The Premium Mediocre Life

A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre. She instantly got what I meant, though she didn’t quite agree that Veggie Grill qualified. In the weeks that followed, premium mediocre turned into a term of art for us, and we gleefully went around labeling various things with the term, sometimes disagreeing, but mostly agreeing. And it wasn’t just us. When I tried the term on my Facebook wall, and on Twitter, again everybody instantly got the idea, and into the spirit of the labeling game.

As a connoisseur and occasional purveyor of fine premium-mediocre memes, I was intrigued. It’s rare for an ambiguous neologism like this to generate such strong consensus about what it denotes without careful priming and curation by a skilled shitlord. Sure, there were arguments at the margins, and sophisticated (well, premium mediocre) discussions about distinctions between premium mediocrity and related concepts such as middle-class fancy, aristocratic shabby, and that old classic, petit bourgeois, but overall, people got it. Without elaborate explanations.

But since the sine qua non of premium mediocrity is superfluous premium features (like unnecessary over-intellectualized blog posts that use phrases like sine qua non), let me offer an elaborate explanation anyway. It’s a good way to celebrate August, which I officially declare the premium mediocre month, when all the premium mediocre people go on premium mediocre vacations featuring premium mediocre mai tais at premium mediocre resorts paid for in part by various premium-mediocre reward programs.

It is not hard to learn to pattern-match premium mediocre. In my sample of several dozen people I roped into the game, only one had serious trouble getting the idea. Most of the examples below, and all the really good ones, came from others.

Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio.

Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.

Premium mediocre is Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its original pumpkin spice lattes featuring a staggering absence of pumpkin in the preparation. Actually all the coffee at Starbucks is premium mediocre. I like it anyway. (...)

Premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre, premium mediocre. Mediocre with just an irrelevant touch of premium, not enough to ruin the delicious essential mediocrity. (...)

Premium mediocre is international. My buddy Visakan Veerasamy (a name Indian-origin people will recognize as a fantastic premium mediocre name, suitable for a Tamil movie star, unlike mine which is merely mediocre, and suitable for a side character) reports that Singaporeans can enjoy the fine premium mediocre experience of the McDonald’s Signature Collection.

Anything branded as “signature” is premium mediocre of course. (...)

At its broad, fuzzy edges, premium mediocre is an expansive concept; a global, cosmopolitan and nationalist cultural Big Tent: it is arguably both suburban and neourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers and the tiki torches — designed for premium mediocre backyard barbecues — favored by your friendly neighborhood Nazis. It includes everything Trump-branded. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It includes Netflix and chill. It includes Blue Apron meals.

At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase. Premium mediocrity is a stand-in for the classy kind of post-scarcity digital utopia some of us like to pretend is already here, only unevenly distributed. The kind where everybody gets a mansion, is a millionaire, and drives a Tesla.

by Venkatesh Rao, Ribbon Farm |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Perverse Incentives of the National Flood Insurance Program

Much of Houston should not exist.

I say that not out of any malice for the Magnolia City, but as a simple statement of geographic fact. The east Texas boomtown — the fourth-largest city in the U.S., now in the midst of a horrific pummeling by Hurricane Harvey — is the product of decades of rapid-fire development in which home after home was built on flat, low-lying land with a propensity for flooding. Drainage is central to Houston's problems, for urban sprawl has engulfed and encased prairie land once far from the city center, replacing deep-rooted, absorbent native grasses on natural floodplains with impermeable paved surfaces. When water arrives — and arrive it will, as environmental changes now have once-in-a-lifetime storms like Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston several times a decade — it must go somewhere. When it cannot drain down, it will go up: up into your yard, your car, your living room, your books, your heirlooms, your life.

When I say that much of Houston should not exist, it is because it is constructed on dangerous and environmentally fragile land that should never have been used for permanent structures. So why does it exist? Why would the practical, fiscally conservative people of Texas anchor their financial security in houses that are now literally underwater?

There is no one answer, but a major culprit is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and specifically its subsidiary, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Together, FEMA and the NFIP have provided builders and buyers with bad information from a trusted source while offering financial encouragement to build on land best left alone. These programs have fostered the infrastructure arrangements that are magnifying the heartbreak in Houston this week. Well-meaning but drenched in perverse incentives, they are complicit in the horrifying destruction now racking the Texas gulf coast.

The NFIP offers flood insurance at steep discounts for homes and other buildings, including businesses, constructed in flood-prone areas. (Such insurance is a federal mandate to secure a mortgage in these zones.) Where a normal insurance company would jack up the premium price to cover the high risk of floodplain construction, thus discouraging vulnerable building plans among those who cannot afford to cover the cost of disaster, the NFIP will insure this construction at a discount.

This incentivizes risky construction and downplays the nature of the risk. After all, catastrophic insurance is essentially a wager in which the company bets disaster won't strike and the customer bets it will. Riskier wagers come at a higher price, so an artificially low premium like the NFIP offers cruelly deludes homeowners into believing their flood-prone houses are far safer than they are.

