly right to blame them, but it induces a feeling of abandonment. It causes people with depression to be more and more secretive about their feelings, for fear of being abandoned by other loved ones. It’s very painful to realize that your darkest side is too ugly for others to be accepted.
If you’ve gone through it, you know the struggle, and you also know what a burden it is for the people around you. Sometimes when you let someone get close enough to sense your struggle, they walk away. It’s not exactly right to blame them, but it induces a feeling of abandonment. It causes people with depression to be more and more secretive about their feelings, for fear of being abandoned by other loved ones. It’s very painful to realize that your darkest side is too ugly for others to be accepted.
They can be pros at “cover-up” stories.
The stories are elaborate, from excuses about the cuts on their arms, to reasons for skipping appointments. People going through different forms of depression, experience different hardships, and it disturbs the normalcy of everyday life. In these moments of low esteem, they’re very good at changing the subject and turning attention away from their displays of pain. They’re also often unwilling to admit they’re hitting rock bottom, so they know how to hide it all.
The stories are elaborate, from excuses about the cuts on their arms, to reasons for skipping appointments. People going through different forms of depression, experience different hardships, and it disturbs the normalcy of everyday life. In these moments of low esteem, they’re very good at changing the subject and turning attention away from their displays of pain. They’re also often unwilling to admit they’re hitting rock bottom, so they know how to hide it all.
They may have abnormal sleeping and eating habits.
It may seem insignificant, but the consequences are dire. People living with depression often display only little signs. Sleeping too much or too little is the most commonly known symptom of depression. It’s the same with food, and food and sleep are essential for your body’s health. They’re also thing that your mind controls. Depression causes you to be in a state of helplessness, and experiencing a bit of control is sometimes all a person can do. Sleep may be impossible, or it may be the only escape. The same goes for food.
They may interpret substances differently.
A person battling depression, probably knows exactly what they’re taking to ease their pain. Alcohol is a depressant, and prolonged periods of drinking can cause such a low mental state, that it makes them unable to handle normal situations. They know caffeine and sugar raise the mood, and so does medicine, and they also know what doesn’t mix well. And they know all this because they try to alter their state of mind purposefully, and it requires a much greater effort than it does for other people.
by Stay Occupied | Read more:
[ed. I don't usually post listicles, but as someone who has suffered from long periods of depression I can confirm the accuracy of these observations.]
Monday, July 10, 2017
Spherical Cow
A spherical cow is a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex real life phenomena. The implication is that theoretical physicists will often reduce a problem to the simplest form they can imagine in order to make calculations more feasible, even though such simplification may hinder the model's application to reality.
The phrase comes from a joke that spoofs the simplifying assumptions that are sometimes used in theoretical physics.
Image via: Wikimedia
The phrase comes from a joke that spoofs the simplifying assumptions that are sometimes used in theoretical physics.
by Wikipedia | Read more:Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum".
Image via: Wikimedia
Crony Beliefs
For as long as I can remember, I've struggled to make sense of the terrifying gulf that separates the inside and outside views of beliefs.
From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded.
But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?!
No, seriously: how?
Let's resist the temptation to dismiss such believers as "crazy" — along with "stupid," "gullible," "brainwashed," and "needing the comfort of simple answers." Surely these labels are appropriate some of the time, but once we apply them, we stop thinking. This isn't just lazy; it's foolish. These are fellow human beings we're talking about, creatures of our same species whose brains have been built (grown?) according to the same basic pattern. So whatever processes beget their delusions are at work in our minds as well. We therefore owe it to ourselves to try to reconcile the inside and outside views. Because let's not flatter ourselves: we believe crazy things too. We just have a hard time seeing them as crazy.
So, once again: how could anyone believe this stuff? More to the point: how could we end up believing it?
After struggling with this question for years and years, I finally have an answer I'm satisfied with.
By way of analogy, let's consider how beliefs in the brain are like employees at a company. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it'll get us 70% of the way there.
Employees are hired because they have a job to do, i.e., to help the company accomplish its goals. But employees don't come for free: they have to earn their keep by being useful. So if an employee does his job well, he'll be kept around, whereas if he does it poorly — or makes other kinds of trouble, like friction with his coworkers — he'll have to be let go.
Similarly, we can think about beliefs as ideas that have been "hired" by the brain. And we hire them because they have a "job" to do, which is to provide accurate information about the world. We need to know where the lions hang out (so we can avoid them), which plants are edible or poisonous (so we can eat the right ones), and who's romantically available (so we know whom to flirt with). The closer our beliefs hew to reality, the better actions we'll be able to take, leading ultimately to survival and reproductive success. That's our "bottom line," and that's what determines whether our beliefs are serving us well. If a belief performs poorly — by inaccurately modeling the world, say, and thereby leading us astray — then it needs to be let go.
I hope none of this is controversial. But here's where the analogy gets interesting.
Consider the case of Acme Corp., a property development firm in a small town called Nepotsville. The unwritten rule of doing business in Nepotsville is that companies are expected to hire the city council's friends and family members. Companies that make these strategic hires end up getting their permits approved and winning contracts from the city. Meanwhile, companies that "refuse to play ball" find themselves getting sued, smeared in the local papers, and shut out of new business.
In this environment, Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political. First, like any business, it needs to complete projects on time and under budget. And in order to do that, it needs to act like a meritocracy, i.e., by hiring qualified workers, monitoring their performance, and firing those who don't pull their weight. But at the same time, Acme also needs to appease the city council. And thus it needs to engage in a little cronyism, i.e., by hiring workers who happen to be well-connected to the city council (even if they're unqualified) and preventing those crony workers from being fired (even when they do shoddy work).
Suppose Acme has just decided to hire the mayor's nephew Robert as a business analyst. Robert isn't even remotely qualified for the role, but it's nevertheless in Acme's interests to hire him. He'll "earn his keep" not by doing good work, but by keeping the mayor off the company's back.
Now suppose we were to check in on Robert six months later. If we didn't already know he was a crony, we might easily mistake him for a regular employee. We'd find him making spreadsheets, attending meetings, drawing a salary: all the things employees do. But if we look carefully enough — not at Robert per se, but at the way the company treats him — we're liable to notice something fishy. He's terrible at his job, and yet he isn't fired. Everyone cuts him slack and treats him with kid gloves. The boss tolerates his mistakes and even works overtime to compensate for them. God knows, maybe he's even promoted.
Clearly Robert is a different kind of employee, a different breed. The way he moves through the company is strange, as if he's governed by different rules, measured by a different yardstick. He's in the meritocracy, but not of the meritocracy.
And now the point of this whole analogy.
I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been "hired" not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.
As Steven Pinker says,
Now for the $64,000 question: How can we identify which of our beliefs are cronies?
by Kevin Simler, Melting Asphalt | Read more:
From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded.
But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?!
No, seriously: how?
Let's resist the temptation to dismiss such believers as "crazy" — along with "stupid," "gullible," "brainwashed," and "needing the comfort of simple answers." Surely these labels are appropriate some of the time, but once we apply them, we stop thinking. This isn't just lazy; it's foolish. These are fellow human beings we're talking about, creatures of our same species whose brains have been built (grown?) according to the same basic pattern. So whatever processes beget their delusions are at work in our minds as well. We therefore owe it to ourselves to try to reconcile the inside and outside views. Because let's not flatter ourselves: we believe crazy things too. We just have a hard time seeing them as crazy.
So, once again: how could anyone believe this stuff? More to the point: how could we end up believing it?
After struggling with this question for years and years, I finally have an answer I'm satisfied with.
Beliefs as Employees
By way of analogy, let's consider how beliefs in the brain are like employees at a company. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it'll get us 70% of the way there.
Employees are hired because they have a job to do, i.e., to help the company accomplish its goals. But employees don't come for free: they have to earn their keep by being useful. So if an employee does his job well, he'll be kept around, whereas if he does it poorly — or makes other kinds of trouble, like friction with his coworkers — he'll have to be let go.
