An Alternate Universe of Shopping, in Ohio

It was a scorching day outside, hot even for late summer in Ohio, and yet I was freezing. I had stepped inside the EB Ice Box, a meat-locker-like display at the Eddie Bauer store here that was cooled to 13 degrees Fahrenheit. The metal-sheathed room looked out onto the promenade of an upscale shopping mall, and featured a large block of ice for a bench. Even though I was wearing a down jacket (the room is meant to be a place where customers can test Eddie Bauer wear), the frigid air had gotten under my skin.

The ice box was a gambit designed to attract the one thing so many stores like Eddie Bauer seem to be missing these days — customers.

For shoppers, this city of 860,000 smack in the middle of a swing state, can feel like an alternate reality, a place where up is down and down is up. Frumpy department stores feature personal shopping services and boutique wellness amenities. Workaday grocery stores like Kroger offer exotic fruits and freshly baked artisan breads.

Even the fast-food business is living in the future. McDonald’s is offering table service from friendly waiters. Robots are taking orders at Wendy’s. Chipotle started a chain that serves hamburgers.

That kind of experimentation has long been a feature of the Columbus shopping scene, but these days it stems as much from desperation as from innovation. The physical retail market, crumbling in the face of competition from e-commerce sites, is in the midst of a transformation as fundamental as the one that shifted consumers to suburban shopping malls — and away from Main Street — half a century ago. (...)

“We are Test Market, U.S.A.,” said Irene Alvarez, director of marketing and communications for Columbus 2020, a trade group that promotes the region. “We decide the fate of cheeseburgers and presidents here in Columbus.”

A combination of demographics, geography and luck turned Columbus into the nation’s consumer laboratory. This Rust Belt city has historically been a microcosm of the national population’s age and ethnicity, ranking fourth among metropolitan areas in its resemblance to the United States over all, according to data compiled by WalletHub.

“It’s a perfect melting pot for folks like us to test new concepts,” said Roger Rawlins, chief executive of DSW, the shoe retailer, which is based in Columbus.

Ohio State University’s 65,000 students mean young shoppers are always on hand. Columbus is within a day’s drive of nearly half of the United States population, making it a convenient hub for distribution. The city’s relatively small size and contained media market make it affordable for companies to run advertising campaigns and measure their effectiveness. And its relatively low profile allows brands to try something and fail — without the scrutiny they would draw in New York or Los Angeles.

Perhaps most important, a robust network of retailers and service providers — from big brands like Abercrombie & Fitch to small design firms that focus on store layouts — has taken root in Columbus. Today there are more fashion designers in Columbus than in any other American city besides New York and Los Angeles.

by David Gelles, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Andrew Spear for The New York Times

The Death of Languages

"You mentioned before that at one point, everyone spoke Sumerian. Then, nobody did. It just vanished, like the dinorsaurs. And there's no genocide to explain how that happened. Which is consistent with the Tower of Babel story... Did Lagos think that Babel really happened?"

"He was sure of it. He was quite concerned about the vast number of human languages. He felt there were simply too many of them."

"How many?"

"Tens of thousands. In many parts of the world, you will find people of the same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. This sort of thing is not an oddity --  it is ubiquitous. Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue."

"Has anyone come up with an answer yet?"

"The question is difficult and profound," the Librarian says...

                                                                                       -- Snowcrash, Neil Stephenson, 1992

The year 2010 saw the death of Boa Senior, the last living speaker of Aka-Bo, a tribal language native to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. News coverage of Boa Senior’s death noted that she had survived the 2004 tsunami – an event that was reportedly foreseen by tribe elders – along with the Japanese occupation of 1942 and the barbaric policies of British colonisers. The linguist Anvita Abbi, who knew Boa Senior for many years, said: ‘After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people.’

Tales of language extinction are invariably tragic. But why, exactly? Aka-Bo, like many other extinct languages, did not make a difference to the lives of the vast majority of people. Yet the sense that we lose something valuable when languages die is familiar. Just as familiar, though, is the view that preserving minority languages is a waste of time and resources. I want to attempt to make sense of these conflicting attitudes.

The simplest definition of a minority language is one that is spoken by less than half of some country or region. This makes Mandarin – the world’s most widely spoken language – a minority language in many countries. Usually, when we talk of minority languages, we mean languages that are minority languages even in the country in which they are most widely spoken. That will be our focus here. We’re concerned especially with minority languages that are endangered, or that would be endangered were it not for active efforts to support them.

The sorrow we feel about the death of a language is complicated. Boa Senior’s demise did not merely mark the extinction of a language. It also marked the loss of the culture of which she was once part; a culture that was of great interest to linguists and anthropologists, and whose extinction resulted from oppression and violence. There is, in addition, something melancholy about the very idea of a language’s last speaker; of a person who, like Boa Senior, suffered the loss of everyone to whom she was once able to chat in her mother tongue. All these things – the oppression until death of a once thriving culture, loneliness, and losing loved ones – are bad, regardless of whether they involve language death.

Part of our sadness when a language dies, then, has nothing to do with the language itself. Thriving majority languages do not come with tragic stories, and so they do not arouse our emotions in the same ways. Unsurprisingly, concern for minority languages is often dismissed as sentimental. Researchers on language policy have observed that majority languages tend to be valued for being useful and for facilitating progress, while minority languages are seen as barriers to progress, and the value placed on them is seen as mainly sentimental.

Sentimentality, we tend to think, is an exaggerated emotional attachment to something. It is exaggerated because it does not reflect the value of its object. The late philosopher G A Cohen describes a well-worn, 46-year-old eraser that he bought when he first became a lecturer, and that he would ‘hate to lose’. We all treasure such things – a decades-old rubber, our children’s drawings, a long-expired train ticket from a trip to see the one we love – that are worthless to other people. If the value of minority languages is mainly sentimental, it is comparable to the value that Cohen placed on his old eraser. It would be cruel to destroy it deliberately, yet it would be unreasonable for him to expect society to invest significant resources preserving it. The same might be true of minority languages: their value to some just doesn’t warrant the society-wide effort required to preserve them.

by Rebecca Roache, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Mujahid Safodien/AFP/Getty

via:

A Tale of Two Islands

Hurricanes develop in the Atlantic ocean and move across the cold water towards the warmer sea of the Caribbean. All that energy journeys, picking up steam, driving forward with immense force. This September, hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia and Maria thrust themselves into the Caribbean and devastated many of its islands as well as the coastline of the United States and Central America. One meteorologist, Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University, suggested that this September was the most deadly hurricane month since 1893.

Changes in the world’s climate, scientists suggest, have made these Atlantic cyclones much more powerful than before. Warming waters increases the ability of the storms to draw in water vapour and to engorge themselves with more energy. These devastatingly formidable storms then drag the rising waters to produce dangerous storm surges that beat against coastlines and produce large-scale flooding. (...)

