[ed. I read about this practice for the first time last week (can't remember where). Sounds excruciating. See also: A Holy Quest in Tibet: Prostrate, and Miles to Go]
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Paths of the Soul
[ed. I read about this practice for the first time last week (can't remember where). Sounds excruciating. See also: A Holy Quest in Tibet: Prostrate, and Miles to Go]
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
The Uninhabitable Earth
I. 'Doomsday'
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.
The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.
Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.
In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule. (...)
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster. (...)
by David Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image:Fossils by Heartless Machine
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.
Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data showing the globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.
In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule. (...)
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster. (...)
by David Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image:Fossils by Heartless Machine
Praying For a Real Estate Crash
A year after getting married, Alex Taylor and Rachel Tuttle decided it was time to buy a home and start a family. The two Vancouver residents were in their late 30s, and each had stable, full-time jobs—Taylor served as an urban planner while Tuttle worked for a credit union. They were debt-free, and after years of hard work, frugal living, and the sale of a previous home Tuttle had owned in England, they had a down payment ready. The couple figured they could buy a fixer-upper in Vancouver’s historically low-income Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. But soon after starting the hunt in 2015, their hopes were dashed. Detached homes were averaging $1.2 million, and even though Taylor and Tuttle qualified for a mortgage, they would have faced steep monthly payments of $4,000. They adjusted their expectations and set their sights on a townhouse on the outskirts of the city. Still, the cost was too high. “It felt very risky to put that much of your savings into one investment,” says Tuttle.
That risk hasn’t stopped plenty of their peers from diving into the white-hot real estate market. Some got in before the bubble; others took the plunge more recently in a fit of panic as it seemed prices would never stop escalating. Taylor and Tuttle sensed an opportunity last year, when the province put in a place measures, including a foreign buyer tax, to temper runaway house prices. Sales slumped, but prices are picking up again. “It’s discouraging,” says Tuttle. “We look at people who bought two years ago and they’ve now made 30 per cent on their purchase. You definitely feel like you’ve been left behind.” Taylor is tired of talking about the issue. “I know it’s mean to say and I know it would hurt those of our friends who completely over-extended themselves,” he says, “but honestly, we’re praying for a crash.”
He’s not the only one. As prices in Vancouver and Toronto have skyrocketed and affordability has eroded, scores of Canadians fear getting permanently shut out of the country’s two largest regions. Paying for all of the costs associated with a detached home in the Vancouver area requires 121 per cent of median household income; for a condo, it’s 46 per cent of income, making it Canada’s least affordable city, according to economists at the Royal Bank of Canada. Toronto isn’t far behind. Aggregate housing costs are 64.6 per cent of income, the worst level since 1990, when interest rates spiked.
Soaring prices have for months stoked resentment between the haves and have-nots of housing, as young, educated Canadians who in the past could be assured a shot at purchasing a home and achieving financial stability feel the opportunity slipping away. With every price spike, the antipathy has deepened, but the hostility has come into sharper relief after Ontario followed B.C.’s example this spring by introducing its own market-cooling measures. In May, sales dropped 20 per cent compared to the year before in the Greater Toronto Area while active listings surged 42.9 per cent from a record low. Those are the kinds of numbers that cause indebted homeowners to sweat, but serve as a balm for those on the sidelines in Toronto: like Taylor in B.C., many now openly cheer for the market to collapse.
Nowhere is the antagonism more evident than on social media. Facebook and Twitter are home to daily (even hourly) outrages, of course, but a recent Toronto Life article touched off a firestorm and revealed deep frustrations about the state of the housing market. The author, Catherine Jheon, recounted the “nightmare” renovation she and her husband undertook, sinking hundreds of thousands dollars into a “crack house” purchased almost on impulse, with seemingly little to no concern for the low-income tenants who were evicted in the process. Many saw the couple as the worst kind of gentrifiers: privileged, callous and clueless. Jheon and her husband made numerous bad decisions during the renovation, but were still able to continue borrowing money (including from a wealthy relative) and ultimately rewarded for their fecklessness with a palatial detached house in an up-and-coming neighbourhood. On social media, readers expressed intense loathing (“I hate these people so much,”) threats of physical violence (“Dear god, I want to punch them in the face,”) and a longing for karmic justice (“I’ve never wanted the entire real estate market to completely collapse until now”).
