16 Ways QR Codes are Being Used in China

We’ve talked a lot about the rise of QR codes in Asia, but they may now finally be moving from being a “joke” to being more widely adopted in other places as well. Simply put, QR codes let you hyperlink and bookmark the physical world. Just as UPC barcodes allow machine-readable scanning of data (e.g., price) on items in stores, QR codes are a barcode-like vector between online and offline information. And unlike NFC (near-field communication), which is used for reading smart cards, keycards, and contactless payments, QR codes can be easily accessed by any phone in the world that has a camera. They enable everything from online to offline (O2O) marketplaces, which are huge in China, to augmented reality.

Some of the more obvious use cases for them include things like adding a WeChat friend in real life (IRL); subscribing to a WeChat official account (often representing media, stores, people, and others); paying a street vendor or at a convenience store; connecting to wi-fi in a shop; getting additional content from a magazine article; and learning more about styling or the brand from a clothing label. But there are also a number of less-obvious (or not as well covered) uses in China, which I share below, because they show the range of what’s possible everywhere when QR codes disintermediate existing use cases… and enable new ones.

Things people already do, but now with QR codes

#1 Give and collect gifts at a wedding
On wedding invitations, “no boxed gifts please” is basically code for “just give me cash”. And in many Asian cultures, cash is more standard and socially acceptable anyway compared to other gifts for auspicious occasions like marriage, births, etc. In China, these gifts come in the form of red envelopes — which were also a growth hack for increasing adoption of payments in messaging.

But here, a member of the bridal party wears a QR code as necklace to collect digital money from wedding guests who forgot to bring physical red envelopes… though this use case had a mixed reception.

#2 Give and collect alms
Bluntly, begging has gone digital in China thanks to the penetration of mobile wallets there. And no one can really claim that they don’t have spare change when they are almost always likely to have their cell phones on them.

In this case, the panhandlers collect physical change from kind strangers, but also (quite brilliantly) provide mobile payment QR codes as another payment option.

#3 Collect tithes
The penetration of QR codes is so deep in China that it includes other forms of social commerce besides gifting or begging. Even churches collect tithes through QR codes. Why only offer wooden collection boxes when you can offer a QR code, as with this temple in Hangzhou? (...)

Things that are now possible (or way easier to do now) because of QR codes

#7 Checking the source and authenticity of food and drinks
QR codes can already be found in restaurants in China for things like paying for or ordering a meal at a restaurant. But even food distributors are taking advantage of QR codes; supermarkets, for instance, use them in produce stands so that customers can learn about the supply chain behind a specific batch of fruits or vegetables: Which farm did it come from? How was it transported? Meanwhile, wine-makers use QR codes as a way of proving the authenticity of the bottle — source, vintage — as well as educating consumers (type of grape, suggested pairings).

by Connie Chan, Andreesen Horowitz |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

St. Vincent

Pills to wake, pills to sleep
Pills, pills, pills every day of the week
Pills to walk, pills to think
Pills, pills, pills for the family
Pills to grow, pills to shrink
Pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink
Pills to fuck, pills to eat
Pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink

Lyrics

[ed. See also: St. Vincent Breaks Down Every Song on Her New Album, Masseduction]

The Country Sausage That's Going to Town

It has come to my attention that within the dog-eat-dog underworld of the culinary industry, there is a clandestine movement afoot to discredit my food writing. The chief criticisms are that I don’t actually cook and my essays aren’t about food. This has gotten on my last nerve! I put forth that any creature in possession of an alimentary canal knows plenty about food. The basics are simple: If you don’t eat, you will die, and bacon tastes better than rice cakes. Nutrition is for the food writer as ornithology is for the birds!

To reassure the skeptics, my bona fides are as follows. For more than a decade I worked in seventeen different restaurants, cafés, and bars. My career began in Morehead, Kentucky, at a Burger Queen and ended at Doyle’s Cafe in Boston, Massachusetts. I worked as a dishwasher, busboy, prep cook, steward, breakfast cook, soda pop pourer, sandwich maker, barista, and waiter. I got fired often, although never for reasons related to job performance. The most common reason was a mysterious word—“insubordination”—essentially a pretext used by power-mad bosses to shed themselves of people they didn’t like. Or in my case, a person who resisted the lure of kissing the boss’s b-hole. Of all the professional sadness in the world, the most poignant is that of assistant managers at a restaurant. Their priority is scheduling shifts for a waitstaff that makes more money than managers. Their only recourse is firing people.

A deeply personal matter led to my decade in the restaurant business and subsequent “career” as a food writer. At age fifteen I met a girl. Nothing is as powerful as the extraordinary jolt of a teenager’s first love. It’s like seeing the world after a double-cataract surgery. Life is suddenly exquisite. Each leaf becomes the bearer of unbearable beauty. Romeo and Juliet were so deliriously happy that they embraced murder and suicide as an ideal solution. I didn’t go that far, but I fell deeply and totally in love with Kim. She was smart, pretty, and laughed at my jokes. I spent all my waking hours trying to talk to her, eventually moving up to walking around holding hands. Our six-week romance was the best of my life—virtuous, finite, and gloriously unprecedented. I never again knew such an all-encompassing joy.

We met doing summer stock theatre as part of a college recruitment program for promising high school students. This occurred before the advent of portable music devices, which meant we listened to the radio. Every lyric seemed to be about us, directed exclusively at the impermeable dome in which we lived. Our favorite song was “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band, in which he spoke of the pompitous of love. Neither Kim nor I knew exactly what the phrase meant, but we felt it described what we had, a kind of purity and truth. We were pompitous. Our love embodied pompitousness. We sought pompity.

In mid-August Kim returned home to western Kentucky, two hours away. We wrote each other daily, a pace that dwindled in frequency to weekly, then monthly. We called each other a few times, long spells with each of us clutching the receiver silently, content to know the other person was on the line. She visited me once, driving with a couple of her friends who clearly evaluated me as deficient: too short, too poor, non-athletic. Plus I was from the hills and looked it. I didn’t even own a car to reciprocate her visit. We stopped writing. I never saw Kim again, but I never forgot her.

Her grandfather was Fred Purnell, a former railroad man who founded Purnell’s “Old Folks” Sausage company in Simpsonville, Kentucky. According to family lore, Fred loved listening to the elderly talk, a trait that earned him the phenomenal nickname of “Old Folks.” I deeply envy his sobriquet. As a child I also enjoyed hearing tales of the old days. This has evolved into a secret desire that young people would be interested in hearing me talk. As it is, I can’t even get my wife to listen to a word I say. My nickname could readily be “Husby Ignored” or “He Who Talks Too Much.”

Purnell’s Sausage began as a family company and still maintains that status, which is quite unusual in the corporate era of Big Pork. For example, Smithfield Foods began as a family operation in Virginia and was America’s biggest pork company until it was bought by a Chinese corporation for seven billion dollars. (Yes, that’s 7,000,000,000 bucks!) Industrialized pork created a lucrative side business, the never-ending disposal of hog feces. If you can withstand the dreadful smell, it’s a wide-open field for a “manure entrepreneur.”