Cuba and Irma

Irma, a Category 5 hurricane—the strongest possible—struck Cuba with immense force in early September. The storm came fast and hard. The devastation was severe. In the small town of Moscu in the municipality of Esmeralda (Camaguey province), only 10 of its 289 houses remained standing. The Cuban journalist Yaditza del Sol Gonzalez reported for Granma that near Jiguey beach “the sea took it all”. The storm surge overcame the Malecon sea wall in Havana, sending water into its streets with ferocity. Havana, with its old buildings, suffered from flooding and power cuts. Ten people died, the majority of them in Havana. Cuba’s President Raul Castro took to the airwaves, calling for unity of the nation and for reconstruction of the island. “This is not the time to mourn,” Castro said, “but to build what the winds of Irma attempted to destroy.”

By all indications, the death toll in Cuba was remarkably low as was the devastation to the island’s infrastructure. Certainly, homes in the old part of Havana are brittle and parts of the infrastructure are in severe need of modernisation. But the island’s preparation for the hurricane and the general community spirit that prevails there saved it from total devastation. Tens of thousands of people had been evacuated from Havana in anticipation of the storm, and over a million people from across the island went into shelters. One such shelter was at the Karl Marx Vocational Pre-University in Matanzas, where volunteers gathered food, water and medical supplies for the evacuees.

The country’s pharmaceutical industry halted production of medicines a week before the storm in order to build up the stock of hydration salts, which were then distributed across the island. Electricity and gas supplies were cut before the storm came to the island, and measures were taken to protect the lines and transformers from the impact of the winds and the flooding. The government made sure to dispatch flour to state bakeries, which worked overtime to produce stocks of bread for the aftermath of the storm. Agricultural workers from Santiago de Cuba harvested their crops before they ripened in the field and distributed the produce.

Meanwhile, brigades and defence councils began to conduct search-and-rescue operations across the areas most affected by the hurricane. “The most important task is, and will be, the preservation of life,” said Dr Jose Luis Aparicio Suarez, a coordinator of one of the medical brigades. “The recovery will come later, gradually. Health and life are the absolute priorities.”

But rebuilding was not left to later. Radio Cadena Agramonte in Camaguey reported during the storm that electric workers had begun to restore power in the area. Within weeks, such workers restored the electric grid, which is not anyway in the best shape. The electric providers reported that the storm destroyed two high-tension pylons, downed 3,616 poles and 2,176 kilometres of power lines, and damaged 1,379 transformers and several substations. Today, almost the entire island has electrical power.

Just before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba, U.S. President Donald Trump renewed the embargo of the island. This means that Cuba will be denied crucial supplies needed for reconstruction, including financial assistance from multilateral organisations. Cuba’s finances cannot manage the reconstruction, but nonetheless the government has announced that its state budget will finance 50 per cent of the construction materials needed for the 158,554 homes that have been affected by the storm. Also, the government has said it will provide a 50 per cent discount on damaged household goods. For those who have had all their goods destroyed, the government has said it will cover 100 per cent of their expenses.

Puerto Rico and Maria

Hurricane Irma did not directly strike the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, but it did knock out its power grid. More than a million customers lost access to power and half of the island’s hospitals went offline. This happened without any rainfall on the island and without a direct hit from Irma. Last July, the government-owned power company declared bankruptcy when it could no longer service its debt of $9 billion. There was no money to protect the grid, nor was there money to hastily get it back on its feet. Irma’s strike on Puerto Rico was a warning of what was to come.

Ten days later, with the power grid still in distress, Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm, struck Puerto Rico. Power went out across the island. Drinking water was no longer available and fuel vanished. The 3.4 million U.S. citizens of the island found themselves stranded in an apocalyptic nightmare. The official death toll was given as 16, although the Centre for Investigative Journalism (School of Law at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico) says that there are already dozens of confirmed deaths, with the toll likely to rise to the hundreds. As hospitals are unable to function, the infirm are under danger of death. Dialysis has been halted; oxygen is not available. The Demographic Registry that certifies deaths has no power. It cannot do its work.(...)

Power company officials said it would take at least four, if not six, months for the power to be fully restored to Puerto Rico. This is on territory that is under U.S. government control, although according to a poll only 54 per cent of Americans know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Recovery has been glacially slow. In Aguadilla, thousands of desperate people were given four bottles of water and four snacks. They are starving and frustrated. The price of water has skyrocketed from $2.99 to $10 in many parts of the island. Carmen Yulin Cruz, the Mayor of the capital, San Juan, said: “I’m begging, begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying. If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying and you are killing us with the inefficiency.”

Trump celebrated the “incredible” job his government had done. “The loss of life—it’s always tragic—but it’s been incredible, the results that we’ve had with respect to loss of life,” he said. “People can’t believe how successful that has been, relatively speaking.” He waived the Jones Act, which prevents ships from coming directly into Puerto Rico without going to a U.S. mainland port. But this will not be enough. Cuba has even offered to send its personnel to the island, but the Trump administration has not acknowledged the request.

Here is a tale of two islands, one a poor socialist state with infrastructure in grave need of modernisation and the other a territory of one of the richest countries in the world. One has slowly emerged out of the chaos caused by a hurricane’s wrath, while the other cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel.

by Vijay Prashad, Frontline | Read more:
Image: Ramon Espinosa/AP

The Lasting Magic of Drift Bottles

Today, oceanographers mostly rely on the latest GPS technology to study how large masses of water travel around the world’s oceans. But it wasn’t so long ago that they relied on a decidedly less efficient, though certainly more romantic, strategy: drift bottles.

In a famous experiment run in June 1914, Captain C. Hunter Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation set adrift nearly 2,000 numbered bottles. Whoever found the bottle was asked to drop a note at the nearest post office stating its whereabouts. “Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea,” the instructions explained. One of them was found in 2012, making it the world’s oldest message-in-a-bottle.

A science teacher in North Carolina, Susan Schambach, is the latest person to adopt Brown’s technique. As part of a lesson to teach her students about the Gulf Stream, Schambach has her students fill empty wine bottles containing a short explanation of their drift bottle experiment, a postcard, and Schambach’s email address. They then have the bottles dropped into the Gulf Stream about 40 miles off the coast, and wait. Over the past five years, three out of Ms. Schambach’s 53 drift bottles have been found stranded on European beaches, and the most recent one washed up in Normandy last month. (...)

Drift bottles have a long history. It’s said that back in 310 B.C., the Greek philosopher Theophrastus tried to prove that the Mediterranean was formed by inflowing Atlantic currents by setting some bottles adrift and waiting for their return—they never did. During the 16th century, the British navy would communicate with Queen Elizabeth I by sending encrypted messages-in-bottles. Such was the strategic importance of these drifting codes that the Queen appointed an official “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles”—anyone else who dared to open them would face capital punishment.

Back in 2000, Eddy Carmack, a climate researcher at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Science, was so inspired by some of the amazing journeys drift bottles had made through history that he launched the Drift Bottle Project. Participants throw bottles over the side of ocean-going ships and mark the ‘drop’ location—when someone retrieves them, a ‘found’ location is added. Approximately one in every 25 bottles is found. The rest sink, wash up in uninhabited locations, or end up buried in sand. Carmack originally intended to use the lost and found bottles database to study ocean currents close to North America, but later extended its scope to the entire planet.

