Thursday, August 3, 2017
You’ve Never Heard of HNA Group. Here’s Why You Will.
On a warm summer night in Paris, hundreds of executives, bankers, diplomats, and French officials walk the red carpet snaking up the steps of the Petit Palais museum—a sumptuous Beaux Arts building in the heart of the French capital, with sculptures and paintings set around a manicured garden. Under 200-year-old frescoes, the guests dine on lobster, duck, and white-chocolate mousse, prepared by a top French chef, washed down with grand cru Bordeaux, and topped off with entertainment from the Peking Opera. Three large red letters affixed to the ornate gates offer a clue about who’s throwing the invitation-only affair: HNA.
To the hundreds of people passing by, the name HNA probably means nothing. But to the business world at large, the presence of those three letters is another sign—if any is needed—that a little-known Chinese conglomerate with provincial roots has, in just a few years, transformed into a powerful global player with tentacles stretching across the planet.
HNA Group, headquartered in Hainan in southern China, still lacks the brand-name status it eagerly seeks. That’s despite the fact that it has plowed tens of billions of dollars into buying up foreign assets since 2015, on every continent—including $5.66 billion in just the past six months, according to the tracking firm Dealogic. By the company’s estimation, its investments in the U.S. alone have reached $35 billion.
Over the past two years, about $1 trillion has flowed out of China, as Chinese individuals and companies, having made fortunes at home and with state-owned banks willing to lend, invested elsewhere. Among those companies, one of the most aggressive has been HNA. Its dealmaking in some ways highlights how a mere handful of Chinese groups have snapped up dozens of Western assets, especially since the 2008 economic crisis, while at the same time leaving unanswered questions over ownership and transparency.
In the case of HNA, its executives have crisscrossed the globe in a frenetic buying spree, making deals through a labyrinth of subsidiaries in China and abroad. The purchases have included household names for Americans and Europeans. Among them are Minnesota-based Carlson Hotels—owner of the Radisson and Park Plaza hotels—which HNA bought outright last December for an undisclosed sum. In March of this year, it bought 25% of Hilton Worldwide Holdings (HLT, +0.39%), the hotel group, from Blackstone for $6.5 billion. And in May it increased its stake in Deutsche Bank to become its biggest shareholder, with its stake worth about $3.7 billion.
The list goes on: HNA owns the airline catering giant Gategroup and the aviation servicing giant Swissport. In April of this year, HNA’s Dublin-based aircraft leasing subsidiary, Avolon Holdings—which HNA bought in 2016—acquired the aircraft leasing arm of the New York financial firm CIT Group for $10 billion, turning HNA into the world’s third-largest lessor of planes. And its U.S. real estate holdings include 245 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, which it bought in March this year for $2.2 billion.
In December, HNA went to California and bought Ingram Micro, the Irvine-based company that is the world’s biggest distributor of technology products, with operations in about 160 countries. The price: $6 billion—in cash.
There are plenty of other purchases that, by HNA’s outsize standard, seem almost forgettable: eight golf courses purchased in Washington State for $137.5 million last October, for instance. In January, HNA Capital, one of the group’s subsidiaries, spent about $200 million for a majority stake in the New York hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, according to HNA. That deal might have gone unnoticed had the seller not been Anthony Scaramucci, a key financial backer of President Donald Trump. (...)
As it swallows new businesses and properties, HNA is making a rapid ascent up Fortune’s Global 500 rankings. The company first appeared on the list in 2015, at No. 464. Last year it jumped to No. 353. And this year it’s No. 170, with some $53 billion in revenue—a nearly 80% gain over the previous 12 months. Add in a full year of Ingram Micro, which last year had some $42 billion in sales, and HNA Group should easily crack the top 100 of the Global 500 in 2018.
But HNA’s thirst for growth seems far from sated. That was clear when the company’s top executives met Fortune over several days in late June. It was a rare window into the privately held (and private) company. The execs described goals that seemed wildly ambitious, until one considers that HNA started from scratch just 24 years ago—making it younger than Apple (AAPL, -0.92%), for example, by a full 17 years.
Indeed, the man who runs HNA today is set on its becoming one of the world’s biggest companies, period. “We have a target to be in the top 10,” says HNA’s CEO Adam Tan (his Chinese name is Tan Xiangdong), sitting in his hotel suite in Paris the morning after the company’s spectacular dinner, a charity event that takes place in a different city every year, on the birthday of the company’s billionaire founder and chairman, Chen Feng.
The Paris dinner kicked off HNA’s “International Week” in Paris, in which major clients, bankers (including from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan), and business partners converged on the city over several days for meetings. At the National Golf course near Versailles, outside Paris, HNA launched the first HNA Open de France, a European PGA tour it now sponsors. All of that is valuable branding for a company grasping for the top. Tan, known universally in the company simply as Adam, says he doesn’t know how long it will take for HNA to become one of the world’s biggest companies. But he’s confident that it will get there. It helps, he admits, that business is booming at the moment. “Earning money is so easy,” he says, laughing. “We are now the geniuses.”
by Vivienne Walt, Fortune | Read more:
Image: HNA Group
To the hundreds of people passing by, the name HNA probably means nothing. But to the business world at large, the presence of those three letters is another sign—if any is needed—that a little-known Chinese conglomerate with provincial roots has, in just a few years, transformed into a powerful global player with tentacles stretching across the planet.
HNA Group, headquartered in Hainan in southern China, still lacks the brand-name status it eagerly seeks. That’s despite the fact that it has plowed tens of billions of dollars into buying up foreign assets since 2015, on every continent—including $5.66 billion in just the past six months, according to the tracking firm Dealogic. By the company’s estimation, its investments in the U.S. alone have reached $35 billion.Over the past two years, about $1 trillion has flowed out of China, as Chinese individuals and companies, having made fortunes at home and with state-owned banks willing to lend, invested elsewhere. Among those companies, one of the most aggressive has been HNA. Its dealmaking in some ways highlights how a mere handful of Chinese groups have snapped up dozens of Western assets, especially since the 2008 economic crisis, while at the same time leaving unanswered questions over ownership and transparency.
In the case of HNA, its executives have crisscrossed the globe in a frenetic buying spree, making deals through a labyrinth of subsidiaries in China and abroad. The purchases have included household names for Americans and Europeans. Among them are Minnesota-based Carlson Hotels—owner of the Radisson and Park Plaza hotels—which HNA bought outright last December for an undisclosed sum. In March of this year, it bought 25% of Hilton Worldwide Holdings (HLT, +0.39%), the hotel group, from Blackstone for $6.5 billion. And in May it increased its stake in Deutsche Bank to become its biggest shareholder, with its stake worth about $3.7 billion.
The list goes on: HNA owns the airline catering giant Gategroup and the aviation servicing giant Swissport. In April of this year, HNA’s Dublin-based aircraft leasing subsidiary, Avolon Holdings—which HNA bought in 2016—acquired the aircraft leasing arm of the New York financial firm CIT Group for $10 billion, turning HNA into the world’s third-largest lessor of planes. And its U.S. real estate holdings include 245 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, which it bought in March this year for $2.2 billion.
In December, HNA went to California and bought Ingram Micro, the Irvine-based company that is the world’s biggest distributor of technology products, with operations in about 160 countries. The price: $6 billion—in cash.
There are plenty of other purchases that, by HNA’s outsize standard, seem almost forgettable: eight golf courses purchased in Washington State for $137.5 million last October, for instance. In January, HNA Capital, one of the group’s subsidiaries, spent about $200 million for a majority stake in the New York hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, according to HNA. That deal might have gone unnoticed had the seller not been Anthony Scaramucci, a key financial backer of President Donald Trump. (...)
As it swallows new businesses and properties, HNA is making a rapid ascent up Fortune’s Global 500 rankings. The company first appeared on the list in 2015, at No. 464. Last year it jumped to No. 353. And this year it’s No. 170, with some $53 billion in revenue—a nearly 80% gain over the previous 12 months. Add in a full year of Ingram Micro, which last year had some $42 billion in sales, and HNA Group should easily crack the top 100 of the Global 500 in 2018.
But HNA’s thirst for growth seems far from sated. That was clear when the company’s top executives met Fortune over several days in late June. It was a rare window into the privately held (and private) company. The execs described goals that seemed wildly ambitious, until one considers that HNA started from scratch just 24 years ago—making it younger than Apple (AAPL, -0.92%), for example, by a full 17 years.
Indeed, the man who runs HNA today is set on its becoming one of the world’s biggest companies, period. “We have a target to be in the top 10,” says HNA’s CEO Adam Tan (his Chinese name is Tan Xiangdong), sitting in his hotel suite in Paris the morning after the company’s spectacular dinner, a charity event that takes place in a different city every year, on the birthday of the company’s billionaire founder and chairman, Chen Feng.
The Paris dinner kicked off HNA’s “International Week” in Paris, in which major clients, bankers (including from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan), and business partners converged on the city over several days for meetings. At the National Golf course near Versailles, outside Paris, HNA launched the first HNA Open de France, a European PGA tour it now sponsors. All of that is valuable branding for a company grasping for the top. Tan, known universally in the company simply as Adam, says he doesn’t know how long it will take for HNA to become one of the world’s biggest companies. But he’s confident that it will get there. It helps, he admits, that business is booming at the moment. “Earning money is so easy,” he says, laughing. “We are now the geniuses.”
by Vivienne Walt, Fortune | Read more:
Image: HNA Group
The Man Trap
Nathan, a successful lawyer in Manhattan, hardly seems like a candidate for sympathy. His midtown office is smart, his suit is natty and he earns a decent living negotiating contracts and intellectual-property rights for players in the city’s dynamic entertainment industry. Divorced and in his late 40s, he speaks fondly of his teenage children and is delighted with his fiancĂ©e, whom he will marry in a few weeks’ time. His life is good, he assures me, and he is thriving in his career. So it is only with some hesitation that he admits something he has never discussed before, not even with his closest friends: “In the society that I live in, as a professional in New York City, I think it is easier being a woman than being a man.”
This is not to say that being a woman is easy, Nathan hastily adds. He understands why many are frustrated by “the way they are expected to do it all, to have a career and be moms, it’s a whole contradictory bundle of things.” It’s just that few women seem to notice that men, too, are struggling with a similarly burdensome bundle. “As the man, there’s this tacit expectation that I’m going to be the earner and the person who kills bugs and fixes things around the house. At the same time, I’m going to be responsive to feelings and helpful with cooking and the children and those kinds of things.” Unlike his two long-term female partners, who pursued personally rewarding careers that offered enough flexibility to be available to their children, Nathan felt obliged to pursue work that offered a pay cheque large enough to support a family. “For the last 20-plus years I’ve been chained to a desk,” he says. “I’m in a profession that I’m happy to be in, but if I were a 20-year-old and told I could do anything I wanted with my life, I’m not sure I’d be doing this.” Nathan speaks enviously of female friends who decided to leave their professional careers when they became mothers. “They weren’t perceived as failures. If anything, they were told ‘That’s so great, you’re choosing to be a mom, that’s the most important thing in the world.’ That is not an option open to men.”
Nathan is not alone in his misgivings. Between 1977 and 2008 the percentage of American fathers in dual-earner couples who suffered from work-family conflicts jumped from 35% to 60%. The percentage of similarly vexed mothers grew only slightly, from 41% to 47%. Young men who get stuck supporting a family often report high levels of stress and sadness that they aren’t spending more time with their kids.
Because men – and especially white, professional men – occupy a uniquely privileged place in society, Nathan is reluctant to discuss his feelings openly. “I’ve never expressed this to any of the women in my life, and I think it’s best that I don’t,” he says. He is right to be wary. Most conversations about gender inequities characterise men like Nathan as part of the problem. Women around the world may be graduating from college at higher rates than men, but they have yet to achieve similar rates of success in their careers. The uneven burdens of parenthood appear to be to blame. Although men in rich countries spend far more time cooking, cleaning and child-rearing than ever before, their efforts continue to be dwarfed by those of women. In America, for example, mothers devote nearly twice as much time to child care and housework as their male partners. Even couples with grand plans for an egalitarian partnership typically revert to more traditional roles after the birth of a child. A new study of the time-diaries of highly educated dual-earning American couples found that new fathers enjoyed up to three-and-a-half times as much leisure as their female partners, as mothers who worked full time were still stuck with the lion’s share of unpaid labour.
