The $70m High School Stadium

It cost over $70m and has 12,000 seats, multi-tiered stands, a $1.8m video screen and an exterior that lights up in the colours of the home team. None of which seems extraordinary in the gaudy world of Texas high school football.

What might be most striking about the state’s latest student sports palace is not the arena itself, but the wide-angle view encompassing what is next to it: another high school football stadium, neatly landscaped with a giant screen of its own and a capacity of almost 10,000.

The Texas high school building frenzy is often dubbed an arms race – in which case, Katy Independent school district (ISD), near Houston, is tooled up like few others.

Legacy Stadium, the latest most expensive high school venue in the nation, had its opening ceremony on Thursday night. The red-clad Tigers of Katy high school and other local teams will play there in the coming season. Rhodes Stadium, which opened in 1981, will still be used by the district’s sides – sometimes on the same day as Legacy, with kick-offs an hour apart.

These are heady times for Robert McSpadden, aka “Texas Bob”, a stadium aficionado who lives in Katy. That the fast-growing region needed another field is not in question, though whether it had to be so lavish is another matter.

“We had seven teams playing in one stadium, so we had Friday night lights and Thursday night lights, Saturday night lights and Saturday afternoon,” McSpadden said.

“More controversial than the cost, in my opinion, is building it right next to the other stadium. I think it’s ingenious. [At first] I did not like it at all – I thought, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of,’ but there’s so many shared resources.”

The city of Allen, near Dallas, ushered in this decade’s mega-stadium era with a $60m, 18,000-capacity venue that made national headlines when it opened in 2012, and then when it was embarrassingly forced to close temporarily in 2014 because of cracks in the concrete.

Another Dallas suburb, McKinney, is expected to complete a $70m, 12,000-capacity arena around the turn of the year. A third, Prosper, plans to open a $48m stadium complex in 2019. Alvin, 25 miles south of downtown Houston, will welcome a 10,000-capacity, $41m stadium next year. The city’s population is about 26,000.

It all makes the brand new place in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville – named The Pfield – seem a relative bargain at $25.8m for 10,000 seats.

There are 1,202 high school football stadiums used for regular-season varsity games in Texas, with a combined seating capacity of over 4.2m, and 17% of which have video scoreboards, according to TexasBob.com, which says that a growing trend is to replace grass with artificial turf.

This works out to roughly one seat per seven Texans, or more seats than there are residents in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Expenditure is not limited to stadiums. The Dallas Morning News last year found that Texas communities spent about $500m on 144 indoor practice facilities with artificial turf football fields over the past two decades – including two dozen that cost more than $5m in the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone.

by Tom Dart, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Tom Dart

René Burri, Peace Hotel, Shanghai, China, 1989.
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Public Enemy

From the jury selection process that took place over three days in June for the trial of Martin Shkreli, an investor and hedge fund founder who is facing eight counts of securities and wire fraud. In 2015, when Shkreli was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company raised the price of its drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent. In 2016, Shkreli was widely criticized for defending the 400 percent increase in the price of EpiPen, an emergency allergy injection sold by Mylan. More than two hundred potential jurors were excused from the trial. Judge Kiyo Matsumoto presided. Benjamin Brafman is a lawyer representing Shkreli.

The Court: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

Juror No. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

Benjamin Brafman: I’m sorry.

Juror No. 1: I think he’s a greedy little man.

The Court: Jurors are obligated to decide the case based only on the evidence. Do you agree?

Juror No. 1: I don’t know if I could. I wouldn’t want me on this jury.

The Court: Juror Number 1 is excused. Juror Number 18.

Juror No. 18: Both of my parents are on prescriptions that have gone up over the past few months, so much that they can’t afford their drugs. I have several friends who have H.I.V. or AIDS who, again, can’t afford the prescription drugs that they were able to afford.

The Court: These charges don’t concern drug pricing. Could you decide this case based only on the evidence—

Juror No. 18: No. No.

The Court: — presented at this trial and put aside anything you might have heard in the media?

Juror No. 18: No. No.

The Court: Sir, we are going to excuse you from this panel. Juror Number 25, come forward, please.

Juror No. 25: This is the price-gouging, right, of drugs?

The Court: This case has nothing to do with drugs.

Juror No. 25: My kids use those drugs.

The Court: As I said, the case does not concern anything that you might have read or heard about the pricing of certain pharmaceuticals.

Juror No. 25: It affects my opinion of him.

The Court: I am going to excuse you. Juror Number 40. Come on up, sir.

Juror No. 40: I’m taking prescription medication. I would be upset if it went up by a thousand percent. I saw the testimony on TV to Congress and I saw his face on the news last night. By the time I came in and sat down and he turned around, I felt immediately I was biased.

The Court: Sir, we are going to excuse you. Juror Number 47, please come up.

Juror No. 47: He’s the most hated man in America. In my opinion, he equates with Bernie Madoff with the drugs for pregnant women going from $15 to $750. My parents are in their eighties. They’re struggling to pay for their medication. My mother was telling me yesterday how my father’s cancer drug is $9,000 a month.

The Court: The case is going to come before you on evidence that you must consider fairly and with an open mind.

Juror No. 47: I would find that difficult.

The Court: And that’s based on your parents’ experience with medication?

Juror No. 47: It’s based on people working very hard for their money. He defrauded his company and his investors, and that’s not right.