The packaging of Purnell’s sausage features a drawing of a cheerfully grinning pig’s face. It’s a great design: simple, bold, and memorable. At least as long as you ignore the obvious—what the hell does that pig have to be happy about? His entire family is encased in frozen wrappers for sale! Setting aside the complex emotional life of a hog, what enthralled me most was the slogan: “The Country Sausage that’s Going to Town!”

When I was a child living on a dirt road in the country, there was nothing better than going to the nearest town. Morehead had paved streets, multiple two-story buildings, and sidewalks. One building was rumored to contain an elevator. A ten-cent store sold model cars and Hot Wheels. The corner drugstore had comic books and nickel Cokes. The prospect of going to Morehead on Saturday sustained me throughout the tedious week of attending school. My mother’s greatest punishment was forbidding her kids from accompanying her to town. Merely the threat impelled me to prompt obedience. (The worst period of my life was being banned from Morehead for a month. After reading that Daniel Boone had stained his skin with walnut juice to pass as a Shawnee, I smeared the brown inner oil all over my body. It didn’t wash out.)

The phrase “going to town” has another, more generalized and colloquial definition. It means to carry out something with great enthusiasm, fully committed and doing the best you can—such as eating. That boy is going to town on that sausage! As a food slogan, it connotes the ambition of a country staple that’s heading out, putting the farm behind, eager for the bright lights. Maybe that’s why the pig was so happy. The enthusiasm for departure was a form of ignorance at the true destination—the bloody fate of a slaughterhouse. Like me in later years, that pig would often wish it had stayed home, safe in the hills.

I recently learned that the Purnell motto was discontinued sometime in the mid-1970s. The new slogan, currently in use on all their products, is bland and innocuous: “It’s Gooo-od.” The phrase is better utilized in a verbal fashion, drawing out the syllable for emphasis. Written, it’s harder to comprehend, leading one to mentally pronounce it as “gew-odd.” Still, it sounds less old-fashioned and is faster to say on TV and radio. (I guess they had to go with an elongated form of “good” because Tony the Tiger had already appropriated “They’re Gr-r-reat!” to endorse Frosted Flakes.) Most important, it’s true. Purnell’s sausage is the best sausage in the world.

I began wondering if the new motto was a business decision or a family mandate due to Kim’s interest in me around the same time. Maybe the Purnells didn’t want my country sausage coming to Louisville. It’s gooo-od that we got rid of that bumpkin early! Feeling rejected, I realized I could simply call Kim and ask her what motivated the new motto. I immediately became terrified that she wouldn’t remember me, or that she’d consider me a stalker with a forty-year delay. The best-case scenario would be if we talked for hours, met in person, fell in love, and I left my wife to move to Louisville and eat sausage forever. That would also be the worst-case scenario.

by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: "Alice,” by Kevin Horan

Same Time, Another Planet

PRK24 is sitting at the kitchen table when KNT32 glides into the room. PRK24 is so beautiful that one could die from it, thinks KNT32; how, she thinks, as she hides her head in her hands, can one do something so painful, as she must, to something so handsome? Or someone? PRK24 looks at her with amazement, then a polaroid picture slides out of his head, he takes it down with his hands, gives it to her, it shows KNT32 as she is standing now, with her hands around her head. Then he pulls out another picture that is blank, but with this symbol: “?” KNT32 shakes her head. Then she pulls out a picture. It shows KNT32, naked, against this kitchen table, with PRK27 behind her. PRK24 slides slowly back from the chair while staring at the picture, which slowly dissolves before his eyes. KNT32’s heart is hammering. Then she pulls out a picture that shows a little embryo. It is so handsome. It is so little, and the light around it is so red. It is sucking its thumb. It looks as though it is dreaming. Things one cannot know. PRK24 closes his eyes, because it hurts! He is both furious and completely lost. He pulls a picture out of his head: PRK24 and KNT32 eating hotdogs at a hotdog stand. KNT32 has her mouth wide open around a gigantic hotdog with too much onion. PRK24 is laughing. A new picture: PRK24 has won a pink teddybear for KNT32, and KNT32 is hugging it. A new picture: PRK24 and KNT32 are walking hand in hand on a sandy beach, the sun is setting, they are not wearing shoes. KNT32’s heart is about to break. She takes out a picture that shows how her heart is breaking. But PRK24 does not see it. He sits with his eyes closed. He takes out a picture that shows the surface of a body of water. He sits for a little. Then he takes out a new picture: A large bubble of air is about to burst against the surface of the water. KNT32 throws herself toward the picture, trying to dive into it, but too late, it dissolves, she shakes PRK24, but he has disappeared into himself.

by Gunnhild Øyehaug, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Santos Gonzales, via Flickr

Autopilot Wars

Sixteen Years, But Who’s Counting?

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.

Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know. True, government authorities withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details that they find convenient. Yet information describing what U.S. forces are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by barrages of presidential tweets. Here, for anyone interested, are press releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:

September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive

September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty

September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Ever since the United States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have poured forth. And those are just for starters. To provide updates on the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional committees or brief members of the press. From the field, journalists offer updates that fill in at least some of the details -- on civilian casualties, for example -- that government authorities prefer not to disclose. Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military officers, provide analysis. Trailing behind come books and documentaries that put things in a broader perspective.

But here’s the truth of it. None of it matters.

Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with. In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal.

While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved grotesquely premature. Yet a half-century later, his wish has become reality.

Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf? Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive deleted]?

Perhaps just posing such a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on television.

Without any expectation of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why we don’t give a @#$%&! Here are eight distinctive but mutually reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly obvious and ends with the more speculative.

Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because:

1. U.S. casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded. In all of 2017, for example, a grand total of 11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan -- about equal to the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly, plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed. (The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.) But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United States is concerned. As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations, they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).

2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dollars spent on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes, highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he continued. “[I]t is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since accommodated themselves to that cross of iron. Many actually see it as a boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions. As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending wars. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions. Imagine the benefits of investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure. Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about anyone else to pursue that connection.

3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out. Others have made the point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime. Even so, it bears repeating: the American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part. Members of Congress abet this civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility. In effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree: supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest sense. Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism. What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability. (...)

6. Besides, we’re too busy. Think of this as a corollary to point five. Even if the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to attend to such critiques. Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection. We live in an era (so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when being overscheduled is almost obligatory. Our attention span shrinks and with it our time horizon. The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago. Yet like the great solar eclipse of 2017 -- hugely significant and instantly forgotten -- those matters will, within another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that briefly captures our attention. As a result, a dwindling number of Americans -- those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts -- have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the Afghanistan War end? Why has it lasted almost 16 years? Why doesn’t the finest fighting force in history actually win? Can’t package an answer in 140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite? Well, then, slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.