Feminists have long argued that men see little need to help out more at home because they already enjoy all the benefits of marriage and fatherhood without having to put in the extra work. “Even though it’s shifting drastically, marriage is still a pretty good deal for men in terms of the actual labour they capture from their wives,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Coltrane has found that after controlling for variables like age and education, married American men earn significantly more than their unmarried or divorced male peers, and their earnings go up with every child they have. Marriage seems to make men more productive at work because it allows them to outsource much of the housekeeping to their wives. Women, however, see no such “marriage premium”, and their earnings tend to go down with every new child. These parenthood effects can be seen across a variety of Western countries; they are greater in gender-conservative countries such as Austria and Germany, and weaker in more progressive countries, such as Sweden. This imbalance at home would seem to explain why the rate of female employment, after rising like gangbusters from the 1960s through the 1980s, slowed through the 1990s and has levelled off since the 2000s.
In order for more mothers to flourish in paid employment, more fathers need to pick up some of the slack at home. But, as Nathan’s frustration makes plain, this is not as simple as it sounds.
Women may not be moving as fast into male-dominated worlds as feminists would like, but they have moved much faster than men have into female-dominated ones. To understand better this asymmetry, we need to look more closely at the relative value we place on masculinity and femininity.
Most people assume that gender is simply a scheme for classifying differences or a template for guiding the behaviour of children. The reality is more pernicious. We typically prize the attributes we associate with men, such as competence, strength, virility and stoicism, and underestimate the qualities we associate with women, like warmth, tenderness and compassion. We usually see masculinity in terms of power and dominance and femininity in terms of softness and subservience. We defer to men and indulge women. In other words, gender is not merely a bunch of traits embodied by individuals, but a subtle stratification system that often advantages men and disadvantages women.
All of this means there are far more incentives for women to act masculine than there are for men to act feminine. Women who behave like their male colleagues may be disliked for being “pushy” or “bitchy”, but these penalties are offset by the fact that they are also likely to enjoy more power and greater financial rewards. When men adopt the jobs and behaviours associated with women, however, they typically experience a loss of status with fewer perks and more social sanctions, especially from other men. “It’s seen as an unknowable crisis if men want to step down,” explains Barbara Risman, head of the department of sociology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “It’s not just being more like women, it’s seen as being less than men. Because women are seen as less than men.”
Once we see masculinity as an elite fraternity that confers special privileges, it becomes clearer why its membership is so strictly policed. Not every man qualifies. The hazing begins early. We teach girls that they can be whatever they want to be, and wipe their tears away when they struggle. But we teach boys that they need to toughen up, shake it off and take things “like a man”. Parents are often charmed when their young girls eschew dolls and dresses to play sport and build things, as if their daughters are already learning how to “lean in” at the playground. But many find it unsettling when their young boys want to trade a football for a tutu.
As these children grow older, boys will often go to punishing lengths to prove their masculinity to each other, whereas girls enjoy a much wider gamut of acceptable behaviour. “If we’re keeping score about who has it worse, girls actually have it much better when it comes to the definition of femininity,” says Lisa Damour, a psychologist who works closely with adolescents. “You can be a tomboy and that’s cool. You can be into make-up and that’s cool. But boys operate in an exceedingly narrow margin for what’s considered masculine.” When boys stray from this script, they typically get bullied or abused. Their status as men is at once so valuable and so precarious that it must be won over and over again.
This is not to say that being a woman is easy, Nathan hastily adds. He understands why many are frustrated by “the way they are expected to do it all, to have a career and be moms, it’s a whole contradictory bundle of things.” It’s just that few women seem to notice that men, too, are struggling with a similarly burdensome bundle. “As the man, there’s this tacit expectation that I’m going to be the earner and the person who kills bugs and fixes things around the house. At the same time, I’m going to be responsive to feelings and helpful with cooking and the children and those kinds of things.” Unlike his two long-term female partners, who pursued personally rewarding careers that offered enough flexibility to be available to their children, Nathan felt obliged to pursue work that offered a pay cheque large enough to support a family. “For the last 20-plus years I’ve been chained to a desk,” he says. “I’m in a profession that I’m happy to be in, but if I were a 20-year-old and told I could do anything I wanted with my life, I’m not sure I’d be doing this.” Nathan speaks enviously of female friends who decided to leave their professional careers when they became mothers. “They weren’t perceived as failures. If anything, they were told ‘That’s so great, you’re choosing to be a mom, that’s the most important thing in the world.’ That is not an option open to men.”
Nathan is not alone in his misgivings. Between 1977 and 2008 the percentage of American fathers in dual-earner couples who suffered from work-family conflicts jumped from 35% to 60%. The percentage of similarly vexed mothers grew only slightly, from 41% to 47%. Young men who get stuck supporting a family often report high levels of stress and sadness that they aren’t spending more time with their kids.Because men – and especially white, professional men – occupy a uniquely privileged place in society, Nathan is reluctant to discuss his feelings openly. “I’ve never expressed this to any of the women in my life, and I think it’s best that I don’t,” he says. He is right to be wary. Most conversations about gender inequities characterise men like Nathan as part of the problem. Women around the world may be graduating from college at higher rates than men, but they have yet to achieve similar rates of success in their careers. The uneven burdens of parenthood appear to be to blame. Although men in rich countries spend far more time cooking, cleaning and child-rearing than ever before, their efforts continue to be dwarfed by those of women. In America, for example, mothers devote nearly twice as much time to child care and housework as their male partners. Even couples with grand plans for an egalitarian partnership typically revert to more traditional roles after the birth of a child. A new study of the time-diaries of highly educated dual-earning American couples found that new fathers enjoyed up to three-and-a-half times as much leisure as their female partners, as mothers who worked full time were still stuck with the lion’s share of unpaid labour.
Feminists have long argued that men see little need to help out more at home because they already enjoy all the benefits of marriage and fatherhood without having to put in the extra work. “Even though it’s shifting drastically, marriage is still a pretty good deal for men in terms of the actual labour they capture from their wives,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Coltrane has found that after controlling for variables like age and education, married American men earn significantly more than their unmarried or divorced male peers, and their earnings go up with every child they have. Marriage seems to make men more productive at work because it allows them to outsource much of the housekeeping to their wives. Women, however, see no such “marriage premium”, and their earnings tend to go down with every new child. These parenthood effects can be seen across a variety of Western countries; they are greater in gender-conservative countries such as Austria and Germany, and weaker in more progressive countries, such as Sweden. This imbalance at home would seem to explain why the rate of female employment, after rising like gangbusters from the 1960s through the 1980s, slowed through the 1990s and has levelled off since the 2000s.
In order for more mothers to flourish in paid employment, more fathers need to pick up some of the slack at home. But, as Nathan’s frustration makes plain, this is not as simple as it sounds.
Women may not be moving as fast into male-dominated worlds as feminists would like, but they have moved much faster than men have into female-dominated ones. To understand better this asymmetry, we need to look more closely at the relative value we place on masculinity and femininity.
Most people assume that gender is simply a scheme for classifying differences or a template for guiding the behaviour of children. The reality is more pernicious. We typically prize the attributes we associate with men, such as competence, strength, virility and stoicism, and underestimate the qualities we associate with women, like warmth, tenderness and compassion. We usually see masculinity in terms of power and dominance and femininity in terms of softness and subservience. We defer to men and indulge women. In other words, gender is not merely a bunch of traits embodied by individuals, but a subtle stratification system that often advantages men and disadvantages women.
All of this means there are far more incentives for women to act masculine than there are for men to act feminine. Women who behave like their male colleagues may be disliked for being “pushy” or “bitchy”, but these penalties are offset by the fact that they are also likely to enjoy more power and greater financial rewards. When men adopt the jobs and behaviours associated with women, however, they typically experience a loss of status with fewer perks and more social sanctions, especially from other men. “It’s seen as an unknowable crisis if men want to step down,” explains Barbara Risman, head of the department of sociology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “It’s not just being more like women, it’s seen as being less than men. Because women are seen as less than men.”
Once we see masculinity as an elite fraternity that confers special privileges, it becomes clearer why its membership is so strictly policed. Not every man qualifies. The hazing begins early. We teach girls that they can be whatever they want to be, and wipe their tears away when they struggle. But we teach boys that they need to toughen up, shake it off and take things “like a man”. Parents are often charmed when their young girls eschew dolls and dresses to play sport and build things, as if their daughters are already learning how to “lean in” at the playground. But many find it unsettling when their young boys want to trade a football for a tutu.
As these children grow older, boys will often go to punishing lengths to prove their masculinity to each other, whereas girls enjoy a much wider gamut of acceptable behaviour. “If we’re keeping score about who has it worse, girls actually have it much better when it comes to the definition of femininity,” says Lisa Damour, a psychologist who works closely with adolescents. “You can be a tomboy and that’s cool. You can be into make-up and that’s cool. But boys operate in an exceedingly narrow margin for what’s considered masculine.” When boys stray from this script, they typically get bullied or abused. Their status as men is at once so valuable and so precarious that it must be won over and over again.
by Emily Bobrow, The Economist | Read more:
Image: Shout
Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Don’t Be Evil.
They were gods.
In 3150 BC, a man named Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt. His people took control of the Nile River, beginning the 3,000 year reign of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. What made Ancient Egypt the first historic civilization were geopolitics:
In 3150 BC, a man named Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt. His people took control of the Nile River, beginning the 3,000 year reign of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. What made Ancient Egypt the first historic civilization were geopolitics:
- Egypt’s natural desert borders protected it from invaders.
- The Nile River was a natural network that connected the civilization.
The river made it possible to mass produce food in epic proportions. The Pharaohs controlled the Nile River and taxed the farmers for access in the form of food. They stockpiled food stores that they distributed to mitigate local famine and floods. They quelled revolts because they could summon troops with speed.
By controlling the Nile River, this small group of humans became living gods on earth. Their people built hundreds of pyramids over the course of their reign in their honor. Each pyramid sentenced ten thousand farmers to thirty years of hard excruciating labor.
They are gods.
The Internet was not the first network to supposedly change everything forever. In 1910 under Theodore Vail, AT&T connected the nation with a monopoly of telephone wires. Like Google’s early “Don’t Be Evil” policy under Larry and Sergei, Vail’s AT&T served the public good. At the time, people perceived AT&T with the same technological reverence as they do with Google today. The telephone, radio, television, and film all started out as freely accessible networks. Now they’re all closed systems controlled by monopolies or cartels.
The Internet is simply repeating another cycle driven by human nature. What once began as a utopian network to bring people together is now controlled by The Four.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple.
Our four Pharaohs effectively rule over almost all gates to the Nile River of your time: The Internet.
For access, you have no choice but to pay the toll with your attention and your data.
Google is after your mind.
Google knows every question you’ve ever asked the Internet (Search). He knows what you’ve done and what you will do (Calendar). He knows where you’ve gone and where you are going (Waze, Maps). He knows every website you’ve ever visited (Chrome, Analytics) — even the ones in incognito. He’s probably reading your Gmail, your Google Docs, and your Hangouts. He can even predict what you’ll want before you tell him (Google Now).
Google spends billions building free software to collect millions of your data points. He’s captured your mind by using all that data to understand what you’re thinking better than you do. And he sold you, and others like you, to his advertisers for $79 billion last year.
Facebook is after your heart.
Facebook knows your real name and can recognize your face from any photo. She can accurately predict your interests from your location, age, education, and occupation. She has a deep understanding of who you care about, how you know them, and how close you are with them. She tracks how often you message them and interact with them. She knows what you like to read, everything you like, and everything you care about.