The Court: Ma’am, we’re going to excuse you. Juror Number 52, how are you?

Juror No. 52: When I walked in here today I looked at him, and in my head, that’s a snake — not knowing who he was. I just walked in and looked right at him and that’s a snake.

Brafman: So much for the presumption of innocence.

The Court: We will excuse Juror Number 52. Juror Number 67?

Juror No. 67: The fact that he raised the price of that AIDS medication, like, such an amount of money disgusts me. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget that. Who does that, puts profit and self-interest ahead of anything else? So it’s not a far stretch that he could do what he’s accused of.

The Court: Please go to the jury room and tell them you have been excused. Juror Number 70.

Juror No. 70: I have total disdain for the man. When you go back to how he was able to put so many children —

The Court: You have negative feelings?

Juror No. 70: Very.

The Court: Would those feelings prevent you from being fair to both sides in this case?

Juror No. 70: I can be fair to one side but not the other.

The Court: We will excuse you from this jury. Juror Number 77.

Juror No. 77: From everything I’ve seen on the news, everything I’ve read, I believe the defendant is the face of corporate greed in America.

Brafman: We would object.

Juror No. 77: You’d have to convince me he was innocent rather than guilty.

The Court: I will excuse this juror. Hello, Juror Number 125.

Juror No. 125: I’ve read extensively about Martin’s shameful past and his ripping off sick people and it hits close to me. I have a mother with epilepsy, a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and a brother with multiple sclerosis. I think somebody that’s dealt in those things deserves to go to jail.

The Court: Just to be clear, he’s not being charged with anything relating to the pricing of pharmaceuticals.

Juror No. 125: I understand that, but I already sense the man is guilty.

The Court: Well, I’m going to excuse you. Juror Number 144, tell us what you have heard.

Juror No. 144: I heard through the news of how the defendant changed the price of a pill by up-selling it. I heard he bought an album from the Wu-Tang Clan for a million dollars.

The Court: The question is, have you heard anything that would affect your ability to decide this case with an open mind. Can you do that?

Juror No. 144: I don’t think I can because he kind of looks like a dick.

by Harper's Magazine |  Read more:

Image: NBC/stevepb/MGN
[ed. Much easier to hate someone you can put a face on rather than a corporation. Same thing with Madoff. See also: Conservatives’ Blind Love For Corporate America Must End (from The American Conservative!)]

Flora Purim

The Greatest Good

Last winter, William MacAskill and his wife Amanda moved into a Union Square apartment that I was sharing with several friends in New York. At first, I knew nothing about Will except what I could glean from some brief encounters, like his shaggy blond hair and the approximation of a beard. He was extremely polite and devastatingly Scottish, trilling his “R”s so that in certain words, like crook or the name Brooke, the second consonant would vibrate with the clarity of a tiny engine.

MacAskill, I soon discovered, was a Cambridge-and Oxford-trained philosopher, and a steward of what’s known as effective altruism, a burgeoning movement that has been called "generosity for nerds." Effective altruism seeks to maximize the good from one's charitable donations and even from one’s career. It is munificence matched with math, or, as he once described it to me memorably, “injecting science into the sentimental issue of doing good in the world.”

Up to that point, I would have described my interest in charity as approximately average. I certainly hadn’t thought deeply about my donations long before I met MacAskill. I'd volunteered for music-education programs because I liked music, but this felt not like an exercise in selflessness, but rather an expression of my personal identity, like wearing clothes.

One night at an apartment party, MacAskill and I huddled with some beers in the corner of the kitchen to talk about his worldview, which he was turning into a book called Doing Good Better (out July 28.) Imagine you are a thoughtful 22-year-old college graduate who wants to make a great difference in the world, he said, invoking one of his many thought experiments. Many such people try to get a job with Oxfam, the Gates Foundation, or any number of excellent charities. That's fine. But if you don’t get that job at Oxfam, somebody just as smart and generous will get it instead. You’re probably not much better than that “next person up.” But imagine you go to work on Wall Street…

Wall Street? I probably interrupted.

Yes, imagine you work in investment banking. You make $100,000 and give away half to charity. The “next person up” would not have done the same, so you have created $50,000 of good that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. Even better, your donation could pay for one or two workers at Oxfam—or any effective cause you chose to donate to.

This story underlines an effective-altruist principle called “earning to give,” which is like tithing on steroids. Earning to give argues for maximizing the amount of money you can make and donating a large share of it to charity. What attracted me to the story wasn’t the specific advice (I have not yet sent a resume to Wall Street) but rather the philosophical approach to pursuing good in the world—counterintuitive, and yet deeply moral and logical. It was like pinpointing a secret corpus callosum connecting the right-brain interest in being a good person with a left-brain inclination to think dispassionately about goodness. (...)

The Scientific Method of Goodness: Effective Altruism

There are so many causes that focus on improving lives, and the spectrum is vast. Some worthy programs save lives (e.g. drug research to avert premature death), others alleviate suffering and poverty (e.g. by providing irrigation), and others focus on enrichment (e.g. by giving to a museum).

These programs exist along another wide spectrum, which is certainty. Some organizations distribute proven drugs (quite certain), others develop unproven drugs (less certain), and some lobby to reduce global carbon emissions (more uncertain). The point isn’t that the certain causes are better than less-certain causes, but rather that thoughtful donors weigh the risk that their donations won’t pay off, as they would any other investment.