“There have been some amazing paths followed by these bottles,” he told National Geographic in 2012. Some were dropped off in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea, got frozen, and showed up five years later on the coasts of Northern Europe as a result of melting Arctic ice. Some made it from Mexico to the Philippines, while others proved that oil spills and debris from one part of the world can clearly affect far-reaching locations. It’s these deeply interconnected journeys that make the project so special to Carmack: “The main thing about this study is that it connects people with the currents of the ocean,” he told National Geographic. “We find that we are only a bottle drop away from our neighbors around the world.”

by Vittoria Traverso, Atlas Obscura |  Read more:

Image: Public domain

[ed. My first job with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game involved assembling drift bottles to study near-surface ocean currents in Cook Inlet and the Bering Sea (in anticipation of offshore oil leasing and potential oil spill trajectories - pdf). I spent a whole summer making thousands: plastic bottle, little bit of gravel, information card with pre-paid postage, then floating each in a tub of salt water to insure they floated properly with just the cap above water. Good times (I guess?). Fortunately, I also got to take them out and drop them (at pre-selected locations in a steeply banked, circling floatplane - just open the window and throw them out - 100 to a bag. I thought I was going out the window.) We got some percentage back (I can't remember how many, but not a high number), and from all over. One even came back postmarked from Lake Michigan. Everyone's a comedian.]

Government By Goldman

Steve Bannon was in the room the day Donald Trump first fell for Gary Cohn. So were Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s pick for secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. It was the end of November, three weeks after Trump’s improbable victory, and Cohn, then still the president of Goldman Sachs, was at Trump Tower presumably at the invitation of Kushner, with whom he was friendly. Cohn was there to offer his views about jobs and the economy. But, like the man he was there to meet, he was at heart a salesman.

On the campaign trail, Trump had spoken often about the importance of investing in infrastructure. Yet the president-elect had apparently failed to appreciate that the government would need to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to fund his plans. Cohn, brash and bold, wired to attack any moneymaking opportunity, pitched a fix that would put Wall Street firms at the center: Private-industry partners could help infrastructure get fixed, saving the federal government from going deeper into debt. The way the moment was captured by the New York Times, among other publications, Trump was dumbfounded. “Is this true?” he asked. Was a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan likely to increase the deficit by a trillion dollars? Confronted by nodding heads, an unhappy president-elect said, “Why did I have to wait to have this guy tell me?”

Within two weeks, the transition team announced that Cohn would take over as director of the president’s National Economic Council.

Goldman Always Wins

Goldman Sachs had been a favorite cudgel for candidate Trump — the symbol of a government that favors Wall Street over its citizenry. Trump proclaimed that Hillary Clinton was in the firm’s pockets, as was Ted Cruz. It was Goldman Sachs that Trump singled out when he railed against a system rigged in favor of the global elite — one that “robbed our working class, stripped our country of wealth, and put money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” Cohn, as president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, had been at the heart of it all. Aggressive and relentless, a former aluminum siding salesman and commodities broker with a nose for making money, Cohn had turned Goldman’s sleepy home loan unit into what a Senate staffer called “one of the largest mortgage trading desks in the world.” There, he aggressively pushed his sales team to sell mortgage-backed securities to unaware investors even as he watched over “the big short,” Goldman’s decision to bet billions of dollars that the market would collapse.

Now Cohn would be coordinating economic policy for the populist president.

The conflicts between the two men were striking. Cohn ran a giant investment bank with offices in financial capitals around the globe, one deeply committed to a world with few economic borders. Trump’s nationalist campaign contradicted everything Goldman Sachs and its top executives represented on the global stage.

Trump raged against “offshoring” by American companies during the 2016 campaign. He even threatened “retribution,”­ a 35 percent tariff on any goods imported into the United States by a company that had moved jobs overseas. But Cohn laid out Goldman’s very different view of offshoring at an investor conference in Naples, Florida, in November. There, Cohn explained unapologetically that Goldman had offshored its back-office staff, including payroll and IT, to Bangalore, India, now home to the firm’s largest office outside New York City: “We hire people there because they work for cents on the dollar versus what people work for in the United States.”

Candidate Trump promised to create millions of new jobs, vowing to be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” Cohn, as Goldman Sachs’s president and COO, oversaw the firm’s mergers and acquisitions business that had, over the previous three years, led to the loss of at least 22,000 U.S. jobs, according to a study by two advocacy groups. Early in his candidacy, Trump described as “disgusting” Pfizer’s decision to buy a smaller Irish competitor in order to execute a “corporate inversion,” a maneuver in which a U.S. company moves its headquarters overseas to reduce its tax burden. The Pfizer deal ultimately fell through. But in 2016, in the heat of the campaign, Goldman advised on a megadeal that saw Johnson Controls, a Fortune 500 company based in Milwaukee, buy the Ireland-based Tyco International with the same goal. A few months later, with Goldman’s help, Johnson Controls had executed its inversion.

With Cohn’s appointment, Trump now had three Goldman Sachs alums in top positions inside his administration: Steve Bannon, who was a vice president at Goldman when he left the firm in 1990, as chief strategist, and Steve Mnuchin, who had spent 17 years at Goldman, as Treasury secretary. And there were more to come. A few weeks later, another Goldman partner, Dina Powell, joined the White House as a senior counselor for economic initiatives. Goldman was a longtime client of Jay Clayton, Trump’s choice to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission; Clayton had represented Goldman after the 2008 financial crisis, and his wife Gretchen worked there as a wealth management adviser. And there was the brief, colorful tenure of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director: Scaramucci had been a vice president at Goldman Sachs before leaving to co-found his own investment company.

Even before Scaramucci, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had joked that enough Goldman alum were working for the Trump administration to open a branch office in the White House.

“There was a devastating financial crisis just over eight years ago,” Warren said. “Goldman Sachs was at the heart of that crisis. The idea that the president is now going to turn over the country’s economic policy to a senior Goldman executive turns my stomach.” Prior administrations often had one or two people from Goldman serving in top positions. George W. Bush at one point had three. At its peak, the Trump administration effectively had six.

Earlier this summer, Trump boasted about his team of economic advisers at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “This is the president of Goldman Sachs. Smart,” Trump said. “Having him represent us! He went from massive paydays to peanuts.”

Trump waved off anyone who might question his decision to rely on the very people he had demonized. “Somebody said, ‘Why did you appoint a rich person to be in charge of the economy?’ … I said: ‘Because that’s the kind of thinking we want.’” He needed “great, brilliant business minds … so the world doesn’t take advantage of us.” How else could he get the job done? “I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.”

“Does that make sense?” Trump asked. The crowd cheered.

by Gary Rivlin, Michael Hudson, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. And in other news from The Intercept, see: The Airport Bomber From Last Week You Never Heard About.] 

The Magic of Making Salt

“My mother boils seawater. It sits all afternoon simmering on the stovetop, almost two gallons in a big soup pot. The windows steam up and the house smells like a storm. In the evening, a crust of salt is all that’s left at the bottom of the pot. My mother scrapes it out with a spoon. We each lick a fingertip and dip them in the salt and it’s softer than you’d think, less like sand and more like snow. We lay our fingertips on our tongues, right in the middle. It tastes like salt but like something else, too—wide, and dark. It tastes like drowning, or like falling asleep on the shore and only waking up when the tide has come up to your feet and you wonder if you’d gone on sleeping, would you have sunk?”