Facebook spends billions of dollars to ensure you’re perpetually distracted and addicted. Her algorithms use your like and click history to curate content so you never stop scrolling. Every time that little red notification appears, you have to check the number of likes you got. The last time you looked was seven minutes ago. You often catch yourself scrolling on autopilot not knowing how you got there. Facebook is enabling your addiction to capture your attention and your heart. She sold you, and others like you, for $27 billion last year. Google and Facebook combined are monopolizing the global ad market.
Amazon is after your gut consumption.
Over the last million years, more of our species have died from starvation than any other ailment. We’re hardwired with one basic instinct: the need for MORE. We can never get enough.
Amazon Prime has turned the world’s fastest growing retailer into a subscription service. 64% of US households now have Prime. He’s inserted a direct feeding tube of stuff into the wealthiest households of the world. Services such as same-day free shipping has hooked him into your home. He’s ensured your need to increase consumption and renew your recurring subscription. Quitting would cause withdrawals.
Now with the acquisition of Wholefoods ($13B), he’s conquered perishables. 55% of all product searches in the US now start from Amazon and he accounts for nearly half of US online retail sales. Amazon is a search engine attached to a warehouse. Armed with your consumption data, he convinces you to buy more.
Apple is after your reproduction instinct.
Luxury brands are how you signal your ability to attract and keep a mate. As a man, you demonstrate that you can absorb costs without endangering survival. As a woman, you’re deterring romantic rivals from poaching your relationship partner.
Former Burberry CEO, Angela Ahrendts, and YSL CEO, Paul Deneve, transformed Apple into a luxury retail brand. Your iPhone signals you’re wealthier, better-educated, and more attractive than an Android user. She convinces you that you’re a loser if you haven’t traded for the latest version of the iPhone. You own her Airpods, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch so your entire outfit matches. The data you leave on your Apps, iTunes, and iCloud lock you into her ecosystem so that you need to keep buying Apple. She has managed to marry the profit margins of Ferrari with the production volumes of Toyota. She is the most profitable company in the world.
The war for future control.
As the Internet expands to all aspects of our lives, we’re witnessing a corporate war for control.
The following are some of the current battlefronts in the war to control your access to the Internet:
Your digital collar and leash.
The iPhone has already secured Apple’s control of mobile. We’ve moved off the browser and instead use apps from Apple’s App Store to access the Internet on our phones. To avoid getting shut out, Google gives away Android to phone and tablet manufacturers (Samsung, LG). Facebook acquired Whatsapp ($19B) and Instagram ($1B) to hold onto our mobile attention. To capture developing countries, Facebook is giving away free wireless Internet. Though there’s a caveat — they have to use Facebook to access it.
Infiltration of your home has begun.
Google (Nest) is watching your house through security cameras, thermostats, and smoke alarms. Google Home and Amazon Echo listen to everything you’re saying. They also can control your house as you begin collecting smart appliances. Apple is secretly working on her own Siri-based Echo competitor: Homepod.
Keeping your eyes glued.
You’ve cancelled traditional cable television because you’re using Apple TV and Google Chromecast. Amazon’s $4.5 billion original content budget only trails Netflix’s $6 billion. Google is chasing Amazon Prime and Netflix with his own YouTube Red. Amazon’s NFL streaming is attacking traditional television’s last stand — live sports. Amazon bought Twitch ($970MM)because e-sports is surpassing traditional professional sports.
Total Internet immersion experience.
Facebook bought Oculus ($2B) because she believes virtual reality is the next Internet gateway. Google wants to avoid being shut out by Oculus and Hololens (Microsoft), so he’s giving away Google Daydream by packaging it with the Android. Apple is secretly working on her own Augmented Reality product. Apple Glasses are inevitable.
The future of transportation without a steering wheel.
Google will be giving away Waymo’s self-driving platform to car manufacturers (Fiat Chrysler). He knows you will spend your idle travel time using your self-driving car to search the Internet. Apple is also secretly working on her own self-driving technology. Tesla, Uber, and Lyft hope to join The Four with this move.
Beware of the prince.
Vail built AT&T’s network as a public service to improve the lives of its customers. Yet, AT&T eventually used its monopolistic advantages to tax customers without adding value. A public company must report to shareholders who care about short-term profit. It’s structurally impossible for Vail’s successors to have a founder’s idealism and authority to ignore their demands.
Though Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Bezos are still on their thrones, the founders of Apple and Google have passed on their scepters. The FCC is repealing net neutrality. Our Four Pharaohs will utterly control your Nile while you build their pyramids. Could the Internet be closed and predatory in the next 10 years?
Absolutely.
by Will Chang, Medium | Read more:
Image :Scott Galloway’s The Four
By controlling the Nile River, this small group of humans became living gods on earth. Their people built hundreds of pyramids over the course of their reign in their honor. Each pyramid sentenced ten thousand farmers to thirty years of hard excruciating labor.
They are gods.
The Internet was not the first network to supposedly change everything forever. In 1910 under Theodore Vail, AT&T connected the nation with a monopoly of telephone wires. Like Google’s early “Don’t Be Evil” policy under Larry and Sergei, Vail’s AT&T served the public good. At the time, people perceived AT&T with the same technological reverence as they do with Google today. The telephone, radio, television, and film all started out as freely accessible networks. Now they’re all closed systems controlled by monopolies or cartels.
The Internet is simply repeating another cycle driven by human nature. What once began as a utopian network to bring people together is now controlled by The Four.Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple.
Our four Pharaohs effectively rule over almost all gates to the Nile River of your time: The Internet.
For access, you have no choice but to pay the toll with your attention and your data.
Google is after your mind.
Google knows every question you’ve ever asked the Internet (Search). He knows what you’ve done and what you will do (Calendar). He knows where you’ve gone and where you are going (Waze, Maps). He knows every website you’ve ever visited (Chrome, Analytics) — even the ones in incognito. He’s probably reading your Gmail, your Google Docs, and your Hangouts. He can even predict what you’ll want before you tell him (Google Now).
Google spends billions building free software to collect millions of your data points. He’s captured your mind by using all that data to understand what you’re thinking better than you do. And he sold you, and others like you, to his advertisers for $79 billion last year.
Facebook is after your heart.
Facebook knows your real name and can recognize your face from any photo. She can accurately predict your interests from your location, age, education, and occupation. She has a deep understanding of who you care about, how you know them, and how close you are with them. She tracks how often you message them and interact with them. She knows what you like to read, everything you like, and everything you care about.
Facebook spends billions of dollars to ensure you’re perpetually distracted and addicted. Her algorithms use your like and click history to curate content so you never stop scrolling. Every time that little red notification appears, you have to check the number of likes you got. The last time you looked was seven minutes ago. You often catch yourself scrolling on autopilot not knowing how you got there. Facebook is enabling your addiction to capture your attention and your heart. She sold you, and others like you, for $27 billion last year. Google and Facebook combined are monopolizing the global ad market.
Amazon is after your gut consumption.
Over the last million years, more of our species have died from starvation than any other ailment. We’re hardwired with one basic instinct: the need for MORE. We can never get enough.
Amazon Prime has turned the world’s fastest growing retailer into a subscription service. 64% of US households now have Prime. He’s inserted a direct feeding tube of stuff into the wealthiest households of the world. Services such as same-day free shipping has hooked him into your home. He’s ensured your need to increase consumption and renew your recurring subscription. Quitting would cause withdrawals.
Now with the acquisition of Wholefoods ($13B), he’s conquered perishables. 55% of all product searches in the US now start from Amazon and he accounts for nearly half of US online retail sales. Amazon is a search engine attached to a warehouse. Armed with your consumption data, he convinces you to buy more.
Apple is after your reproduction instinct.
Luxury brands are how you signal your ability to attract and keep a mate. As a man, you demonstrate that you can absorb costs without endangering survival. As a woman, you’re deterring romantic rivals from poaching your relationship partner.
Former Burberry CEO, Angela Ahrendts, and YSL CEO, Paul Deneve, transformed Apple into a luxury retail brand. Your iPhone signals you’re wealthier, better-educated, and more attractive than an Android user. She convinces you that you’re a loser if you haven’t traded for the latest version of the iPhone. You own her Airpods, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch so your entire outfit matches. The data you leave on your Apps, iTunes, and iCloud lock you into her ecosystem so that you need to keep buying Apple. She has managed to marry the profit margins of Ferrari with the production volumes of Toyota. She is the most profitable company in the world.
The war for future control.
As the Internet expands to all aspects of our lives, we’re witnessing a corporate war for control.
The following are some of the current battlefronts in the war to control your access to the Internet:
Your digital collar and leash.
The iPhone has already secured Apple’s control of mobile. We’ve moved off the browser and instead use apps from Apple’s App Store to access the Internet on our phones. To avoid getting shut out, Google gives away Android to phone and tablet manufacturers (Samsung, LG). Facebook acquired Whatsapp ($19B) and Instagram ($1B) to hold onto our mobile attention. To capture developing countries, Facebook is giving away free wireless Internet. Though there’s a caveat — they have to use Facebook to access it.
Infiltration of your home has begun.
Google (Nest) is watching your house through security cameras, thermostats, and smoke alarms. Google Home and Amazon Echo listen to everything you’re saying. They also can control your house as you begin collecting smart appliances. Apple is secretly working on her own Siri-based Echo competitor: Homepod.
Keeping your eyes glued.
You’ve cancelled traditional cable television because you’re using Apple TV and Google Chromecast. Amazon’s $4.5 billion original content budget only trails Netflix’s $6 billion. Google is chasing Amazon Prime and Netflix with his own YouTube Red. Amazon’s NFL streaming is attacking traditional television’s last stand — live sports. Amazon bought Twitch ($970MM)because e-sports is surpassing traditional professional sports.
Total Internet immersion experience.
Facebook bought Oculus ($2B) because she believes virtual reality is the next Internet gateway. Google wants to avoid being shut out by Oculus and Hololens (Microsoft), so he’s giving away Google Daydream by packaging it with the Android. Apple is secretly working on her own Augmented Reality product. Apple Glasses are inevitable.
The future of transportation without a steering wheel.
Google will be giving away Waymo’s self-driving platform to car manufacturers (Fiat Chrysler). He knows you will spend your idle travel time using your self-driving car to search the Internet. Apple is also secretly working on her own self-driving technology. Tesla, Uber, and Lyft hope to join The Four with this move.
Beware of the prince.
Vail built AT&T’s network as a public service to improve the lives of its customers. Yet, AT&T eventually used its monopolistic advantages to tax customers without adding value. A public company must report to shareholders who care about short-term profit. It’s structurally impossible for Vail’s successors to have a founder’s idealism and authority to ignore their demands.
Though Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Bezos are still on their thrones, the founders of Apple and Google have passed on their scepters. The FCC is repealing net neutrality. Our Four Pharaohs will utterly control your Nile while you build their pyramids. Could the Internet be closed and predatory in the next 10 years?
Absolutely.
by Will Chang, Medium | Read more:
Image :Scott Galloway’s The Four
Angel Olsen
I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you I started dancing just to be around you Here's to thinking that it all meant so much more I kept my mouth shut and opened up the door I wanted nothing but for this to be the end For this to never be a tied and empty hand If all the trouble in my heart would only mend I lost my dream I lost my reason all again It's not just me for you, I have to look out too I have to save my life I need some peace of mind I am the only one now I am the only one now I am the only one now You may not be around You may not be around You may not be around I am the only one now I am the only one now I am the only one now I am the only one now
Hot Potatoes and Dutch Tulips
At the height of the technology bubble, the median of the most reliable market valuation measures we follow (those most strongly correlated with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns) briefly reached an apex 178% above historical norms that had been regularly approached or breached over the completion of every market cycle in history. That level of valuation implied a prospective market loss of (1/(1+1.78)-1 = ) -64% as the bubble collapsed. In real-time, I suggested, based on related measures, that prospective market losses would likely be tiered, with tech stocks losing about -83%, the S&P 500 losing more than half of its value. As it happened, the 2000-2002 collapse took the S&P 500 down by 50%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index lost an oddly precise -83%. Smaller capitalization stocks suffered less extensive losses due to better valuations, as they had materially lagged the large-cap indices during the late-stages of that bubble.