When I decided that I wanted effective altruism to guide my decision, I called Will again to get a better understanding of the philosophy I was wading into. Then I spoke with several poverty experts and moral philosophers to learn why the movement might be misguided. I wanted to know it deeply, to see it closely, its virtues and its flaws.

The simplest way to explain effective altruism and its discontents is to begin with three pillars of the movement: (1) You can make a truly enormous difference in the world if you live in a rich country; (2) you can "do good better" by thinking scientifically rather than sentimentally; and (3) you can do good even better by trying to find the greatest need for the next marginal dollar. (...)

The Measuring of Life: GiveWell

When I asked several philosophers and poverty experts what causes they would give to, answers ranged from women’s rights to direct transfers to the poor. Iason Gabriel, a politics lecturer at Oxford University, made a surprisingly strong case for tax reform in the developing world. Africa, he said, loses tens of billions of dollars a year in illicit flows of money, even more than it receives in government aid. Helping governments crack down on tax avoidance could preserve billions in funds for the state to direct toward health and education. But I felt drawn to two personal values for my donation: I wanted to prevent premature deaths, and I wanted a high degree of scientific certainty that the money would be spent well.

The most common refrain from experts I consulted was that my priorities pointed in a clear direction: If what you want is to save lives with certainty, several people said, you have to go to GiveWell.

In 2006, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld were young Ivy-league-educated workers at a hedge fund, making more money than they needed, and searching for a worthy charitable cause. “We wanted the biggest bang for our buck,” Hassenfeld said, and since few outside organizations offered much guidance, they formed a club of several like-minded people to research a simple question: How did various charities spend money, and was there any evidence that they were doing good? “We were calling charities directly, but we weren’t always getting good answers,” he said. The gaping lack of hard data, combined with their personal mission to find that elusive greatest cause, inspired them to create GiveWell in 2007.

GiveWell is a meta-charity, an organization that evaluates other charities. They have four broad criteria, in Hassenfeld’s words: “effectiveness” (does the charity make a difference?), “cost-effectiveness” (how much difference does the charity make per dollar received?), “room for funding” (can the charity use your donation in the near future?), and “transparency” (is the charity forthcoming about its spending and its results?). Its top-ranked charities for this year include GiveDirectly, a radically simple approach to sending no-strings-attached cash to extremely poor households, and the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes insecticide-treated malaria nets in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s impossible not to be struck by the encyclopedic thoughtfulness of GiveWell's analyses, which take months to complete and are often thousands of words long, contain more than 100 footnotes, and elaborate on concerns they have for even the top-ranked charities.

It is hard for the casual donor to determine on her own which charities do the most good. For example, compare two well-meaning organizations: Charity A accepts $100 and sends $90 to the field to buy better textbooks for Kenyan children. Charity B accepts $100 and sends $45 to the field to buy deworming tablets for Kenyan kids. If you focus on “overhead" costs, as many people do, the choice is clear: Charity A is twice as effective. But randomized controlled trials have shown that while textbooks do little to raise school attendance, medicine for intestinal worms often helps children go back to school. In the end, Charity B might be many times more effective. This is why it’s so important for organizations like GiveWell to track dollars and outcomes.

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: HappyDancing / Mega Pixel / Shutterstock / The Atlantic
[ed. See also: How ‘effective altruism’ can save the world.]

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Wireheading

Wireheading is the artificial stimulation of the brain to experience pleasure, usually through the direct stimulation of an individual's brain's reward or pleasure center with electrical current. It can also be used in a more expanded sense, to refer to any kind of method that produces a form of counterfeit utility by directly maximizing a good feeling, but that fails to realize what we value.

In both thought experiments and laboratory experiments direct stimulation of the brain’s reward center makes the individual feel happy. In theory, wireheading with a powerful enough current would be the most pleasurable experience imaginable. There is some evidence that reward is distinct from pleasure, and that most currently hypothesized forms of wireheading just motivate a person to continue the wirehead experience, not to feel happy. However, there seems to be no reason to believe that a different form of wireheading which does create subjective pleasure could not be found. The possibility of wireheading raises difficult ethical questions for those who believe that morality is based on human happiness. A civilization of wireheads "blissing out" all day while being fed and maintained by robots would be a state of maximum happiness, but such a civilization would have no art, love, scientific discovery, or any of the other things humans find valuable.

If we take wireheading as a more general form of producing counterfeit utility, there are many examples of ways of directly stimulating of the reward and pleasure centers of the brain, without actually engaging in valuable experiences. Cocaine, heroin, cigarettes and gambling are all examples of current methods of directly achieving pleasure or reward, but can be seen by many as lacking much of what we value and are potentially extremely detrimental. Steve Omohundro argues that: “An important class of vulnerabilities arises when the subsystems for measuring utility become corrupted. Human pleasure may be thought of as the experiential correlate of an assessment of high utility. But pleasure is mediated by neurochemicals and these are subject to manipulation.”