It’s not all jealously, envy and social media griping. Missing out on home-ownership often means missing out on housing stability and security. Rental markets in Toronto and Vancouver are extremely tight, units suitable for raising families in are highly coveted, and being subjected to the whims of a landlord can make for a precarious existence. Hundreds of tenants in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, for example, have been withholding payments for more than two months to protest steep rent hikes in apartments meant to be rent-controlled. Many believe the goal is to squeeze them out so the building’s property management firm can re-list the units at market rates, well above what the current tenants are paying. Last month, the firm’s CEO nearly ran over a tenant advocate with his truck. (...)
“A lot of people have these totally unsustainable lifestyles they’re only able to pull off because, by doing nothing but sit on their ass, their net worth goes up by a few grand every month,” says Toronto resident Phillip Mendonça-Vieira. “I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t own property who’s not secretly, like, ‘F–k you, guys. This is unsustainable.’” Mendonça-Vieira has taken a keen interest in housing. He co-founded a group called BetterTO to organize discussions on issues facing the city—the first, held in March, focused on housing. The 30-year-old has shared a rental for the last two years; the owners of the house took advantage of the city’s exorbitant prices and cashed out a few months ago. Mendonça-Vieira faces the prospect of moving again, at a time when he and his partner would like to settle down in preparation for having kids in the near future. Had Mendonça-Vieira, who runs a small startup, and his partner, a lawyer, been in this situation a year or two ago, they might have been able to purchase a home. But then the average home price soared more than 30 per cent since the start of 2016 alone. “Frankly, it’s kind of inconceivable to own a house,” he says. (...)
What makes matters more frustrating is homeowner opposition to rental and multi-unit developments. “We have a housing shortage, and a large group of people who don’t want more housing—often people who already have secure housing, and who get richer if there is a shortage,” says Daniel Oleksiuk, a member of Abundant Housing Vancouver, an organization that advocates for changing zoning practices to build more multi-unit housing. “There’s a class of landowners that passively grow wealthy, and another class that’s struggling to pay rent,” he says. “That’s not the Canada I learned about growing up.”
by Joe Castaldo and Catherine McIntyre, Macleans | Read more:
Image: uncredited
That risk hasn’t stopped plenty of their peers from diving into the white-hot real estate market. Some got in before the bubble; others took the plunge more recently in a fit of panic as it seemed prices would never stop escalating. Taylor and Tuttle sensed an opportunity last year, when the province put in a place measures, including a foreign buyer tax, to temper runaway house prices. Sales slumped, but prices are picking up again. “It’s discouraging,” says Tuttle. “We look at people who bought two years ago and they’ve now made 30 per cent on their purchase. You definitely feel like you’ve been left behind.” Taylor is tired of talking about the issue. “I know it’s mean to say and I know it would hurt those of our friends who completely over-extended themselves,” he says, “but honestly, we’re praying for a crash.”
He’s not the only one. As prices in Vancouver and Toronto have skyrocketed and affordability has eroded, scores of Canadians fear getting permanently shut out of the country’s two largest regions. Paying for all of the costs associated with a detached home in the Vancouver area requires 121 per cent of median household income; for a condo, it’s 46 per cent of income, making it Canada’s least affordable city, according to economists at the Royal Bank of Canada. Toronto isn’t far behind. Aggregate housing costs are 64.6 per cent of income, the worst level since 1990, when interest rates spiked.Soaring prices have for months stoked resentment between the haves and have-nots of housing, as young, educated Canadians who in the past could be assured a shot at purchasing a home and achieving financial stability feel the opportunity slipping away. With every price spike, the antipathy has deepened, but the hostility has come into sharper relief after Ontario followed B.C.’s example this spring by introducing its own market-cooling measures. In May, sales dropped 20 per cent compared to the year before in the Greater Toronto Area while active listings surged 42.9 per cent from a record low. Those are the kinds of numbers that cause indebted homeowners to sweat, but serve as a balm for those on the sidelines in Toronto: like Taylor in B.C., many now openly cheer for the market to collapse.