Attempting to “stimulate” the economy from the recession that followed, the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates to just 1%, provoking an episode of yield-seeking speculation, where yield-starved investors created demand for higher-yielding mortgage-backed securities, and a weakly-regulated Wall Street rushed to create new “product” to meet the demand (by lending to anyone with a pulse). At its peak, the resulting bubble took the median of the most reliable market valuation measures we follow to a level more than 95% above their historical norms, implying a prospective market loss on the order of -49% as that bubble collapsed.
While I've written about numerous valuation measures over time, the most reliable ones share a common feature: they focus on identifying "sufficient statistics" for the very, very long-term stream of cash flows that stocks can be expected to deliver into the hands of investors over time. On that front, revenues are typically more robust "sufficient statistics" than current or year-ahead earnings. See Exhaustion Gaps and the Fear of Missing Out for a table showing the relative reliability of a variety of measures. In April 2007, I estimated that an appropriate valuation for the S&P 500 stood about 850, roughly -40% lower than prevailing levels. By the October peak, the prospective market loss to normal valuation had increased to about -46%. As it happened, the subsequent collapse of the housing bubble took the S&P 500 about -55% lower. In late-October 2008, as the market plunge crossed below historically reliable valuation norms, I observed that the S&P 500 had become undervalued on our measures.
Again attempting to “stimulate” the economy from the recession that followed, the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates to zero in recent years, provoking yet another episode of yield-seeking speculation, where yield-starved investors created demand for virtually every class of securities, in the hope of achieving returns in excess of zero. Meanwhile, Wall Street, suffering from what J.K. Galbraith once called the “extreme brevity of the financial memory,” convinced itself yet again that the whole episode was built on something more solid than quotes on a screen and blotches of ink on paper. At last week’s highs, the median of the most reliable market valuation measures we follow reached an extreme that placed them 170% above their historical norms, implying a prospective market loss on the order of -63% in what I fully expect to be the collapse of the third speculative bubble since 2000. Notably, there is only a single week in history where the median valuation on our most reliable measures exceeded the level we just observed. That was the week of March 24, 2000, which set the peak of the tech bubble. Unlike the 2000-2002 retreat however, the damage to paper values over the completion of the current cycle is likely to spare few sectors, as the median valuation across individual stocks is at a record high, and far beyond the 2000 peak. (...)
By the completion of the current cycle, investors will likely relearn how erroneous and irrelevant it was to worry about “selling too early” in an extremely overvalued market. It’s worth remembering now that by the end of the 2000-2002 decline, the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bills, had been wiped out all the way back to May 1996. By the end of the 2007-2009 collapse, the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bills, had been wiped out all the way back to June 1995. Likewise, my expectation is that the completion of the current market cycle will wipe out the total returns of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bill returns, all the way back to roughly October 1997 (from the standpoint of of the recent bull market advance, that would also erase the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bill returns, since late-2009). This outcome would not even require the most reliable valuation measures to breach historical norms that they have revisited in virtually every market cycle, even those associated with very low interest rates. See Durable Returns, Transient Returns for a reminder of how all of this works.
Having correctly anticipated and watched major collapses unfold in prior market cycles, my sense is that many investors are likely thinking “I can always get out if the news gets bad and a steep loss starts to unfold.” More likely, what will actually happen is that the first market loss off the top will be a nearly vertical drop on the order of 12-14% and will be associated with virtually no meaningful news at all, and most investors will consider the decline far too steep to make selling worthwhile. A subsequent advance from that low, whether it recovers a third, or a half, or nearly all of the loss, will reinforce that mentality. Except for outright crashes like 1987, steep market losses are regularly punctuated by fast, furious advances that restore hope, and then give way to a fresh cascade of losses. If possible, get some charts and go through a few past market collapses day-by-day (blocking out the right side so it’s not clear what happened next), and you’ll get a feel for this constant flux between fear and relief, all the way down.
Attempting to “stimulate” the economy from the recession that followed, the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates to just 1%, provoking an episode of yield-seeking speculation, where yield-starved investors created demand for higher-yielding mortgage-backed securities, and a weakly-regulated Wall Street rushed to create new “product” to meet the demand (by lending to anyone with a pulse). At its peak, the resulting bubble took the median of the most reliable market valuation measures we follow to a level more than 95% above their historical norms, implying a prospective market loss on the order of -49% as that bubble collapsed.
While I've written about numerous valuation measures over time, the most reliable ones share a common feature: they focus on identifying "sufficient statistics" for the very, very long-term stream of cash flows that stocks can be expected to deliver into the hands of investors over time. On that front, revenues are typically more robust "sufficient statistics" than current or year-ahead earnings. See Exhaustion Gaps and the Fear of Missing Out for a table showing the relative reliability of a variety of measures. In April 2007, I estimated that an appropriate valuation for the S&P 500 stood about 850, roughly -40% lower than prevailing levels. By the October peak, the prospective market loss to normal valuation had increased to about -46%. As it happened, the subsequent collapse of the housing bubble took the S&P 500 about -55% lower. In late-October 2008, as the market plunge crossed below historically reliable valuation norms, I observed that the S&P 500 had become undervalued on our measures.
Again attempting to “stimulate” the economy from the recession that followed, the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates to zero in recent years, provoking yet another episode of yield-seeking speculation, where yield-starved investors created demand for virtually every class of securities, in the hope of achieving returns in excess of zero. Meanwhile, Wall Street, suffering from what J.K. Galbraith once called the “extreme brevity of the financial memory,” convinced itself yet again that the whole episode was built on something more solid than quotes on a screen and blotches of ink on paper. At last week’s highs, the median of the most reliable market valuation measures we follow reached an extreme that placed them 170% above their historical norms, implying a prospective market loss on the order of -63% in what I fully expect to be the collapse of the third speculative bubble since 2000. Notably, there is only a single week in history where the median valuation on our most reliable measures exceeded the level we just observed. That was the week of March 24, 2000, which set the peak of the tech bubble. Unlike the 2000-2002 retreat however, the damage to paper values over the completion of the current cycle is likely to spare few sectors, as the median valuation across individual stocks is at a record high, and far beyond the 2000 peak. (...)
By the completion of the current cycle, investors will likely relearn how erroneous and irrelevant it was to worry about “selling too early” in an extremely overvalued market. It’s worth remembering now that by the end of the 2000-2002 decline, the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bills, had been wiped out all the way back to May 1996. By the end of the 2007-2009 collapse, the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bills, had been wiped out all the way back to June 1995. Likewise, my expectation is that the completion of the current market cycle will wipe out the total returns of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bill returns, all the way back to roughly October 1997 (from the standpoint of of the recent bull market advance, that would also erase the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bill returns, since late-2009). This outcome would not even require the most reliable valuation measures to breach historical norms that they have revisited in virtually every market cycle, even those associated with very low interest rates. See Durable Returns, Transient Returns for a reminder of how all of this works.
Having correctly anticipated and watched major collapses unfold in prior market cycles, my sense is that many investors are likely thinking “I can always get out if the news gets bad and a steep loss starts to unfold.” More likely, what will actually happen is that the first market loss off the top will be a nearly vertical drop on the order of 12-14% and will be associated with virtually no meaningful news at all, and most investors will consider the decline far too steep to make selling worthwhile. A subsequent advance from that low, whether it recovers a third, or a half, or nearly all of the loss, will reinforce that mentality. Except for outright crashes like 1987, steep market losses are regularly punctuated by fast, furious advances that restore hope, and then give way to a fresh cascade of losses. If possible, get some charts and go through a few past market collapses day-by-day (blocking out the right side so it’s not clear what happened next), and you’ll get a feel for this constant flux between fear and relief, all the way down.
by John P. Hussman Ph.D., Hussman Funds | Read more:
ASMR Star (Quietly) Reaches a Major Milestone
Deep in the dungeons of YouTube subcultures, past the bicycling dogs and wannabe musicians, down the disgusting hall of extraction videos and around the corner from makeup tutorials, you’ll find the eerily quiet, softly-lit realm of ASMR. Its hushed videos of people whispering into the camera, or slowly running their hands over fabric, once a niche craze, have risen in popularity, and last week the ASMR community reached a major milestone when its biggest star hit one million subscribers.
In her (quiet) thank you video, Maria, the woman behind the popular Gentle Whispering ASMR account, told her audience: “It’s a huge milestone not just for my channel, but for our whole ASMR community.”
Maria started the account in 2011. In her videos, the 30-year-old Russian-American whispers positive affirmations, folds towels, brushes hair, or slowly turns the pages of a book, anything to trigger ASMR, or the autonomous sensory meridian response. For some, these videos do nothing. (Personally, all the mellow, quiet sounds puts me on edge, and hearing the saliva behind people’s whispers makes me cringe.) But for others, these soft sounds can induce a pleasant tingling down their spine and the back of their skull, as well as a feeling of deep relaxation. Some people call it a “head orgasm,” which is an unfortunate term for what sounds like a pleasant enough experience.
But despite all the talk of tingles and orgasms, ASMRtists, the people who create ASMR videos, insist its not a fetish.
“It comes off as a little bit creepy just because of the nature of whispering, but when it comes down to it, you can sexualize anything,” says Lilliana, the Pittsburgh-based ASMRtist behind the Lily Whispers ASMR YouTube account, which has over 150,000 subscribers.
While relatively little is known about ASMR (the term was only coined in 2010) some of its followers claim its calming effect has helped them with feelings of anxiety. Maria started listening to videos to help her relax following her divorce in 2009, and Lilliana said it helped with anxiety her freshman year of college.
“It works and I strongly believe that it works,” Lilliana said.
by Madeleine Aggeler, The Cut | Read more:
Image:YouTube/Gentle Whispering ASMR
In her (quiet) thank you video, Maria, the woman behind the popular Gentle Whispering ASMR account, told her audience: “It’s a huge milestone not just for my channel, but for our whole ASMR community.”Maria started the account in 2011. In her videos, the 30-year-old Russian-American whispers positive affirmations, folds towels, brushes hair, or slowly turns the pages of a book, anything to trigger ASMR, or the autonomous sensory meridian response. For some, these videos do nothing. (Personally, all the mellow, quiet sounds puts me on edge, and hearing the saliva behind people’s whispers makes me cringe.) But for others, these soft sounds can induce a pleasant tingling down their spine and the back of their skull, as well as a feeling of deep relaxation. Some people call it a “head orgasm,” which is an unfortunate term for what sounds like a pleasant enough experience.
But despite all the talk of tingles and orgasms, ASMRtists, the people who create ASMR videos, insist its not a fetish.
“It comes off as a little bit creepy just because of the nature of whispering, but when it comes down to it, you can sexualize anything,” says Lilliana, the Pittsburgh-based ASMRtist behind the Lily Whispers ASMR YouTube account, which has over 150,000 subscribers.
While relatively little is known about ASMR (the term was only coined in 2010) some of its followers claim its calming effect has helped them with feelings of anxiety. Maria started listening to videos to help her relax following her divorce in 2009, and Lilliana said it helped with anxiety her freshman year of college.
“It works and I strongly believe that it works,” Lilliana said.
by Madeleine Aggeler, The Cut | Read more:
Image:YouTube/Gentle Whispering ASMR
Tumblr’s Unclear Future in Internet Culture
Earlier this month, Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo, incorporating the internet-portal pioneer’s slate of brands under a new umbrella corporation named, ominously, Oath. Among those Yahoo brands is the website Tumblr, a blog-based social network that you either know well to the point of obsession, or find completely incomprehensible. As Verizon completed its acquisition, a number of Tumblr employees, as well as those at other Verizon-owned properties, like the Huffington Post, were laid off.