7. Anyway, the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well. Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this expectation. Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the slate clean and Make America Great Again. Ignoring the historical record of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be deities but flawed human beings, Americans -- members of the media above all -- pretend to take all this seriously. Campaigns become longer, more expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial. One might think that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the exalted expectations of presidents putting things right. Instead, especially in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion! Corruption! Obstruction! Impeachment!) has become the overriding imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by the framers of the Constitution. The irony of Trump perpetuating wars that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.

by Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: America’s War for the Greater Middle East

By What Measure?

On Catalonia and the referendum

How did things in Catalonia end up the way they did? Under Francoism, the Spanish government committed itself to a shameful pattern of cultural and linguistic repression in Spain’s so-denominated “historical” communities—Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. The peaceful constitution (in both senses of the word) of post-dictatorial Spain depends in large part on the restoration (or concession) of a significant measure of autonomy to those same communities. But the response to Catalonia’s October 1 independence referendum suggests a crisis for the status quo.

From a merely “cosmetic” perspective—to borrow a turn of the phrase from our own current President—the footage was horrific: military and federal police forces decked out in riot gear breaking down the doors at polling places, clashing openly with members of the Catalan Mossos d’Esquadra, dragging voters and protesters by their hair and ears, beating them to the ground with their truncheons and then continuing to beat them after they’d fallen, breaking fingers, leaving children and elderly people bleeding and in tears. These events aren’t just embarrassing domestically: for a Spanish government hoping to keep its European allies lined up against the idea of Catalan secession, the violence can’t help but weaken its bargaining position.

But the whole lamentable mess—all the clubs and shattered glass and the approximately 900 injured—wasn’t unforeseeable. In October 2015, following the previous month’s electoral victory of the pro-independence alliance Junts pel Sí, the Catalan parliament set into motion an “hoja de ruta,” or roadmap, to independence, agreed upon by the alliance’s constitutive parties the previous month. In October 2016, in line with that original plan, a parliamentary resolution was passed calling for a binding and binary independence referendum to be convened no later than September 2017, followed by an immediate or virtually immediate declaration of independence in the (expected) case of a Yes victory.

The Spanish central government’s response to these circumstances was, for a long time, denial. Time and again, Spanish president Mariano Rajoy, leader of the ruling Partido Popular (a political party itself constructed from the legislative remnants of Francoism), stood there blinking through his rimless eyeglasses and declared that there would be no referendum.1 The referendum-day violence, then, can be understood as a mere extension of that attitude of denial from something that could happen to something that was, in fact, happening. And as “it won’t happen” began to transform into “it sure appears to be happening,” the Spanish government opted to criminalize the whole affair, sending in the military and federal police to conduct raids on the warehouses where ballots and ballot boxes had been stored. Less than a week before the referendum was scheduled to be held, the police arrested fourteen middle and high-ranking government officials for their involvement in its organization. Those who turned out to vote, to manage precincts, to collect and count ballots, were treated as dangerous criminals by the military and militarized police.

The Spanish government’s lengthy refusal to engage even rhetorically with the referendum—and its subsequent criminalization of it—were predicated on its unconstitutionality. And, thanks to various court rulings on the subject, its illegality. For months, El País, the newspaper of record of constitutional Spain, has described the Catalan referendum as “el referéndum ilegal” or “el referéndum independentista ilegal,” as though the one concept were literally unthinkable without the other. The problems with this approach are obvious. Under the Spanish constitution, and as confirmed by Spain’s highest court, calling the referendum, organizing the referendum, and voting in the referendum may have been illegal, but these actions were no more criminal than sitting at the front of the bus when the law dictates that you sit in the back. Arresting people for trying to organize a vote and bludgeoning people trying to vote doesn’t look to very many people like a democratically elected government fulfilling its obligation to protect its citizens. It looks instead like violent political repression, which is, of course, exactly what it was.

Yet the more fundamental problem is disingenuousness. To suggest that the issue with the referendum specifically, and the Catalan government’s pursuit of independence from Spain more generally, is that it is not legal under Spanish law presumes that under Spanish law there exists some legal and democratic path to independence. But the Spanish constitution makes no such provisions for secession. Under Spanish law, and under the Spanish constitution, illegality is effectively built into the pursuit of independence as such and so cannot, on its own, provide grounds for disqualifying this or that particular such pursuit.

... It is true that Catalonia pays more money in taxes to the Spanish government than it receives in return (and no less true that not all of this unreturned tax money is, as the Spanish government claims, redistributed to Spain’s needier communities). But it is also true that Catalonia is an extremely wealthy community with many exceedingly wealthy individuals (many of them current and former Catalan government officials, and many of them suspected of or charged with corruption of fraud). Whatever problems Catalonia may have with social and economic inequities owe as much to the disproportionate distribution of that wealth (when not the outright pillaging of it) by the Catalan government as to its partial appropriation by the even more deeply corrupt central government in Madrid. This is not, in other words, a straightforward case of exploitation.

by Elis S. Evans, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Adolfo Lujan

Thoughts and Prayers

Thoughts and Prayers, The Game.
via:
[ed. See also: Thoughts and Prayers]

Actually, Do Read the Comments - They Can Be the Best Part

Imagine you want to collect donations for a food bank. You could place an empty box on the street, walk away, and hope there’s food inside when you return. The likely result? Your box will be filled with trash.

Alternatively, you could think strategically. Where should you put the box? Outside a grocery store, perhaps. How will people know what to put in the box? You can write, “Donations for Food Bank,” on the side. You can also stand near the box, so that if people throw trash inside, you can remove it quickly. And when people put tins of food inside, you can make them visible, so others know what to buy inside the store.

Right now, many publishers are placing an empty box at the bottom of their stories and walking away. And then they’re frustrated, maybe even disgusted, at the trash that collects there.

Abuse, trolling, harassment, racism, misogyny—these are all real problems down in the comments, and they’re a symptom of wider problems: societal, yes, but also strategic. The current process goes like this: Journalist writes an article. Article is published. People write comments. Journalist peeks at the comments, and sees a lot of meanness and abuse (especially if they’re a woman, a person of color, or especially a woman of color). Journalist vows not to engage with such horrid readers. The organization listens to its journalists when they say that comments are worthless and puts fewer resources into them. The comments then get worse due to lack of engagement and strategy, leaving the space to a small number of argumentative types corralled by a tiny battled-hardened community team.

A few sites have nixed comments completely, saying that the conversation is now better had elsewhere. “We encourage our audience to continue to interact with us [on social media],” said Al Jazeera English when it removed comments last month.

If a site chooses not to dedicate resources to community management, then closing the comments is probably the best option. However, this is a dangerous and short-sighted position for the news industry to adopt. It’s damaging not only to the bottom line, but also to the future of journalism as an industry.

Let’s start with three of the key metrics that advertisers care about: number of views, time spent on a page, and the loyalty of the audience. Who spends the most time on the page? People reading comments after the article and engaging in the discussion. Who creates multiple page views? Commenters who return to reply to conversations they’re involved in. Who are the most loyal audience members? Almost certainly your commenters.

Earlier this year, The Financial Times found that its commenters are seven times more engaged than the rest of its readers. The Times of London revealed recently that the 4 percent of its readers who comment are by far its most valuable.