Wireheading is also an illustration of the complexities of creating a Friendly AI. Any AGI naively programmed to increase human happiness could devote its energies to wireheading people, possibly without their consent, in preference to any other goals. Equivalent problems arise for any simple attempt to create AGIs who care directly about human feelings ("love", "compassion", "excitement", etc). An AGI could wirehead people to feel in love all the time, but this wouldn’t correctly realize what we value when we say love is a virtue. For Omohundro, because exploiting those vulnerabilities in our subsystems for measuring utility is much easier then truly realizing our values, a wrongly designed AGI would most certainly prefer to wirehead humanity instead of pursuing human values. In addition, an AGI itself could be vulnerable to wirehead and would need to implement “police forces” or “immune systems” to ensure its measuring system doesn’t become corrupted by trying to produce counterfeit utility.

by LessWrong Wiki |  Read more:

[ed. See also: Are Wireheads Happy? And: Scientists Are Finally Set to Mass-Produce The Active Compound Found in Magic Mushrooms.]

The North’s Role in Supplying the South with Confederate Monuments

For all the stoic silence in which figures in bronze or marble stand, monuments are built to elicit a response. They serve as symbols that ensure the endurance of the public’s memory of people and events — long after those who personally experienced those individuals and moments are gone from the earth. However, the impact of monuments lessens as they multiply and our national memory lengthens. Perhaps it is their ubiquity that has allowed Confederate monuments to stand for so long (by one count, about 1,500 in 31 states). Their omnipresence normalizes the white supremacy they represent. Removing these monuments is not a simple toppling of a few stones, but rather, is an intensive surgery, removing a mass that has taken deep root in the political body of the United States. (...)

Although monuments to the Confederacy are ubiquitous in the South, they are so rare in the North that, for some Americans, they remain remote, unnoticed specters of a past that is foreign in both time and space. Even so, Confederate monuments would not exist in such large numbers without mass production, which, in the wake of the Civil War, was far more possible in the North rather than in the South.

On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, the decades following the Civil War marked a shift in public memorialization in the United States, away from only commemorating famous individuals. There was a new impetus to honor the anonymous soldier, and a felt necessity for a place to mourn when the gravesites of loved ones were unknown or located too far away to easily reach in person. This shift birthed an entire industry of memorial-making companies. Eventually, some of these companies were successfully set up in the South. At first though, the demand for memorials was often filled by already established Northern companies who made gravestones.

The majority of the Confederate monuments created by companies in the North are local monuments that stand in cemeteries and town squares throughout the South. They often depict an anonymous soldier standing in “parade rest,” a pose assumed by soldiers during ceremonial occasions. Most of these sculptures do not bear an inscription regarding where they were made, since local communities were less than forthcoming about spending collectively raised funds in the North. But a comparison of these figures to the samples depicted in catalogues published by the companies producing them, as well as the diligent work of historians, reveals their provenance.

One of the most prominent Northern companies producing memorials for the South was the Monumental Bronze Company of Connecticut. It specialized in making monuments out of zinc, which was referred to as “white bronze” to help market it as a newfangled, more affordable alternative to actual bronze. Memorials designed by the Monumental Bronze Company can be found in Goldsboro, North Carolina (1883), Floyd, Virginia (1904), and more than twenty other towns throughout the South. The zinc casting process consisted of casting the figure in parts, which were then soldered together. A faux finish was applied to the figure in order to mask these soldering joints, and make the material look more expensive. This allowed for segments of the figures to be easily reused, with the ironic result that the figures representing both Northern and Southern soldiers were largely made of the same elements. (...)

In some part, this interdependence due to economic limitations could be read as resulting in a poignant symbolism: the war dead became unified in memorialization, that ideological differences are erased by the human cost of war. But the crucial ideological difference here was the right to own slaves — the commemoration of whom is scant in comparison to the number of memorials raised to the Civil War dead. Nevertheless, the transport of these commemorative figures from North to South, and their existence in near replica, binds us. The memory of the Confederacy is not limited to the South, but rather the result of an entanglement across a geographic divide.

by Lola Arellano-Fryer, Hyperallergic | Read more:
Image: Edward Orde/Wikimedia Commons

LA Speed Check

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[ed. It's true, the coolest guys on the radio were always the military dudes. They must practice in the shower or something.]

Bruce Cockburn

Adrian Tomine

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The Little Golf Course That Could

Sweetens Cove: The Little Golf Course That Could

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Mark Zuckerberg Tapes Over His Webcam. Should You?

Don’t worry, Mark Zuckerberg: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. And as the richest millennial in the world, you can probably be confident that someone, somewhere, is after you.

Which is why it makes perfect sense that you’ve joined the growing number of people doing a little DIY hardware hacking, and disabling their computer’s webcam and microphone. Even if a sneaky hacker does manage to penetrate your security, they’re not going to be seeing you in your tighty whities.

3 things about this photo of Zuck:

Camera covered with tape
Mic jack covered with tape
Email client is Thunderbird

Yes folks, Zuckerberg tapes over his webcam. The billionaire made the (accidental?) revelation in a Facebook post intended to promote Instagram reaching its latest milestone of half a billion monthly active users.

In the picture Zuckerberg posted, of himself framed by a cardboard Instagram UI (cute), his laptop is visible in the background. And as Christopher Olson pointed out, that laptop has some weird accoutrements:

Thunderbird is an email client, for what it’s worth, which is made by Firefox creators Mozilla. Unlike Firefox, though, it’s never really taken off in the wider world, and development has rather stalled in the past five years. It may not even be Thunderbird that Zuckerberg has installed – others think it’s a Cisco VPN client.