The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd — that’s partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 — but despite a user base near the size of Instagram’s, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect. For a long time, its founder and CEO David Karp was publicly against the idea of inserting ads into users’ timelines. (Other experiments in monetization, like premium options, never caught on: It’s tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income.) Even once the timeline became open to advertising, it was tough to find clients willing to brave the sometimes-porny waters of the Tumblr Dashboard. Since it joined Yahoo, the site has started displaying low-quality “chum”-style ads in between user posts on the Dashboard. Looked at from a bottom-line perspective, Tumblr is an also-ran like its parent company — a once-hot start-up that has eased into tech-industry irrelevance.
Looked at from another angle, however, Tumblr is among the most important sites online — a central hub of what is nebulously known as “internet culture.” Most recently, the site gave us Dat Boi, the unicycling frog, but Tumblr’s most famous legacy is probably the reaction GIF, which was popularized by Tumblr accounts like What Should We Call Me. Tumblr’s reblog structure, which created lengthy, publicly shared conversations between strangers, also helped popularize the concept of the Discourse, the internetwide conversation happening all at once. It is also the primary meeting place for fandoms of shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural, and films like the Marvel movies — some of the most aggressive fandoms are cultivated on Tumblr.
It is rare, but not at all unprecedented, for a site to reach Tumblr’s size, prominence, and level of influence and still be unable to build a sustainable business. Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit. Twitter itself shuttered its service Vine after just four years, even though the six-second-video social network had created more ubiquitous catchphrases and viral videos than any other social network over the same period. Reddit, the so-called “front page of the internet,” has been unable to fully capitalize on its enormous audience and influence, even after being purchased by CondĂ© Nast (which it then spun out again; CondĂ© Nast is very careful to specify that it does not own Reddit, though its parent company Advance Publications is a majority stakeholder). 4chan, whatever else you might think of it, is probably the most influential single website of the last decade, but its owner Hiroyuki Nishimura has said he is likely to shut it down. Even YouTube, which is synonymous with online video, still has trouble with profitability. As late as last October, CEO Susan Wojcicki was saying that the site was still in “investment mode” and that there was “no timetable” for profitability.
What makes these sites so friendly to creative expression? To begin with, there’s a focus on frictionless, near-immediate sharing — making posting hassle-free. 4chan doesn’t even require an account, whereas Vine limited its clips to a mere six seconds. It also has to be easy for users to iterate or remix content: The core function of Tumblr is the reblog, which lets users attach their own comments and photos to other posts like Lego blocks.
Importantly, iteration, and a meme’s growth, is much easier to track and understand when platforms use strict chronological timelines, which allow users to see a visible progression of online discourse, rather than trying to piece it together like a puzzle. Algorithmic timelines, like Facebook’s News Feed, are terrible for collaborative online culture. If Twitter has seemed a bit more staid over the last year, it might have something to do with its algorithmic timeline (which you can turn off).
Lastly, there is light content moderation. This can be a blessing and a curse, but allowing users to feel safe posting whatever is what allows these communities to grow, whether it’s via 4chan’s lolcats or Tumblr’s porn GIFs. When heavy-handed moderation is put in place, you not only limit expression, you run the risk of alienating the creators — like when top YouTubers like PewDiePie began to rebel against the platform after advertisers withdrew over content they found objectionable.
Advertisers, ultimately, are part of the problem. The general thinking in the rise of social networks was that if you make stuff that gets a lot of attention (or, better yet, own the real estate on which others are making stuff for free), brands will put their ads next to it. But with a small handful of exceptions, the advertising riches never really materialized. There are many reasons for this — for one thing, it’s tough to sell a high-quality ad experience to executives at Coca-Cola when you first have to explain what a meme is and why it’s “viral.” On top of all that, there are reams of porn, hate speech, copyright infringement, and more porn floating around on these platforms, easily accidentally placed adjacent to a company’s studiously inoffensive ad.
Maybe more importantly, Tumblr and Vine and the like never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook. That’s why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It’s less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life. For much of its life, Facebook aggressively trafficked not in collecting rage comics and funny video clips, but in collecting bland lists of favorite movies and where you went to college — personal information that it can use to target ads with alarming specificity. And by selling ads against people’s identities, rather than their creative content, the company has churned out impressive profits, and given a wider impression that an ad-supported content platform is viable. (One of the great ironies of Twitter’s and Tumblr’s inability to make sustained profits is that Instagram and Facebook are both full of videos and posts screenshotted and stolen from their more productive, less wealthy rival platforms.)
But the truth is that running a platform for culture creation is, increasingly, a charity operation undertaken by larger companies. Servers are expensive, and advertisers would rather just throw money at Facebook than take a chance on your weird, problematic network. Generating and incubating internet culture has little market value in and of itself.
by Brian Feldman, Select/All | Read more:
Image: Select All
The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd — that’s partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 — but despite a user base near the size of Instagram’s, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect. For a long time, its founder and CEO David Karp was publicly against the idea of inserting ads into users’ timelines. (Other experiments in monetization, like premium options, never caught on: It’s tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income.) Even once the timeline became open to advertising, it was tough to find clients willing to brave the sometimes-porny waters of the Tumblr Dashboard. Since it joined Yahoo, the site has started displaying low-quality “chum”-style ads in between user posts on the Dashboard. Looked at from a bottom-line perspective, Tumblr is an also-ran like its parent company — a once-hot start-up that has eased into tech-industry irrelevance.Looked at from another angle, however, Tumblr is among the most important sites online — a central hub of what is nebulously known as “internet culture.” Most recently, the site gave us Dat Boi, the unicycling frog, but Tumblr’s most famous legacy is probably the reaction GIF, which was popularized by Tumblr accounts like What Should We Call Me. Tumblr’s reblog structure, which created lengthy, publicly shared conversations between strangers, also helped popularize the concept of the Discourse, the internetwide conversation happening all at once. It is also the primary meeting place for fandoms of shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural, and films like the Marvel movies — some of the most aggressive fandoms are cultivated on Tumblr.
It is rare, but not at all unprecedented, for a site to reach Tumblr’s size, prominence, and level of influence and still be unable to build a sustainable business. Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit. Twitter itself shuttered its service Vine after just four years, even though the six-second-video social network had created more ubiquitous catchphrases and viral videos than any other social network over the same period. Reddit, the so-called “front page of the internet,” has been unable to fully capitalize on its enormous audience and influence, even after being purchased by CondĂ© Nast (which it then spun out again; CondĂ© Nast is very careful to specify that it does not own Reddit, though its parent company Advance Publications is a majority stakeholder). 4chan, whatever else you might think of it, is probably the most influential single website of the last decade, but its owner Hiroyuki Nishimura has said he is likely to shut it down. Even YouTube, which is synonymous with online video, still has trouble with profitability. As late as last October, CEO Susan Wojcicki was saying that the site was still in “investment mode” and that there was “no timetable” for profitability.
What makes these sites so friendly to creative expression? To begin with, there’s a focus on frictionless, near-immediate sharing — making posting hassle-free. 4chan doesn’t even require an account, whereas Vine limited its clips to a mere six seconds. It also has to be easy for users to iterate or remix content: The core function of Tumblr is the reblog, which lets users attach their own comments and photos to other posts like Lego blocks.
Importantly, iteration, and a meme’s growth, is much easier to track and understand when platforms use strict chronological timelines, which allow users to see a visible progression of online discourse, rather than trying to piece it together like a puzzle. Algorithmic timelines, like Facebook’s News Feed, are terrible for collaborative online culture. If Twitter has seemed a bit more staid over the last year, it might have something to do with its algorithmic timeline (which you can turn off).
Lastly, there is light content moderation. This can be a blessing and a curse, but allowing users to feel safe posting whatever is what allows these communities to grow, whether it’s via 4chan’s lolcats or Tumblr’s porn GIFs. When heavy-handed moderation is put in place, you not only limit expression, you run the risk of alienating the creators — like when top YouTubers like PewDiePie began to rebel against the platform after advertisers withdrew over content they found objectionable.
Advertisers, ultimately, are part of the problem. The general thinking in the rise of social networks was that if you make stuff that gets a lot of attention (or, better yet, own the real estate on which others are making stuff for free), brands will put their ads next to it. But with a small handful of exceptions, the advertising riches never really materialized. There are many reasons for this — for one thing, it’s tough to sell a high-quality ad experience to executives at Coca-Cola when you first have to explain what a meme is and why it’s “viral.” On top of all that, there are reams of porn, hate speech, copyright infringement, and more porn floating around on these platforms, easily accidentally placed adjacent to a company’s studiously inoffensive ad.
Maybe more importantly, Tumblr and Vine and the like never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook. That’s why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It’s less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life. For much of its life, Facebook aggressively trafficked not in collecting rage comics and funny video clips, but in collecting bland lists of favorite movies and where you went to college — personal information that it can use to target ads with alarming specificity. And by selling ads against people’s identities, rather than their creative content, the company has churned out impressive profits, and given a wider impression that an ad-supported content platform is viable. (One of the great ironies of Twitter’s and Tumblr’s inability to make sustained profits is that Instagram and Facebook are both full of videos and posts screenshotted and stolen from their more productive, less wealthy rival platforms.)
But the truth is that running a platform for culture creation is, increasingly, a charity operation undertaken by larger companies. Servers are expensive, and advertisers would rather just throw money at Facebook than take a chance on your weird, problematic network. Generating and incubating internet culture has little market value in and of itself.
by Brian Feldman, Select/All | Read more:
Image: Select All
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
Why Were They Throwing Bricks?
“I lost hearing in this ear when a horse jumped over a fence and collided against the side of my face,” my grandmother told me when she arrived at JFK. I was 9 and hadn’t seen her in four years. “In Shanghai you slept with me every single night. Every week we took you to your other grandmother’s house. She called incessantly, asking for you. ‘Can’t I see my own granddaughter?’ I said, ‘Sure you can.’ But — let’s not spare any feelings — you didn’t want to see her. Whenever you were at your waipo’s house you cried and called my name and woke up the neighbors. You hated her face because it was round like the moon, and you thought mine was perfectly oval like an egg. You loved our house. It was your real home — and still is. Your waipo would frantically call a few minutes after I dropped you off asking me to come back, and I would sprint all the way there. Yes, my precious heart, your 68-year-old grandmother ran through the streets for you. How could I let you suffer for even a second? You wouldn’t stop crying until I arrived, and the minute I pulled you into my arms, you slept the deep happy sleep of a child who has come home to her true family.”
“I sleep by myself now. I have my own bed with stickers on it,” I told her in Chinese, without knowing the word for stickers. I hugged my body against my mother, who was telling my father he would have to make two trips to the car because my grandmother had somehow persuaded the airline to let her bring three pieces of checked luggage and two carry-on items without any additional charges.
“And did you see that poor man dragging her suitcases off the plane for her? How does she always do that?” my mother said. She shrugged me away and mouthed in English to me, “Talk. To. Grandma.”
My father threw his hands up. “You know exactly how,” he said, and went off with the first two bags.
“You remember how uncanny it was,” my grandmother continued, tweaking her hearing aid until it made a small shrill sound and then a shriller sound and then another even shriller sound. “They called me a miracle worker and I said, ‘No, no, I’m just her nainai,’ but everyone said, ‘You’re a miracle worker. You’re the only one who can make that child stop crying.’ They said there was no need for me to be modest. ‘This child prefers her grandmother to even her own mother and father! Why sugarcoat the truth?’ I had to stop myself from stopping other people from saying it after a while. Was I supposed to keep insulting everyone’s intelligence? Protesting endlessly? Your nainai isn’t that type of person. And the truth is, people don’t make things up out of nothing. There’s truth in every widely believed saying, and that’s just true.”
“What?” I said. “I don’t understand Chinese that good.”
“I knew you wouldn’t forget a moment of your real life, your real home — the place you come from. Have you learned English yet?”
“That’s all I speak. It’s America.”