When it was introduced in 1968, the NFIP was cast as a necessary aid to Americans put in precarious financial situations because they could not afford flood insurance on the open market. But the NFIP's most significant effect is not offering respite for old construction put in new danger by a changing climate. Rather, the NFIP has taxpayers subsidizing unrealistically low premiums that incentivize new construction on dangerous land, and its discounts are available even to wealthy homeowners with pricey properties. "About 80 percent of NFIP households are in counties that rank in the top income quintile," notes a recent report at Politico, and "[w]ealthier households also tend to receive larger subsidies."

For example, journalist John Stossel, formerly of ABC News and Fox Business (and certainly not hurting for cash), recounted his own acquisition of NFIP insurance in a 2004 article entitled, "Confessions of a Welfare Queen." Stossel described building a large, four-bedroom beach house in an "absurd place," where all "that stood between my house and ruin was a hundred feet of sand."

Because "private insurers weren't dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers," the only insurance available to Stossel was the NFIP. For just a few hundred dollars a year, the federal government insured his flood-prone home — indefinitely. "So if the ocean ate what I built, I could rebuild and rebuild again and again," Stossel wrote, as "there was no limit to the number of claims on the same property in the same location" and the NFIP would pay up to "$250,000 per house per flood."

Since Stossel's piece was published, taxpayers have covered the cost to rebuild the entire first floor of his beachfront home after predictable flooding — oh, and Congress bumped the per house per flood payment limit up to $520,000.

by Bonnie Kristian, The Week | Read more:
Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
[ed. See also: How Washington Made Harvey Worse]

Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Hyping of Whole Foods Under Amazon

Whole Foods under Amazon seems to be doing as well in the free PR category as Trump did in his 2016 campaign. And at this juncture, I see no reason for eventual buyer satisfaction to be any higher.

The press was agog over Amazon cutting prices on a grand total of 100 items. Read that again. 100 items of how many SKUs? And it wasn’t as if many seemed to be the sort of loss leaders you see in conventional grocery stores, like putting a prime cut of meat or very popular dessert line on sale.

Moreover, comments at the Wall Street Journal story on the Whole Foods price reductions were surprisingly hostile. Recall that Wall Street Journal readers are high income and are therefore in Whole Foods’ target market. One had asked store staff how long the price cuts in the meat department would be in effect and was told a week. Another pointed out that the supposedly great new price on organic Fiji apples were still well above those of Sam’s Club, although you admittedly have to buy 6 lbs at Sam’s Club to get them at 75% of the Whole Foods price. Other readers complained of poor quality of berries, avocados, and chicken.

Now there may be sample bias at work, but the antipathy by people who have shopped Whole Foods and not found it lives up to its promise of high quality suggests that even getting its prices down may not be that much of a draw, even if Amazon decides to do more than just a first day price cut gimmick.

And let’s consider a few other factors:

Whole Foods has very few stores compared to big grocers. WalMart has over 4000 grocery stores with extremely large footprints. Unless Amazon buys several Whole Foods sized chains, it’s not remotely in WalMart’s league and does not pose much of a threat. Even the Southeast chain Publix has over 1100 stores. Having said that, the store chain that might be most vulnerable is Sprouts, which operates in 15 states, mainly in the southern part of the US, and has 240 stores. Given all of the noise about the Whole Foods acquisition, it’s a bit surprising that there hasn’t yet been a more granular analysis of exactly where Whole Foods stores are and which major grocery chains are exposed.

At least some, perhaps many, stores are relatively modest in size. That means Whole Foods is even smaller relative its major competitors than the raw number of outlets suggests. Whole Foods stores vary considerably in size. The smaller ones in urban areas (most of the ones I’ve visited in NYC and SF) have confusing layouts and scrimp on things I consider important, like the salad bar. And the lines are bad even at off hours.

Another set of arguments made by the “new Whole Foods” enthusiasts is that Amazon has trotted out all sorts of ideas for getting more people into the stores, like price breaks for Amazon Prime customers, having an Amazon locker service for pickups and returns, and having local deliveries.

Perhaps there is a market niche for the locker service, but for a lot of people, if you are going to bother to go to a store, you might as well go in and have a look. You might decide the asparagus looks punky and you’d rather have broccoli, or that the avocados aren’t ripe enough and so you don’t want them, or the cuts of lamb you wanted look too fatty and you’ll get some nice upscale sausages instead. And who returns anything to a grocery store?

And as for home deliveries, that market is generally limited to higher income, dense neighborhoods. I can’t see anything beyond a trivial interest from the customers of the stores I visited in Plano, Birmingham, and Portland, Maine. So this may be germane some places but can’t be assumed to be a meaningful sales booster across the chain.

Moreover, if these new services are structured like the existing Amazon Fresh food service in Seattle, I’m even more skeptical. Confusingly, as we will unpack. Amazon sems to have been running two different models under its “Amazon Fresh” label.

The original Amazon Fresh dates from 2007. It was and apparently still is a home delivery service. The latest information I could find on our modern crapified search engines is that Amazon now charges $299 per year. That does not sound much if you get deliveries regularly. The flip side is a lot of grocers in NYC, and I would assume in other urban areas, give you free delivery for a big enough order. And that $299 fee locks you into Amazon, which of course is the point.