Taping over the sensors and a particularly geeky mail client might seem paranoid. But to be fair to Zuckerberg, he’s not the only one taking a look at his webcam and wondering if it’s worth the risk.

Take the FBI’s director, James Comey: “I put a piece of tape over the camera because I saw somebody smarter than I am had a piece of tape over their camera.” The American digital rights group EFF sells webcam stickers, and told the Guardian’s Danny Yadron “people purchase these regularly”.

Even experts who don’t cover their cameras think they should. Why doesn’t Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University? “Because I’m an idiot,” he told Yadron.

“I have no excuse for not taking this seriously … but at the end of the day, I figure that seeing me naked would be punishment enough.”

by Alex Hern, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mark Zuckerberg
[ed. I've been taping mine over for years.]

New York City Guarantees a Lawyer to Every Resident Facing Eviction

On Friday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law an act that guarantees legal representation to any low-income resident facing eviction. This is the first law in the nation to establish a right to counsel in housing cases, the culmination of a push by activists and organizers that started in 2014.

The law promises legal representation to any resident facing eviction whose income is 200 percent of the federal poverty level or less. The act could transform housing court in New York, where landlords appear with counsel in more than 90 percent of cases. Until 2014, tenants were represented in just 1 to 10 percent of cases.

“When you have that kind of imbalance, not occasionally but almost guaranteed in every case, it starts to change the entire way that the court works and the entire way that the justice system works,” says John Pollock, coordinator for the National Coalition of the Civil Right to Counsel. “Cases are disposed of quickly. There’s not really any due process.”

Often, tenants have defenses to eviction lawyers would raise that could stop or at least postpone an eviction, such as improper notice or neglected repairs.

Fewer illegal evictions also means fewer households experiencing transitional homelessness, a crisis on the rise in America. That means reducing suffering for families but also limiting a substantial burden carried by cities. The coalition predicts an overall savings of $320 million per year, well above the program’s costs.

Even in cases where an eviction is warranted, legal representation can make the process less painful and interruptive.

“Lawyers do a lot of things for tenants besides just [determining in court] whether or not they’re evicted,” Pollock says. “There’s some tenants who may not be able to stay in their units, but the attorney may be able to keep the eviction off their records. They may be able to find them alternative housing. They may be able to get them into subsidized housing. They can arrange a soft landing in so many ways.”

With New York leading the way, several other cities may soon embrace so-called “civil Gideon” laws, namely San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. However, budget plans by the Trump administration could affect how broadly a right to counsel can be embraced in other places.

The tenant legal services community has pursued a right to counsel in housing court for decades, says Marika Dias, director of the Tenant Rights Coalition at Legal Services NYC. But that effort became much more aggressive in 2014, when a number of advocacy campaigns, bar associations, unions, and other groups formed The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition. They sought, and won, greater funding for legal representation for tenants.

Since 2014, evictions have already declined in New York by 24 percent, and the percentage of tenants who have appeared before housing court with representation has climbed to about 27 percent.

“Over the course of the next five years, there will be a phase-in process, so it’s going to take five years to get to the point where all tenants who are under 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines get full representation,” Dias says.

She adds, “But in addition to that, the legislation provides for tenants who are over that income threshold to also get some legal services as well. By the time we get through the 5-year phase-in, 100 percent of tenants in housing court will have access to either full representation or the advice of the lawyer.”

The act, which the New York City Council passed in July (with a veto-proof majority), commits $155 million over five years to fulfill a right to counsel. The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition projects that the increase in legal representation will be met with a considerable cost savings for the city, as frivolous cases that might otherwise go unchallenged fall out of the justice system.

San Francisco almost beat New York to the punch. Back in 2012, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance declaring its intent to become the nation’s first city to establish a right to counsel in civil matters. California has led the way for years, in fact: The state’s 2011 Sargent Shriver Civil Counsel Act established seven pilot programs at about $9 million per year to provide legal representation to low-income residents in civil cases—mostly housing cases. One of the pilot programs, in Los Angeles, was originally designed to end in 2016; that’s now a permanently funded (but not comprehensive) program.

With the ordinance, San Francisco set up its own pilot. The results are revealing: An analysis by the John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest at Stanford University found an enormous potential costs savings for the city (albeit based on limited results). During the pilot, pro-bono lawyers helped more than 600 tenants avoid homelessness. The cost of sheltering a family runs about $30 per night, meaning a savings of more than $18,000 each day. Over the course of 60 days—the average shelter stay in San Francisco—the potential savings adds up to more than $1.1 million. Paying the lawyers for their time would not cost nearly as much.

“A number of people from San Francisco contacted me and said, ‘We want to be next,’” Pollock says.

by Kriston Capps, City Lab |  Read more:

Image: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Carol Vax - The Oliver (Mezzotint) 2004
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Chen Ting-shih

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Mark Knopfler

A lovestruck Romeo sings a streetside serenade
Laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made
Finds a convenient streetlight steps out of the shade
Says something like you and me babe how about it?

Juliet says hey it's Romeo you nearly gimme a heart attack
He's underneath the window she's singing hey la my boyfriend's back
You shouldn't come around here singing up at people like that
Anyway what you gonna do about it?

Juliet the dice were loaded from the start
And I bet and you exploded in my heart
And I forget I forget the movie song
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong Juliet?