“Your nainai is so proud of you. One day your English will catch up. It’s such a gift to be here now with you. You don’t know how many lonely nights I’ve spent dropping tears for you. It was wrong of me to let you go. Remember how you called for me when you let go of my hand and boarded the airplane with your mother? Remember how you howled that you wanted to take me with you? Four years ago, your father wrote to me, ‘You can’t keep my own wife and child away from me any longer. I’m sending for them immediately.’ I wanted to know if he ever considered maybe you and your mother simply didn’t want to go to America? In those days, you would’ve rather eaten a basement full of rats than be separated from your nainai. Your father’s also stubborn, but I’m not the type to insult the spoonful of food nourishing me. You see what I mean? I won’t say any more. I’m living in his house now and even though he has only made fatally wrong choices, we still have to listen to him. But remember how at the airport you cried and said, ‘Nainai, I love you the most of everyone. I want to stay with you. I don’t want to go to America.’”
“I don’t remember that,” I said to my grandmother. “Sorry.”
“You remember everything, don’t you? But it hurts too much to dredge up bad memories.” Her hearing aid buzzed again and she twisted its tiny hidden knob with her thumb and index finger. “This thing works for a moment and then it goes dead for days. Your father said he would get me a proper hearing aid so I can hear your beautiful voice. You speak up now and let your grandmother look at you. She’s only missed you every minute of every hour of every second of every single iota of a time unit that’s elapsed since you last slept with your nainai every night, refusing to even close your eyes unless I was in the bed with you. You know what everyone’s favorite joke was? ‘Who’s the mom? You?’ Oh, I laughed.”
“That’s not a joke.”
“That’s right. It was the plain truth,” she continued. “They all asked me, ‘Doesn’t your granddaughter ever want to sleep with her mother and father?’ And I had to tell them — not in a bragging way, just in an informing way — ‘No. Her father is in America learning how to build computers and her mother works late at the factory and even if her mother didn’t come home from work so late, my granddaughter has made it clear she can only sleep with me. I know it’s not proper while her mother sleeps alone in another room under the same roof, but when a child wants something, how can you look her in the eye and deny her?’”
My grandmother lived with us in America for a year. She taught me how to knit, and after school I watched her make dinner and do dishes and sew curtains. At first I wouldn’t let her sleep with me in my bed. She cried and came every night to my bedroom and sat at the edge of the bed saying nothing. She had small red eyes and no teeth at night, except for four on the bottom row and a couple in the back. She ate daily bulbs of garlic so she’d live to be 117 and see me grow for another forty-five years, and the first few times she brought it up, I imagined myself running away from home just to get a few years to myself. But after a month, the smell was comforting, and I needed it near me before I could close my eyes, and just when I started to call for her more than she called for me, my parents announced that she had to move back to China to be with her dying husband. “Your grandfather,” my grandmother said with disgust, “says the only proper way for a man to leave this world is in his own home with his wife by his side. Have you ever heard anything so spineless?”
My grandfather had been begging her to come back for six months. He had been diagnosed with lesions in his throat and he didn’t want to die without her. For a year, I had slept in her bed, pressed up against her like she was my bedroom wall, and after she left, I stayed in her bed for two weeks, refusing to return to my own bed even after my mother threatened to push me off if I didn’t get out.
“This room reeks,” she said. “It smells like several people have died. You still want to sleep in here?”
I nodded.
“On sheets that haven’t been washed for weeks?”
I nodded. “She said she’s coming back after Grandpa dies.”
“She also said you’d learn English in middle school. She said she learned to drive in her dreams and that’s how she’ll pass the driving test and take you to Mount Rushmore for your birthday. You believe everything she says? Have you gone back in time and lost all sense?”
I shook my head. Finally, she and my father dragged me out, my arms wrapped around the cheap white lacquered bed frame as my father held my legs and my mother pried my fingers free.
“You’re going to sleep on your own,” my mother said. “Like you did before she came around.”
“You hear your mother?” my father said, wiping the tears from my face and blowing softly on my hot red cheeks. “Just a day at a time.”
“Don’t indulge this,” my mother said.
“You want to beat the sadness out of her?” my father said. “Because that’s what your mother wants. For us to be the bad guys and her to be the hero when she comes back.”
“I’m not inviting her back,” my mother said.
“I sleep by myself now. I have my own bed with stickers on it,” I told her in Chinese, without knowing the word for stickers. I hugged my body against my mother, who was telling my father he would have to make two trips to the car because my grandmother had somehow persuaded the airline to let her bring three pieces of checked luggage and two carry-on items without any additional charges.
“And did you see that poor man dragging her suitcases off the plane for her? How does she always do that?” my mother said. She shrugged me away and mouthed in English to me, “Talk. To. Grandma.”My father threw his hands up. “You know exactly how,” he said, and went off with the first two bags.
“You remember how uncanny it was,” my grandmother continued, tweaking her hearing aid until it made a small shrill sound and then a shriller sound and then another even shriller sound. “They called me a miracle worker and I said, ‘No, no, I’m just her nainai,’ but everyone said, ‘You’re a miracle worker. You’re the only one who can make that child stop crying.’ They said there was no need for me to be modest. ‘This child prefers her grandmother to even her own mother and father! Why sugarcoat the truth?’ I had to stop myself from stopping other people from saying it after a while. Was I supposed to keep insulting everyone’s intelligence? Protesting endlessly? Your nainai isn’t that type of person. And the truth is, people don’t make things up out of nothing. There’s truth in every widely believed saying, and that’s just true.”
“What?” I said. “I don’t understand Chinese that good.”
“I knew you wouldn’t forget a moment of your real life, your real home — the place you come from. Have you learned English yet?”
“That’s all I speak. It’s America.”
“Your nainai is so proud of you. One day your English will catch up. It’s such a gift to be here now with you. You don’t know how many lonely nights I’ve spent dropping tears for you. It was wrong of me to let you go. Remember how you called for me when you let go of my hand and boarded the airplane with your mother? Remember how you howled that you wanted to take me with you? Four years ago, your father wrote to me, ‘You can’t keep my own wife and child away from me any longer. I’m sending for them immediately.’ I wanted to know if he ever considered maybe you and your mother simply didn’t want to go to America? In those days, you would’ve rather eaten a basement full of rats than be separated from your nainai. Your father’s also stubborn, but I’m not the type to insult the spoonful of food nourishing me. You see what I mean? I won’t say any more. I’m living in his house now and even though he has only made fatally wrong choices, we still have to listen to him. But remember how at the airport you cried and said, ‘Nainai, I love you the most of everyone. I want to stay with you. I don’t want to go to America.’”
“I don’t remember that,” I said to my grandmother. “Sorry.”
“You remember everything, don’t you? But it hurts too much to dredge up bad memories.” Her hearing aid buzzed again and she twisted its tiny hidden knob with her thumb and index finger. “This thing works for a moment and then it goes dead for days. Your father said he would get me a proper hearing aid so I can hear your beautiful voice. You speak up now and let your grandmother look at you. She’s only missed you every minute of every hour of every second of every single iota of a time unit that’s elapsed since you last slept with your nainai every night, refusing to even close your eyes unless I was in the bed with you. You know what everyone’s favorite joke was? ‘Who’s the mom? You?’ Oh, I laughed.”
“That’s not a joke.”
“That’s right. It was the plain truth,” she continued. “They all asked me, ‘Doesn’t your granddaughter ever want to sleep with her mother and father?’ And I had to tell them — not in a bragging way, just in an informing way — ‘No. Her father is in America learning how to build computers and her mother works late at the factory and even if her mother didn’t come home from work so late, my granddaughter has made it clear she can only sleep with me. I know it’s not proper while her mother sleeps alone in another room under the same roof, but when a child wants something, how can you look her in the eye and deny her?’”
My grandmother lived with us in America for a year. She taught me how to knit, and after school I watched her make dinner and do dishes and sew curtains. At first I wouldn’t let her sleep with me in my bed. She cried and came every night to my bedroom and sat at the edge of the bed saying nothing. She had small red eyes and no teeth at night, except for four on the bottom row and a couple in the back. She ate daily bulbs of garlic so she’d live to be 117 and see me grow for another forty-five years, and the first few times she brought it up, I imagined myself running away from home just to get a few years to myself. But after a month, the smell was comforting, and I needed it near me before I could close my eyes, and just when I started to call for her more than she called for me, my parents announced that she had to move back to China to be with her dying husband. “Your grandfather,” my grandmother said with disgust, “says the only proper way for a man to leave this world is in his own home with his wife by his side. Have you ever heard anything so spineless?”
My grandfather had been begging her to come back for six months. He had been diagnosed with lesions in his throat and he didn’t want to die without her. For a year, I had slept in her bed, pressed up against her like she was my bedroom wall, and after she left, I stayed in her bed for two weeks, refusing to return to my own bed even after my mother threatened to push me off if I didn’t get out.
“This room reeks,” she said. “It smells like several people have died. You still want to sleep in here?”
I nodded.
“On sheets that haven’t been washed for weeks?”
I nodded. “She said she’s coming back after Grandpa dies.”
“She also said you’d learn English in middle school. She said she learned to drive in her dreams and that’s how she’ll pass the driving test and take you to Mount Rushmore for your birthday. You believe everything she says? Have you gone back in time and lost all sense?”
I shook my head. Finally, she and my father dragged me out, my arms wrapped around the cheap white lacquered bed frame as my father held my legs and my mother pried my fingers free.
“You’re going to sleep on your own,” my mother said. “Like you did before she came around.”
“You hear your mother?” my father said, wiping the tears from my face and blowing softly on my hot red cheeks. “Just a day at a time.”
“Don’t indulge this,” my mother said.
“You want to beat the sadness out of her?” my father said. “Because that’s what your mother wants. For us to be the bad guys and her to be the hero when she comes back.”
“I’m not inviting her back,” my mother said.
by Jenny Zhang, N+1 | Read more:
Image: CD Wu, Untitled. 2016
Monday, July 31, 2017
Keeping Up, on Camera - No Longer Just for the Kardashians
“It removed so much of the humanity of the conversation, because my life is just a big piece of content now,” he said. “There was literally no element of surprise.”
Digital self-promotion has gone to a new extreme. Perhaps taking a cue from BeyoncĂ©, who has famously recorded almost every single moment of her waking life, Mr. Henry is one of a small but growing number of entrepreneurs who have turned their lives into do-it-yourself reality shows. They pay videographers, editors and producers thousands of dollars a month to shadow them and create content for their social media platforms. They “star” as part motivational speaker, part life coach, as they dispense advice and speak enthusiastically about the hustle. They are earnest to a fault; you’ll find no melodrama here (or even much drama).But people are watching, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands. “The reach is incredible,” Mr. Henry said. “It’s mind-blowing to me that a regular person can reach a quarter of a million people a month if they put the work in.”
Despite the self-promotional nature of this phenomenon, most of these workaday video protagonists claim altruistic reasons for putting their lives under the microscope.
“I wanted to step up as a role model,” said Gerard Adams, 32, a founder of the website Elite Daily who calls himself the “Millennial Mentor,” a title he has trademarked. “I had to overcome a lot of failure and challenges.” Three videographers take turns filming Mr. Adams at his New Jersey-based business incubator, at the gym, and with his family and friends.
Patrick Bet-David, 38, the chief executive of an insurance company, said he wanted “people to see that you can have a wife and kids, and work out, and stay healthy and manage a business. You can pull it off.”
Just over a third of Mr. Bet-David’s life is captured on camera for his YouTube channel, Valuetainment. He was interviewed for this article over the phone at a restaurant in Dallas, where he was having lunch. As usual, his director of film production, Paul Escarcega, was there, too. Mr. Escarcega used two different cameras — one stationary, one hand-held — to shoot the call. (Of course, the audio only picked up Mr. Bet-David’s side of the conversation.)
“You never know when you could be having a conversation that naturally leads to something that brings value to somebody watching,” Mr. Bet-David said. “You try to catch all the moments.”
Cy Wakeman, 52, the chief executive of a human resources and leadership development company called Reality-Based Leadership, which teaches employees how to “ditch the drama,” is convinced there are professional benefits of having a video team follow her around Omaha, where she lives, to conferences across the country and on vacations to places like Tulum, Mexico.
“If people are distracted at work on their phones, I want to be their distraction,” Ms. Wakeman said. (...)
Hiring a full-time — or even part-time — camera and production crew isn’t cheap. Adam Hamwey, who shoots and produces content for Mr. Henry, said that daily rates ranged from $300 to $500. Mr. Adams said he pays six figures annually for his three-person team. VaynerTalent offers packages starting at $25,000 a month. They work with clients who want a comprehensive personal brand strategy, which means you’re not simply hiring a videographer and producer but also a growth hacker, media strategist and analytics expert. Ms. Wakeman, for instance, has a team of seven people.
by Jennifer Miller, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joshua Bright
The Toxic Saga of the World’s Greatest Fish Market
Tsukiji is the most exalted fish market on earth, the sort of humbling place that causes the likes of globally worshipped god-chef RenĂ© Redzepi to deem it one of the “seven culinary wonders of the world.” With nearly 671 licensed wholesale dealers selling more than 500 different kinds of seafood — $17 million worth a day, and more than 700,000 tons a year — the 23-hectare market is so vital to the global commercial flow of fish that it’s almost impossible to imagine how the international sea critter industry would fare without it.
But the occupants of this oceanic oasis have been dancing to a slow swan song. Last November, after more than 80 years in its current location, Tsukiji’s inner market, the fish-slinging heart of the operation, was supposed to move to Toyosu, a man-made island about 1.5 miles south, where a freshly constructed, state-of-the-art space had been built. Tuna wholesalers scheduled the shutdown of their refrigerators; new contracts were arranged with outside shippers; shrimp mongers tied up loose ends for delivery routes. A stunning film about the market, Tsukiji Wonderland, was released to commemorate the historical moment. Nostalgia was in the air.
The move never happened. Today, Toyosu sits empty, and Tsukiji teems with life, its fate still hanging in the air. This is the, er, fishy story of what happened.
With a layout that’s akin to a tipped-over Greek amphitheater, Tsukiji is a menagerie of things both living and recently alive. The outer market spills into the taxi-jammed streets with its offerings — oversized vegetables, patterned dishware, mom-and-pop noodle shops — and crawls with tourists in their sandals and DSLR cameras, ogling bowls of slurp-worthy udon, boxes of chestnuts, and shiitake mushrooms, phallic and forearm-thick.
The inner market, where tourists are banned but for a limited window each day, possesses a decidedly factory-like quality: At every turn, piles of discarded Styrofoam loom, while hoses spray away fish guts, blood, and sweat in equal measure. Stapled advertisements for concerts and now-defunct fish companies have yellowed almost beyond recognition. Everything looks like a fire hazard, though nothing feels out of place. Birds peck around the periphery, and on one morning, I watched an emboldened hawk swoop in and pick up a rogue piece of fish from the concrete.
Built in 1923 on the site of a former imperial naval base, Tsukiji is a testament to an older way of doing business — that just happens to sit in the middle of a grid of impeccable city planning. Take a comfortable stroll a few blocks northeast, and you’ll find the fancifully hooved streets of the Ginza district, where you can literally eat breakfast at the Gucci store, just like in the Kanye song. Meander down another path, and you’ll run smack into the drab concrete towers of salarymen, who scuttle in and out like worker bees serving the inscrutable whims of company queens.
Real estate developers have argued for decades that the land underneath Tsukiji is too centrally located to remain a fish market. In the 1970s, city planners considered moving the market because they believed that “the land in the major business and entertainment districts could be put to much better use,” Harvard professor and Tsukiji expert Theodore Bestor wrote in his 2004 book, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.
The main reason for the most recent push to relocate Tsukiji’s inner market, though, is the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics. A new multi-lane highway critical to the city’s Olympics infrastructure is slated to run through the center of the market, connecting the Olympic Village directly to the National Stadium. Today, that thoroughfare sits half-built, with construction arching directly into the lip of Tsukiji like a post-apocalyptic rainbow into a pot of fish guts. Without it, many are concerned that traffic will be a nightmare as athletes attempt to trek between their temporary homes and the primary stadium, making Tsukiji a literal roadblock of the highest order.
There’s also the rumbling, but never directly stated, sense that Tsukiji just doesn’t quite project the image Japan wants to show the world. As with its aggressive modernization campaign going into the 1964 Olympic Games — to spotlight just how far the country had come in the aftermath of World War II — Japan seems intent on showcasing a country that is modern, orderly, and forward-thinking. Tsukiji, on the other hand, is structurally outmoded in every possible way. On the morning I visited in mid-October, skidding across the water-slicked floors of the inner market, it quickly became clear that Tsukiji is a living, breathing organism unto itself, luminous in its gore. (...)
After an extended period of construction bidding, work began on the new space in 2012. Located in the ward of Koto, about a 20-minute train ride from Tsukiji, the initial renderings of the Toyosu site reflected an Epcot-like, futuristic vibe. It was to be a surgically sterile place for handling precious edible cargo, coupled with a distinctly separate area for tourists where the hungry and shutter-happy could enjoy snacks in a contained environment and soak in hot mineral baths. On a chilly autumn afternoon when I toured the site, the overcast sky and sprawling, boxy complex seemed to fuse together into one indistinguishable landscape that was 180 degrees of difference from Tsukiji. Grey and lifeless, the Toyosu market has an exterior — huge, polished and shiny — that could just as easily be found in Austin, Texas, as in Tokyo. Scraggly trees had been planted to give it some semblance of vibrancy, but the impact was minimal.
It’s also fairly obvious that the fishmongers weren’t widely consulted during the construction process. The shiny new stalls for vendors are closed off in an attempt to be more sanitary, but the design deeply limits the mobility of the fishmongers, especially when cutting large hunks of fish. (In one television program about the new space, a wholesaler showed just how difficult it is to go about his business of slicing tuna as his elbows repeatedly bumped up against the cubicle-tight walls.) The Toyosu space has multiple levels, which means that fish will have to be carried up and down stairs, sloshing liquid all the way. Dangerous slip-and-falls seem guaranteed. There’s also only one access point for trucks to unload and pick up wares, which many wholesalers worry will create traffic and workflow problems. (...)
Plans to relocate Tsukiji to Toyosu were put into motion under former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a novelist-turned-politician who was regarded during his tenure, from 1999 to 2012, as a hawkish, corrupt leader. In 2001, the Ishihara administration finalized the decision to build the new market on land that had been occupied by the Tokyo Gas Company from 1966 until 1988, an area known to be heavily polluted with industrial chemicals. Testing in January of that year had revealed that benzene levels (among other things) were 1,500 times higher than the allowed maximum, but Ishihara’s administration pushed forward. To sanitize the site, the ex-governor approved a plan to replace the defiled dirt with a 4.5-meter-thick layer of clean topsoil as one of a series of “chemical countermeasures” that would, in theory, neutralize and seal off the hazardous materials, preventing them from oxidizing or affecting the market’s products or workers in any way.
This, however, never came to pass. Last September, Yuriko Koike, the newly elected governor of Tokyo, held a press conference to announce that the necessary improvements never actually happened. Koike, the former environmental minister, revealed that not only was the soil still loaded with arsenic, cyanide, hexavalent chromium, cyanogen, lead, and benzene from the gas company’s tenure, but the protective layer of topsoil was never added beneath the Toyosu site in the first place. Instead, contractors created hollow concrete chambers in place to separate the dirty soil from the ground floor of the market. The public and vendors alike had been duped, and now a very real danger was present in the new space.
by Sarah Baird, Eater | Read more:
Image:Wesley Verhoeve
But the occupants of this oceanic oasis have been dancing to a slow swan song. Last November, after more than 80 years in its current location, Tsukiji’s inner market, the fish-slinging heart of the operation, was supposed to move to Toyosu, a man-made island about 1.5 miles south, where a freshly constructed, state-of-the-art space had been built. Tuna wholesalers scheduled the shutdown of their refrigerators; new contracts were arranged with outside shippers; shrimp mongers tied up loose ends for delivery routes. A stunning film about the market, Tsukiji Wonderland, was released to commemorate the historical moment. Nostalgia was in the air.
The move never happened. Today, Toyosu sits empty, and Tsukiji teems with life, its fate still hanging in the air. This is the, er, fishy story of what happened.With a layout that’s akin to a tipped-over Greek amphitheater, Tsukiji is a menagerie of things both living and recently alive. The outer market spills into the taxi-jammed streets with its offerings — oversized vegetables, patterned dishware, mom-and-pop noodle shops — and crawls with tourists in their sandals and DSLR cameras, ogling bowls of slurp-worthy udon, boxes of chestnuts, and shiitake mushrooms, phallic and forearm-thick.
The inner market, where tourists are banned but for a limited window each day, possesses a decidedly factory-like quality: At every turn, piles of discarded Styrofoam loom, while hoses spray away fish guts, blood, and sweat in equal measure. Stapled advertisements for concerts and now-defunct fish companies have yellowed almost beyond recognition. Everything looks like a fire hazard, though nothing feels out of place. Birds peck around the periphery, and on one morning, I watched an emboldened hawk swoop in and pick up a rogue piece of fish from the concrete.
Built in 1923 on the site of a former imperial naval base, Tsukiji is a testament to an older way of doing business — that just happens to sit in the middle of a grid of impeccable city planning. Take a comfortable stroll a few blocks northeast, and you’ll find the fancifully hooved streets of the Ginza district, where you can literally eat breakfast at the Gucci store, just like in the Kanye song. Meander down another path, and you’ll run smack into the drab concrete towers of salarymen, who scuttle in and out like worker bees serving the inscrutable whims of company queens.
Real estate developers have argued for decades that the land underneath Tsukiji is too centrally located to remain a fish market. In the 1970s, city planners considered moving the market because they believed that “the land in the major business and entertainment districts could be put to much better use,” Harvard professor and Tsukiji expert Theodore Bestor wrote in his 2004 book, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.
The main reason for the most recent push to relocate Tsukiji’s inner market, though, is the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics. A new multi-lane highway critical to the city’s Olympics infrastructure is slated to run through the center of the market, connecting the Olympic Village directly to the National Stadium. Today, that thoroughfare sits half-built, with construction arching directly into the lip of Tsukiji like a post-apocalyptic rainbow into a pot of fish guts. Without it, many are concerned that traffic will be a nightmare as athletes attempt to trek between their temporary homes and the primary stadium, making Tsukiji a literal roadblock of the highest order.
There’s also the rumbling, but never directly stated, sense that Tsukiji just doesn’t quite project the image Japan wants to show the world. As with its aggressive modernization campaign going into the 1964 Olympic Games — to spotlight just how far the country had come in the aftermath of World War II — Japan seems intent on showcasing a country that is modern, orderly, and forward-thinking. Tsukiji, on the other hand, is structurally outmoded in every possible way. On the morning I visited in mid-October, skidding across the water-slicked floors of the inner market, it quickly became clear that Tsukiji is a living, breathing organism unto itself, luminous in its gore. (...)
After an extended period of construction bidding, work began on the new space in 2012. Located in the ward of Koto, about a 20-minute train ride from Tsukiji, the initial renderings of the Toyosu site reflected an Epcot-like, futuristic vibe. It was to be a surgically sterile place for handling precious edible cargo, coupled with a distinctly separate area for tourists where the hungry and shutter-happy could enjoy snacks in a contained environment and soak in hot mineral baths. On a chilly autumn afternoon when I toured the site, the overcast sky and sprawling, boxy complex seemed to fuse together into one indistinguishable landscape that was 180 degrees of difference from Tsukiji. Grey and lifeless, the Toyosu market has an exterior — huge, polished and shiny — that could just as easily be found in Austin, Texas, as in Tokyo. Scraggly trees had been planted to give it some semblance of vibrancy, but the impact was minimal.
It’s also fairly obvious that the fishmongers weren’t widely consulted during the construction process. The shiny new stalls for vendors are closed off in an attempt to be more sanitary, but the design deeply limits the mobility of the fishmongers, especially when cutting large hunks of fish. (In one television program about the new space, a wholesaler showed just how difficult it is to go about his business of slicing tuna as his elbows repeatedly bumped up against the cubicle-tight walls.) The Toyosu space has multiple levels, which means that fish will have to be carried up and down stairs, sloshing liquid all the way. Dangerous slip-and-falls seem guaranteed. There’s also only one access point for trucks to unload and pick up wares, which many wholesalers worry will create traffic and workflow problems. (...)
Plans to relocate Tsukiji to Toyosu were put into motion under former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a novelist-turned-politician who was regarded during his tenure, from 1999 to 2012, as a hawkish, corrupt leader. In 2001, the Ishihara administration finalized the decision to build the new market on land that had been occupied by the Tokyo Gas Company from 1966 until 1988, an area known to be heavily polluted with industrial chemicals. Testing in January of that year had revealed that benzene levels (among other things) were 1,500 times higher than the allowed maximum, but Ishihara’s administration pushed forward. To sanitize the site, the ex-governor approved a plan to replace the defiled dirt with a 4.5-meter-thick layer of clean topsoil as one of a series of “chemical countermeasures” that would, in theory, neutralize and seal off the hazardous materials, preventing them from oxidizing or affecting the market’s products or workers in any way.
This, however, never came to pass. Last September, Yuriko Koike, the newly elected governor of Tokyo, held a press conference to announce that the necessary improvements never actually happened. Koike, the former environmental minister, revealed that not only was the soil still loaded with arsenic, cyanide, hexavalent chromium, cyanogen, lead, and benzene from the gas company’s tenure, but the protective layer of topsoil was never added beneath the Toyosu site in the first place. Instead, contractors created hollow concrete chambers in place to separate the dirty soil from the ground floor of the market. The public and vendors alike had been duped, and now a very real danger was present in the new space.
by Sarah Baird, Eater | Read more:
Image:Wesley Verhoeve
Book Review: Raise a Genius!
A few months ago, I learned about Laszlo Polgar, the man who trained all three of his daughters to be chess grandmasters. He claimed he could make any child a genius just by teaching them using his special methods. I was pretty upset because, although he had a book called Raise A Genius, it was hard to find and only available in Hungarian and Esperanto.
Many SSC readers contributed money to get the book translated, and Esperanto translator Gordon Tishler stepped up to do the job. Thanks to everyone involved. You can find his full translation here: Raise A Genius!
I was hoping that this book would explain Lazslo Polgar’s secrets for raising gifted children. It does so only in very broad strokes. Nor does he seem to be holding much back. But it looks more like he doesn’t really have secrets, per se. The main things he does differently from everyone else are the things he’s talked about in every interview and documentary: he starts young (around the time the child is three), focuses near-obsessively on a single subject, and never stops. Polgar:
And maybe this stuff deserves some attention. He spends a long time responding to people who say it’s inhumane or immoral to educate children the way he does it, and certainly those claims need a response. A lot of his pedagogical philosophy and personal philosophy of life come out in the way he answers these questions, and given how few specifics he gives, maybe understanding his broader worldview is the way to go. And although a lot of people talk about how public school destroys children’s minds, it’s always good to hear it from the mouth of somebody who’s put his money where his mouth is and done a better job.
But what can we glean from this book in terms of how one can educate a child in the Polgar method?
The closest Raise A Genius comes to anything like a specific prescription is Polgar’s description of what a day might be like in some kind of imaginary Polgar genius school:
This idea that children should learn things they find exciting and enjoyable – and where they keep making measurable progress – recurs throughout the book. Often it’s in the context of a kind of counterintuitive point, where someone asks him “Won’t kids hate having to learn so much?” and Polgar answers that kids may hate public school, where they sit around a lot and never feel like they’re really mastering anything, but won’t hate intensive genius education, where they actually feel like people are trying to make them good at things:
Image: via:
Many SSC readers contributed money to get the book translated, and Esperanto translator Gordon Tishler stepped up to do the job. Thanks to everyone involved. You can find his full translation here: Raise A Genius!I was hoping that this book would explain Lazslo Polgar’s secrets for raising gifted children. It does so only in very broad strokes. Nor does he seem to be holding much back. But it looks more like he doesn’t really have secrets, per se. The main things he does differently from everyone else are the things he’s talked about in every interview and documentary: he starts young (around the time the child is three), focuses near-obsessively on a single subject, and never stops. Polgar:
The first characteristic of genius education – I could say the most important novelty distinguishing it from contemporary instruction – and its necessary precondition, is early specialization directed at one concrete field. It is indeed true what Homer said, “A person cannot be experienced or first in everything.” Because of this parents should choose a specific field at their discretion. It is only important that by the age of 3-4 some physical or mental field should be chosen, and the child can set out on their voyage.He has a couple more things to say, but they’re more like vague principles than like specific details. The rest of the book is his opinions on the meaning of genius, his gripes about the Hungarian government, the ways public schooling destroys children’s natural creativity, and various related subjects.
And maybe this stuff deserves some attention. He spends a long time responding to people who say it’s inhumane or immoral to educate children the way he does it, and certainly those claims need a response. A lot of his pedagogical philosophy and personal philosophy of life come out in the way he answers these questions, and given how few specifics he gives, maybe understanding his broader worldview is the way to go. And although a lot of people talk about how public school destroys children’s minds, it’s always good to hear it from the mouth of somebody who’s put his money where his mouth is and done a better job.
But what can we glean from this book in terms of how one can educate a child in the Polgar method?
The closest Raise A Genius comes to anything like a specific prescription is Polgar’s description of what a day might be like in some kind of imaginary Polgar genius school:
In genius education it is necessary that the pedagogue (whether the parents or professional teachers or tutors) stay in direct, constant and intensive contact with the child. Because of this we imagine groups of only 10-15 members. In practice an intensive collaborative contact between the child and an adult must be formed, in which the child does not feel “subordinate.” Think how advantageous it would be if the child already understands at the age of 10 that they know a great deal, that they are a person of the same value as an adult, and that in their life there is at least one field they master as well or better than adults.As for the curriculum, it would be:
– 4 hours of specialist study (for us, chess)All of this cries out for more explanation (in particular, the humor lessons sound fascinating), but the only part he really explains is the foreign language. He quotes Frantishek Marek: “Learning foreign languages in early childhood is very important, because without that a person cannot later express themself spontaneously, rapidly, and appropriately”, and I think suggests (though I might be misunderstanding) that languages are one of the easiest things to teach young children, and so a good way to get them into the spirit of learning things. He also thinks languages are nice because they have a defined end-goal (speaking fluently) and obvious progress along the way, so children feel good about learning them. He argues Esperanto is perfect for this: as a logical constructed language, it’s very easy to learn, and it convinces children that learning is fast and easy. Then with their Esperanto knowledge they’ll be much better able to pick up other languages later on. I’m not really sure what to think of this – language learning might be more important if you grow up speaking Hungarian rather than English, and Polgar seems so enthusiastic an Esperantist that it’s hard to picture him recommending it for purely rational reasons – but he’s quite insistent on it.
– 1 hour of a foreign language. Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third. At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months. In summer, study trips to other countries.
– 1 hour of general study (native language, natural science and social studies)
– 1 hour of computing
– 1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies (humor lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke telling)
– 1 hour of gymnastics, freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually outside school. The division of study hours can of course be treated elastically.
This idea that children should learn things they find exciting and enjoyable – and where they keep making measurable progress – recurs throughout the book. Often it’s in the context of a kind of counterintuitive point, where someone asks him “Won’t kids hate having to learn so much?” and Polgar answers that kids may hate public school, where they sit around a lot and never feel like they’re really mastering anything, but won’t hate intensive genius education, where they actually feel like people are trying to make them good at things:
In conditions of intensive instruction a child will soon feel knowledgeable, perceive independence, achieve success, and shortly become capable of independently applying their knowledge. Let us take an example from language learning. Let us suppose that someone visits a class for interpreters at a school for geniuses, where they are occupied for 5-6 hours with a first foreign language, Esperanto if possible. (Why precisely with this language I will clarify below.) After some months they are already corresponding with children in other countries, they participate in meetings in and outside of their country – and longer-lasting – where they experience serious successes, and they converse fluently in the language they have learned by then. Is this a nice feeling for a child? Yes, it is nice. Is it useful for the child? Yes, it is useful. Is it useful for society? It is useful. In the following year one can do the same with another foreign language – let us say English – and in the year after that another.
The same is valid for any field of life. In this way a child really enjoys what they are doing, and they see that it makes sense. In contemporary schools students do not understand why they are learning. But in genius-education schools the children know that after a few months they will speak Esperanto, in the following year English, in the following year German, etc. Or in the field of chess; in the first year they play at level 3, after the third year at level 1, after five years as a master candidate, after 6-7 years as a master, after 8-10 years as an international master, and after the 15th year as a grandmaster. So the child sees the goal and meaning of their work.And:
One thing is certain: one can never achieve serious pedagogical results, especially at a high level, through coercion. One can teach chess only by means of love and the love of the game. If I may advise: one should make sure that before everything the father or mother should not diminish the child’s habit of chess playing by too much severity. We should make sure not to always win against the child; we should let them win sometimes so that they feel that they also are capable of thinking. In this way we should bring them to a feeling of success. (...)There’s a lot of this, always exhorting people to make sure children enjoy being intensively educated, but always giving only vague gestures on how to do it. I suspect Polgar was a naturally gifted teacher, and his daughters naturally curious students, and that he never really encountered problems in this regard and doesn’t expect other people to either. Some of this seems apparent in his section on play:
I think of play as a very important phenomenon, perhaps more important than do many of those psychologists who put it on a pedestal.
But play is not the opposite of work. Play is very important for a child, but in play there is an element of work. One should not separate these two factors in a child’s value system; if for example a child hears at an impressionable age, “Play, son, don’t work!” this can later result in him feeling that work is alien. On the contrary, it is my opinion that a child does not like only play: for them it is also enjoyable to acquire information and solve problems. A child’s work can also be enjoyable; so can learning, if it is sufficiently motivating, and if it means a constant supply of problems to solve that are appropriate for the level of the child’s needs.
A child does not need play separate from work, but meaningful action. Children already enjoy doing meaningful things in infancy. They like solving problems during play, even pleasurable play. The more meaningful and information-rich the problems they solve during their activities, the greater is their enjoyment and sense of success. In the end it is most important at this age to awaken enjoyment and good feelings in them.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:Regarding my daughters, it is my experience that learning presents them with more enjoyment than a sterile game. I have the feeling that play deprived of information often plays only a surrogate role, of surrogate action, of surrogate satisfaction.
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Sunday, July 30, 2017
Nine Minutes of Doubt
At 8:55am, Donald Trump tweeted the following:
Nine minutes later, he finished the sentence:
BuzzFeed reports:
After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow......Six trailing periods, sic.
Nine minutes later, he finished the sentence:
....Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming.....There are all sorts of reasons to be furious about these tweets. But one that’s been largely overlooked is that 9-minute gap.
BuzzFeed reports:
At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is on vacation this week, and defense officials said Mattis knew that Trump was considering the policy change. It is unclear if he approved it.Suspecting that Trump was using Twitter to announce military action against North Korea was a perfectly reasonable conclusion by the Pentagon. It also would have been a perfectly reasonable conclusion by North Korea. The policy decision is terrible, the lack of any consultation with the Pentagon is terrible, but the way that it was made, starting with a belligerent tweet without follow-up for nearly 10 minutes, is jaw-droppingly dangerous.
by John Gruber, Daring Fireball | Read more:
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