Nowhere is the antagonism more evident than on social media. Facebook and Twitter are home to daily (even hourly) outrages, of course, but a recent Toronto Life article touched off a firestorm and revealed deep frustrations about the state of the housing market. The author, Catherine Jheon, recounted the “nightmare” renovation she and her husband undertook, sinking hundreds of thousands dollars into a “crack house” purchased almost on impulse, with seemingly little to no concern for the low-income tenants who were evicted in the process. Many saw the couple as the worst kind of gentrifiers: privileged, callous and clueless. Jheon and her husband made numerous bad decisions during the renovation, but were still able to continue borrowing money (including from a wealthy relative) and ultimately rewarded for their fecklessness with a palatial detached house in an up-and-coming neighbourhood. On social media, readers expressed intense loathing (“I hate these people so much,”) threats of physical violence (“Dear god, I want to punch them in the face,”) and a longing for karmic justice (“I’ve never wanted the entire real estate market to completely collapse until now”).
It’s not all jealously, envy and social media griping. Missing out on home-ownership often means missing out on housing stability and security. Rental markets in Toronto and Vancouver are extremely tight, units suitable for raising families in are highly coveted, and being subjected to the whims of a landlord can make for a precarious existence. Hundreds of tenants in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, for example, have been withholding payments for more than two months to protest steep rent hikes in apartments meant to be rent-controlled. Many believe the goal is to squeeze them out so the building’s property management firm can re-list the units at market rates, well above what the current tenants are paying. Last month, the firm’s CEO nearly ran over a tenant advocate with his truck. (...)
“A lot of people have these totally unsustainable lifestyles they’re only able to pull off because, by doing nothing but sit on their ass, their net worth goes up by a few grand every month,” says Toronto resident Phillip Mendonça-Vieira. “I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t own property who’s not secretly, like, ‘F–k you, guys. This is unsustainable.’” Mendonça-Vieira has taken a keen interest in housing. He co-founded a group called BetterTO to organize discussions on issues facing the city—the first, held in March, focused on housing. The 30-year-old has shared a rental for the last two years; the owners of the house took advantage of the city’s exorbitant prices and cashed out a few months ago. Mendonça-Vieira faces the prospect of moving again, at a time when he and his partner would like to settle down in preparation for having kids in the near future. Had Mendonça-Vieira, who runs a small startup, and his partner, a lawyer, been in this situation a year or two ago, they might have been able to purchase a home. But then the average home price soared more than 30 per cent since the start of 2016 alone. “Frankly, it’s kind of inconceivable to own a house,” he says. (...)
What makes matters more frustrating is homeowner opposition to rental and multi-unit developments. “We have a housing shortage, and a large group of people who don’t want more housing—often people who already have secure housing, and who get richer if there is a shortage,” says Daniel Oleksiuk, a member of Abundant Housing Vancouver, an organization that advocates for changing zoning practices to build more multi-unit housing. “There’s a class of landowners that passively grow wealthy, and another class that’s struggling to pay rent,” he says. “That’s not the Canada I learned about growing up.”
by Joe Castaldo and Catherine McIntyre, Macleans | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. It ain't just Canada.]
Capitalism the Apple Way vs. Capitalism the Google Way
Whichever company’s vision wins out will shape the future of the economy.
While lots of attention is directed toward identifying the next great start-up, the defining tech-industry story of the last decade has been the rise of Apple and Google. In terms of wealth creation, there is no comparison. Eight years ago, neither one of them was even in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world, and their combined market value was less than $300 billion. Now, Apple and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) have become the two most valuable companies, with a combined market capitalization of over $1.3 trillion. And increasingly, these two behemoths are starting to collide in various markets, from smartphones to home-audio devices to, according to speculation, automobiles.
But the greatest collision between Apple and Google is little noticed. The companies have taken completely different approaches to their shareholders and to the future, one willing to accede to the demands of investors and the other keeping power in the hands of founders and executives. These rival approaches are about something much bigger than just two of the most important companies in the world; they embody two alternative models of capitalism, and the one that wins out will shape the future of the economy.