“You can see the benefits in terms of engaging readers and renewing subscriptions,” Ben Whitelaw, head of audience development at the Times and The Sunday Times, told the online news site Digiday.

When an organization moves these communities onto Facebook, it is handing over everything to the big blue thumb: all of the readers’ data, the control of the moderation tools, control of the advertising, even the opportunity to manage subscriptions — and all in a place where people are more likely to comment without even opening the article. (Not to mention that Facebook has hardly solved its own abuse problem.)

Yes, some community members can be demanding, argumentative, aggressive, mean. But others can be helpful. David Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigations into Donald Trump; his readers helped him uncover various pieces of information, including the location of a painting of the now-president that he bought for himself at a charity auction. Comments are where many people share personal anecdotes related to a news story, and where experts sometimes share links to their research. Sometimes, the community can be supportive and meaningful for its members: for example, a commenter on the Carolyn Hax advice blog at The Washington Post was so beloved that the newspaper wrote a piece about her after she died. Memorials to her writing were then left, yes, in the comments.

Commenters can even become potential hires: The Atlantic’s current politics editor, Yoni Appelbaum, was plucked from the comments section. It’s easy to forget that behind the anonymous usernames are real people with something to say. (...)

Right now, many news sites with comments spend their resources policing the actions of a small minority of people. Those organizations need to shift the focus from merely removing the negative to building positive, flexible community spaces, where a small, antisocial subset are no longer able to dominate the space or abuse the people within it with impunity.

Every site needs to be thinking about more than just improving comments, Publishers should also be more clear about what the goals of the space are, and should try to build strong digital communities that members are actively involved in managing. If more comments sections become places where people actually talk to each other—and to the person who wrote the story—they will encourage ideas and empathy, not insults. Potential sources and new story ideas will emerge.

We can achieve this through better technology and more flexible tools, and by hiring people who have actually suffered harassment to help build the solutions. Those tools should make it easy to highlight the best parts of the conversation and for journalists to engage without making themselves vulnerable to abuse. At Coral, where I work, we have two open source tools that are being adopted by newsrooms. Ask collects reader submissions and displays them back to readers. (It’s used by Univision, PBS Frontline, and others.) Talk reimagines how comment moderation and conversation function. (It’s used by the Washington Post, the Brisbane Times, and Estadao in Brazil.) (...)

There is no single approach or tool that will work everywhere. The best community strategies are adaptable. For example: If a topic is unlikely to spur thoughtful discussion in a comment section, the editors should consider other kinds of engagement—such as a form to submit stories and experiences that can help future reporting.

by Andrew Losowsky, Wired | Read more:
Image: Getty

Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks

In the fall of 1889, when he was 41 years old, the painter Paul Gauguin was brutally, furiously alone. Famous now for his saturated, almost hallucinatory paintings of life in Tahiti, at the time he was living in Brittany, still two years away from his first visit to French Polynesia. He was penniless and adrift, trying to paint his way through the devastations of his dying marriage, his rejection by the cliques of the Parisian art establishment, and the precarity of his friendship with Vincent van Gogh, who shortly before Christmas had assaulted him with a razor and, after Gauguin’s departure that evening, used the same blade to cut off his own ear.

Gauguin and Van Gogh had a tumultuous acquaintance, one that served both men better in writing than in person. In their extensive correspondence, Gauguin — originally a stockbroker — refined his beliefs about the purpose of art. Impressionism had thundered into the salons, upending classical formality and with it the rubrics by which a painting could be considered a success. Beauty was no longer the standard, nor was faithful representation of a subject; the artist himself was now part of the consideration, judged by the nuance of his thoughts and his facility with their artistic evocation. Gauguin was dazzled by this idea of art as a vehicle for emotion, a way to depict not things or people, but their essences.

A religious man, he found profundity in the practice of art: the brushes and paints, the forms and colors on the canvas, and the distillation and expression of his own mind. It was from that last point that his solitude sprang. Gauguin’s contemporaries, including Van Gogh, found it inoffensive — even useful! — to paint from life, referring to models and objects and scenery. To Gauguin, direct observation was anathema, a tool for overwriting the memories and emotions that make a painting worthwhile. He was furious at his cohort for their weakness, disdainful of their inability to see the truth in his vision. He painted it: a garden of sinuous trees, with primitive, black-clad figures in the background hazily merging with the twilight landscape. Filling the foreground is a figure with blazing orange hair and beard, his face — Gauguin’s face — rendered in intricate detail, full of life and warmth, looking to the ground with an expression of infinite wisdom and sorrow.

“There I have painted my own portrait,” he wrote of the work. “But it also represents the crushing of an ideal, and a pain that is both divine and human. Jesus is totally abandoned; his disciples are leaving him, in a setting as sad as his soul.” Gauguin found great richness in the story of Jesus, and often painted himself as the savior. He called this painting, which now hangs in the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, Le Christ au Jardin des Oliviers, or, Christ in the Garden of Olives.

***

There are two globally renowned olive gardens: Gethsemane, the grove where Jesus and his disciples prayed the night before his betrayal and crucifixion, its agony painted by Gauguin and by hundreds of other painters, and the fictional Tuscan hillside that lends its name to Olive Garden, a massive restaurant chain with more than 800 locations in North America. The two appear to be unconnected: According to Darden Restaurants, owner of the Olive Garden chain, the phrase is intended to call to mind ideas of the olive harvest and Tuscan authenticity, not the final, anguished night of a prophet, dark hours spent in prayer, wrath, and silence.

Despite the promises of the name, it can be a challenge to find actual olives at Olive Garden. The omission is intentional, though the irony is not. It's a simple matter of marketing: People don't like olives. They don't know what to do with them. They show up occasionally on the menu; their most recent engagement, on a “Mediterranean flatbread,” seems to no longer be available, part of an unbroken chain of olive-adorned dishes that have languished, unordered and unloved, before being dispatched by less culinarily threatening options like Meatball Stuffed Pizza Fritta.

Still, there are two places you'll always find olives at Olive Garden, no matter which way the menu consultants declare that the wind is blowing: The bar, where green spheroids wait, limply piled, to be pressed into service for a martini, and in the salad bowls. Two black olives — exactly two — are supposed to be in every family-size bowl, though when I was at an Olive Garden in Michigan City, Indiana, my server admitted that about half her tables ask for them to be kept out, or simply leave them on the side.

She was a little surprised when I asked where all the olives were — she said it’s usually the middle-aged men who fling that joke at her, which maybe I should have seen coming. According to her, they all order the Tour of Italy, a three-way sampler of lasagna, chicken parm, and fettuccine alfredo. No one really wants to eat any olives. The other joke she gets, usually from the same sort of men, is “Where’s the garden?” No one actually wants to see a garden, they just want to make the pretty waitress blush.