That arrived in an email today from my daughter who had no idea I was working on this post. It is an excerpt from an essay on water for one of her classes. Now nineteen and a college sophomore, she has been witness to more of my food experiments than she can count. This is one that worked beautifully. I boiled a lot of seawater this summer. Mostly because while those of you down south were sweltering in one of the hottest summers ever, we were freezing our butts off here in Alaska. Anchorage experienced its coldest summer since they started keeping track of those things and in Homer, 220 miles south, we suffered through more 40-degree mornings than not. With all the cold and rain that accompanied, it just seemed right having cauldrons of hot water warming up my kitchen. And, I like to think of cooking as alchemy and while we may not call it art, I believe that there are certain mystical forces at play here—to be able to take a pot of water from the ocean and with very little effort extract from it something that will in turn transform whatever it touches. The beauty of salt is its ability to anonymously elevate everything it contacts. And to be able to conjure this valuable resource from something so vast to me is magic.

My friend Maurice is a writer who loves to cook, and I am a cook who loves writing, so whenever we get together the ideas fly. This summer, at his family’s camp across the bay for their yearly 4th of July celebration, much of the conversation revolved around making salt from seawater. We wondered if salts from other parts of the bay would taste different and discussed methods of declumping. From there the experiments continued until I think we have come up with the easiest, best method. Now that I have made the switch in my career from baker to savory chef running the dinner scene here at the bakery, salt and its many abilities rule my world and make it possible to use local ingredients as fully as they deserve.

To make your own salt from seawater: (..)

It is important to be sure your collection site is away from any possible human pollutants. Don’t collect on rainy or stormy days when things are stirred up. I gathered my water at slack tide right from the beach of Kachemak Bay. Homer has some crazy tidal changes, so it’s important to keep a tide book handy.

1. A gallon of water will produce about a cup of salt, depending on the salinity of the water in your area or recent heavy rainfall.

2. Filter your water through a fine cloth (Ruhlman’s All-Strain kitchen cloths would be perfect for this) into a glass or ceramic pot. I used stainless the first time and it worked great, but then in my research for this post I found that the stainless might react to the salt at high heat. Until I get that documented, I figure better safe than sorry. Do not under any circumstances use aluminum.

3. Once it is in the pot, bring to a hard simmer and let it go for about 2 hours per gallon of water. Yes, the house will start to smell like the sea, but that’s part of the magic.

4. As the water evaporates, stir occasionally and at the point it becomes a wet sludge, pull it off the heat and pour into a shallow glass pan. 

5. Spread the mixture out and dry further by either putting in the sun in a drafty window for a day or baking in a 200°F oven for another 30 minutes.

6. Scrape together and break it up with your fingers if you like big chunks or with a mortar and pestle to make it finer. You can also press it through a tamis or sieve.

To make flavored salt I added garlic cloves to the water and pulled them out as the sludge was forming . . . it’s got a nice caramel color and amazing roasted garlic flavor. I made the orange thyme salt by zesting orange rind into the saltwater and then grinding fresh thyme into it once it was dry. I rubbed it on pork ribs. Yeah.

If you don’t want to use fuel to dry your saltwater you can fill a shallow glass baking pan and leave it undisturbed in a sunny airy window. I unfortunately did not have enough heat or sun or patience to do this. I did use my oven for other things while I was baking the salt to not waste all that heat.

How does it taste? As she said, like the sea, wide and dark.

by Carri Thurman, Ruhlman | Read more:
Images: Carri Thurman
[ed. The cliffs I harvest salt from are susceptible to south swells, so it's sometimes discouraging to find evaporating pools re-inundated. Trying to be more pro-active. See also: Sea Salt]

The Philosophy of Fly-Fishing

When I was seventeen, I drove to Missoula, Montana, to learn how to fly-fish. The town is one of the best places to fish in the country. Rivers with names like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot crisscross the valley harboring trout the size of walruses. I spent that summer learning to cast and looking for the eddies and pools where fish might be lurking. I tried a thousand different flies and a hundred different rivers, and though I tensed my entire body to be ready for a strike, though I was living with a friend who made his living as a fishing guide, in three months I didn’t catch a single fish. Not one.

Published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler might best be described as a curiosity cabinet of a pious Renaissance naturalist. Framed as a dialogue between a veteran angler, Pescator, and his eager student, Venator, the book came recommended by practiced anglers and seemed to promise some bit of knowledge I was lacking. Next to descriptions of fish like pike (“a solitary, melancholy, and a bold Fish”), and bream (“scales set in excellent order”), were poems by George Herbert. Alongside a cheery round of fishing songs, I found instructions for making fishing line from horse hair (“take care that your hair be round and clear, and free from galls or scabs or frets”). I discovered that it was better to be “a civil, well govern’d well grounded, temperate, poor Angler, than a drunken Lord,” and that the clever angler would keep about two thousand black beetles alive through the winter in a firkin. Wasps are good bait if you dip their heads in blood, and if you wish to fish with maggots (and you are likely to wish it), find a “fly-blown” dead cat and you will soon be well prepared. Also “the crumbs of white bread and honey made into paste is good bait for a Carp.”

My curiosity was pricked, but I doubted I was becoming a better fisherman. Modern fly-fishing is so different from what Walton practiced in the seventeenth century that the similarities perhaps begin and end with the fish. Whereas we have a cornucopia of expertly tied artificial flies, floating nylon line, and evolved casting techniques, Walton didn’t even have a reel—he just used a stick with hair tied to the end. To entice the trout, he might employ a fragrant oil; to seduce perch, he would select a minnow, a feather, or a cork, though he would not dare to try his luck before the mulberry trees were in bud. It seemed more like witchcraft than fishing.

On the mystery of how eels reproduce (a mystery that puzzles scientists still) I discovered the theory that they “are bred of a particular dew falling in the months of May or June on the banks of some particular Ponds or Rivers.” Of the frog I learned that he expresses “malice or anger by his swoln cheeks and staring eyes” and makes good bait if you put a hook through his mouth and then “with a fine needle and silk sow [sic] the upper part of his leg to the arming wire of your hook.” But do not do so hastily: “use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live longer.”

What the hell was this book? I put it aside and kept fishing. But a few years later, while I was on a river in Idaho at dusk and found myself in the middle of a tremendous caddis-fly hatch, an answer occurred to me. Caddis flies, like many aquatic insects, pupate in little husks attached to rocks in rivers. At the right moment in the summer, they emerge as flies, swim to the surface and take off, but not before pausing to dry their wings. They do this by the thousands and, as Walton puts it, they make the trout “bold and lusty.” (...)

This is what the angler does: He observes and tries to imitate the world around him. He chooses the fly of a similar size, pattern, and color as those bugs he sees rising; he flicks his line back and forth over his head to lay his nearly weightless bait down without too much of a splash along the riffles where the fish are feeding. He notices the direction of the wind; he matches the length of her line with the depth of the water; he waits for the afternoon to cool off and rises early to beat the morning sun. He fishes little midges in the spring and thick hairy buggers in the summer and slim nymphs in the fall. He sees the natural world as a puzzle he tries to solve, and his success is measured absolutely: when the surface breaks, the fly disappears, and he feels that unmistakable tug. (...)