In the spring of 2012, Toni Sacconaghi, a respected equity-research analyst, released a report that contemplated a radical move for Apple. He, along with other analysts, had repeatedly been pushing Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to consider returning some of Apple’s stockpile of cash, which approached $100 billion by the end of 2011, to shareholders. Cook, and Steve Jobs before him, had resisted similar calls so that the company could, in the words of Jobs, “keep their powder dry” and take advantage of “more strategic opportunities in the future.”
But there was another reason Apple wouldn’t so readily part with this cash: The majority of it was in Ireland because of the company’s fortuitous creation of Apple Operations International in Ireland in 1980. Since then, the vast majority of Apple’s non-U.S. profits had found their way to the country, and tapping into that cash would mean incurring significant U.S. taxes due upon repatriation to American soil. So Sacconaghi floated a bold idea: Apple should borrow the $100 billion in the U.S., and then pay it out to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. The unusual nature of the proposal attracted attention among financiers and served Sacconaghi’s presumed purpose, ratcheting up the pressure on Cook. A week later, Apple relented and announced plans to begin releasing cash via dividends.
The results of Sacconaghi’s report were not lost on Silicon Valley, and Google responded three weeks later. At the time, the share structure that the company put in place when it went public in 2004 was becoming fragile. This original arrangement allowed Google’s founders to maintain voting control over the company, even as their share of ownership shrunk as more shares were issued. The explicit premise was that this structure would “protect Google from outside pressures and the temptation to sacrifice future opportunities to meet short-term demands.”
But by the time of Apple’s announcement in March 2012, this bulwark against outside influence was eroding, as Google’s founders continued to sell stock and employees were issued shares in their compensation packages. A few weeks after Apple’s concession to shareholders, the founders of Google announced a new share structure that would defend against a similar situation: The structure gave the founders’ shares 10 times the voting power of regular shares, ensuring they’d dictate the company’s strategy long into the future and that Google was, in the words of the founders, “set up for success for decades to come.”
What has happened to Google and Apple in the wake of these events is the defining story of early 21st-century capitalism. Apple’s decision in 2012 to begin paying dividends didn’t satiate shareholders—it sparked a wider revolt. Several hedge funds started asking for much larger payouts, with some of them filing suits against Apple and even proposing an “iPref”—a new type of share that would allow Apple to release much more cash in a way that didn’t incur as high of a tax bill. In 2013 and 2014, Apple upped its commitments to distribute cash. From 2013 to March 2017, the company released $200 billion via dividends and buybacks—an amount that is equivalent to, using figures in S&P’s Capital IQ database, more than 72 percent of their operating cash flow (a common metric of performance that is about cash generation rather than profit accrual) during that period. And to help finance this, Apple took on $99 billion in debt. Sacconaghi’s vision had come true.
What has Google done in that same period? Google is, like Apple, making loads of money. From 2013 to March 2017, it generated $114 billion in operating cash flow. How much has the company distributed to shareholders? In contrast to Apple’s 72 percent payout rate, Google has only distributed 6 percent of that money to shareholders.
The paths taken by Apple and Google manifest alternative answers to one of the main questions facing capitalism today: What should public companies do with all of the money that they’re making? Even as corporations have brought in enormous profits, there has been a shortage of lucrative opportunities for investment and growth, creating surpluses of cash. This imbalance has resulted in the pileup of $2 trillion on corporate balance sheets. As companies continue to generate more profits than they need to fund their own growth, the question becomes: Who will decide what to do with all those profits—managers or investors? At Google, where the founders and executives reign supreme, insulated by their governance structure, the answer is the former. At Apple, where the investors are in charge because of the absence of one large manager-shareholder, it’s the latter. (To be clear, even though Apple’s previous efforts to stifle investors’ concerns were no longer tenable, the company can still afford to spend mightily on research and development.)