This was the third Olive Garden I’d been to in two weeks, and in the weeks to come I’d eat at half a dozen more — a grand tour of Tours of Italy, a chain of chains stretching from New York to California. The brand is in the middle of a grand reimagining, an overhauling of its hundreds of stores, that will dispense with its tile and faux-stucco and genially middlebrow upholstery in favor of a more streamlined, anodyne aesthetic of white walls, dark wood, and colorblocking. It’s a massive undertaking — not all locations are transforming at once — so while some restaurants I went to have entered the chain’s glossy future, many were still the Olive Gardens of the prior era. In these, you can still find some olives: On the shoulder-height half-walls that carve cavernous dining rooms into sections, sit potted rows of faux olive trees, slim shoots sprouting dusty green leaves and clusters of dark plastic footballs. You can’t eat them, but they remind you that somewhere, the real thing is growing on a real tree, and maybe you could.

I feel an intense affinity for Olive Garden, which — like the lack of olives on its menu — is by design. The restaurant was built for affinity, constructed from the foundations to the faux-finished rafters to create a sense of connection, of vague familiarity, to bring to mind some half-lost memory of old-world simplicity and ease. Even if you’ve never been to the Olive Garden before, you’re supposed to feel like you have. You know the next song that’s going to play. You know how the chairs roll against the carpet. You know where the bathrooms are. Its product is nominally pasta and wine, but what Olive Garden is actually selling is Olive Garden, a room of comfort and familiarity, a place to return to over and over.

In that way, it’s just like any other chain restaurant. For any individual mid-range restaurant, return customers have always been an easy majority of the clientele, and chain-wide, it’s overwhelmingly the case: If you’ve been to one Olive Garden, odds are very high you’ve been to two or more. If the restaurant is doing it right, though, all the Olive Gardens of your life will blur together into one Olive Garden, one host stand, one bar, one catacomb of dining alcoves warmly decorated in Toscana-lite. Each Olive Garden is a little bit different, but their souls are all the same. (...)

It’s not a coincidence that Olive Gardens tend to spring up near highways and shopping malls, within the orbit of mid-range hotels. Chain begets chain, or maybe chains are more comfortable among other chains — and in sufficient concentration they cause a little hiccup in the psychospace of reality, erasing any locality or sense of place, replacing it with a sanitized, brand-driven commercial hospitality. In downtown Salt Lake City or western Massachusetts or on the southern edge of the Chicago suburbs, wherever you see an Olive Garden, you’ll find something like a Quality Inn & Suites nearby. These accretions of commercial activity, stripped from geographic or historical identity, are what the French anthropologist Marc Augé talks about as “non-places.” (He also finds non-place in, of all places, Tahiti — specifically as seen through the eyes of a traveler, someone who is more interested in the fulfillment of his self-conception than in the spectacle that surrounds him.) What it means to be a non-place is the same thing it means to be a chain: A plural nothingness, a physical space without an anchor to any actual location on Earth, or in time, or in any kind of spiritual arc. In its void, it simply is.

Despite its flirtation with the existential abyss, a non-place isn't necessarily a bad thing for a place to be. It may be bad sometimes, or even frequently, but it isn’t always. One of the things I love about the Olive Garden, the reason I continue to love it, despite its gummy pasta and its maladaptive, kale-forward response to modern food culture, is its nowhereness. I love that I can walk in the door of an Olive Garden in Michigan City, Indiana, and feel like I’m in the same room I enter when I step into an Olive Garden in Queens or Rhode Island or the middle of Los Angeles. There is only one Olive Garden, but it has a thousand doors. (...)

The well-paid suits who run Olive Garden have tried, many times, to breathe new life into their chain, and it always backfires spectacularly. They’ve flirted with small plates, they put kale and polenta on the menu, they recently started slicing the breadsticks down the middle and making sandwiches out of them. Most tables and bar seats have little unobtrusive video screens on which customers can hail their server for a refill, or pay $1.99 to test their trivia knowledge against other players who allegedly are real, but almost certainly are not. At most locations, the fake olive plants with their twisty branches have already been chucked in the trash, the walls have been un-stuccoed, and the chairs have been stripped of their exquisitely smooth-rolling wheels. By next year, they’ll all be gone.

Every time Olive Garden tries to freshen its image, to move away from its cultural role as a punchline for faux authenticity and mediocre mall food, everything collapses. Nobody wants to eat kale at Olive Garden. Nobody wants garlic hummus. We want soup and salad and unlimited breadsticks, we want never-ending bowls of pasta with a variety of sauces, we want giant glasses full of Coke and tiny wine glasses full of plonky reds and fruity whites. Just about the only stunt Olive Garden has ever pulled that’s been successful — and it’s been a raging success, an astounding, nearly unbelievable one — has been the Pasta Pass. For $100, you can buy a card that entitles you to seven weeks of unlimited unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks, and unlimited never-ending pasta bowls. Or you could buy it, if you were one of the 22,000 people who managed to snatch them up before they sold out in one second. One. Second. That’s how much no one cares if Olive Garden serves kale.

by Helen Rosner, Eater |  Read more:

Image: Paul Gaugin, Christ in the Garden of Olives
[ed. See also: As Goes the Middle Class, So Goes TGI Fridays]

How Economists Turned Corporations into Predators

The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense

In a new INET paper featured in the Financial Times, economist William Lazonick lays out a theory about how corporations can work for everyone – not just a few executives and Wall Streeters. He challenges a set of controversial ideas that became gospel in business schools and the mainstream media starting in the 1980s. He sat down with INET’s Lynn Parramore to discuss.

Lynn Parramore: Since the 1980s, business schools have touted “agency theory,” a controversial set of ideas meant to explain how corporations best operate. Proponents say that you run a business with the goal of channeling money to shareholders instead of, say, creating great products or making any efforts at socially responsible actions such as taking account of climate change. Many now take this view as gospel, even though no less a business titan than Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, called the notion that a company should be run to maximize shareholder value “the dumbest idea in the world.” Why did Welch say that?

William Lazonick: Welch made that statement in a 2009 interview, just ahead of the news that GE had lost its S&P Triple-A rating in the midst of the financial crisis. He explained that, “shareholder value is a result, not a strategy” and that a company’s “main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” During his tenure as GE CEO from 1981 to 2001, Welch had an obsession with increasing the company’s stock price and hitting quarterly earnings-per-share targets, but he also understood that revenues come when your company generates innovative products. He knew that the employees’ skills and efforts enable the company to develop those products and sell them.

If a publicly-listed corporation succeeds in creating innovative goods or services, then shareholders stand to gain from dividend payments if they hold shares or if they sell at a higher price. But where does the company’s value actually come from? It comes from employees who use their collective and cumulative learning to satisfy customers with great products. It follows that these employees are the ones who should be rewarded when the business is a success. We’ve become blinded to this simple, obvious logic.

LP: What have these academic theorists missed about how companies really operate and perform? How have their views impacted our economy and society?

WL: As I show in my new INET paper “Innovative Enterprise Solves the Agency Problem,” agency theorists don’t have a theory of innovative enterprise. That’s strange, since they are talking about how companies succeed.

They believe that to be efficient, business corporations should be run to “maximize shareholder value.” But as I have argued in another recent INET paper, public shareholders at a company like GE are not investors in the company’s productive capabilities.