Come up on different streets they both were streets of shame
Both dirty both mean yes and the dream was just the same
And I dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?

When you can fall for chains of silver you can fall for chains of gold
You can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold
You promised me everything you promised me thick and thin
Now you just say oh Romeo yeah you know I used to have a scene with him

Juliet when we made love you used to cry
You said I love you like the stars above I'll love you till I die
There's a place for us you know the movie song
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong?

Amazon Looks to New Food Technology for Home Delivery

Amazon.com Inc is exploring a technology first developed for the U.S. military to produce tasty prepared meals that do not need refrigeration, as it looks for new ways to muscle into the $700 billion U.S. grocery business.

The world's biggest online retailer has discussed selling ready-to-eat dishes such as beef stew and a vegetable frittata as soon as next year, officials at the startup firm marketing the technology told Reuters.

The dishes would be easy to stockpile and ship because they do not require refrigeration and could be offered quite cheaply compared with take-out from a restaurant.

If the cutting-edge food technology comes to fruition, and Amazon implements it on a large scale, it would be a major step forward for the company as it looks to grab hold of more grocery customers shifting toward quick and easy meal options at home.

Delivering meals would build on the company's AmazonFresh service, which has been delivering groceries to customers' homes for a decade. It could also complement Amazon's planned $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market Inc and Amazon's checkout-free convenience store, which is in the test stage.

The pioneering food-prep tech, known as microwave assisted thermal sterilization, or MATS, was developed by researchers at Washington State University, and is being brought to market by a venture-backed startup called 915 Labs, based in Denver.

The method involves placing sealed packages of food in pressurized water and heating them with microwaves for several minutes, according to 915 Labs.

Unlike traditional processing methods, where packages are in pressure cookers for up to an hour until both bacteria and nutrients are largely gone, the dishes retain their natural flavor and texture, the company said. They also can sit on a shelf for a year, which would make them suitable for Amazon's storage and delivery business model.

"They obviously see that this is a potential disruptor and an ability to get to a private brand uniqueness that they’re looking for," said Greg Spragg, a former Wal-Mart Stores Inc executive and now head of a startup working with MATS technology. "They will test these products with their consumers, and get a sense of where they would go."

by Jeffrey Dastin, Reuters | Read more:
Image:Harrison McClary

Rise of the Robot Barons

The robots are coming, ready to remake our world according to the specifications of a cabal of millennial asswipes and megalomaniacal billionaires. These are the people who are destined to become our feudal overlords in the Age of Robotics. The question is: is there any way to stop them?

There are a few ways to approach the problem of a robot economy. One is to reject increased automation of labor as generally undesirable, because people need jobs and robots are tricky devils. The 19th century had an unsuccessful but memorable tradition of anti-machine fervor, from the Luddite machine-breaking riots of the 1810s, to this magnificently sinister pronouncement by Samuel Butler in 1863:

“Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against [machines]. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.”

Some people, of course, might regard this whole “war to the death against anything more complicated than an abacus” proposal as extreme. But full-on Unabomber-style technophobia aside, there’s an argument to be made that limits on automation ought to be established by regulation, in order to allow human beings to continue to work. This is not only because U.S. society, as currently constituted, makes livelihood contingent on employment, but also because work—so the argument goes—is generally a good thing for human beings. In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, for example, Pope Francis wrote that we shouldn’t endeavor to have “technological progress increasingly replace human work,” as this outcome would, in his view, “be detrimental to humanity. Work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfillment.” This line of thought is also fairly common within labor movements, because it holds that all occupations are equal in dignity, that a construction worker is no less deserving of respect, and entitled to a decent living, than a software engineer. Even if you could automate all labor, you wouldn’t want to, because human identity and psychological well-being are inextricably bound up in the work we do, and mechanization deprives people of the ability to contribute to their communities. The important thing is simply to make sure that workers are properly paid and protected. (...)

As we think about what increased automation ought to look like, in an ideal world where the economy serves human needs, we should first disabuse ourselves of the idea that efficiency is an appropriate metric for assessing the value of an automated system. Sure, efficiency can be a good thing—no sane person wants an inefficient ambulance, for example—but it isn’t a good in itself. (After all, an efficient self-disembowling machine doesn’t thereby become a “good” self-disembowling machine.) In innumerable contexts, inefficient systems and unpredictable forces give our lives character, variety, and suspense. The ten-minute delay on your morning train, properly considered, is a surprise gift from the universe, being an irreproachable excuse to read an extra chapter of a new novel. Standing in line at the pharmacy is an opportunity to have a short conversation with a stranger, who may be going through a hard time, or who may have something interesting to tell you. The unqualified worship of efficiency is a pernicious kind of idolatry. Often, the real problem isn’t that our world isn’t efficient enough, but rather that we lack patience, humility, curiosity, and compassion: these are not failings in our external environments, but in ourselves.

Additionally, we can be sure that, left to themselves, Market Forces will prioritize efficiencies that generate profit over efficiencies that really generate maximum good to humans. We currently see, for instance, a constant proliferation of labor-saving devices and services that are mostly purchased by fairly well-off people. This isn’t to say that these products are always completely worthless—to the extent that a Roomba reduces an overworked single parent’s unpaid labor around the home, for example, that might be quite a good thing—but in other respects, these minute improvements in efficiency (or perceived efficiency) generate diminished returns for the well-being of the human population, and usually only a very small percentage of it, to boot. The amount of energy that’s put into building apps and appliances to replace existing things that already work reasonably well is surely a huge waste of ingenuity, in a world filled with pressing social problems that need many more hands on deck.

Thinking about which kinds of jobs and systems really ought to be automated, however, can require complicated and nuanced assessments. Two possible baseline standards, for example, would be that robots should only do jobs at which they are equally good or better than humans, and/or that robots should only do jobs that are difficult, dangerous, or unfulfilling for humans. In some cases, these standards would be fairly straightforward to apply. A robot will likely never be able to write a novel to the same standard as a human writer, for example, so it doesn’t make sense to try to replace novelists with louchely-attired cyborgs. On the other hand, robots could quite conceivably be designed to bake cakes, compose generic pop songs, and create inscrutable canvases for major contemporary art museums—but to the extent that humans enjoy being bakers, pop stars, and con artists, we shouldn’t automate those jobs, either.

For certain professions, however, estimating the relative advantages of human labor versus robot labor is rather difficult by either of these metrics. For example, some commentators have predicted we’ll see a marked increase in robot “caregivers” for the elderly. In many ways, this would be a wonderful development. For elders who have health and mobility impairments, but are otherwise mentally acute, having robots that can help you out of bed, steady you in the shower, and chauffeur you to your destinations might mean several more decades of independent living. Robots could make it much easier for people to care for their aging loved ones in their own homes, rather than putting them in some kind of facility. And within institutional settings like nursing homes, hospitals, and hospices, it would be an excellent thing to have robots that can do hygienic tasks, like cleaning bedpans, or physically dangerous ones, like lifting heavy patients (nurses have a very high rate of back injury).

At the same time, the idea of fully automated elder care has troubling implications. There’s no denying that caring for declining elders can be difficult and often unpleasant work; anybody who has spent time in medical facilities knows that nursing staffs are overworked, and that individual nurses can be incompetent and profoundly unsympathetic. One might well argue that a caregiver robot, while not perfect, is still better than an exhausted or outright hostile human caregiver; and thus, that the pros of substituting robots for humans across a wide array of caregiving tasks outweigh the cons. However, as a society that already marginalizes and warehouses the elderly—especially the elderly poor—we ought to feel queasy about consigning them to an existence where the little human interaction that remains to them is increasingly replaced by purpose-built machines. Aging can be a time of terrible loneliness and isolation: imagine the misery of a life where no fellow-human ever again touches you with affection, or even basic friendliness. The problem is not just that caring for elders is often difficult, but that the humans who currently do it are undervalued and underpaid, despite the fact that they bear the immense burden of buttressing our shaky social conscience. It would be a lot easier to manufacture caregiver robots than to improve working conditions for human caregivers, but a robot can’t possibly substitute for a nurse who is actually kind, empathetic, and good at their job.

These sorts of concerns are common to most of the “caring” and educational professions, which are usually labor-intensive, time-consuming, poorly compensated, and insufficiently respected. Automating these jobs is an easy shortcut to meaningfully improving them. For example, people like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings think that “education software” is a reasonable alternative to a human-run classroom, despite the fact that the only real purpose of primary education, when it comes down to it, is to teach children about social interaction. (Do you remember anything substantive that you learned in school before, say, age 15? I sure don’t.) And what job is more difficult than parenting? If a robot caregiver is cheaper than a nanny and more reliable than a babysitter, we’d be foolish to suppose that indifferent, career-focused, or otherwise overtasked parents won’t readily choose to have robots mind their children for long periods of time. Automation may well be more cost-effective and easier to implement than better conditions for working parents, or government payouts that would allow people to be full-time parents to their small children, or healthier social attitudes generally about work-family balance. But with teaching and parenting, as with nursing, it’s intuitively obvious that software and robots are in no sense truly equivalent to humans. Rather than automating these jobs, we should be thinking about how to materially improve conditions for people who work in them, with the aim of making their work easier where possible, and rewarding them appropriately for the aspects of their work that are irremediably difficult. Supplementing some aspects of human labor with automated labor can be part of this endeavor, but it can’t be the whole solution.

Additionally, without better labor standards for human workers, determining which kinds of jobs humans actually don’t want to do becomes rather tricky. Some jobs are perhaps miserable by their very nature, but others are miserable because the people who currently perform them lack benefits and protections. We may all have assumptions and biases here that are not necessarily instructive. We might often, like Oscar Wilde, think primarily of manual labor when we’re imagining which jobs should be automated. Very likely there are some forms of manual labor so monotonous, painful, or unpleasant that nobody on earth would voluntarily choose to do them—we can certainly think of a few jobs, like mining, that are categorically and unconscionably dangerous for human workers. But it is also an undeniable fact that many people genuinely like physical labor. It’s even possible that many more people like physical labor than are fully aware of it, due to the class-related prejudices associated with manual work—why on earth else do so many people who work white-collar jobs derive their entire sense of self-worth from running marathons or lifting weights or riding stationary bicycles in sweaty, rubber-scented rooms? Why do so many retirees take up gardening? Why do some lunatics regularly clean their houses as a form of relaxation? Clearly, physical labor can be very satisfying under the right circumstances. The point is, there are some jobs we might intuitively think are morally imperative to automate, because in their current forms, they are undeniably awful. But if we had more humane labor laws, and altered our societal expectations about the appropriate relationship between work and leisure, they might be jobs people actually liked.

by Brianna Rennix, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Pranas Naujokaitis

The Legion Lonely

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, a concentration of high pressure in the upper atmosphere above Midwest Chicago forced massive amounts of hot air to the ground, causing temperatures as high as 41°C (106°F). In a Midwestern city not built for tropical heat, roads buckled, cars broke down in the street, and schools closed their doors. On Friday, three Con Ed power transformers failed, leaving 49,000 people without electricity. In high-rise apartments with no air conditioning, temperatures hit 49°C (120°F) even with the windows open. The heat continued into Saturday. The human body can only take about 48 hours of uninterrupted heat like this before its defenses begin to shut down, and emergency rooms were so crowded they had to turn away heatstroke victims. Sunday was no better, and as the death toll rose—of dehydration, heat exhaustion, and renal failure—the morgues hit capacity, too, and bodies were stored in refrigerated meat-packing trucks. In all, 739 people died as a result of the heat wave.

In its aftermath, an inquiry found, unsurprisingly, that the majority of those who died were poor, old, and lived alone. More surprising was the gender imbalance: significantly more men died than women. This was especially strange considering that in Chicago in July of 1995, there were more old women who lived alone than old men.

What made these men more vulnerable than the women? It wasn’t physical circumstances. Both groups lived mostly in “single room occupancy” buildings, or SROs—apartments of one room in what used to be called flophouses. It was social circumstances. The phrase “No known relatives” appears repeatedly in police reports of the dead men’s homes. Letters of regret were found on floors and in backs of drawers: “I would like to see you if that’s possible, when you come to the city”; “It seems to me that our family should have gotten along.” The single rooms of the deceased are described as “roach infested” and “a complete mess,” indicating few or no visitors. The women, according to Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book on the heat wave, had people who checked up on them and so kept them alive; the men did not. “When you have time please come visit me soon at my place,” read another letter, unsent.

What conditions lead to this kind of isolation? Why men?

Artie, 63, who lives in Beards Fork, West Virginia, population 200, has never married. He grew up in Beards Fork, but spent most of his life elsewhere. He moved back when he was 47 to take care of his sick mother, who died earlier this year. Now, after putting his own life on hold for sixteen years, he finds himself single, semi-retired, and without a close friend. “Life goes by really fast,” he said. Since his mom died, he’s found himself thinking, “Where in the hell did it go?”

This is the kind of thing he used to talk about with his mother. Now that she’s gone, he doesn’t really open up to anyone. He has no close friends in the area, and he’s “felt a lot of depression over the past few years.”

Artie’s not an antisocial guy or a homebody. His career brought him into contact with hundreds of interesting people over the years; he lived in California for a decade, and before that he had a nine-year relationship. But back in his hometown, all the connections he made seem to have melted away. “I don’t really have any close friends, other than my family,” he said, “which is something different.” (A 2005 Australian study agreed: while close friendships increase your longevity by up to 22 percent, family relationships make no difference.)

Artie has a group of friends he met in his thirties and forties with whom he’s still in touch, mainly on Facebook, but those relationships are “not quite the same as the friendships I had when I was younger. Less deep. Less vulnerable. And I’m not even sure I want to [open up].” He’s somewhat close with a few of his former coworkers, but though they confide in him, he doesn’t feel like he can confide in them. “They’re younger,” he said. “They don’t understand my problems.” Despite being semi-retired, he still goes into the office every day and stays late, after everyone’s gone. “I’m reluctant to go home,” he said. “Nobody’s there.”

In many ways, Artie seems in danger of going down the path of those Chicago SRO-dwellers. But there’s an important difference between those men and Artie: what the former had in common was their social isolation—having few or no social connections. Artie’s problem, on the other hand, is one of loneliness—the feeling of being isolated, regardless of your social connectedness, usually due to having few or no confidants.

Is this my future?

At first glance it seems unlikely. I’m 34. I have what seems to me a pretty active social life. I’m integrated into my community and I go to arts events regularly. I’ve lived here in Toronto off and on since I was 18. I went to university here. I helped found an arts venue here. I know hundreds of people here, if not thousands. I have multiple jobs—college instructor, freelance writer, tutor. I have friends. Whatever path led to these lonely destinations, I want to believe, is not the path I’m on. When I die, my floor will be tidy, and my letters sent.

And yet, there’s something about their stories that seems eerily familiar. Slowly but surely, I feel my social world slipping away from me. All three of my jobs combined require me to be around other humans a total of about eight hours out of a week’s 168. The other 160, I’m mostly at home. It’s not unusual for me to go several days in a row with no social contact of any kind, and the longer I go without it, the scarier it feels. I become shy, paranoid that no one would want to hang out with me. Social slights metastasize in my brain. I start to avoid social functions, convinced I’ll walk into a wall of mysterious eye contact. I live close to many friends, but I hide from them when I see them in the street. I don’t think of myself as antisocial—I love people, love being around them, and have had so many good friendships—but it often feels like an uphill battle, and mystifyingly complex, to not slip back endlessly into this pit of despair.

The thing is, I wasn’t always like this. How did I get here?

by Stephen Thomas, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: Postcard image via Flickr user Rob