Why has each company taken the approach that it has? These two strategies reflect different reactions to an issue central to modern capitalism, the separation of ownership and control. In short, owners aren’t managers, as they once were when businesses existed on a smaller scale. And when owners have to outsource running the company to executives, this leads to what economists call “the principal-agent problem,” which refers to the issues that come up when one person, group, or company—an “agent”—can make decisions that significantly affect another—a “principal.”
Having investors dominate, as Apple does, is a good way of handling one principal-agent problem: getting managers to do right by their owners. Rather than spending money on failed products (remember Google Plus?) or , Apple has to face the disciplining force of large investors. In a way that individual shareholders would have trouble doing, larger investors can act swiftly to put a check on managers who might pursue goals that enrich themselves, such as wasteful mergers, excessive executive compensation, or lush perks. And, after all, a company’s profits theoretically belong to investors, so why shouldn’t they decide how they are put to use?
Proponents of the managerial model embodied by Google worry about a different principal-agent problem. Rather than being concerned about managers ignoring investors, they are concerned that investors won’t serve the people who would benefit from the long-term success of the company. Those professional investors are both the principals for the CEOs but also the agents of many other shareholders. The hedge funds that pressured Apple are the dreaded “short-term” investors who are interested only in quick wins and don’t serve their longer-term beneficiaries, such as pension funds, that allocate capital to them in the first place. As investors, hedge funds are impatient, and, the argument goes, ruining the economy by shortening time horizons.
Who’s right? Which principal-agent problem is more vexing? Stock-market returns are one, albeit imperfect, way of answering this question and since the initial developments, Google has far outperformed Apple. But that pattern is flipped if the time frame is restricted to the past year. So it won’t be known for many years to come if Apple or Google has a sharper financial strategy.
More importantly, though, how do these strategies impact the lives of everyday people?
by Mihir A. Desai, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Tim Clayton / Corbis / GettyWhile lots of attention is directed toward identifying the next great start-up, the defining tech-industry story of the last decade has been the rise of Apple and Google. In terms of wealth creation, there is no comparison. Eight years ago, neither one of them was even in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world, and their combined market value was less than $300 billion. Now, Apple and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) have become the two most valuable companies, with a combined market capitalization of over $1.3 trillion. And increasingly, these two behemoths are starting to collide in various markets, from smartphones to home-audio devices to, according to speculation, automobiles.
But the greatest collision between Apple and Google is little noticed. The companies have taken completely different approaches to their shareholders and to the future, one willing to accede to the demands of investors and the other keeping power in the hands of founders and executives. These rival approaches are about something much bigger than just two of the most important companies in the world; they embody two alternative models of capitalism, and the one that wins out will shape the future of the economy.
In the spring of 2012, Toni Sacconaghi, a respected equity-research analyst, released a report that contemplated a radical move for Apple. He, along with other analysts, had repeatedly been pushing Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to consider returning some of Apple’s stockpile of cash, which approached $100 billion by the end of 2011, to shareholders. Cook, and Steve Jobs before him, had resisted similar calls so that the company could, in the words of Jobs, “keep their powder dry” and take advantage of “more strategic opportunities in the future.”But there was another reason Apple wouldn’t so readily part with this cash: The majority of it was in Ireland because of the company’s fortuitous creation of Apple Operations International in Ireland in 1980. Since then, the vast majority of Apple’s non-U.S. profits had found their way to the country, and tapping into that cash would mean incurring significant U.S. taxes due upon repatriation to American soil. So Sacconaghi floated a bold idea: Apple should borrow the $100 billion in the U.S., and then pay it out to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. The unusual nature of the proposal attracted attention among financiers and served Sacconaghi’s presumed purpose, ratcheting up the pressure on Cook. A week later, Apple relented and announced plans to begin releasing cash via dividends.
The results of Sacconaghi’s report were not lost on Silicon Valley, and Google responded three weeks later. At the time, the share structure that the company put in place when it went public in 2004 was becoming fragile. This original arrangement allowed Google’s founders to maintain voting control over the company, even as their share of ownership shrunk as more shares were issued. The explicit premise was that this structure would “protect Google from outside pressures and the temptation to sacrifice future opportunities to meet short-term demands.”