LP: Wait, as a stockholder I’m not an investor in the company’s capabilities?

WL: When you buy shares of a stock, you are not creating value for the company — you’re just a saver who buys shares outstanding on the stock market for the sake of a yield on your financial portfolio. Public shareholders are value extractors, not value creators.

By touting public shareholders as a corporation’s value creators, agency theorists lay the groundwork for some very harmful activities. They legitimize “hedge fund activists,” for example. These are aggressive corporate predators who buy shares of a company on the stock market and then use the power bestowed upon them by the ill-conceived U.S. proxy voting system, endorsed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to demand that the corporation inflate profits by cutting costs. That often means mass layoffs and depressed incomes for anybody who remains. In an industry like pharmaceuticals, the activists also press for extortionate product price increases. The higher profits tend to boost stock prices for the activists and other shareholders if they sell their shares on the market.

LP: So the hedge fund activists are extracting value from a corporation instead of creating it, and yet they are the ones who get enriched.

WL: Right. Agency theory aids and abets this value extraction by advocating, in the name of “maximizing shareholder value,” massive distributions to shareholders in the form of dividends for holding shares as well as stock buybacks that you hear about, which give manipulative boosts to stock prices. Activists get rich when they sell the shares. The people who created the value — the employees — often get poorer.

“downsize-and-distribute” —something that corporations have been doing since the 1980s, which has resulted in extreme concentration of income among the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities.

LP: You’ve called stock buybacks — what happens when a company buys back its own shares from the marketplace, often to manipulate the stock price upwards— the “legalized looting of the U.S. business corporation.” What’s the problem with this practice?

WL: If you buy shares in Apple, for example, you can get a dividend for holding shares and, possibly, a capital gain when you sell the shares. Since 2012, when Apple made its first dividend payment since 1996, the company has shelled out $57.4 billion as dividends, equivalent to over 22 percent of net income. That’s fine. But the company has also spent $157.9 billion on stock buybacks, equal to 62 percent of net income.

Yet the only time in its history that Apple ever raised funds on the public stock market was in 1980, when it collected $97 million in its initial public offering. How can a corporation return capital to parties that never supplied it with capital? It’s a very misleading concept.

The vast majority of people who hold Apple’s publicly-listed shares have simply bought outstanding shares on the stock market. They have contributed nothing to Apple’s value-creating capabilities. That includes veteran corporate raider Carl Icahn, who raked in $2 billion by holding $3.6 billion in Apple shares for about 32 months, while using his influence to encourage Apple to do $80.3 billion in buybacks in 2014-2015, the largest repurchases ever. Over this period, Apple, the most cash-rich company in history, increased its debt by $47.6 billion to do buybacks so that it would not have to repatriate its offshore profits, sheltered from U.S. corporate taxes.

There are many ways in which the company could have returned its profits to employees and taxpayers — the realvalue creators — that are consistent with an innovative business model. Instead, in doing massive buybacks, Apple’s board (which includes former Vice President Al Gore) has endorsed legalized looting. The SEC bears a lot of blame. It’s supposed to protect investors and make sure financial markets are free of manipulation. But back in 1982, the SEC bought into agency theory under Reagan and came up with a rule that gives corporate executives a “safe harbor” against charges of stock-price manipulation when they do billions of dollars of buybacks for the sole purpose of manipulating their company’s stock price.

LP: But don’t shareholders deserve some of the profits as part owners of the corporation?

WL: Let’s say you buy stock in General Motors. You are just buying a share that is outstanding on the market. You are contributing nothing to the company. And you will only buy the shares because the stock market is highly liquid, enabling you to easily sell some or all of the shares at any moment that you so choose.

In contrast, people who work for General Motors supply skill and effort to generate the company’s innovative products. They are making productive contributions with expectations that, if the innovative strategy is successful, they will share in the gains — a bigger paycheck, employment security, a promotion. In providing their labor services, these employees are the real value creators whose economic futures are at risk.

by Lynn Parramore and William Lazonick, Institute for New Economic Thinking via: Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. See also: Donald Trump is exposing the contradictions of the elite]

Drawing Dogs in George Booth’s Living Room

via:

Sorrento's

Sorrento's pizza (Anchorage). World's best.
photo: markk

What Once Was Lost: Unfinding and Refinding Music History

Most of us have, at one time or another, put something valuable in a supposedly safe place and then forgotten where we left it. Car keys, wallets, eyeglasses, cell phones—whether through distraction or neglect or diabolical misfortune, things disappear. And it’s not just household items. Over the centuries, more than a few of our most precious cultural artifacts have been lost in similar ways. This includes historically significant music manuscripts, a spate of which have turned up in recent years, to the delight of musicologists and listeners alike. Which is to say that sometimes, through an unpredictable combination of knowledge, awareness, sleuthing, and occasional pure luck, lost treasures are, like paradise, regained.

Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history.

Olivia Harrison, whom I believe would consider herself a curator of her husband’s legacy, was revising and updating George’s 1980 memoir/scrapbook, I Me Mine, when she decided to search through previously ignored nooks and crannies for fresh material to include in the book. This February, Ms. Harrison presented a copy of the lyrics to a stunned Ringo at a Los Angeles party commemorating George’s seventy-fourth birthday, expressing hope that he and Paul McCartney would record it. She is said to be searching now for a possible demo tape made by George more than four decades ago that would give his surviving bandmates a key to how lyrics like “Hey Ringo, now I want you to know, that without you my guitar plays far too slow” were meant to be set to music.

One might think such a discovery is a rare occurrence. But other, even older, manuscripts thought to be lost forever have been surfacing—often in dusty lockers, attics, archives—with curious regularity. If Beatles material can arise from the abyss, why not Beethoven?

In fact, a Beethoven manuscript turned up a little over a decade ago in, of all places, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A piano duet transcription of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the original finale of the composer’s renowned and revolutionary Opus 130 String Quartet, had been acquired by an unknown buyer at an auction house in Berlin in 1890. It then made its circuitous way to the Palmer Theological Seminary, where it was put on a shelf and forgotten for over a hundred years. That is, until an intrepid librarian named Heather Carbo, going about the mundane business of cleaning the seminary’s archive cabinets one summer day, recognized the eighty-page document—scribed vigorously in sepia ink in the composer’s own hand—and lifted it out of obscurity.

The heavily revised and annotated score was written toward the very end of Beethoven’s life, when he was altogether deaf. It fetched $1.9 million at Sotheby’s in London, in December 2005, a handsome sum by any calculus, but its real value lies in insights it offers musicologists into his working habits and thoughts before his death in 1827.