It has become increasingly difficult to say what qualifies as art today, but it certainly isn’t the perfect imitation of nature. Yet fishing does somehow feel artful. What I have grown to admire in Walton’s book most is the wonder he brings to the world, the way he converts the mysteries of the river into a tangible fish on his line. In Walton’s esteem for all the odd particularity of the fish and its environs, he seems to be attempting to merge two worlds that exist only in opposition to each other—the terrestrial and the aquatic. We know hardly anything of the vast empire that exists just below the surface of the water, but we know just enough that with a bit of study, a dash of faith, and a great deal of patience, we can, occasionally, break through. In these moments, the angler is the link between one world and the next. What could be more artful?

This might also help explain the disproportion between the amount of time I spend fishing and the number of fish I catch. Most of the time I hook only enough trout to keep me believing that I’m not chasing some myth, and even then just barely. Yet I find great solace in the sport. I delight in a day on the river, noticing all its features, trying to join its small dramas. Rarely do we have the excuse to sidestep the human perspective and become something else in a place where the only currency is camouflage and politics are straightforward. You can spend a small fortune on waders and nets and tackle boxes, but I have found that more often than not these things become a hindrance. The real task of fishing is not to try a thousand different flies and wade up to your ears; it’s to understand that you’re a stranger here. For all our prodigious technology and equipment, the necessary humility of a day spent fishing finds the angler reckoning with a world in which he has few answers and very little control. If these also happen to be the very circumstances of our lives, the measure of success lies not in dominance but in finding a place within what we don’t fully understand.

by John Knight, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. For Jerry, and my grandson Calvin, who has yet to catch his first fish.]

Human Nature
photo: markk

How To Meditate 101

Step One: Choose an object of attention. Standard Buddhist is your breath. Standard Hindu is a mantra – words you speak or think (move towards thinking them) while paying attention to the sound of them. If you use a mantra it should be something emotionally neutral or unalloyed positive (don’t meditate on God, say, if you fear going to hell.)

I suggest breath, but some mantras are:

• “Sunflower” (an emotionally neutral word)
• Om Mani Padme Hum
• Om Nama Shivaya
• Om Ah Bee Lah Hung Chit (Vairocana mantra)

If you use a mantra, you should do so with the breath. One syllable or word should be said or thought on the exhale or inhale.

If you use the breath, attention stays on the negative part of it: when you’re not breathing.

Step Two: intend to notice when you are no longer paying attention to the object of attention.

Step Three: put your attention lightly on the objection of attention.

Step Four: at some point you will notice that you are not paying attention to the object. Pat yourself on the back for noticing that you aren’t paying attention the breath. Be pleased. Then:

• Look at whatever you’re now paying attention to, appreciate it for a second or two without judgment, then think to yourself either “this isn’t important”, or “I’ll deal with this after meditating”.  

• Move your attention back to your object of attention.

REPEAT

Do this for either as long as you can stand to, or a predetermined time (set an alarm).

Notes:

You should do this with your spine straight. You can sit on the ground, in a stiff backed chair, on lie on your side with your knees drawn up. Sitting without support has the advantage that if you start to fall asleep, falling will make you wake up. That said, due to illness I did almost all my meditation lying flat on my back for years, which is not how you’re supposed to do it. It isn’t as important as doing it.

This style of meditation is training your meta-attention: training you to notice when you have stopped paying attention to the object of attention. You can do it with any object of attention: homework, your little finger, staring at a fire, watching a boring presentation, work you’d rather not do, the feeling of the position of your body as you walk, etc…

So you can do it during your daily life if you wish. Just decide what you should be paying attention to, intend to notice when you stop, be pleased that you notice, decide that whatever grabbed your attention isn’t important or can wait, and go back to your original object of attention.

by Ian Welsh |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. You'll need this after reading the next post.]

The Scandal of Pentagon Spending

Here’s a question for you: How do you spell boondoggle?

The answer (in case you didn’t already know): P-e-n-t-a-g-o-n.

Hawks on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. military routinely justify increases in the Defense Department’s already munificent budget by arguing that yet more money is needed to “support the troops.” If you’re already nodding in agreement, let me explain just where a huge chunk of the Pentagon budget—hundreds of billions of dollars—really goes. Keep in mind that it’s your money we’re talking about.

The answer couldn’t be more straightforward: it goes directly to private corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and other military hardware that, in the end, won’t even perform as promised. Too often the result is weapons that aren’t needed at prices we can’t afford. If anyone truly wanted to help the troops, loosening the corporate grip on the Pentagon budget would be an excellent place to start.

The numbers are staggering. In fiscal year 2016, the Pentagon issued $304 billion in contract awards to corporations—nearly half of the department’s $600 billion-plus budget for that year. And keep in mind that not all contractors are created equal. According to the Federal Procurement Data System’s top 100 contractors report for 2016, the biggest beneficiaries by a country mile were Lockheed Martin ($36.2 billion), Boeing ($24.3 billion), Raytheon ($12.8 billion), General Dynamics ($12.7 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($10.7 billion). Together, these five firms gobbled up nearly $100 billion of your tax dollars, about one-third of all the Pentagon’s contract awards in 2016.

And remember: the Pentagon buys more than just weapons. Health care companies like Humana ($3.6 billion), UnitedHealth Group ($2.9 billion), and Health Net ($2.6 billion) cash in as well, and they’re joined by, among others, pharmaceutical companies like McKesson ($2.7 billion) and universities deeply involved in military-industrial complex research like MIT ($1 billion) and Johns Hopkins ($902 million).

The real question is: How much of this money actually promotes the defense of the country and how much is essentially a subsidy to weapons makers and other corporations more focused on their bottom lines than giving the taxpayers value for their money?

“Modernizing” the Military-Industrial Complex

Let’s start with the obvious (but seldom said). Some arms company expenditures clearly have no more of a national security rationale than Tom Price’s air travel did for the promotion of American health. Take the compensation that defense company CEOs get, for example. The heads of the top five Pentagon contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—made a cumulative $96 million last year. These are companies that are significantly or, in the cases of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, almost entirely dependent on government dollars. That means one thing: your tax dollars are basically paying their exorbitant salaries. And that $96 million figure doesn’t even count the scores of other highly paid executives and board members at major weapons contractors like these. Don’t you feel safer already? (...)

The arms industry’s investment in lobbying is even more impressive. The defense sector has spent a total of more than $1 billion on that productive activity since 2009, employing anywhere from 700 to 1,000 lobbyists in any given year. To put that in perspective, you’re talking about significantly more than one lobbyist per member of Congress, the majority of whom zipped through Washington’s famed “revolving door”; they moved, that is, from positions in Congress or the Pentagon to posts at weapons companies from which they could proselytize their former colleagues.

This process, of course, allows newly minted lobbyists to use their privileged contacts with former government colleagues to promote the special interests of their corporate clients. It also ensures that congressional staffers, military officers, and Pentagon bureaucrats nearing the end of their careers and looking toward a lucrative future will be inclined to cut major contractors some slack. Why not, when they are looking forward to a big payday with that same cast of characters after they leave government? (...)

In other words, what we’re getting in return for the hundreds of billions of dollars we shower on those weapons firms is a raw deal and that revolving door is but one example of it. Don’t forget the endemic waste, fraud, and abuse that is part and parcel of the Pentagon budget -- of that is, an outfit that has proven incapable of even auditing itself. As with influence peddling, when it comes to that trio there’s a scale that ranges from the criminal to the merely outrageous. In the first category, you might start with the “Fat Leonard” scandal, named for a corporate executive who bribed dozens of Navy officials with money, vacations, and prostitutes to get the inside track on contracts to help maintain U.S. ships based in ports in the Pacific. So far, 29 criminal indictments have been handed down in the case.

That one got the headlines, but the biggest sources of corporate waste when it comes to Pentagon dollars are such a part of everyday life in Washington that they go largely unnoticed. The Pentagon, for example, employs more than 600,000 private contractors. There are so many of them and they are so poorly monitored that the Pentagon (as it has reluctantly acknowledged) doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many of them it has hired. What we do know is that many are carrying out redundant tasks that could be done more cheaply by government employees. Cutting the contractor work force by 15% -- theoretically an easy task but light years beyond anything presently imaginable -- would save a quick $20 billion a year.

Then there are the big weapons programs. As the Project on Government Oversight has shown, the Lockheed Martin F-35 combat aircraft -- supposedly a state-of-the-art plane for the twenty-first century -- has had so many cost and performance issues that it may never be fully ready for combat. That, however, hasn’t stopped the Pentagon from planning to spend $1.4 trillion to build and maintain more than 2,400 of these defective planes during the lifetime of the program.

Last but hardly least, don’t forget the Pentagon’s misguided plan to spend more than $1 trillion in the next three decades on a whole new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and land- and air-based missiles. The United States nuclear arsenal already has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads in its active stockpile, with 1,700 deployed and ready to be launched on a moment’s notice.

by William D. Hartung, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image:The Pentagon ( Frontpage / Shutterstock)

Why Bureaucrats Don't Seem to Care

In 1987, the software company Infocom released Bureaucracy, a text-based game scripted by Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Imagine you’ve just landed a great new job and are about to be sent to Paris for a training seminar and vacation. “What could possibly go wrong?,” the brochure accompanying the game asks. “The answer, of course, is everything.”

It all starts when your bank mishandles your change-of-address form. One thing leads to another and soon you find yourself drowning in rules that are confusing at first sight and plainly absurd upon closer consideration. You learn, for instance, that “you must file your change-of-address form at least two months, but no sooner than six weeks, before your moving date.” Trying to make sense of that, you are left scurrying for the help of customer-service representatives, who are “frequently available” during normal business hours. All the while, the game tracks fluctuations in your blood pressure. Let it rise above a certain level, and you may die.

Bureaucracy is so baffling that it can be funny—until of course it isn’t. Millions of people rely on public assistance to make ends meet. When rent, medical insurance, and personal dignity are in the balance, absurdity stops being comical and starts being terrifying.

The popular conception of bureaucracy is familiar. There are of course the rules: innumerable, entangled, often impenetrable. There are the stiff waiting rooms: white, fluorescent-lit, with rows of identical chairs and gray partition panels. Above all, perhaps, there are the people, the infamous bureaucrats. They are the supposedly human face of the state—cold, distant, unconcerned. Of all the ills of bureaucracy, they might be the worst. They look without seeing, they listen without hearing, and they proclaim decisions that can change people’s lives with the indifference of a butcher slicing a piece of steak.

Or so one might think. In preparation for my book, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, I spent eight months as a volunteer receptionist at a publicly funded anti-poverty agency, observing how my coworkers did their jobs. As a nonprofit contractor for the state, the agency helps low-income families apply for a range of public programs, such as food stamps, health services, fuel assistance, and early-childhood education. This is the new face of the administrative state: private provision of services with public funding and oversight.

Located in a large city in the northeastern United States, the agency operates a network of 16 neighborhood centers, each modest in size, but serving collectively close to 100,000 families annually. The center to which I was assigned employed eight to 10 full-time caseworkers, and relied on the unpaid, part-time support of an equal number of volunteers and interns. It catered primarily to African American and Hispanic clients, reflecting the demographics of the surrounding area.

While working there, I learned that the routine of everyday work at the front lines of public service is not quite what it seems from the outside. It is neither as simple, repetitive, nor rule-governed as one might believe. If frontline work is soul-sucking, it is less because bureaucrats must mechanically apply rules than because they must shoulder, day in and day out, the weight of difficult discretionary decisions which most people have the luxury to ignore.

Frontline bureaucrats are often portrayed as unthinking automata, yet they are in fact vested with a substantial margin of discretion. This is where the challenge of implementing policy starts. It is not that rules are absent; on the contrary, they abound. But they are often sufficiently ambiguous that they lend themselves to various plausible interpretations, or so numerous that they conflict with one another. When this is the case, bureaucrats must exert independent judgment to figure out what to do. If they were to stop doing so and adhere religiously to the scripts provided to them, public-service agencies would come to a halt.

Some uses of discretion are technical. In welfare agencies, for instance, caseworkers must draw on their expertise to determine which work-training program is most likely to be successful for a particular client. Other uses of discretion, however, are normative, or value-laden. Did clients have a “good reason” to miss their appointment? Did they exert “sufficient effort” to look for a job? Questions such as these call for moral or political judgment. And the stakes are high: When one is dealing with vulnerable clients, erring on one side or the other can make the difference between someone having food on the table, a safe place to sleep, and a bit of dignity left or not.

The moral dimension of street-level work has two sides, then. Empowering in one respect, it elevates bureaucrats beyond the tedium of applying rules, and imparts gravity to what they do. Yet it also makes them complicit in the shortcomings of the system they embody, for they become implicated in it not just as operators, but as thinking and reasoning agents as well. With this comes a more acute sense of personal responsibility.

* * *

Generally speaking, public-service agencies combine three core functions: processing clients, providing services, and applying the rules evenly. Bureaucrats must process incoming cases by sorting people as efficiently as possible into pre-defined administrative categories. They must provide clients with services that are tailored to their needs, taking into account their particular life circumstances. They must, finally, enforce program requirements and eligibility criteria meticulously, treating everyone impartially.

Taken individually, each of these demands is sensible. Who wouldn’t want the provision of public services to be efficient, responsive, and fair? Combined together, however, they often yield conflicting guidance. When resources are limited, they give rise to endless, morally draining dilemmas.

Consider the following two examples, which I witnessed unfolding before me, and imagine that you are the bureaucrat. It is the end of fuel-assistance season, and your office, which is already understaffed in normal circumstances, is crowded with applicants who need help keeping their houses warm during the winter. Most are in precarious situations, and many have taken time off from work to be here. Providing them with timely service is of the essence.

The client you are currently assisting, however, has arrived with incomplete paperwork and seems too confused and agitated to comprehend the instructions you give him. In leafing through the documents he did bring, you notice that he is eligible for other services, and urgently in need of them. You can devote the next hour to him or to those in the waiting room. Do you delve into the case? Or do you send the client off and proceed with the others, but risk releasing him into the world without the support he needs? The uncertainty gnaws at you, for as one caseworker put it to me, “We just don’t know who can get things done on their own and who can’t.”

And what about the young mother who has just fled an abusive relationship and is asking you to refer her to a shelter? The only one you could find is on the other side of the city from where her mother, whom she must also care for, lives. If you were to pick up the phone and make the rounds again, you might, just perhaps, be able to find something closer. However, it’s almost the end of the day and there are mountains of paperwork left to tackle so that benefits can actually be processed. What’s more, your boss has already told you that you shouldn’t prioritize domestic-violence cases because other centers specialize in them. If you set a precedent, who knows how many others you’ll have in the future. Do you grab the receiver or move on to the next person?

In cases such as these, frontline workers are forced to choose between an option that is bad and one that may be even worse. They have to make such difficult decisions, moreover, in view of the very people who will suffer the consequences, and watch as disappointment and despair color their faces. The clients bold enough to vent their frustration might prefer to direct it at their elected representatives, but in that moment, the only person they can scold is the one in front of them: the bureaucrat.

How do workers cope with that? Some, understandably, cannot or will not take it. “It used to feel like we were doing something for clients,” a woman named Angela Neville said to The Guardian last year in explaining why she left her job as an employment service advisor in the UK. “Now it [was doing] something to them.”

by Bernardo Zacka, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Randy Faris/Corbis/Getty/Zak Bickel/The Atlantic

[ed. And, remember, the "rules" bureaucrats are enforcing are laws passed by the idiot legislators you voted for.] 

Octopus-Inspired Material Can Change Its Texture

Octopuses change their texture using small regions in their skin known as papillae. In these structures, muscle fibers run in a spiderweb pattern, with both radial spokes and concentric circles. When these fibers contract, they draw the soft tissue in the papillae towards the center. And since that tissue doesn’t compress very well, the only direction it can go is up. By arranging the muscle fibers in different patterns, the octopus can turn flat, two-dimensional skin into all manner of three-dimensional shapes, including round bumps, sharp spikes, and even branching structures.

Octopus-Inspired Material Can Change Its Texture

via:

[ed. Aliens (but tasty).]

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Lark (detail)

via:

Monopoly Men

Given our reality, it would be helpful to think of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as the new “utilities” of the modern era. Today the idea of “public utility” conjures images of rate regulation and electric utility bureaucracies. But for Progressive Era reformers, public utility was a broad concept that, at its heart, was about creating regulations to ensure adequate checks and balances on private actors who had come to control the basic necessities of life, from telecommunications to transit to water. This historical tradition helps us identify what kinds of private power are especially troubling. The problem, ultimately, is not just raw “bigness,” or market capitalization. Rather, the central concern is about private control over infrastructure.

by K. Sabeel Rahman, Boston Review |  Monopoly Men

[ed. See more below, and: "Why is it so hard to ditch Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook?"]

Know Thy Futurist

Have you heard? Someday we will live in a perfect society ruled by an omnipotent artificial intelligence, provably and utterly beneficial to mankind.

That is, if we don’t all die once the machines gain consciousness, take over, and kill us.

Wait, actually, they are going to take some of us with them, and we will transcend to another plane of existence. Or at least clones of us will. Or at least clones of us that are not being perpetually tortured for our current sins.

These are all outcomes that futurists of various stripes currently believe. A futurist is a person who spends a serious amount of time—either paid or unpaid—forming theories about society’s future. And although it can be fun to mock them for their silly sounding and overtly religious predictions, we should take futurists seriously. Because at the heart of the futurism movement lies money, influence, political power, and access to the algorithms that increasingly rule our private, political, and professional lives.

Google, IBM, Ford, and the Department of Defense all employ futurists. And I am myself a futurist. But I have noticed deep divisions and disagreements within the field, which has led me, below, to chart the four basic “types” of futurists. My hope is that by better understanding the motivations and backgrounds of the people involved—however unscientifically—we can better prepare ourselves for the upcoming political struggle over whose narrative of the future we should fight for: tech oligarchs that want to own flying cars and live forever, or gig economy workers that want to someday have affordable health care.

With that in mind, let me introduce two dimensions of futurism, represented by axes. That is to say, two ways to measure and plot futurists on a graph, which we can then examine more closely.

The first measurement of a futurist is the extent to which he or she believes in a singularity. Broadly speaking a singularity is a moment where technology gets so much better, at such an exponentially increasing rate, that it achieves a fundamental and meaningful technological shift of existence, transcending its original purpose and even nature. In many singularity myths the computer either becomes self-aware and intelligent, possibly in a good way but sometimes in a destructive or even vindictive way. In others humans are connected to machines and together become something new. The larger point is that some futurists believe fervently in a singularity, while others do not.

On our second axis, let’s measure the extent to which a given futurist is worried when they theorize about the future. Are they excited or scared? Cautious or jubilant? The choices futurists make are often driven by their emotions. Utopianists generally focus on all the good that technology can do; they find hope in cool gadgets and the newest AI helpers. Dystopianists are by definition focused on the harm; they consequently think about different aspects of technology altogether. The kinds of technologies these two groups consider are nearly disjoint, and even where they do intersect, the futurists’ takes are diametrically opposed.

So, now that we have our two axes, we can build quadrants and consider the group of futurists in each one. Their differences shed light on what their values are, who their audiences are, and what product they are peddling.

Q1.

First up: the people who believe in the singularity and are not worried about it. They welcome it with open arms in the name of progress. Examples of people in this quadrant are Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999); the libertarians in the Seasteaders movement who want to create autonomous floating cities outside of any government jurisdiction; and the people who are trying to augment intelligence and live forever.

These futurists enthusiastically believe in Moore’s Law—the observation by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors in a circuit doubles approximately every two years—and in exponential growth of everything in sight. Singularity University, started by Kurzweil, has no fewer than twelve mentions of the word “exponential” on its website. Its motto is “Be Exponential.”

Generally speaking these futurists are hobbyists—they have the time for these theories because, in terms of wealth, they are already in the top 0.1 percent. They think of the future in large part as a way to invest their money and become even wealthier. They once worked at or still own Silicon Valley companies, venture capital firms, or hedge funds, and they learned to think of themselves as deeply clever—possibly even wise. They wax eloquent about meritocracy over expensive wine or their drug of choice (micro-dosing, anyone?).

With enormous riches and very few worldly concerns, these futurists focus their endeavors on the only things that could actually threaten them: death and disease.

They talk publicly about augmenting intelligence through robotic assistance or better quality of life through medical breakthroughs, but privately they are interested in technical fixes to physical problems and are impatient with the medical establishment for being too cautious and insufficiently innovative. They invest heavily in cryogenics, dubious mind­­–computer interface technology, medical strategies for living forever (here’s looking at you, Sergey Brin and Larry Page), and possibly even the blood of young people.

These futurists are ready and willing to install hardware in their brains because, as they are mostly young or middle-age white men, they have never been oppressed. For them the worst-case scenario is that they live their future lives as uploaded software in the cloud, a place where they can control the excellent virtual reality graphics. (If this sounds like a science fiction fantasy for sex-starved teenagers, don’t be surprised. They got most of these ideas—as sex-starved teenagers—from writers such as Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand.)

The problem here, of course, is the “I win” blind spot—the belief that if this system works for me, then it must be a good system. These futurists think that racism, sexism, classism, and politics are problems to be solved by technology. If they had their way, they would be asked to program the next government. They would keep it proprietary, of course, to keep the hoi polloi from gaming the system.

And herein lies the problem: whether it is the nature of existence in the super-rich bubble, or something distinctly modern and computer-oriented, futurism of this flavor is inherently elitist, genius-obsessed, and dismissive of larger society.

Q2.

Next: people who believe in a singularity but are worried about the future. They do not see the singularity as a necessarily positive force. These are the men—majority men, although more women than in the previous group—who read dystopian science fiction in their youth and think about all the things that could go wrong once the machines become self-aware, which has a small (but positive!) probability of happening. They spend time trying to estimate that probability.

A community center for these folks is the website lesswrong.com, which was created by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher. Yudkowsky thinks people should use rationality and avoid biases in order to lead better lives. It was a good idea, as far as practical philosophies go, but eventually he and his followers got caught up in increasingly abstract probability calculations using Bayes’ Theorem and bizarre thought experiments.

My favorite is called Roko’s basilisk, the thought experiment in which a future superintelligent and powerful AI tortures anyone who imagined its existence but didn’t go to the trouble of creating it. In other words it is a vindictive hypothetical being that puts you in danger as soon as you hear the thought experiment. Roko’s basilisk was seen by its inventor, Roko, as an incentive to donate to the cause of Friendly AI to “thereby increase the chances of a positive singularity.” But discussion of it soon so dominated Yudkowsky’s site that he banned it—a move that, not surprisingly, created more interest in the discussion.

A different but related movement in the world of AI futures comes from the Effective Altruism movement, which has been advocated for in this journal by philosopher Peter Singer. Like Yudkowsky, Effective Altruists started out well. Their basic argument was that we should care about human suffering outside our borders, not just in our close proximity, and that we should take personal responsibility for optimizing our money to improve the world.

You can go pretty far with that reasoning—and to their credit, Effective Altruists have made enormous international charitable contributions—but obsessing over the concept of effectiveness is limited by the fact that suffering, like community good, is hard to quantify.

Instead of acknowledging the limits of hard numbers, however, the group has more recently spun off into a parody of itself. Some factions believe that instead of worrying about current suffering, they should worry about “existential risks,” unlikely futuristic events that are characterized by computations besieged by powers of ten and could thus cause enormous suffering. A good example comes from Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute website: ". . . we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives."

As a group these futurists are fundamentally sympathetic figures but woefully simplistic regarding current human problems. If they are not worried about existential risk, they are worried about the suffering of plankton, or perhaps every particle in the universe.

I will shove Elon Musk into this Q2 group, even though he is not a perfect fit. Being an enormously rich and powerful entrepreneur, he probably belongs in the first group, but he sometimes shows up at Effective Altruism events, and he has made noise recently about the computers getting mean and launching us into World War III. The cynics among us might suspect this is mostly a ploy to sell his services as a mediator between the superintelligent AI and humans when the time inevitably comes. After all Musk always has something to sell, including a ticket to Mars, Earth’s backup planet.

by Cathy O'Neil, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Maurizio Pesce
[ed. From the Boston Review's series: Global Dystopias. See also: Monopoly Men, Schlesinger and the Decline of Liberalism.]

Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Thaler

This is a prize that is easy to understand. It is a prize for behavioral economics, for the ongoing importance of psychology in economic decision-making, and for “Nudge,” his famous and also bestselliing book co-authored with Cass Sunstein.

Here are previous MR posts on Thaler, we’ve already covered a great deal of his research. Here is Thaler on Twitter. Here is Thaler on scholar.google.com. Here is the Nobel press release, with a variety of excellent accompanying essays and materials. Here is Cass Sunstein’s overview of Thaler’s work.

Perhaps unknown to many, Thaler’s most heavily cited piece is on whether the stock market overreacts. He says yes this is possible for psychological reasons, and this article also uncovered some of the key evidence in favor of the now-vanquished “January effect” in stock returns, namely that for a while the market did very very well in the month of January. (Once discovered the effect went away.) Another excellent Thaler piece on finance is this one with Shleifer and Lee, on why closed end mutual funds sell at divergences from their true asset values. This too likely has something to do with market psychology and sentiment, as the same “asset package,” in two separate and non-arbitrageable markets, can sell for quite different prices, sometimes premia but usually discounts. This was one early and relative influential critique of the efficient markets hypothesis.

Another classic early Thaler piece is on a phenomenon known as “mental accounting,” for instance you might treat a dollar in your pocket as different from a dollar in your bank account. Or earned money may be treated different from money you just chanced upon, or won that morning in the stock market. This has significant implications for predicting consumer decisions concerning saving and spending; in particular, economists cannot simply measure income but must consider where the money came from and how it is perceived by consumers, namely how they are performing their mental accounting of the funds. Have you ever gone on a vacation with a notion that you would spend so much money, and then treated all expenditures within that range as essentially already decided? The initial piece on this topic was published in a marketing journal and it has funny terminology, a sign of how far from the mainstream this work once was. It is nonetheless a brilliant piece. Here is more Thaler on mental accounting.

Thaler, with Kahneman and Knetsch, was a major force behind discovering and measuring the so-called “endowment effect.” Once you have something, you value it much more! Maybe three or four times as much, possibly more than that. It makes policy evaluation difficult, because as economists we are not sure how much to privilege the status quo. Should we measure “willingness to pay” — what people are willing to pay for what they don’t already have? Or “willingness to be paid” — namely how eager people are to give up what they already possess? The latter magnitude will lead to much higher valuations for the assets in question. This by the way helps explain status quo bias in politics and other spheres of life. People value something much more highly once they view it as theirs.

This phenomenon also makes the Coase theorem tricky because the final allocation of resources may depend quite significantly on how the initial property rights are assigned, even when the initial wealth effect from such an allocation may appear to be quite small. See this Thaler piece with Knetsch. It’s not just that you assign property rights and let people trade, but rather how you assign the rights up front will create an endowment effect and thus significantly influence the final bargain that is struck.

With Jolls and Sunstein, here is Thaler on a behavioral approach to law and economics, a long survey but also constructive piece that became a major trend and has shaped law and economics for decades. He has done plenty and had a truly far-ranging impact, not just in one or two narrow fields.

Thaler’s “Nudge” idea, developed in conjunction with Cass Sunstein over the course of a major book and some articles, has led policymakers all over the world to focus on “choice architecture” in designing better systems, the UK even setting up a “Nudge Unit.” For instance, one way to encourage savings is to set up pension systems for employees so that the maximum contribution is the default, rather than an active choice people must make. This is sometimes referred to as a form of “soft” or “libertarian paternalism,” since choice is still present. Here is Thaler responding to some libertarian critiques of the nudge idea.

by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution | Read more:

[ed. Lots of good links, even how economics affect the NFL draft. See also: The Making of Richard Thaler's Economics Nobel.]

John Severson, Surfer Magazine
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