But by the time of Apple’s announcement in March 2012, this bulwark against outside influence was eroding, as Google’s founders continued to sell stock and employees were issued shares in their compensation packages. A few weeks after Apple’s concession to shareholders, the founders of Google announced a new share structure that would defend against a similar situation: The structure gave the founders’ shares 10 times the voting power of regular shares, ensuring they’d dictate the company’s strategy long into the future and that Google was, in the words of the founders, “set up for success for decades to come.”
What has happened to Google and Apple in the wake of these events is the defining story of early 21st-century capitalism. Apple’s decision in 2012 to begin paying dividends didn’t satiate shareholders—it sparked a wider revolt. Several hedge funds started asking for much larger payouts, with some of them filing suits against Apple and even proposing an “iPref”—a new type of share that would allow Apple to release much more cash in a way that didn’t incur as high of a tax bill. In 2013 and 2014, Apple upped its commitments to distribute cash. From 2013 to March 2017, the company released $200 billion via dividends and buybacks—an amount that is equivalent to, using figures in S&P’s Capital IQ database, more than 72 percent of their operating cash flow (a common metric of performance that is about cash generation rather than profit accrual) during that period. And to help finance this, Apple took on $99 billion in debt. Sacconaghi’s vision had come true.
What has Google done in that same period? Google is, like Apple, making loads of money. From 2013 to March 2017, it generated $114 billion in operating cash flow. How much has the company distributed to shareholders? In contrast to Apple’s 72 percent payout rate, Google has only distributed 6 percent of that money to shareholders.
The paths taken by Apple and Google manifest alternative answers to one of the main questions facing capitalism today: What should public companies do with all of the money that they’re making? Even as corporations have brought in enormous profits, there has been a shortage of lucrative opportunities for investment and growth, creating surpluses of cash. This imbalance has resulted in the pileup of $2 trillion on corporate balance sheets. As companies continue to generate more profits than they need to fund their own growth, the question becomes: Who will decide what to do with all those profits—managers or investors? At Google, where the founders and executives reign supreme, insulated by their governance structure, the answer is the former. At Apple, where the investors are in charge because of the absence of one large manager-shareholder, it’s the latter. (To be clear, even though Apple’s previous efforts to stifle investors’ concerns were no longer tenable, the company can still afford to spend mightily on research and development.)
Why has each company taken the approach that it has? These two strategies reflect different reactions to an issue central to modern capitalism, the separation of ownership and control. In short, owners aren’t managers, as they once were when businesses existed on a smaller scale. And when owners have to outsource running the company to executives, this leads to what economists call “the principal-agent problem,” which refers to the issues that come up when one person, group, or company—an “agent”—can make decisions that significantly affect another—a “principal.”
Having investors dominate, as Apple does, is a good way of handling one principal-agent problem: getting managers to do right by their owners. Rather than spending money on failed products (remember Google Plus?) or , Apple has to face the disciplining force of large investors. In a way that individual shareholders would have trouble doing, larger investors can act swiftly to put a check on managers who might pursue goals that enrich themselves, such as wasteful mergers, excessive executive compensation, or lush perks. And, after all, a company’s profits theoretically belong to investors, so why shouldn’t they decide how they are put to use?
Proponents of the managerial model embodied by Google worry about a different principal-agent problem. Rather than being concerned about managers ignoring investors, they are concerned that investors won’t serve the people who would benefit from the long-term success of the company. Those professional investors are both the principals for the CEOs but also the agents of many other shareholders. The hedge funds that pressured Apple are the dreaded “short-term” investors who are interested only in quick wins and don’t serve their longer-term beneficiaries, such as pension funds, that allocate capital to them in the first place. As investors, hedge funds are impatient, and, the argument goes, ruining the economy by shortening time horizons.
Who’s right? Which principal-agent problem is more vexing? Stock-market returns are one, albeit imperfect, way of answering this question and since the initial developments, Google has far outperformed Apple. But that pattern is flipped if the time frame is restricted to the past year. So it won’t be known for many years to come if Apple or Google has a sharper financial strategy.
More importantly, though, how do these strategies impact the lives of everyday people?
by Mihir A. Desai, The Atlantic | Read more:
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]
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