And that isn’t the whole story. Notice that despite Amazon being a a behemoth by design, that this type of Amazon Fresh service has supposedly expanded from some parts of Seattle into “major cities” in California, and “many parts” of New York and Philadelphia. Clearly I know the wrong people. I’ve never heard a single person mention it, much the less use it.

However, in response to the news, a reader said today he’s heard reports from Seattle where the service was launched first that people steal out of the Amazon food drop boxes and actually scout out the trucks to find the best times to make the raids.

In addition, a different version of Amazon Fresh has serious quality problems, which raises red flags that that may also have been true of version 1.0.

Bethany Jean Clement of the Seattle Times gave a scathing review of the Amazon Fresh service this June. Let us not forget that is presumably the model for the hyped Whole Foods in-store pickup service. Not only is this doubtful in concept, it appears to be even worse in execution.

One reason many people are leery of online ordering for anything other that items like diapers, beer, and “you can’t screw it up much” fresh food like milk is that if you order produce, veggies, fresh bakery goods, meats or fish, you are at risk of winding up with something you never never would have bought in store for quality reasons. Put it more simply, you are subject to adverse selection. And that’s the case with the seriously misnamed Amazon Fresh.

The headline was bad enough: Test-driving Amazon’s brand-new, very weird grocery pickup service.

First, Clement wasn’t keen about the concept and gave it one star for mystery.

She ordered six items. Two were pretty good. The parsley, got four stars, and the asparagus, five. But the four were not good to awful, and the worst items were the most expensive.

A lousy lemon. How can you stick someone with a two star lemon? That verges on being a cosmic bad joke. (...)

The reviewer’s second most expensive item was an $11.77 rose, for which she gave 2 1/2 stars and the summary: “ Out of a dismal selection, maybe the best choice?” Further comments:

I get that your users aren’t into spending a bunch, but great values abound in cheap wine! You can do so much better. But I suppose your algorithms tell you this is what the world wants. For your selection/algorithms/the world: one star. This wine, at this price, on its own merits: four stars. Average: two-and-a-half stars.

Here is the piece de resistance. This is supposed to be halibut:

If you don’t buy or cook fish, the significance of this picture will be lost on you.

This is an abomination. It should have been thrown as unfit to sell at least two days prior. Fish with visible small cracks is old. This piece has a monster cracks and is dry. I’ve said before that Whole Foods has terrible “fresh” fish, so it looks as if Amazon is already down with that.

This was 1 lb for $22.12. Remember, if you had gotten this as your pickup, you would have been stuck with trying to find some way to make it edible or pitching it and rummaging in your freezer for a backup or ordering in.

From the author:

Raw halibut should be a thing of beauty: firm, fresh, glossy. This fillet was mushy to the touch and even distressing to the eye: matte and sunken, the middle of it a squishy mess with indentations that looked like an angry face. It smelled, unmistakably, fishy, which it never, ever should. According to the label, it had been packed three days before; frighteningly, the use/freeze by date was still four more days away. Oven-roasted for the sake of the experiment, it tasted like it looked: mushy, sad, wrong. A big, majestic fish died for this. This is, apparently, everything that’s wrong with letting the world’s largest e-commerce player — the giant darling of Wall Street — pick out your groceries instead of doing it yourself. I’m really happy I’m not vomiting right now. If I could give this fish zero stars, I would.

And Amazon’s response to a highly critical review…in the top paper in Amazon’s home town is telling. No one from the PR department called her to make excuses or try to make up for the lousy order.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson and Bethany Jean Clement / The Seattle Times

Halalu
photos: markk

Georges Braque, Guitar, Fruit and Pitcher, 1927
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To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining

The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you’ll be eating something else — without a second bottle of wine, because you can’t find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out.

The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.

It can track the restaurant’s duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills.

So Big Data is staging an intervention.

Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports. (...)

In Chicago, at the Michelin-starred Oriole, where 28 diners sit down each night to a $190 tasting menu, the owners, Noah and Cara Sandoval, rely on data from the Upserve system to identify their top 100 guests in terms of numbers of visits and amount spent, but that’s just the start. The system also creates a profile with every first-time reservation.

“You can’t know that someone’s going to become a regular, so you don’t necessarily keep track of those people,” Ms. Sandoval said. “But the system does.” It also tracks the top 100’s dining companions when they split the check. Upserve sends a list of credit card numbers, dates of visits and items bought; the restaurant matches each number to a name, and a search on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn provides a face to go with it.

“We’re sure to recognize them” the next time they come in, so the staff can welcome them back by name, Ms. Sandoval said. “It surprises people, in a nice way, when they didn’t make the reservation themselves.”

Even the type of credit card contributes to the dossier. If a customer pays with an airline card, a server might mention travel. If a customer is a sports fan, he will most likely get a server who is as well.

The food gets similar scrutiny. Upserve offers a “magic quadrant” feature that divides dishes into four categories — “greatest hits,” “underperformers,” “one-hit wonders” that are popular with first-timers but not with repeat visitors, and “hidden gems,” which regulars like and first-timers don’t — to help the Sandovals understand which are popular, and which prompt diners to return.

Customers who find the mining of personal data invasive can opt out, up to a point, but it requires effort: To avoid detection, they have to pay cash and not make reservations. Those who participate actively in the process get more information in return.

by Karen Stabiner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Cole Wilson

[ed. Hmm... I can't think of a better way to alienate your customers.]

Crowdfunding Disaster: Silicon Valley Startup Takes Customers’ Money, Shuts Down

A Bay Area startup that promised to give music lovers state-of-the-art wireless earphones is instead closing its doors, becoming the latest in a string of crowd-funded companies to take customers’ money and shut down without shipping a product.

San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website.

“This is not the outcome we had foreseen, and with the quick turn of events, we are emotionally overwhelmed,” the company’s website stated. “We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried.”

Cival Van Der Lubbe, Kanoa’s founder and CEO, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday. An email sent to the company’s main help center was not returned.

Kanoa is just the latest local crowdfunded company to disappoint customers. Last summer San Francisco-based startup Skully imploded, to the dismay of 3,000 customers who paid $1,500 each for high-tech motorcycle helmets they never received. In February, Lily Robotics, another San Francisco-based startup, filed for bankruptcy. Unlike Skully and Kanoa, Lily promised to reimburse the more than 60,000 customers who paid for but never received its camera drones.

Kanoa created some buzz when it unveiled its wireless, bluetooth enabled earphones back in 2015, before Apple had released its wireless Air Pods. In a press release announcing the product, Kanoa promised all sorts of high-tech features. Music played through the earphones was supposed to change in pace and volume as the user’s heart raced during a workout. Kanoa said users would be able to control how much ambient sound the earphones let in — listeners would be able to block out the outside world, or set the earphones to let them hear oncoming traffic while biking or walking.

Kanoa launched a pre-order campaign on its website as a way to crowdfund the company, and orders started coming in. The earphones retailed for $300, and early backers got discounts of up to 50 percent. But customers said Kanoa kept pushing back the ship date for their orders — customers who expected to have their earphones by the summer of 2016 still hadn’t received them a year later.

Then on Saturday the company suffered another blow: a scathing video product review posted on YouTube by a reviewer who goes by the online name “iTwe4kz.”

“This is trash. You don’t want to have these,” he says in the video, which had 129,000 page views Friday. “This is not a company that you want to deal with.” (...)

The company shut down four days after the review went live on YouTube. In the farewell note posted on its website, Kanoa said its investors backed out of a pending round of funding.

“We are in negotiations with investors for funding, and also large tech companies on an acquisition, while prioritizing our commitment via KANOA to you,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately, without that investment, we do not have enough capital to stay operational while we find a solution.”

That means Kanoa won’t fill any more pre-orders, it said. Kanoa also let go of its employees, and let its customer support and social media channels go dark.

by Marissa Kendall, Mercury News |  Read more:

Image: via:
[ed. I'd like some good data on the track record of crowd-funded start-ups, along with money donated to sites like GoFundMe. See also: San Francisco startup Skully a sham]

The Biggest Misconception About Today’s College Students

You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss, spending each day moving among classes, parties and extracurricular activities. But the reality is that an increasingly small population of undergraduates enjoys that kind of life.

Of the country’s nearly 18 million undergraduates, more than 40 percent go to community college, and of those, only 62 percent can afford to go to college full-time. By contrast, a mere 0.4 percent of students in the United States attend one of the Ivies.

The typical student is not the one burnishing a fancy résumé with numerous unpaid internships. It’s just the opposite: Over half of all undergraduates live at home to make their degrees more affordable, and a shocking 40 percent of students work at least 30 hours a week. About 25 percent work full-time and go to school full-time.

The typical college student is also not fresh out of high school. A quarter of undergraduates are older than 25, and about the same number are single parents.

These students work extremely hard to make ends meet and simultaneously get the education they need to be more stable: A two-year degree can earn students nearly 20 percent more annually than just a high school diploma.

And yet, these students are often the most shortchanged.

As open-access institutions, community colleges educate the majority of our country’s low-income, first-generation students. But public funding for community colleges is significantly less than for four-year colleges, sometimes because of explicit state policies. This means the amount that community colleges can spend on each student — to pay for faculty, support services, tutoring and facilities — is far less as well.

Tuition for low-income students can be covered by federal financial aid programs, but these students often have significant other costs — including housing, transportation, food and child care — that regularly pose obstacles to their education.

A recent Urban Institute study found that from 2011 to 2015, one in five students attending a two-year college lived in a food-insecure household. A study from the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that in 2016, 14 percent of community college students had been homeless at some point. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, where I am president, 77 percent of students live in households making less than $25,000 per year.

With financial pressures like these, studying full-time is not an option. It is not uncommon for a student to take between three and six years to graduate from a two-year associate degree program.

Even that can be a miraculous feat. At LaGuardia, many of our students start their days by taking their child to day care on the bus. Then they take the subway to college, then ride a different bus to their job, another bus to pick up their child and a final bus to go home. Once home, they still need to cook dinner, help their child with homework, tuck the child in, tidy up and complete their own college coursework.

Many of these students have jobs that are part-time and pay the minimum wage; their schedules can vary wildly, making the fragile balance of each day complex.

Being stretched so thin makes each day an ordeal. It’s no wonder that too many students drop out before graduation.

Community colleges need increased funding, and students need access to more flexible federal and state financial aid, enhanced paid internships and college work-study programs. Improved access to public supports, like food stamps and reduced public transportation fares, would also make a world of difference.

It’s not just that policy must change. Last year, more than $41 billion was given in charity to higher education, but about a quarter of that went to just 20 institutions. Community colleges, with almost half of all undergraduate students, received just a small fraction of this philanthropy. It is imperative that individuals, corporations and foundations spread their wealth and diversify where they donate their dollars.

by Gail O. Mellow, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kelsey Wroten

Ikko Tanaka, Traditional Wall Paintings (1966)
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The Princess Myth

Royal time should move slowly and by its own laws: creeping, like the flow of chrism from a jar. But 20 ordinary years have jog-trotted by, and it’s possible to have a grownup conversation with someone who wasn’t born when Diana died. Her widower is long remarried. Her eldest son, once so like her, shows signs of developing the ponderous looks of Philip, his grand-father. Diana should be as passe as ostrich plumes: one of those royal or quasi-royal women, like Mary of Teck or Wallis Simpson or the last tsarina, whose images fade to sepia and whose bones are white as pearls. Instead, we gossip about her as if she had just left the room. We still debate how in 1981 a sweet-faced, puppy-eyed 20-year-old came to marry into the royal house. Was it a setup from the start? Did she know her fiance loved another woman? Was she complicit, or was she an innocent, garlanded for the slab and the knife?

For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse. For the anniversary of her death, the princess’s sons remember her for the TV cameras, and we learn that she was “fun” and “very caring” and “a breath of fresh air”. They speak sincerely, but they have no news. Yet there is no bar on saying what you like about her, in defiance of the evidence. Private tapes she made with her voice coach have been shown in a TV documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words. They were trailed as revealing a princess who is “candid” and “uninhibited”. Yet never has she appeared so self-conscious and recalcitrant. Squirming, twitching, avoiding the camera’s eye, she describes herself hopefully as “a rebel”, on the grounds that she liked to do the opposite of everyone else. You want to veil the lens and explain: that is reaction, not rebellion. Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me”, it doesn’t means they’ll keep your secrets.

Yet royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see; Diana consulted psychics to work out what was going on. The perennial demand for them to cut costs and be more “down to earth” is futile. They are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”

Though she was not born royal, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers, dug more deeply into these islands than the Windsors. She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character. As she correctly discerned, “The British people needed someone to give affection.” A soft-eyed, fertile blond, she represented conjugal and maternal love, and what other source did we have? Until Tony Blair took office as a fresh-faced Prince Charming we had female leaders, but they were old and their cupboards were bare of food and love: a queen who, even at Diana’s death, was reluctant to descend from the cold north, and a prime minister formerly known as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.

The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person. Even at the beginning she was only loosely based on the young woman born Diana Spencer, and once she was engaged to the Prince of Wales she cut adrift from her modest CV. In the recent documentary Diana, Our Mother, her son Harry spoke of her as “an ordinary 20-year-old”; then checked himself, remembering she was an aristocrat. But in some ways his first thought was right. Like a farmer’s daughter, Diana married the boy across the hedge – she grew up near the queen’s estate at Sandringham. As the third daughter born to Viscount Althorp, she wasperhaps a disappointment. The family’s previous child, a son, had died within hours of birth, and Spencer and his wife Frances had to try again for an heir. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman posits that unwanted or superfluous children have difficulty in becoming embodied; they remain airy, available to fate, as if no one has signed them out of the soul store. By Diana’s cradle – where the witches and good fairies do battle – stood a friend of the Queen Mother, her maternal grandmother Ruth Fermoy. When Diana was six, Frances left her young family. Fermoy took sides against her daughter and helped Spencer get custody of his four desolate children. Later, promoted to his earldom, he remarried without telling them. Diana is said to have expressed her views by pushing her stepmother downstairs.

Diana’s private education implanted few cultural interests and no sense of their lack. She passed no public exams. But she could write a civil letter in her rounded hand, and since she didn’t have to earn a living, did it matter? In Diana: In Her Own Words, she speaks of her sense of destiny. “I knew … something profound was coming my way … I knew I was different from my friends …” Like Cinderella in the kitchen, she served an apprenticeship in humility, working as an upper-class cleaner, and in a nursery mopping up after other people’s babies. Then the prince came calling: a mature man, with a history of his own.

by Hilary Mantel, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images

The Philip K Dick Book I Love Most…

You couldn’t really call me a bona fide Dickhead because I haven’t read everything Philip K Dick wrote (60-odd books, including short story collections during a relatively short career – at one point he was so prolific that he completed 11 novels in a single year). I do co-own a large selection of them, though, and in 1992 – or some time thereabouts – I attended a seminar at the ICA, hosted by Brian Aldiss (who else?) in which each title was read aloud and marked out of 10 (this was an approach established by Lawrence Sutin in his marvellous biography of the writer, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick), so that attendees could yell a riotous higher! or lower! according to their own personal predilections.

It would certainly be fair to say that in the 35 years since his early death in 1982 Dick has been openly acknowledged – nay celebrated – as one of the world’s greatest ever writers of science fiction. Sutin rightly summarises Dick’s artistic drive as an exhaustive investigation into both what is real and what is human. Dick himself claimed “the core of my writing is not art, but truth”, and – still more perplexingly: “I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist.” To a majority of his contemporaries (even in sci-fi circles) Dick was, for the most part, considered “a drug-addled nut”. One of his highs (or lows) of choice was horse tranquilliser. He married five times. He was a twin – his sister (who he insisted was a lesbian) died shortly after they were born. His life was illumined by a series of extraordinary spiritual visions.

When you are writing about Dick, there is so much to include, such abundance – so much scandal, so much complexity, so much richness. He was plainly a highly perverse individual and at some level (a funny, clever, joyous level) an outrageous bullshitter. But deny it as he might, he is a novelist – a true novelist – and a novelist of rare genius. These books aren’t simply a series of hypotheses sparsely covered in a thin pelt of character, emotion and language. They are soft and sumptuous and twirl around the reader’s calves, hissing and purring. His writing celebrates art, life, ideas (as surely all the best writing must) and, perhaps most deliriously – the inexpressible.

Early on in his writing career Dick wrote a series of straight novels (not that Dick was ever capable of straightness – he was, by nature, intrinsically curvy). They aren’t among the most celebrated of his works. But my contention is that there are several true gems among them, the shiniest of which – and for me, the most creatively inspirational, as a novelist – are Confessions of a Crap Artist and (my marginal favourite) Puttering About in a Small Land.

Crap Artist definitely has the best opening two lines, though:

“I am made out of water. You wouldn’t know it because I have it bound in.”

It’s a little masterpiece (and for some reason slots into my consciousness hard upon John Kennedy Toole’s superb A Confederacy of Dunces). It was published in 1959, but Puttering (written in 1957 – when Dick was only 29) is my firm favourite. Sutin rates it – rather disconcertingly – at a shockingly measly five. I’m not sure why this is. Because I can find little to fault in it. The bare bones of the story are certainly, on initial appearances, deliberately unshowy – almost pedestrian. But this is what I love. Dick isn’t making a big deal out of anything. He is finding drama in smallness, in the margins, in tiny changes of perspective. The book is slight but transformative. And because this is not an art I have refined myself (a cat may look at a king!), I deeply envy it. I suppose there is a “Kitchen Sink” element (the timing corresponds), but there’s nothing mannered or crass about the way Dick handles his subject matter. He isn’t angry or splenetic. He is quizzical and mystified. He is – best of all – inquisitive.

In brief, the novel details the coming together of its two protagonists, Roger and Virginia Lindahl. They meet, are kind of in love, and kind of horrified by each other. They move from Washington to LA at the end of the war. We see them find work. We see Roger open a television sales and repairs shop. The Lindahls have a son with asthma who they send to a private school in the mountains. Here they meet the Bonners – Chuck and Liz. Roger and Liz commence an affair.

What I most admire about the book is the way people simply do not understand what they are doing while at the same time experiencing utter clarity. Dick’s writing is like a kind of psychological washing-up-brush – he carefully pushes its bristles up into his character’s minds and rotates exhaustively.

The reader has total access. It’s both horrifying and delirious. There are some truly demented passages. And there’s a profound sense that Dick doesn’t really give a damn. He’s not making any great claims for himself (or the novel), he’s just turning it out. It isn’t overthought or minutely considered. It is joyful and propulsive. Because this is how he writes. This is who he is. Effortlessly cool. There are ideas to spare. He throws them around like a Dame tossing Cadbury’s Minis into the crowd at a pantomime.

Such confidence! Such largesse!

I so aspire to be generous in this way. And fun. At one point Dick describes a high-pressure business meeting and says “Beth studied him as if he had managed to fart through his nose.”

Pure Dick. Come on. You gotta love it.

by Nicola Barker, Michael Moorcock, and Adam Roberts, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bryan Mayes

Free Speech Dies in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Protesters opposing a right-wing gathering in liberal San Francisco claimed victory Saturday when the event was cancelled after city officials walled off a city park - a move that the event's organizer said was more about silencing his group's message than preventing a violent clash.

Civic leaders in San Francisco - a cradle of the free speech movement that prides itself on its tolerance - repeatedly voiced concerns that the event organized by Patriot Prayer would lead to a clash with counter-demonstrators.

Joey Gibson, who is Japanese American and leads Patriot Prayer, said his group disavows racism and hatred and wanted to promote dialogue with people who may not share its views. He cancelled a planned rally Saturday at a field under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge after he said his members received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.

He said Saturday in a phone interview that he felt like San Francisco's Democratic leaders had shut him down. Earlier in the week, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee raised concerns that Patriot Prayer would attract hate speech and potential violence. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Democrat who represents San Francisco, called the planned rally a "white supremacist" event.

"They're definitely doing a great job of trying to make sure my message doesn't come out," Gibson said.

San Francisco officials closed the park where Gibson had planned a news conference after cancelling the rally at Crissy Field. City officials surrounded Alamo Square park with a fence and sent scores of police officers -- some in riot gear -- to keep people out. Mayor Ed Lee defended the city's response.

"If people want to have the stage in San Francisco, they better have a message that contributes to people's lives rather than find ways to hurt them," Lee asaid. "That's why certain voices found it very difficult to have their voices heard today."

by Paul Elias and Sudhin Thanawala, AP |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia
[Ed. Free speech for me, but not for thee. See also: The Ugly Side of Antifa]

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AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand

Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”

Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”

To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.

This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.

“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.

“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that’s been observed again, and again, and again. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”

So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.

The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.

Facebook ultimately opted to require its negotiation bots to speak in plain old English. “Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” says Mike Lewis, research scientist at FAIR. Facebook isn’t alone in that perspective. When I inquired to Microsoft about computer-to-computer languages, a spokesperson clarified that Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.

The other issue, as Facebook admits, is that it has no way of truly understanding any divergent computer language. “It’s important to remember, there aren’t bilingual speakers of AI and human languages,” says Batra. We already don’t generally understand how complex AIs think because we can’t really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse.

But at the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?

Because, again, we absolutely can lead machines to develop their own languages. Facebook has three published papers proving it. “It’s definitely possible, it’s possible that [language] can be compressed, not just to save characters, but compressed to a form that it could express a sophisticated thought,” says Batra. Machines can converse with any baseline building blocks they’re offered. That might start with human vocabulary, as with Facebook’s negotiation bots. Or it could start with numbers, or binary codes. But as machines develop meanings, these symbols become “tokens”–they’re imbued with rich meanings. As Dauphin points out, machines might not think as you or I do, but tokens allow them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The way I think about it is with algebra: If A + B = C, the “A” could encapsulate almost anything. But to a computer, what “A” can mean is so much bigger than what that “A” can mean to a person, because computers have no outright limit on processing power.

“It’s perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought,” says Batra. “The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it’s because we have a limit to cognition.” Computers don’t need to simplify concepts. They have the raw horsepower to process them.

by Mark Wilson, Co.Design |  Read more:

Image: Nikiteev_Konstantin/iStock, Zozulinskyi/iStock

[ed. No one (except possibly design engineers and coders) understands how technology works these days. Now AI is developing it's own language? Great. Put me firmly in the 'AI is going to kill us all' camp.]

Fish Spill

The Lummi Nation is marshaling a mop-up of thousands of fugitive Atlantic salmon in the tribe’s territorial waters, and the Swinomish chairman has called for a shutdown of the farmed-salmon industry in Puget Sound after last weekend’s spill. (...)

“These fish are headed to every river in Puget Sound,” Cladoosby said. “We have been saying all along it was not a question of if, but when, this would happen.

“The wild salmon stocks are already endangered. It is time to shut these operations down. Period.”

Meanwhile, the Lummi Nation has declared a state of emergency and is paying fish buyers to take the Atlantic salmon brought in by their fishermen, said Merle Jefferson, director of natural resources for the tribe.

Jefferson declined to say how much the tribe is paying. “It is not going to be cheap, that is all I can say,” he said. “It’s just like an oil spill, we are trying to contain it as best we can.” He said the tribe would be testing some fish for disease, and freezing the rest.

With wild salmon runs already depressed, the tribe does not want native fish subjected to competition for food from the Atlantic salmon or potentially exposed to disease, Jefferson said. The farmed Atlantic salmon also have made their way into the Nooksack River, where Lummi fishermen have had treaty-protected fisheries for generations.

“We are concerned about impact on the spawning grounds,” said Timothy Ballew II, chairman of the Lummi Indian Business Council. “That could have lasting impacts on the future runs. This needs to be taken seriously. There are currently chinook in the river, and coho on the way. Our habitat is already in fragile state and adding this to the mix does not help.”

The tribe felt pressed to pay buyers to take the fish because some fishermen have had trouble selling them. The fish were treated a year ago for yellowmouth, a bacterial infection, and some of the fish also have deformed mouths. It is not uncommon for farmed fish to have deformities because of living in confined conditions in pens, noted Ron Warren, assistant director at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW).

The disaster occurred over the weekend, releasing thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon, an invasive species, into Puget Sound waters from a fish farm owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific at Cypress Island.

There were 305,000 fish in the pen that collapsed. The company still has no count of the number of escaped fish, but company spokeswoman Nell Halse said Wednesday it is a far greater number than the few thousand initially stated by the company. Neither the company nor the WDFW made any public statement about the accident until Tuesday afternoon, when the state’s response was to urge fishermen in a news release to go fishing.

The department Thursday afternoon asked fishermen to report their catch online to help the state get a handle on how far the fish are dispersing.

“The state’s response is a failure,” Ballew said. “We need to get these fish out of the water to protect our fish habitat. It is apparent that we have to clean up this mess.” (...)

The disaster comes as the state Department of Ecology, which considers the spilled fish a pollutant, is working with a variety of partners to update the state’s regulation of fish farms, some of which date to the 1980s and “need to be modernized,” according to the department.

Washington is the only West Coast state with an open-water Atlantic salmon farming industry. Alaska and California ban such operations, and while Oregon does not disallow them, none currently operate in the state.

by Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Dean Rutz/The Seattle Times
[ed. See also: Please Go Fishing]

Selling Social Justice

It should be obvious that having large for-profit media institutions operate yields disastrous results. As with other markets, if a journalistic institution is out to make money, it will sell what people can be convinced to buy rather than what will actually do them any good. And since we are all weak and easily distracted by gossip, fearmongering, and sleaze, we will be given disproportionate amounts of gossip, fearmongering, and sleaze. The pressure for institutions to get as many viewers/readers as possible has had pernicious consequences in the Trump Era, since it’s hard to get people to pay attention to serious issues when they could be watching the antics and drama of the Trump Show, which is—let’s be honest—the most entertaining thing on television. CNN and MSNBC produce nonstop noisy Trump coverage, and are getting their highest ratings in years.

Of course, having a parade of rubbish on television is nothing especially new. Donald Trump may have made it worse, but it’s not like CNN has ever been watchable. And the harmful results of having journalism mixed with business have been evident since at least the time of the Spanish American war. But in a new report about the progressive commentary website Mic, we can see a further troubling dimension of the profit problem: its potential to exploit and thereby corrode and cheapen the ideal of social justice.

Mic recently announced that it would be laying off two dozen staffers, as part of a pivot to video, the infamous process by which moribund journalistic institutions desperately attempt to save themselves by eliminating text-based content, on the theory that this is what millennials want. (As a hip millennial magazine, Current Affairs recently rolled out its own pivot to video.) Writing for The Outline, Adrianne Jeffries surveys the website’s history, from its beginnings as a bland purveyor of D.C. conventional wisdom called PolicyMic to its emergence as one of the foremost online voices of the “social justice” movement, garnering a huge audience by pushing politically progressive takes on the news. Mic swiftly became notorious for the tenor of its condemnations of problematic things, becoming, in the words of one former staffer, the place where millennials could go each day to find out “What are we supposed to be outraged about?” As Jeffries summarizes:

Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman’s Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We’re Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”

But according to the former employees Jeffries spoke to, much of this was deployed cynically. Mic’s founders, Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, “did not believe the things that their staffers were hired to write about.” In fact, their approach to social justice issues was sometimes nakedly mercenary: when pitched a story, one asked about the subject of the aritcle “But is she black? Is she black?” Mic stories had a formula: “In One Perfect Tweet, X” or “Celebrity X Just Said X About Issue X, Here’s Why That’s Important.” As it grew, the site was publishing between 50 and 100 stories per day, with 2500 writers, and “individual stories kept going viral, pulling in 2 million, 3 million, 5 million unique visitors per piece.” Microsoft, Cadillac and GE signed up to run “branded content” on the site, a.k.a. adverts disguised as articles.

While the site’s founders would claim that it was trying to “inform and empower our generation to have an impact,” its staff saw it as trying to “commodify people’s feelings about race and gender.” There was a “fixation on traffic” that led to “reductive headlines [that catered] to an echo chamber.” The outrage was always ratcheted “up to 11,” and while the site often promoted serious progressive causes and drew attention to Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders campaign, it was clear that the chief task was the pursuit of clicks. Every time the site “attempted to reinvent itself as ‘real journalism,’” the founders would “get spooked when traffic dropped and return to the low-hanging fruit.” Staff members, many of whom actually believed in things, felt used.

Jeffries’ report on Mic is disturbing, because it shows how “exploiting your audience’s basest temptations” is not just limited to tapping into people’s lurid interest in celebrities and gore. It can also mean manipulating their most deeply held moral convictions. You know a person is interested in making the world a better place, and bringing about race and gender equality. And you realize that there’s money to be made by selling them the feeling of having made the world a better place and brought about greater race and gender equality. The consumer can get angry at today’s Problematic Thing and feel as if they have participated in the struggle against the world’s injustices. The company reaps advertising dollars from Cadillac and GE.

This isn’t just crassly manipulative. It’s actively harmful to the cause of social justice. First, it takes the fight from the material world to the online world, further turning politics into what Adolph Reed has termed a cargo cult, addressing injustices through discourse rather than action. Second, it makes people’s anger blind and evenly-distributed. As a former Mic employee told Jeffries, “if everything is an outrage nothing is an outrage.” So Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of wearing gray T-shirts is lumped in with mass incarceration as one of the world’s many problematic things. From another employee: “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”

It’s important to stress that these employees believed strongly in social justice. And it’s precisely because they believed in it that they became uncomfortable with a business model that tried to find things to get people upset about, rather than things that people should care about.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Mic

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Ani DiFranco

Onchi Koshiro, The Four Seasons, 1927
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