Another astounding discovery occurred when the German musicologist Timo Jouko Herrmann read patiently through the digital catalogue of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague, entry by entry. He was floored when he realized that the museum’s holdings included a musical collaboration by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his supposed rival, Antonio Salieri. The work, a cantata titled Per la ricuperata salute di Offelia (“For the recovering health of Ophelia”) was scripted in three parts by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was acquired by the museum in the years after World War II, part of a larger cache of music scores, then proceeded to go missing during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Da Ponte had collaborated with Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro in 1786. For this piece, he had Salieri composing music for the first section, Mozart for the middle, and a lesser-known composer named Cornetti for the final movement. The surfacing of Offelia debunks the legend that Salieri—played with sinister finesse by F. Murray Abraham in the film version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus—poisoned Mozart out of jealousy. In fact, it is now clear that they must have worked together in the mid-1780s. The piece was performed last February, in Prague, for the first time in centuries—perhaps ever.

When interviewed about “Hey Ringo” and other works by her husband that had gone astray, Olivia Harrison admitted to having had “a reluctance to disturb these little time capsules,” saying, “You don’t want to decant someone’s life.” Yet the mundane work of many archivists, librarians, and researchers—documentation, cataloguing—is often motivated by just that desire: to disturb the time capsules and reveal what is hidden in them, to bring them to light for fresh study. In short, to decant lives and the artistic work produced during them. And if finding a misplaced wristwatch or favorite ring is cause for excitement, imagine the joy of an archivist who unearths an artifact that changes cultural history.

by Bradford Morrow, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Felix Vallotton, Lady at the Piano, 1904.

The Last Invention of Man

How AI might take over the world

The Omega Team was the soul of the company. Whereas the rest of the enterprise brought in the money to keep things going, by various commercial applications of narrow AI, the Omega Team pushed ahead in their quest for what had always been the CEO’s dream: building general artificial intelligence. Most other employees viewed “the Omegas,” as they affectionately called them, as a bunch of pie-in-the-sky dreamers, perpetually decades away from their goal. They happily indulged them, however, because they liked the prestige that the cutting-edge work of the Omegas gave their company, and they also appreciated the improved algorithms that the Omegas occasionally gave them.

What they didn’t realize was that the Omegas had carefully crafted their image to hide a secret: They were extremely close to pulling off the most audacious plan in human history. Their charismatic CEO had handpicked them not only for being brilliant researchers, but also for ambition, idealism, and a strong commitment to helping humanity. He reminded them that their plan was extremely dangerous, and that if powerful governments found out, they would do virtually anything—including kidnapping—to shut them down or, preferably, to steal their code. But they were all in, 100 percent, for much the same reason that many of the world’s top physicists joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons: They were convinced that if they didn’t do it first, someone less idealistic would.

The AI they had built, nicknamed Prometheus, kept getting more capable. Although its cognitive abilities still lagged far behind those of humans in many areas, for example, social skills, the Omegas had pushed hard to make it extraordinary at one particular task: programming AI systems. They’d deliberately chosen this strategy because they had bought the intelligence explosion argument made by the British mathematician Irving Good back in 1965: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

They figured that if they could get this recursive self-improvement going, the machine would soon get smart enough that it could also teach itself all other human skills that would be useful.

The First Millions

It was 9 o’clock on a Friday morning when they decided to launch. Prometheus was humming away in its custom-built computer cluster, which resided in long rows of racks in a vast, access-controlled, air-conditioned room. For security reasons, it was completely disconnected from the Internet, but it contained a local copy of much of the web (Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, Twitter, a selection from YouTube, much of Facebook, etc.) to use as its training data to learn from.* They’d picked this start time to work undisturbed: Their families and friends thought they were on a weekend corporate retreat. The kitchenette was loaded with microwaveable food and energy drinks, and they were ready to roll.

When they launched, Prometheus was slightly worse than them at programming AI systems, but made up for this by being vastly faster, spending the equivalent of thousands of person-years chugging away at the problem while they chugged a Red Bull. By 10 a.m., it had completed the first redesign of itself, v2.0, which was slightly better but still subhuman. By the time Prometheus 5.0 launched at 2 p.m., however, the Omegas were awestruck: It had blown their performance benchmarks out of the water, and the rate of progress seemed to be accelerating. By nightfall, they decided to deploy Prometheus to start phase 2 of their plan: making money.

Their first target was MTurk, the Amazon Mechanical Turk. After its launch in 2005 as a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace, it had grown rapidly, with tens of thousands of people around the world anonymously competing around the clock to perform highly structured chores called HITs, “Human Intelligence Tasks.” These tasks ranged from transcribing audio recordings to classifying images and writing descriptions of web pages, and all had one thing in common: If you did them well, nobody would know that you were an AI. Prometheus 10.0 was able to do about half of the task categories acceptably well. For each such task category, the Omegas had Prometheus design a lean custom-built narrow AI software module that could do precisely such tasks and nothing else. They then uploaded this module to Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing platform that could run on as many virtual machines as they rented. For every dollar they paid to Amazon’s cloud-computing division, they earned more than $2 from Amazon’s MTurk division. Little did Amazon suspect that such an amazing arbitrage opportunity existed within their own company! (...)

Because they weren’t sure how its goals would evolve during its recursive self-improvement, they had decided to play it safe and go to great lengths to keep Prometheus confined (“boxed”) in ways such that it couldn’t escape onto the Internet. For the main Prometheus engine running in their server room, they used physical confinement: There simply was no Internet connection, and the only output from Prometheus was in the form of messages and documents it sent to a computer that the Omegas controlled.

On an Internet-connected computer, on the other hand, running any complicated program created by Prometheus was a risky proposition: Since the Omegas had no way of fully understanding what it would do, they had no way of knowing that it wouldn’t, say, start virally spreading itself online. When testing the software that Prometheus had written for MTurk tasks, the Omegas guarded against this by running it only inside a virtual machine. This is a program that simulates a computer: For example, many Mac users buy virtual machine software that lets them run Windows programs by tricking them into thinking that they’re actually in a Windows machine. The Omegas had created their own virtual machine, nicknamed Pandora’s Box, which simulated an ultrasimplified machine stripped of all bells and whistles that we usually associate with computers: No keyboard, no monitor, no loudspeakers, no Internet connectivity, nothing. For the MTurk audio transcriptions, the Omegas set things up so that all that could go into Pandora’s Box was one single audio file and all that could come out was one single text document—the transcription. These laws of the box were to the software inside like the laws of physics are to us inside our universe: The software couldn’t travel out of the box any more than we can travel faster than the speed of light, no matter how smart we are. Except for that single input and output, the software inside Pandora’s Box was effectively trapped in a parallel universe with its own computational rules. The Omegas had such strong breakout paranoia that they added boxing in time as well, limiting the life span of untrusted code. For example, each time the boxed transcription software had finished transcribing one audio file, the entire memory content of Pandora’s Box was automatically erased and the program was reinstalled from scratch. This way, when it started the next transcription task, it had no knowledge of what had previously happened, and thus no ability to learn over time.

When the Omegas used the Amazon cloud for their MTurk project, they were able to put all their Prometheus-created task modules into such virtual boxes in the cloud, because the MTurk input and output was so simple. But this wouldn’t work for graphics-heavy computer games, which couldn’t be boxed in because they needed full access to all the hardware of the gamer’s computer. Moreover, they didn’t want to risk that some computer-savvy user would analyze their game code, discover Pandora’s Box and decide to investigate what was inside. The breakout risk put not merely the games market off-limits for now, but also the massively lucrative market for other software, with hundreds of billions of dollars up for grabs. (...)