Similarly, we can think about beliefs as ideas that have been "hired" by the brain. And we hire them because they have a "job" to do, which is to provide accurate information about the world. We need to know where the lions hang out (so we can avoid them), which plants are edible or poisonous (so we can eat the right ones), and who's romantically available (so we know whom to flirt with). The closer our beliefs hew to reality, the better actions we'll be able to take, leading ultimately to survival and reproductive success. That's our "bottom line," and that's what determines whether our beliefs are serving us well. If a belief performs poorly — by inaccurately modeling the world, say, and thereby leading us astray — then it needs to be let go.
I hope none of this is controversial. But here's where the analogy gets interesting.
Consider the case of Acme Corp., a property development firm in a small town called Nepotsville. The unwritten rule of doing business in Nepotsville is that companies are expected to hire the city council's friends and family members. Companies that make these strategic hires end up getting their permits approved and winning contracts from the city. Meanwhile, companies that "refuse to play ball" find themselves getting sued, smeared in the local papers, and shut out of new business.In this environment, Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political. First, like any business, it needs to complete projects on time and under budget. And in order to do that, it needs to act like a meritocracy, i.e., by hiring qualified workers, monitoring their performance, and firing those who don't pull their weight. But at the same time, Acme also needs to appease the city council. And thus it needs to engage in a little cronyism, i.e., by hiring workers who happen to be well-connected to the city council (even if they're unqualified) and preventing those crony workers from being fired (even when they do shoddy work).
Suppose Acme has just decided to hire the mayor's nephew Robert as a business analyst. Robert isn't even remotely qualified for the role, but it's nevertheless in Acme's interests to hire him. He'll "earn his keep" not by doing good work, but by keeping the mayor off the company's back.
Now suppose we were to check in on Robert six months later. If we didn't already know he was a crony, we might easily mistake him for a regular employee. We'd find him making spreadsheets, attending meetings, drawing a salary: all the things employees do. But if we look carefully enough — not at Robert per se, but at the way the company treats him — we're liable to notice something fishy. He's terrible at his job, and yet he isn't fired. Everyone cuts him slack and treats him with kid gloves. The boss tolerates his mistakes and even works overtime to compensate for them. God knows, maybe he's even promoted.
Clearly Robert is a different kind of employee, a different breed. The way he moves through the company is strange, as if he's governed by different rules, measured by a different yardstick. He's in the meritocracy, but not of the meritocracy.
And now the point of this whole analogy.
I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been "hired" not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.
As Steven Pinker says,
People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.In other words, just like Acme, the human brain has to strike an awkward balance between two different reward systems:
- Meritocracy, where we monitor beliefs for accuracy out of fear that we'll stumble by acting on a false belief; and
- Cronyism, where we don't care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others.
Now for the $64,000 question: How can we identify which of our beliefs are cronies?
by Kevin Simler, Melting Asphalt | Read more:
Image: via:
Sunday, July 9, 2017
The Reichstag Fire Next Time
When each day brings more news than we are used to seeing in a week, and the kind of news that only the most catastrophic imagination can accommodate, we find ourselves talking about the Reichstag fire. Time feels both accelerated and slowed down, and so we imagine that we have been talking about the fire for years. It is the new president’s new clothes: invisible, yet always present in our perception of him.
The Reichstag fire, it goes almost without saying, will be a terrorist attack, and it will mark our sudden, obvious, and irreversible descent into autocracy. Here is what it looks like: On a sunny morning you turn on the television as you make coffee, or the speaker in your shower streams the news, or the radio comes on when you turn the ignition key in your car. The voices of the newscasters are familiar, but their pitch is altered, and they speak with a peculiar haste. Something horrible has happened—it is not yet clear what—and thousands are dead, and more are expected to die. You hear the word “terror.” You feel it.
You reach for your cell phone, but the circuits are busy, and will be for hours—it will take you the rest of the day to check in with your loved ones. They are safe, but changed. And so are you. So are all of us. Tragedy has cast its shadow over every space where you encounter strangers: the subway, your child’s school, your lunch spot. People are quieter, less frivolous, yet they are not subdued. They share a sense of purpose that is greater than their fear. They are experiencing something they’d only read about: War has come to their land. Everyone is a patriot now.
You used to scoff at that word, or argue that dissent was the highest form of patriotism. But now you find that the word expresses what you are. Now is not the moment for dissent. A couple of public intellectuals insist that it is, and you feel embarrassed for them. They quickly fade from the scene, and this serves to underscore an unprecedented sort of unity.
Nowhere is this unity more evident than in Washington. Bills are passed unanimously. These laws give new powers to the president and his security apparatus. The president, unpopular and widely considered incompetent before the attack, now steps up to direct the war effort. His demeanor—which some used to deride as primitive—is well suited for this new black-and-white era. His administration institutes sweeping surveillance to ferret out enemies at home, and wages one war and then another abroad.
American public life is profoundly transformed. The press becomes uncritical of the government. There is no outright censorship; correspondents are part of the effort now, as they were during the Second World War. American casualties pile up, the foreign carnage is enormous and unmeasured, but there is scant domestic resistance. Only at the margins of politics and the media do some people question the usefulness and legality of the war effort.
The government pushes the limits further, cutting off access to the judiciary for those deemed the enemy. The president is no longer unpopular, and he can impose his will on Washington and the country. The country is in a forever war, a state of exception that has taken away many American freedoms, some of which were ceded voluntarily.
That is what we talk about when we talk about the Reichstag fire, and it has already happened. Like sad versions of the characters in The Wizard of Oz, who set off in search of traits they already possess, we are living in fear of an event that will catapult us into a terrifying future, when the event has already occurred—and has given us our terrifying present.
by Masha Gessen, Harper's | Read more:
The Reichstag fire, it goes almost without saying, will be a terrorist attack, and it will mark our sudden, obvious, and irreversible descent into autocracy. Here is what it looks like: On a sunny morning you turn on the television as you make coffee, or the speaker in your shower streams the news, or the radio comes on when you turn the ignition key in your car. The voices of the newscasters are familiar, but their pitch is altered, and they speak with a peculiar haste. Something horrible has happened—it is not yet clear what—and thousands are dead, and more are expected to die. You hear the word “terror.” You feel it.
You reach for your cell phone, but the circuits are busy, and will be for hours—it will take you the rest of the day to check in with your loved ones. They are safe, but changed. And so are you. So are all of us. Tragedy has cast its shadow over every space where you encounter strangers: the subway, your child’s school, your lunch spot. People are quieter, less frivolous, yet they are not subdued. They share a sense of purpose that is greater than their fear. They are experiencing something they’d only read about: War has come to their land. Everyone is a patriot now.
You used to scoff at that word, or argue that dissent was the highest form of patriotism. But now you find that the word expresses what you are. Now is not the moment for dissent. A couple of public intellectuals insist that it is, and you feel embarrassed for them. They quickly fade from the scene, and this serves to underscore an unprecedented sort of unity.
Nowhere is this unity more evident than in Washington. Bills are passed unanimously. These laws give new powers to the president and his security apparatus. The president, unpopular and widely considered incompetent before the attack, now steps up to direct the war effort. His demeanor—which some used to deride as primitive—is well suited for this new black-and-white era. His administration institutes sweeping surveillance to ferret out enemies at home, and wages one war and then another abroad.
American public life is profoundly transformed. The press becomes uncritical of the government. There is no outright censorship; correspondents are part of the effort now, as they were during the Second World War. American casualties pile up, the foreign carnage is enormous and unmeasured, but there is scant domestic resistance. Only at the margins of politics and the media do some people question the usefulness and legality of the war effort.
The government pushes the limits further, cutting off access to the judiciary for those deemed the enemy. The president is no longer unpopular, and he can impose his will on Washington and the country. The country is in a forever war, a state of exception that has taken away many American freedoms, some of which were ceded voluntarily.
That is what we talk about when we talk about the Reichstag fire, and it has already happened. Like sad versions of the characters in The Wizard of Oz, who set off in search of traits they already possess, we are living in fear of an event that will catapult us into a terrifying future, when the event has already occurred—and has given us our terrifying present.
by Masha Gessen, Harper's | Read more:
[ed. See also: The Weekly Review]
How Not to Get a Job
What do a fragrance designer, New York City cop, bed-and-breakfast manager and youth hockey coach have in common?
Each of them recently applied for an account director position at my public relations firm, along with 500 others whose experience and skill sets ranged from vaguely on-point to off-the-charts irrelevant. Auto collections manager? Home health aide? Visual merchandiser? Count them all in.
It’s not that my postings on Indeed, LinkedIn and other career sites weren’t explicit in outlining desired qualifications. I added instructions urging candidates to contact us only if they had backgrounds in journalism, P.R. or law. There was nothing to suggest I was looking for a fiscal benefits analyst, emergency medical technician or brand ambassador, but they showed up anyway.
In part, the disconnect stems from a revved-up labor market that encourages job hopping and inflated credentials. It also reflects the vast online jobs marketplace, where restless applicants shoot off their résumés like one of those T-shirt cannons at a football stadium, firing without aiming. Not a single candidate bothered to look us up and refer to what we do in the cover note. Instead, they all invoked grand boilerplate statements meant to impress the hiring gods.
Here’s how one actress stated her case: “Not only do I believe in Ripp Media’s ability to deliver human and intuitive touchpoints through physical and technological interaction, but I can contribute to this strategic investment for the modern enterprise by bringing my diverse experiences …” It was like reading Mad Libs.
I’m all for people crossing the professional divide. America’s work force is going through tumult, as even the superskilled see their jobs eliminated or made obsolete by technology. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a steady decline in the average tenure of wage and salaried workers — most recently at 4.2 years, down from 4.6 in 2014.
Many of those hitting me up hadn’t been at their current job more than four months. Moreover, hardly any tried to connect the dots from their world to ours. They assumed that because they’d done surgical sales or analyzed customer accounts for a dental supply company, they could do anything. P.R. account director? Sure, sign me up.
Online job sites appear to enhance success because of the magnitude of potential targets, coupled with the ease of applying, perhaps while scrolling through one’s phone in between texting and watching TV. But when something is so simple, fast and prepackaged, it tends to feel inauthentic and impersonal. Goodness knows, employers are human, too.
Although I listed my phone numbers in my ads, I got a total of two calls from applicants. Everyone else preferred the automatic approach, and it showed in their one-size-fits-all letters and résumés. I imagined them swiping on Tinder with the same abandon as they responded to my posting. They probably also stay glued to their GPS when driving down dead-end alleys.
Perhaps that’s why so many showcased accomplishments that sounded machine-made, as in “liaise with field managers to create metric reports in line with KPIs.” There were also digital marketers lauding their ability to “increase channel awareness and implement impactful distribution modes to engage target audiences.” I was more drawn to the waitress who described her duties with the clarity of E. B. White: “Explain dishes on menu to patrons and make recommendations; take orders and relay them to kitchen; calculate meal costs and add taxes to final bill.” She was elevated to the “maybe” pile.
Each of them recently applied for an account director position at my public relations firm, along with 500 others whose experience and skill sets ranged from vaguely on-point to off-the-charts irrelevant. Auto collections manager? Home health aide? Visual merchandiser? Count them all in.
It’s not that my postings on Indeed, LinkedIn and other career sites weren’t explicit in outlining desired qualifications. I added instructions urging candidates to contact us only if they had backgrounds in journalism, P.R. or law. There was nothing to suggest I was looking for a fiscal benefits analyst, emergency medical technician or brand ambassador, but they showed up anyway.
In part, the disconnect stems from a revved-up labor market that encourages job hopping and inflated credentials. It also reflects the vast online jobs marketplace, where restless applicants shoot off their résumés like one of those T-shirt cannons at a football stadium, firing without aiming. Not a single candidate bothered to look us up and refer to what we do in the cover note. Instead, they all invoked grand boilerplate statements meant to impress the hiring gods.Here’s how one actress stated her case: “Not only do I believe in Ripp Media’s ability to deliver human and intuitive touchpoints through physical and technological interaction, but I can contribute to this strategic investment for the modern enterprise by bringing my diverse experiences …” It was like reading Mad Libs.
I’m all for people crossing the professional divide. America’s work force is going through tumult, as even the superskilled see their jobs eliminated or made obsolete by technology. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a steady decline in the average tenure of wage and salaried workers — most recently at 4.2 years, down from 4.6 in 2014.
Many of those hitting me up hadn’t been at their current job more than four months. Moreover, hardly any tried to connect the dots from their world to ours. They assumed that because they’d done surgical sales or analyzed customer accounts for a dental supply company, they could do anything. P.R. account director? Sure, sign me up.
Online job sites appear to enhance success because of the magnitude of potential targets, coupled with the ease of applying, perhaps while scrolling through one’s phone in between texting and watching TV. But when something is so simple, fast and prepackaged, it tends to feel inauthentic and impersonal. Goodness knows, employers are human, too.
Although I listed my phone numbers in my ads, I got a total of two calls from applicants. Everyone else preferred the automatic approach, and it showed in their one-size-fits-all letters and résumés. I imagined them swiping on Tinder with the same abandon as they responded to my posting. They probably also stay glued to their GPS when driving down dead-end alleys.
Perhaps that’s why so many showcased accomplishments that sounded machine-made, as in “liaise with field managers to create metric reports in line with KPIs.” There were also digital marketers lauding their ability to “increase channel awareness and implement impactful distribution modes to engage target audiences.” I was more drawn to the waitress who described her duties with the clarity of E. B. White: “Explain dishes on menu to patrons and make recommendations; take orders and relay them to kitchen; calculate meal costs and add taxes to final bill.” She was elevated to the “maybe” pile.
by Allan Ripp, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Salmieri
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
Saturday, July 8, 2017
Nevertheless, She Bought a Shirt
After Mitch McConnell chided Elizabeth Warren for speaking out against the nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general on the Senate floor a few weeks ago, shirts adorned with the phrase “Nevertheless, She Persisted” filled Etsy shops in what felt like a matter of seconds. Warren’s brave speech had been memed. A day or so later a friend of mine, a successful artist, tweeted “#resist… commodified activism :-).” Her replies quickly lit up with dispatches from designers bruised by her tweet. “I think in this industry our first instinct is to make stuff. Intentionality helps legitimize it,” one person wrote. “I’m all for calling out performative allyship, but honestly isn’t it better to have designers making junk for charity rather than just junk?” said another.
I was reminded of this Twitter exchange while looking at nail accounts on Instagram over the weekend, which is my favorite hobby after picking individual strands of hair from my throw rug. Amid the shellacked flowers and geometrical designs were a pair of sharp white nails that looked to be painted with drips of blood and other unidentifiable objects. I zoomed in for a closer look, and saw that painted on the person’s individual nails were a tiny tampon, a bleeding vulva, and a soiled pad.
Hm, I thought. Menstruation does remain far too taboo a subject (women should really get one week off per month to cope with the assault their unfertilized eggs wage on their body). But would I pay to get a bloody tampon manicured on my nail in some sort of feminist statement? It already seems ridiculous enough that I pay a very good nail artist a lot of money to paint tiny butterflies on my nails, but there are so few pleasures in life. The menstrual manicure, however, crystallized something I’ve been thinking a lot lately: how expression, feminism, politics, and commerce tend to converge at mystifying speed in our capitalist dystopia, and end up meaning nothing.
The modern practice of feminist activism has become inextricably tied to what we buy and what we wear. At the most recent New York Fashion Week, designers who seized the moment and made political statements with their looks were praised, not just by their audiences but with extra press coverage. Some models for Prabal Gurung strutted the catwalk wearing shirts that read “LOVE IS THE RESISTANCE.” The Row featured wide-cuffed shirts embroidered with the word “hope.” Milly gave show guests shirts that read “STEINEM AF.” And at Tommy Hilfiger, models in the Tommy x Gigi show wore “white bandanas to show unity, equality and appreciation for all of humanity as part of Business of Fashion’s #tiedtogether hashtag.”
In November, a few weeks after the election, Molly Fischer of The Cut wrote about the feminist t-shirts (“The Future is Female,” “Nasty Woman,” “Pantsuit Nation”) that so many wore — and Instagrammed themselves wearing — to show support for Hillary Clinton. This cheap, easy, and ubiquitous activism will forever be associated with Clinton’s incredible loss on November 8. As Fischer wrote, “It felt so good to see all the women looking proud in their feminist t-shirts! It felt even better to see the feminist t-shirts on children, or just to imagine the children — some of the youngest were photographed in Hillary onesies — who would grow up seeing feminism as cool. I suppose it’s easy, at this juncture, to look back ruefully on any time we spent feeling good. If only we had felt worse? If only we had chosen different ways of feeling better. If only we had realized that making feminism (or Hillary) look cool should be the least of our worries."
Yes. But this is the business of feminist activism: the superfluity of sloganized wearables that don’t really say anything or contribute to any tangible goal while giving the impression that they, and their wearer, do. The artists who manufacture these goods might seek to justify their craft by donating some proceeds to charity; the high-fashion designers who sell politically inspired separates often elide the question of whether they’re donating to charity at all. (Using charity to rationalize the commodification of activism is in itself problematic; it leaves us free from examining the full intentionality of our deeds and words.) In any case, it’s an impoverished state of being.
by Leah Finnegan, The Outline | Read more:
Image: Twitter, uncredited
I was reminded of this Twitter exchange while looking at nail accounts on Instagram over the weekend, which is my favorite hobby after picking individual strands of hair from my throw rug. Amid the shellacked flowers and geometrical designs were a pair of sharp white nails that looked to be painted with drips of blood and other unidentifiable objects. I zoomed in for a closer look, and saw that painted on the person’s individual nails were a tiny tampon, a bleeding vulva, and a soiled pad.
Hm, I thought. Menstruation does remain far too taboo a subject (women should really get one week off per month to cope with the assault their unfertilized eggs wage on their body). But would I pay to get a bloody tampon manicured on my nail in some sort of feminist statement? It already seems ridiculous enough that I pay a very good nail artist a lot of money to paint tiny butterflies on my nails, but there are so few pleasures in life. The menstrual manicure, however, crystallized something I’ve been thinking a lot lately: how expression, feminism, politics, and commerce tend to converge at mystifying speed in our capitalist dystopia, and end up meaning nothing.The modern practice of feminist activism has become inextricably tied to what we buy and what we wear. At the most recent New York Fashion Week, designers who seized the moment and made political statements with their looks were praised, not just by their audiences but with extra press coverage. Some models for Prabal Gurung strutted the catwalk wearing shirts that read “LOVE IS THE RESISTANCE.” The Row featured wide-cuffed shirts embroidered with the word “hope.” Milly gave show guests shirts that read “STEINEM AF.” And at Tommy Hilfiger, models in the Tommy x Gigi show wore “white bandanas to show unity, equality and appreciation for all of humanity as part of Business of Fashion’s #tiedtogether hashtag.”
In November, a few weeks after the election, Molly Fischer of The Cut wrote about the feminist t-shirts (“The Future is Female,” “Nasty Woman,” “Pantsuit Nation”) that so many wore — and Instagrammed themselves wearing — to show support for Hillary Clinton. This cheap, easy, and ubiquitous activism will forever be associated with Clinton’s incredible loss on November 8. As Fischer wrote, “It felt so good to see all the women looking proud in their feminist t-shirts! It felt even better to see the feminist t-shirts on children, or just to imagine the children — some of the youngest were photographed in Hillary onesies — who would grow up seeing feminism as cool. I suppose it’s easy, at this juncture, to look back ruefully on any time we spent feeling good. If only we had felt worse? If only we had chosen different ways of feeling better. If only we had realized that making feminism (or Hillary) look cool should be the least of our worries."
Yes. But this is the business of feminist activism: the superfluity of sloganized wearables that don’t really say anything or contribute to any tangible goal while giving the impression that they, and their wearer, do. The artists who manufacture these goods might seek to justify their craft by donating some proceeds to charity; the high-fashion designers who sell politically inspired separates often elide the question of whether they’re donating to charity at all. (Using charity to rationalize the commodification of activism is in itself problematic; it leaves us free from examining the full intentionality of our deeds and words.) In any case, it’s an impoverished state of being.
by Leah Finnegan, The Outline | Read more:
Image: Twitter, uncredited
Scared About North Korea?
No matter how hard Americans may have tried to check out of the real world over this long holiday, their idylls were undoubtedly interrupted by the news that North Korea had successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that could conceivably reach the U.S. If paired with a miniaturized nuclear warhead, it poses the greatest new threat to domestic security since the end of the Cold War. And, oh yeah, the guy with his hand on the launcher is a stone-cold nut job who reportedly likes killing close relatives with anti-aircraft guns.
OK, this is scary, but mostly in a theoretical sense. There remain lots of unanswered questions about the sophistication and reliability of the North Koreans' weapons, not to mention the odds that the dictator Kim Jong Un would sign his own death warrant by using a nuclear device on South Korea, Japan or the world's remaining military superpower. To get more concrete answers, I spoke with somebody who knows as much as anybody about the Hermit Kingdom's mysterious ways: Jeffrey Lewis -- or, as he is known to his more than 30,000 Twitter followers, @armscontrolwonk. Lewis is the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, writes for Foreign Policy, and oversees a lively blog on nonproliferation issues -- no, that is not an oxymoron -- at armscontrolwonk.com.
I talked with Lewis about the latest North Korean achievement, the history and future of the regime's nuclear program, and what it's like to live in the heart of the fallout zone should Kim make good on his threat to turn the Pacific Coast into a "sea of fire." Here is a transcript of the discussion:
Tobin Harshaw: North Korea's successful ICBM launch seems to have surprised many "experts" in the commentariat, even given its previous progress with ballistic missiles. Yet you warned of this possibility in a blog post more than a year ago, and again after Trump was elected. Did you know something others didn't, or does this just reflect a failure of the cognoscenti to take the threat seriously?
Jeffrey Lewis: I've written two books on the history of China’s nuclear weapons program. The American reaction to Mao’s China and the bomb was pretty similar to the reaction to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program today. China’s goal, from the get-go in the 1950s, was to put a thermonuclear weapon on an ICBM that could reach the U.S. Americans had real trouble accepting that because it didn’t fit our image of a backwards, impoverished China. Of course, that was precisely why the Chinese did it. They had a different view of themselves and their future. It seems the same to me with North Korea. We think they are a joke. But I don’t see them laughing -- well, except in photos right after successful missile tests. They laugh plenty in those. (...)
TH: Having an ICBM is one thing, having a miniaturized nuclear warhead to put on it is another. Kim has bragged about mastering the technology, and released a (unintentionally hilarious) propaganda photo of himself standing next to their supposed device. Do you think he's lying? If so, how close are they?
JL: I don't have any doubt that North Korea has a compact fission device that fits on a ballistic missile. North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests –- and if we look at the other nuclear powers, after five nuclear tests they were all capable of building compact nuclear weapons and/or well on their way to thermonuclear weapons. To go back to my point about China, the U.S. expressed the same skepticism about whether China could make a compact device small enough to fit on a missile. The Chinese responded by altering their nuclear test schedule so that their fourth nuclear test, in 1966, was a test of a live nuclear warhead on a real missile, which they fired across their country. The Chinese made their point. I hope the North Koreans doesn’t feel the need to do something similar and fly a nuclear-armed missile over Japan. (...)
TH: Experts say that if the ICBM was put on a more traditional angle, it could have flown 4,000 miles as opposed to the 600 or so it went before falling into the Sea of Japan. That would put all of Alaska in range if true. But you wrote the other day in the Daily Beast that it could possibly bring the continental U.S. into play as well. Tell us why, and whether the U.S. is taking that threat seriously enough.
JL: Well, there is a difference between the range the missile demonstrated last week, which was about 4,000 miles, and what the simulations we do at the Middlebury Institute suggest the missile may be capable of. My colleages, along with David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists, looked very closely at the launch of a new intermediate-range missile in May, as well as this one, trying to measure the missile and model its performance. It seems to me the North Korea cut the engines a bit early here, possibly so they did not overfly Japan. But they have been very clear their targets are in the continental U.S. -- the Pacific Fleet in San Diego, Washington, and lately New York City -- not Alaska. And our initial modeling of this missile suggests that it should be able to deliver a nuclear-weapon sized payload to most, if not all, those places. We’re still modeling away though.
TH: Which leads us to the question of what we do about it. The latest U.S. missile-defense test was a failure, as have the vast majority. Is the idea of a domestic shield -- the ability to "hit a bullet with a bullet" -- realistic, at least with today's technology? Is the money Congress wants put aside for studies of an East Coast shield just silly?
JL: Some missile defenses are a good investment, while others are not. The system that failed recently, the SM-3 Block IIA is, I think, still a really good investment -- although it is designed to deal with medium- and intermediate-range missiles and would be pretty helpless against an ICBM.
If we want to shoot down a North Korean ICBM headed for the U.S., we have to rely on the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system based in Alaska and southern California. The idea for a third site, possibly in the Northeast, came from a National Academies panel that was co-chaired by a friend of mine, the great Walt Slocombe. It is worth reading why Walt’s panel actually proposed adding a third site -- they concluded that the GMD system intended to defend the U.S. against a North Korean or Iranian ICBM needed to be completely redesigned, with new interceptors, new radars and a new concept of operations. They did not recommend adding a third site with existing technology, but rather suggested starting over almost at square one. That little detail sort of got overlooked.
by Tobin Harshaw, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: AFP/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Trump’s Korea Policy is a Fast-Forward, Stupider Version of Bush’s]
OK, this is scary, but mostly in a theoretical sense. There remain lots of unanswered questions about the sophistication and reliability of the North Koreans' weapons, not to mention the odds that the dictator Kim Jong Un would sign his own death warrant by using a nuclear device on South Korea, Japan or the world's remaining military superpower. To get more concrete answers, I spoke with somebody who knows as much as anybody about the Hermit Kingdom's mysterious ways: Jeffrey Lewis -- or, as he is known to his more than 30,000 Twitter followers, @armscontrolwonk. Lewis is the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, writes for Foreign Policy, and oversees a lively blog on nonproliferation issues -- no, that is not an oxymoron -- at armscontrolwonk.com.I talked with Lewis about the latest North Korean achievement, the history and future of the regime's nuclear program, and what it's like to live in the heart of the fallout zone should Kim make good on his threat to turn the Pacific Coast into a "sea of fire." Here is a transcript of the discussion:
Tobin Harshaw: North Korea's successful ICBM launch seems to have surprised many "experts" in the commentariat, even given its previous progress with ballistic missiles. Yet you warned of this possibility in a blog post more than a year ago, and again after Trump was elected. Did you know something others didn't, or does this just reflect a failure of the cognoscenti to take the threat seriously?
Jeffrey Lewis: I've written two books on the history of China’s nuclear weapons program. The American reaction to Mao’s China and the bomb was pretty similar to the reaction to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program today. China’s goal, from the get-go in the 1950s, was to put a thermonuclear weapon on an ICBM that could reach the U.S. Americans had real trouble accepting that because it didn’t fit our image of a backwards, impoverished China. Of course, that was precisely why the Chinese did it. They had a different view of themselves and their future. It seems the same to me with North Korea. We think they are a joke. But I don’t see them laughing -- well, except in photos right after successful missile tests. They laugh plenty in those. (...)
TH: Having an ICBM is one thing, having a miniaturized nuclear warhead to put on it is another. Kim has bragged about mastering the technology, and released a (unintentionally hilarious) propaganda photo of himself standing next to their supposed device. Do you think he's lying? If so, how close are they?
JL: I don't have any doubt that North Korea has a compact fission device that fits on a ballistic missile. North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests –- and if we look at the other nuclear powers, after five nuclear tests they were all capable of building compact nuclear weapons and/or well on their way to thermonuclear weapons. To go back to my point about China, the U.S. expressed the same skepticism about whether China could make a compact device small enough to fit on a missile. The Chinese responded by altering their nuclear test schedule so that their fourth nuclear test, in 1966, was a test of a live nuclear warhead on a real missile, which they fired across their country. The Chinese made their point. I hope the North Koreans doesn’t feel the need to do something similar and fly a nuclear-armed missile over Japan. (...)
TH: Experts say that if the ICBM was put on a more traditional angle, it could have flown 4,000 miles as opposed to the 600 or so it went before falling into the Sea of Japan. That would put all of Alaska in range if true. But you wrote the other day in the Daily Beast that it could possibly bring the continental U.S. into play as well. Tell us why, and whether the U.S. is taking that threat seriously enough.
JL: Well, there is a difference between the range the missile demonstrated last week, which was about 4,000 miles, and what the simulations we do at the Middlebury Institute suggest the missile may be capable of. My colleages, along with David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists, looked very closely at the launch of a new intermediate-range missile in May, as well as this one, trying to measure the missile and model its performance. It seems to me the North Korea cut the engines a bit early here, possibly so they did not overfly Japan. But they have been very clear their targets are in the continental U.S. -- the Pacific Fleet in San Diego, Washington, and lately New York City -- not Alaska. And our initial modeling of this missile suggests that it should be able to deliver a nuclear-weapon sized payload to most, if not all, those places. We’re still modeling away though.
TH: Which leads us to the question of what we do about it. The latest U.S. missile-defense test was a failure, as have the vast majority. Is the idea of a domestic shield -- the ability to "hit a bullet with a bullet" -- realistic, at least with today's technology? Is the money Congress wants put aside for studies of an East Coast shield just silly?
JL: Some missile defenses are a good investment, while others are not. The system that failed recently, the SM-3 Block IIA is, I think, still a really good investment -- although it is designed to deal with medium- and intermediate-range missiles and would be pretty helpless against an ICBM.
If we want to shoot down a North Korean ICBM headed for the U.S., we have to rely on the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system based in Alaska and southern California. The idea for a third site, possibly in the Northeast, came from a National Academies panel that was co-chaired by a friend of mine, the great Walt Slocombe. It is worth reading why Walt’s panel actually proposed adding a third site -- they concluded that the GMD system intended to defend the U.S. against a North Korean or Iranian ICBM needed to be completely redesigned, with new interceptors, new radars and a new concept of operations. They did not recommend adding a third site with existing technology, but rather suggested starting over almost at square one. That little detail sort of got overlooked.
by Tobin Harshaw, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: AFP/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Trump’s Korea Policy is a Fast-Forward, Stupider Version of Bush’s]
Friday, July 7, 2017
I Feel It Is My Duty to Speak Out
I am writing to complain about one of your products: namely, Silk Cashewmilk (with a touch of almond). I imagine that you receive many complaints about your use of the word “milk,” and frequent challenges to specify where exactly on the cashew nut the teats are located. This, however, is not a problem for me, since I simply mop up what I take to be a sloppy euphemism with a pair of quotation marks. No, what I wish to complain about is the recent redesign of your half-gallon “milk” cartons.
My bipartite beef with this redesign is 1) the reduction in realism of the illustration and 2) the stance of the nuts represented therein. To start with the latter point: I have come, in recent years, to identify with the two nuts who, like game siblings, plunge pell-mell into their fate. I hope that it is not an anthropomorphism too far to suggest that one splashes down as if propelled from a water chute, and the other arcs forward, as if diving headlong, emboldened by the first’s joyful splash. This is an image of excitement and of freedom (from what, I presume, is for the “milk” drinker to decide). In the new arrangement, however, the two nuts face one another, turning their backs on the world to assume a conservative relation based in partnering and stability. My concern is that here you are affirming and perpetuating recent troubling shifts in political attitudes the world over. Your open and energetic cashews have become inward-looking; even their spatial alignment is now in almost complete agreement with one another, as if no differently oriented nut would be welcome.
The medium into which they are about to be subsumed has similarly been made safe. You have, it seems, seen fit to censor the milk-droplet coronet of the earlier packaging—which was, I felt, a nod to the pioneering photographic work of A. M. Worthington at the turn of the twentieth century, and a salute to the spectactularist high-speed film experiments of Harold Edgerton some fifty years later. The new design suppresses the tremendously uplifting splash motif, implementing instead what might be described as a mellifluous swelling of liquid about the nuts. This is no doubt to draw on connotations of silk, to visually insinuate the creaminess that the tongue can look forward to. Well, for one thing, a tongue cannot look. And for another, I do not need such synesthetic cues or Elysian fictions to aid me in my beverage choices. And for yet another, you have likely alienated your buyer base of thrill-seeking individualists with this new appeal to comfort-loving sensualists. This smacks to me of playing to the risk-averse majority; but then again yours is, I would feel confident in submitting, a numbers game above all else.
On the subject of harsh realities, I come back to my first point: the illustration’s insulting retreat from realism. The previous packaging was so bracingly candid about the earthy origins of the nut. Not only were we invited to contemplate the somewhat irregular seam at which the two halves fuse, we were also treated to a well-lit view of the surface of the nut, ridged and pitted like the craggy face of an ancient poet. I could admire these nuts that had passed into “milk” with dignity and originality. The new protagonists, however, have been airbrushed and plumped up; they appear not to exist in any reality that I can identify with, but to hail from the pulpiest of fictions, and one that ends in an improbable perpetuity.
We all know that food photography lies—that the ice cream is mashed potato, that the meat is seared with shoe polish, that the milk, or “milk,” is PVA glue or hair conditioner or suntan lotion. I understand that the look or sound of reality must be constructed to be convincing. But it is not the material lies you tell so much as the conceptual maneuvering that strikes me to the core. What are you trying to hide from us? What is it that you think we cannot handle?
by Sally O'Reilly, Cabinet | Read more:
by Sally O'Reilly, Cabinet | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Whites
We settled on the edges of their towns, when they would let us. And when they would not—Do not let sundown find you in this county, their signs sometimes said—we traveled on. We wandered from one labor camp to the next in their hot dusty valleys—the Sacramento, the Imperial, the San Joaquin—and side by side with our new husbands, we worked their land. We picked their strawberries in Watsonville. We picked their grapes in Fresno and Denair. We got down on our knees and dug up their potatoes with garden forks on Bacon Island in the Delta, where the earth was spongy and soft. And when the harvest season was over we tied our blanket rolls onto our backs and, cloth bundles in hand, we waited for the next wagon to come, and we traveled on.
The first word of their language we were taught was water. Shout it out, our husbands told us, the moment you begin to feel faint in the fields. “Learn this word,” they said, “and save your life.” Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and had never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and never woke up. “I thought she was sleeping,” said her husband. “Heatstroke,” the boss explained. Another of us was too shy to shout and knelt down and drank from an irrigation ditch instead. Seven days later she was burning up with typhoid. Other words we soon learned: All right—what the boss said when he was satisfied with our work—and Go home—what he said when we were too clumsy or slow.
In the beginning we wondered about them constantly. Why did they mount their horses from the left side and not the right? How were they able to tell each other apart? Why were they always shouting? Did they really hang dishes on their walls and not pictures? And have locks on all their doors? And wear their shoes inside the house? To whom did they pray? How many gods did they have? Was it true that they really saw a man in the moon and not a rabbit? And drank the milk of cows? And that smell? What was it? “Butter stink,” our husbands explained.
Stay away from them, we were warned. Approach them with caution, if you must. Do not always believe what they tell you, but learn to watch them closely: their hands, their eyes, the corners of their mouths, sudden changes in the color of their skin. Make sure, however, that you don’t stare. Expect the worst, but do not be surprised by moments of kindness. Remember to make them feel comfortable. Appear eager to please. Say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all.
Some of us worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong. Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never held a hoe. “Easiest job in America,” we were told. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row. Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked—our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover. One of us was distracted by the handsome Hindu man cutting asparagus in the next furrow over while she worked and all she could think of was how much she wanted to unravel his white turban from his enormous brown head. I dream about Gupta-san nightly. Some of us chanted Buddhist sutras while we worked and the hours flew by like minutes. Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan. Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters—they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars—we never would have come to America to do the work no self-respecting American would do.
They admired us for our strong backs and nimble hands. Our stamina. Our discipline. Our docile dispositions. Our unusual ability to tolerate the heat, which on summer days in the melon fields of Brawley could reach 120 degrees. They said our short stature ideally suited us for work that required stooping low to the ground. Wherever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese—we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite—but none of their vices—we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat. We were faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans. We were soberer than the Mexicans. We were cheaper to feed than the Okies and Arkies, both the light and the dark. A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. These folks just drift, we don’t have to look after them at all.
Sometimes the boss would approach us from behind while we were bending over his fields and whisper a few words into our ears. And even though we had no idea what he was saying we knew exactly what he meant. “Me no speak English,” we’d reply. Or, “So sorry, Boss, but no.” Sometimes one of our husband’s unmarried worker friends approached us the moment our husband stepped away and tried to slip us a five-dollar bill. “Just let me put it in once,” he’d say. “I promise you I won’t even move it.” And every now and then we’d give in and say yes. Perhaps we were unhappy with our husbands, who went out to play cards and drink every night and did not come home until late. Or perhaps we needed to send money to our family back home because their rice fields had once again been ruined by floods. Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly: a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of Modern Screen magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without giving anything in return we knew there would be a price to pay. He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife. And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.
Sometimes they drove by our farm shacks and sprayed our windows with buckshot, or set our chicken coops on fire. Sometimes they burned down our fields just as they were beginning to ripen and we lost our entire earnings for that year. And even though we found footsteps in the dirt the following morning, and many scattered matchsticks, when we called the sheriff to come out and take a look he told us there were no clues worth following. And after that our husbands were never the same. Why even bother? At night we slept with our shoes on, and hatchets beside our beds, while our husbands sat by the windows until dawn. Sometimes our husbands bought themselves guard dogs, which they named Dick or Harry or Spot, and they grew more attached to those dogs than they ever did to us, and we wondered whether we had made a mistake, coming to such a violent and unwelcoming land.
Some of us moved out of the countryside and into their suburbs and got to know them well. We lived in the servants’ quarters of the big houses in Atherton and Berkeley, above Telegraph, up high in the hills. Or we worked for a man like Dr. Giordano, who was a prominent thoracic surgeon on Alameda’s gold coast. And while our husband mowed Dr. Giordano’s lawn and pruned Dr. Giordano’s shrubs and raked Dr. Giordano’s leaves we stayed inside with Mrs. Giordano, who had wavy brown hair and a kind manner and asked us to please call her Rose, and we polished Rose’s silver and we swept Rose’s floors and we tended to Rose’s three young children, Richard, Jim, and Theo, whom we sang to sleep every night in a language not their own. Nemure, nemure.And it was not at all what we had expected. I have come to care for those boys as though they were my own. But it was Dr. Giordano’s elderly mother, Lucia, whom we came to care for the most. She followed us from one room to the next as we dusted and mopped and not once did she ever stop talking. Molto bene. Perfetto! Basta così. And for many years after her death her memories of the old country would continue to linger with us as though they were our own: the mozzarella, the pomodori, the Lago di Como, the piazza in the center of town where she went shopping with her sisters every day. Italia, Italia, how I long to see it one last time.
It was their women who taught us the things we most needed to know. How to light a stove. How to make a bed. How to answer a door. How to shake a hand. How to operate a faucet, which many of us had never seen in our lives. How to dial a telephone. How to sound cheerful on a telephone even when you were angry or sad. How to fry an egg. How to peel a potato. How to set a table. How to prepare a five-course dinner in six hours for a party of twelve. How to light a cigarette. How to curl your hair so it looked just like Mary Pickford’s. How to wash a lipstick stain out of your husband’s favorite white shirt even when that lipstick stain was not yours. How to talk to a husband. How to argue with a husband. How to deceive a husband. How to keep a husband from wandering too far from your side. Don’t ask him where he’s been or what time he’ll be coming home and make sure he is happy in bed.
When they were unhappy and had no one to talk to they told us their deep, darkest secrets. Everything I told him was a lie. When their husbands went away on business they asked us to sleep with them in their bedrooms in case they got lonely. When they fell in love with a man who was not their husband we kept an eye on their children while they went out to meet that man in the middle of the day. We brushed invisible specks of lint from their blouses, retied scarves, adjusted stray locks of hair so they hung just so. “You look beautiful,” we said to them, and then we sent them on their way. And when their husbands came home in the evening at the usual hour we pretended not to know a thing.
Some of them dismissed us without any warning and we had no idea what we’d done wrong. “You were too pretty,” our husbands would tell us, even though we found it hard to believe this was true. Some of us were so inept we knew we would not last more than one week. We forgot to cook their meat before serving it to them for supper. We dropped their best crystal goblets. We threw out their cheese by mistake. “I thought it was rotten,” we tried to explain. “That’s how it’s supposed to smell,” we were told. Some of us had trouble understanding their English, which bore no resemblance to what we had learned in our books. We said “Yes” when they asked us if we would mind folding their laundry, and “No” when they asked us to mop, and when they asked us if we’d seen their missing gold earrings we smiled and said, “Oh, is that so?” Some of us had grown up on large estates with servants of our own and could not tolerate being told what to do. Some of us did not get along well with their children, whom we found aggressive and loud. Some of us objected to what they said about us to their children when they did not realize we were still in the room. If you don’t study harder, you’ll end up scrubbing floors just like Yuki.
From time to time one of their men would ask to have a word with us in his study while his wife was out shopping and we did not know how to say no. “Is everything all right?” he would ask us. Usually we stared down at the floor and said yes, of course, everything was fine, even though this was not true, but when he touched us lightly on the shoulder and asked us if we were sure, we did not always turn away. “Nobody has to know,” he would say to us. Or, “She’s not due home until late.” And when he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed—the very same bed we had made up that morning—we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held.
The first word of their language we were taught was water. Shout it out, our husbands told us, the moment you begin to feel faint in the fields. “Learn this word,” they said, “and save your life.” Most of us did, but one of us—Yoshiko, who had been raised by wet nurses behind high-walled courtyards in Kobe and had never seen a weed in her life—did not. She went to bed after her first day at the Marble Ranch and never woke up. “I thought she was sleeping,” said her husband. “Heatstroke,” the boss explained. Another of us was too shy to shout and knelt down and drank from an irrigation ditch instead. Seven days later she was burning up with typhoid. Other words we soon learned: All right—what the boss said when he was satisfied with our work—and Go home—what he said when we were too clumsy or slow.
In the beginning we wondered about them constantly. Why did they mount their horses from the left side and not the right? How were they able to tell each other apart? Why were they always shouting? Did they really hang dishes on their walls and not pictures? And have locks on all their doors? And wear their shoes inside the house? To whom did they pray? How many gods did they have? Was it true that they really saw a man in the moon and not a rabbit? And drank the milk of cows? And that smell? What was it? “Butter stink,” our husbands explained.
Stay away from them, we were warned. Approach them with caution, if you must. Do not always believe what they tell you, but learn to watch them closely: their hands, their eyes, the corners of their mouths, sudden changes in the color of their skin. Make sure, however, that you don’t stare. Expect the worst, but do not be surprised by moments of kindness. Remember to make them feel comfortable. Appear eager to please. Say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all.Some of us worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong. Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never held a hoe. “Easiest job in America,” we were told. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row. Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked—our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover. One of us was distracted by the handsome Hindu man cutting asparagus in the next furrow over while she worked and all she could think of was how much she wanted to unravel his white turban from his enormous brown head. I dream about Gupta-san nightly. Some of us chanted Buddhist sutras while we worked and the hours flew by like minutes. Many more of us sang the same harvest songs we had sung in our youth and tried to imagine we were back home in Japan. Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters—they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars—we never would have come to America to do the work no self-respecting American would do.
They admired us for our strong backs and nimble hands. Our stamina. Our discipline. Our docile dispositions. Our unusual ability to tolerate the heat, which on summer days in the melon fields of Brawley could reach 120 degrees. They said our short stature ideally suited us for work that required stooping low to the ground. Wherever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese—we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite—but none of their vices—we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat. We were faster than the Filipinos and less arrogant than the Hindus. We were more disciplined than the Koreans. We were soberer than the Mexicans. We were cheaper to feed than the Okies and Arkies, both the light and the dark. A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. These folks just drift, we don’t have to look after them at all.
Sometimes the boss would approach us from behind while we were bending over his fields and whisper a few words into our ears. And even though we had no idea what he was saying we knew exactly what he meant. “Me no speak English,” we’d reply. Or, “So sorry, Boss, but no.” Sometimes one of our husband’s unmarried worker friends approached us the moment our husband stepped away and tried to slip us a five-dollar bill. “Just let me put it in once,” he’d say. “I promise you I won’t even move it.” And every now and then we’d give in and say yes. Perhaps we were unhappy with our husbands, who went out to play cards and drink every night and did not come home until late. Or perhaps we needed to send money to our family back home because their rice fields had once again been ruined by floods. Even those of us who were not pretty were often offered gifts on the sly: a tortoiseshell hairpin, a bottle of perfume, a copy of Modern Screen magazine that had been stolen from the counter of a dime store in town. But if we accepted that gift without giving anything in return we knew there would be a price to pay. He sliced off the tip of her finger with his pruning knife. And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.
Sometimes they drove by our farm shacks and sprayed our windows with buckshot, or set our chicken coops on fire. Sometimes they burned down our fields just as they were beginning to ripen and we lost our entire earnings for that year. And even though we found footsteps in the dirt the following morning, and many scattered matchsticks, when we called the sheriff to come out and take a look he told us there were no clues worth following. And after that our husbands were never the same. Why even bother? At night we slept with our shoes on, and hatchets beside our beds, while our husbands sat by the windows until dawn. Sometimes our husbands bought themselves guard dogs, which they named Dick or Harry or Spot, and they grew more attached to those dogs than they ever did to us, and we wondered whether we had made a mistake, coming to such a violent and unwelcoming land.
Some of us moved out of the countryside and into their suburbs and got to know them well. We lived in the servants’ quarters of the big houses in Atherton and Berkeley, above Telegraph, up high in the hills. Or we worked for a man like Dr. Giordano, who was a prominent thoracic surgeon on Alameda’s gold coast. And while our husband mowed Dr. Giordano’s lawn and pruned Dr. Giordano’s shrubs and raked Dr. Giordano’s leaves we stayed inside with Mrs. Giordano, who had wavy brown hair and a kind manner and asked us to please call her Rose, and we polished Rose’s silver and we swept Rose’s floors and we tended to Rose’s three young children, Richard, Jim, and Theo, whom we sang to sleep every night in a language not their own. Nemure, nemure.And it was not at all what we had expected. I have come to care for those boys as though they were my own. But it was Dr. Giordano’s elderly mother, Lucia, whom we came to care for the most. She followed us from one room to the next as we dusted and mopped and not once did she ever stop talking. Molto bene. Perfetto! Basta così. And for many years after her death her memories of the old country would continue to linger with us as though they were our own: the mozzarella, the pomodori, the Lago di Como, the piazza in the center of town where she went shopping with her sisters every day. Italia, Italia, how I long to see it one last time.
It was their women who taught us the things we most needed to know. How to light a stove. How to make a bed. How to answer a door. How to shake a hand. How to operate a faucet, which many of us had never seen in our lives. How to dial a telephone. How to sound cheerful on a telephone even when you were angry or sad. How to fry an egg. How to peel a potato. How to set a table. How to prepare a five-course dinner in six hours for a party of twelve. How to light a cigarette. How to curl your hair so it looked just like Mary Pickford’s. How to wash a lipstick stain out of your husband’s favorite white shirt even when that lipstick stain was not yours. How to talk to a husband. How to argue with a husband. How to deceive a husband. How to keep a husband from wandering too far from your side. Don’t ask him where he’s been or what time he’ll be coming home and make sure he is happy in bed.
When they were unhappy and had no one to talk to they told us their deep, darkest secrets. Everything I told him was a lie. When their husbands went away on business they asked us to sleep with them in their bedrooms in case they got lonely. When they fell in love with a man who was not their husband we kept an eye on their children while they went out to meet that man in the middle of the day. We brushed invisible specks of lint from their blouses, retied scarves, adjusted stray locks of hair so they hung just so. “You look beautiful,” we said to them, and then we sent them on their way. And when their husbands came home in the evening at the usual hour we pretended not to know a thing.
Some of them dismissed us without any warning and we had no idea what we’d done wrong. “You were too pretty,” our husbands would tell us, even though we found it hard to believe this was true. Some of us were so inept we knew we would not last more than one week. We forgot to cook their meat before serving it to them for supper. We dropped their best crystal goblets. We threw out their cheese by mistake. “I thought it was rotten,” we tried to explain. “That’s how it’s supposed to smell,” we were told. Some of us had trouble understanding their English, which bore no resemblance to what we had learned in our books. We said “Yes” when they asked us if we would mind folding their laundry, and “No” when they asked us to mop, and when they asked us if we’d seen their missing gold earrings we smiled and said, “Oh, is that so?” Some of us had grown up on large estates with servants of our own and could not tolerate being told what to do. Some of us did not get along well with their children, whom we found aggressive and loud. Some of us objected to what they said about us to their children when they did not realize we were still in the room. If you don’t study harder, you’ll end up scrubbing floors just like Yuki.
From time to time one of their men would ask to have a word with us in his study while his wife was out shopping and we did not know how to say no. “Is everything all right?” he would ask us. Usually we stared down at the floor and said yes, of course, everything was fine, even though this was not true, but when he touched us lightly on the shoulder and asked us if we were sure, we did not always turn away. “Nobody has to know,” he would say to us. Or, “She’s not due home until late.” And when he led us upstairs to the bedroom and laid us across the bed—the very same bed we had made up that morning—we wept because it had been so long since we’d been held.
by Julie Otsuka, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Univ. of California
Thursday, July 6, 2017
A Way to Own Your Social-Media Data
The European Union imposed a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) fine on Google last Tuesday for manipulating its search engine results to favor its own comparison shopping service. It is just the latest institution to recognize the increasing monopolization of the technology industry.
Google has about a 90 percent market share in searches, while Facebook has a penetration of about 89 percent of internet users. Economists have a fancy name for this phenomenon: “network externalities.” In traditional product markets, one customer’s choice (for example, a particular car tire) does not directly affect other individuals’ preferences for that product, and competition generally ensures that consumers enjoy the best products at the lowest possible price.
In the market for social media, by contrast, when one customer uses Facebook over Myspace, it has a direct (and positive) impact on other customers’ preferences for the same social network: I want to be in the social network where my friends are. These markets naturally tend toward a monopoly.
Historically, there have been two main government interventions to reduce this risk of monopoly power. The first is price regulation. When railway companies gained excessive market power in the late 1800s, the United States government created the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it the power to set maximum prices. (In the long run, the remedy turned out to be worse than the disease, but that’s another story.)
The second is antitrust. When Standard Oil, in the early 1900s, controlled 90 percent of oil refinery capacity in the United States, the federal government used its antitrust power to break it up into more than 30 smaller companies. A similar breakup was imposed 70 years later on AT&T.
Still, there is a problem with traditional antitrust policy when looked at through the lens of network externalities: It focuses only on consumers’ benefits from competition. But consumers love Google and Facebook since they do not pay a dime for their services.
What many users do not fully appreciate is that they do pay for these services, in the form of very valuable information. And those who appreciate this cost have no choice: There is no major search engine that does not store our past searches or collect information on our activities, and there is no significant social media platform that does not retain our preferences. That is the cost of using these technologies. Lack of competition also means lack of choice, which is ultimately lack of freedom. But what can be done?
For a 21st-century problem, we suggest a 21st-century solution: a reallocation of property rights via legislation to provide more incentives to compete. In fact, the idea is not new. Patent law, for example, attributes the right to an invention to the company a scientist works for, to motivate companies to invest in research and development. Similarly, in the mobile industry, most countries have established that a cellphone number belongs to a customer, not the mobile phone provider. This redefinition of property rights (in jargon called “number portability”) makes it easier to switch carriers, fostering competition by other carriers and reducing prices for consumers.
The same is possible in the social network space. It is sufficient to reassign to each customer the ownership of all the digital connections that she creates — what is known as a “social graph.” If we owned our own social graph, we could sign into a Facebook competitor — call it MyBook — and, through that network, instantly reroute all our Facebook friends’ messages to MyBook, as we reroute a phone call.
If I can reach my Facebook friends through a different social network and vice versa, I am more likely to try new social networks. Knowing they can attract existing Facebook customers, new social networks will emerge, restoring the benefit of competition.
Today Facebook provides developers with application-program interfaces that give them access to its customers’ social graph, Facebook Connect and Graph A.P.I. Facebook controls these gates, retaining the right to cut off any developer who poses a competitive threat. Anticipating this outcome, very few developers invest seriously in creating alternatives, eliminating even the threat of competition.
By guaranteeing access to new customers’ data and contacts, a Social Graph Portability Act would reduce the network externality dimension of the existing digital platforms and ensure the benefits of competition.
by Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters
[ed. See also: Is social graph portability workable?]
Google has about a 90 percent market share in searches, while Facebook has a penetration of about 89 percent of internet users. Economists have a fancy name for this phenomenon: “network externalities.” In traditional product markets, one customer’s choice (for example, a particular car tire) does not directly affect other individuals’ preferences for that product, and competition generally ensures that consumers enjoy the best products at the lowest possible price.
In the market for social media, by contrast, when one customer uses Facebook over Myspace, it has a direct (and positive) impact on other customers’ preferences for the same social network: I want to be in the social network where my friends are. These markets naturally tend toward a monopoly.
Historically, there have been two main government interventions to reduce this risk of monopoly power. The first is price regulation. When railway companies gained excessive market power in the late 1800s, the United States government created the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it the power to set maximum prices. (In the long run, the remedy turned out to be worse than the disease, but that’s another story.)The second is antitrust. When Standard Oil, in the early 1900s, controlled 90 percent of oil refinery capacity in the United States, the federal government used its antitrust power to break it up into more than 30 smaller companies. A similar breakup was imposed 70 years later on AT&T.
Still, there is a problem with traditional antitrust policy when looked at through the lens of network externalities: It focuses only on consumers’ benefits from competition. But consumers love Google and Facebook since they do not pay a dime for their services.
What many users do not fully appreciate is that they do pay for these services, in the form of very valuable information. And those who appreciate this cost have no choice: There is no major search engine that does not store our past searches or collect information on our activities, and there is no significant social media platform that does not retain our preferences. That is the cost of using these technologies. Lack of competition also means lack of choice, which is ultimately lack of freedom. But what can be done?
For a 21st-century problem, we suggest a 21st-century solution: a reallocation of property rights via legislation to provide more incentives to compete. In fact, the idea is not new. Patent law, for example, attributes the right to an invention to the company a scientist works for, to motivate companies to invest in research and development. Similarly, in the mobile industry, most countries have established that a cellphone number belongs to a customer, not the mobile phone provider. This redefinition of property rights (in jargon called “number portability”) makes it easier to switch carriers, fostering competition by other carriers and reducing prices for consumers.
The same is possible in the social network space. It is sufficient to reassign to each customer the ownership of all the digital connections that she creates — what is known as a “social graph.” If we owned our own social graph, we could sign into a Facebook competitor — call it MyBook — and, through that network, instantly reroute all our Facebook friends’ messages to MyBook, as we reroute a phone call.
If I can reach my Facebook friends through a different social network and vice versa, I am more likely to try new social networks. Knowing they can attract existing Facebook customers, new social networks will emerge, restoring the benefit of competition.
Today Facebook provides developers with application-program interfaces that give them access to its customers’ social graph, Facebook Connect and Graph A.P.I. Facebook controls these gates, retaining the right to cut off any developer who poses a competitive threat. Anticipating this outcome, very few developers invest seriously in creating alternatives, eliminating even the threat of competition.
By guaranteeing access to new customers’ data and contacts, a Social Graph Portability Act would reduce the network externality dimension of the existing digital platforms and ensure the benefits of competition.
by Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters
[ed. See also: Is social graph portability workable?]
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