New Technologies

Over a timescale of months, the business empire controlled by the Omegas started gaining a foothold in ever more areas of the world economy, thanks to superhuman planning by Prometheus. By carefully analyzing the world’s data, it had already during its first week presented the Omegas with a detailed step-by-step growth plan, and it kept improving and refining this plan as its data and computer resources grew. Although Prometheus was far from omniscient, its capabilities were now so far beyond human that the Omegas viewed it as the perfect oracle, dutifully providing brilliant answers and advice in response to all their questions.

Prometheus’ software was now highly optimized to make the most of the rather mediocre human-invented hardware it ran on, and as the Omegas had anticipated, Prometheus identified ways of dramatically improving this hardware. Fearing a breakout, they refused to build robotic construction facilities that Prometheus could control directly. Instead, they hired large numbers of world-class scientists and engineers in multiple locations and fed them internal research reports written by Prometheus, pretending that they were from researchers at the other sites. These reports detailed novel physical effects and manufacturing techniques that their engineers soon tested, understood, and mastered. Normal human research and development (R&D) cycles, of course, take years, in large part because they involve many slow cycles of trial and error. The current situation was very different: Prometheus already had the next steps figured out, so the limiting factor was simply how rapidly people could be guided to understand and build the right things. A good teacher can help students learn science much faster than they could have discovered it from scratch on their own, and Prometheus surreptitiously did the same with these researchers. Since Prometheus could accurately predict how long it would take humans to understand and build things given various tools, it developed the quickest possible path forward, giving priority to new tools that could be quickly understood and built and that were useful for developing more advanced tools.

In the spirit of the maker movement, the engineering teams were encouraged to use their own machines to build their better machines. This self-sufficiency not only saved money, but it also made them less vulnerable to future threats from the outside world. Within two years, they were producing much better computer hardware than the world had ever known. To avoid helping outside competition, they kept this technology under wraps and used it only to upgrade Prometheus.

What the world did notice, however, was an astonishing tech boom. Upstart companies around the world were launching revolutionary new products in almost all areas. A South Korean startup launched a new battery that stored twice as much energy as your laptop battery in half the mass, and could be charged in under a minute. A Finnish firm released a cheap solar panel with twice the efficiency of the best competitors. A German company announced a new type of mass-producible wire that was superconducting at room temperature, revolutionizing the energy sector. A Boston-based biotech group announced a Phase II clinical trial of what they claimed was the first effective, side-effect-free weight-loss drug, while rumors suggested that an Indian outfit was already selling something similar on the black market. A California company countered with a Phase II trial of a blockbuster cancer drug, which caused the body’s immune system to identify and attack cells with any of the most common cancerous mutations. Examples just kept on coming, triggering talk of a new golden age for science. Last but not least, robotics companies were cropping up like mushrooms all around the world. None of the bots came close to matching human intelligence, and most of them looked nothing like humans. But they dramatically disrupted the economy, and over the years to come, they gradually replaced most of the workers in manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, retail, construction, mining, agriculture, forestry, and fishing.

What the world didn’t notice, thanks to the hard work of a crack team of lawyers, was that all these firms were controlled, through a series of intermediaries, by the Omegas. Prometheus was flooding the world’s patent offices with sensational inventions via various proxies, and these inventions gradually led to domination in all areas of technology.

Although these disruptive new companies made powerful enemies among their competition, they made even more powerful friends. They were exceptionally profitable, and under slogans such as “Investing in our community,” they spent a significant fraction of these profits hiring people for community projects—often the same people who had been laid off from the companies that were disrupted. They used detailed Prometheus-produced analyses identifying jobs that would be maximally rewarding for the employees and the community for the least cost, tailored to the local circumstances. In regions with high levels of government service, this often focused on community building, culture, and caregiving, while in poorer regions it also included launching and maintaining schools, healthcare, day care, elder care, affordable housing, parks, and basic infrastructure. Pretty much everywhere, locals agreed that these were things that should have been done long ago. Local politicians got generous donations, and care was taken to make them look good for encouraging these corporate community investments.

by Max Tegmark, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Sophy Hollington

Corey Arnold, The mud set (2012)
via:

Tadanori Yokoo, Poster for 16th Exhibition of Japan Advertising Artists Club
via:

What To Do If You See A Bear

You may have received conflicting advice on how to act when you encounter a bear. Finally, the U.S. Forestry Department has put together a definitive guide, based on the latest research. Once and for all, this is what you’re supposed to do when you see a bear.

If You See a Black Bear

Black bears are black. They have black fur, which looks black, when you see it. If you encounter a black bear, do not make eye contact. If you make eye contact, black bears will take this as an act of aggression. They will put two and two together and go nuts on you and ruin your life. But also don’t look away. Just look to the side, or act as if you spotted something over the black bear’s shoulder. Like, “Oh, that leaf? That’s good stuff.” Then stick your arms out to make yourself look bigger and back away slowly. But not too slowly. If you back away too slowly, black bears will think you are simply delicious. The last thing you want is for a black bear to think that. If you happen to have a neon traffic cone, go ahead and put it between you and the bear. Not because black bears understand traffic signals, but because it’s a well known fact that they hate neon shit. (...)

If You See a Brown Bear

Brown bears are brown, with fur that can be qualified as “standard brown.” Brown bears tend to be peaceful and to keep to themselves, going along with their daily business, until someone comes up to them and starts playing the devil’s advocate. The last thing you want to do around a brown bear is jauntily take a contrarian stance in order to challenge its preconceived notions. If you do this, the bear will feel as if he is being razzed within an inch of his life, and might decide to take you, and everyone you’re with, “to town” in the sense of killing you. Also, there is a common misconception that brown bears appreciate the art of a good psych-out. We cannot stress enough how untrue this is. Do not attempt to psych-out a brown bear by showing him a photo of what looks like a computer chip but turns out to be an aerial view of a city. This will cause him to turn into his most conflicted self.

If You See a Grizzly Bear

If you see a grizzly bear, the most important thing to remember is to not ride its nuts about anything. Like whether it’s foraged enough today. Or stuck its head out and growled in a terrifying manner. Or had a salmon jump into its mouth from a stream in a picturesque way. If it senses you’re riding its nuts about any of this stuff, it might just get up in arms and have a snack-attack with your body. We can’t stress this enough: if you see a Grizzly Bear, just give it the sense that it’s doing a great job, that it’s generally done “enough,” and that every decision it’s ever made has been the right one.

by Emma Rathbone, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: UIG via Getty
[ed. I'm in Alaska this week so thought I'd repost this. Actually, brown and grizzly bears are one and the same, except brown bears are found in coastal habitats and grizzlies further inland, so don't try to out-psych either one of them. Also (to be pedantic) black bears are black, but also cinnamon-colored, and even blue (glacier bears). So yeah, other than that, all this seems like good advice.]

Martin Grohs
via: