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Thursday, January 18, 2018
The Long-Term Care Crisis: Premiums Exploding, Leaving Seniors With “An Awful Choice”
A Wall Street Journal article gives an overview of a topic we discussed briefly before: an escalating crisis in the long-term care business. As we explain in more detail below, the entire industry massively underpriced policies that cover nursing home and other types of long-term care for the elderly. They are now playing catch-up with hefty rate increases. This puts those who paid for coverage in a terrible fix: do they abandon the policies entirely, when they have paid in substantial amounts of money and the policies do have real economic value should they need them? Do they reduce the amount of coverage so they can keep the premiums affordable? Or do they take the hit, when it might mean serious cutbacks to spending or retirement savings.
7.3 million individuals, equal to nearly 20% of the people over 65, are grappling with the dilemma of what to do about long-term care sticker shock. Some examples from the Journal’s story:
In other words, the typical behavior of insurers under duress is to engage in insurance fraud, which is to refuse to pay for valid claims. One way to do that is to put customers to go through so many hoops that some give up. One consumer complaint I read more than once regarding Genworth was that they would repeatedly claim that they had not received powers of attorney from children trying to get claims processed on behalf of aged parent. In evaluating whether it was worth it to renew my mother’s Genworth policy, I have assumed she will have to spend $10,000 in nastygrams to get claims processed.
Many adults don’t realize until they approach retirement age that Medicare does not provide for coverage in what are called long-term care facilities, such as assisted living (where the residents aren’t hospitalized but need help with some activities, like bathing or getting dressed) and nursing homes. Medicaid does, but it has strict financial eligibility limits (among other things, you will effectively be required to exhaust your financial assets). And based on reports by readers, facilities that accept Medicaid patients often do not provide a high standard of care.
Insurers rushed to fill this gap in a serious way about 40 years ago. Long-term care policies will reimburse the cost of care in approved facilities, or in many cases with approved home health care services, up to a daily maximum amount. Policies typically also have a maximum total payout amount (which may be expressed in other terms but amounts to the same thing).
The problem was twofold. One was that the insurers had no experience in offering this sort of policy and made unduly optimistic assumptions, such as how many people would lapse (stop paying before they used the policy), how long they would live, and how many days of care they would consume if and when they needed care. Ironically, when my father was looking at whether to get a long term care policy over 30 years ago, he was frustrated at his inability to get data to make any sort of an informed decision. It turns out the insurers themselves didn’t have enough of a track record to be doing any better than guessing, and they guessed wrong.
To give an idea of how seriously off some of their basic assumptions were, they assumed a lapse rate of 5% a year. Remember, when someone lapses, that’s a boon to the insurer and everyone else in the pool, because the funds they paid into the policy they abandoned goes to everyone else. It turns out that everyone who purchased these policies understood how valuable they could be and paid like clockwork. The Wall Street Journal reports that the lapse rate was 1%.
The Journal described other assumptions that proved to be wildly off the mark:
The second big problem is years of super low interest rates. This has meant that investment returns for year have fallen vastly short, on an inflation-adjusted basis, of what they had forecast. The results have been devastating for all long-term investors: life insurers, pension funds, and ordinary people trying to save for retirement.
On top of that, some insurers like Genworth offered policies that promised no rate increases over the life of the policy. Consumers who purchased them and made plans assuming the payments were fixed, have been hit in the last few years with massive increases.
The rate of individuals buying new policies has plunged now that insures are charging more for them. Again from the Journal:
Given the plunge in people buying these policies, the US is clearly moving towards the neoliberal answer of “Die faster!” Better approaches for providing in-home care could reduce the overall burden, but there seems to be no policy will to move in that direction.
7.3 million individuals, equal to nearly 20% of the people over 65, are grappling with the dilemma of what to do about long-term care sticker shock. Some examples from the Journal’s story:
In the past two years, CNA Financial Corp. has increased the annual long-term-care insurance bill for Ms. Wylie and her husband by more than 90% to $4,831. They bought the policies in 2008, which promise future benefits of as much as $268,275 per person. The Wylies are bracing for more increases.
To make their budget work, she has taken on a part-time landscaping job. The couple has delayed home maintenance, travels less and sometimes rents out their house. “We feel like we are out on a limb here, and these policies are supposed to be our safety net,” she says…And there is an additional set of issues even for those who can afford to pay for pricier coverage. As we described in our earlier post, even the long-term care insurer that is supposedly the best in terms of paying claims, Genworth, now has many complaints on consumer websites. My own experience, when my mother was injured long enough that she might be submitting a claim, was that I got a HAMP-level run-around: they would not deal with me over the Internet and I was repeatedly disconnected when put on hold. When I finally reached a rep, I was told that they would need to send a nurse to evaluate my mother…but the phone rep could not schedule that visit and claimed they could not reach the unit responsible, and would have someone call back instead. We never got that call.
In other words, the typical behavior of insurers under duress is to engage in insurance fraud, which is to refuse to pay for valid claims. One way to do that is to put customers to go through so many hoops that some give up. One consumer complaint I read more than once regarding Genworth was that they would repeatedly claim that they had not received powers of attorney from children trying to get claims processed on behalf of aged parent. In evaluating whether it was worth it to renew my mother’s Genworth policy, I have assumed she will have to spend $10,000 in nastygrams to get claims processed.
Many adults don’t realize until they approach retirement age that Medicare does not provide for coverage in what are called long-term care facilities, such as assisted living (where the residents aren’t hospitalized but need help with some activities, like bathing or getting dressed) and nursing homes. Medicaid does, but it has strict financial eligibility limits (among other things, you will effectively be required to exhaust your financial assets). And based on reports by readers, facilities that accept Medicaid patients often do not provide a high standard of care.
Insurers rushed to fill this gap in a serious way about 40 years ago. Long-term care policies will reimburse the cost of care in approved facilities, or in many cases with approved home health care services, up to a daily maximum amount. Policies typically also have a maximum total payout amount (which may be expressed in other terms but amounts to the same thing).
The problem was twofold. One was that the insurers had no experience in offering this sort of policy and made unduly optimistic assumptions, such as how many people would lapse (stop paying before they used the policy), how long they would live, and how many days of care they would consume if and when they needed care. Ironically, when my father was looking at whether to get a long term care policy over 30 years ago, he was frustrated at his inability to get data to make any sort of an informed decision. It turns out the insurers themselves didn’t have enough of a track record to be doing any better than guessing, and they guessed wrong.
To give an idea of how seriously off some of their basic assumptions were, they assumed a lapse rate of 5% a year. Remember, when someone lapses, that’s a boon to the insurer and everyone else in the pool, because the funds they paid into the policy they abandoned goes to everyone else. It turns out that everyone who purchased these policies understood how valuable they could be and paid like clockwork. The Wall Street Journal reports that the lapse rate was 1%.
The Journal described other assumptions that proved to be wildly off the mark:
It turned out that nearly everyone underestimated how long policyholders would live and claims would last. For example, actuaries, insurers and regulators didn’t anticipate a proliferation of assisted-living facilities. And they assumed families would do whatever they could to avoid moving loved ones into nursing homes, holding down policy claims.
By the late 1990s, assisted-living facilities were widely popular. Especially at well-run ones, staff members looked after policyholders so well that they lived years longer than actuaries had projected.
Residents “are taking their medications; they are not falling,” says Mr. Bodnar, now a senior executive at Genworth.A possibly even more fundamental modeling issue is that insurers arguably have and continue to be using the wrong type of model.
The second big problem is years of super low interest rates. This has meant that investment returns for year have fallen vastly short, on an inflation-adjusted basis, of what they had forecast. The results have been devastating for all long-term investors: life insurers, pension funds, and ordinary people trying to save for retirement.
On top of that, some insurers like Genworth offered policies that promised no rate increases over the life of the policy. Consumers who purchased them and made plans assuming the payments were fixed, have been hit in the last few years with massive increases.
The rate of individuals buying new policies has plunged now that insures are charging more for them. Again from the Journal:
Fewer than 100,000 long-term-care insurance policies were sold in the U.S. in 2016, and sales fell to about 34,000 in the first half of 2017, the industry-funded research firm Limra says. Both those totals are the lowest in more than 25 years. The business peaked in 2002 with about 750,000 sales.
The latest policies typically cover less and cost more. According to the insurance agents’ trade group, a 60-year-old couple can expect to spend about $3,490 in combined annual premium for a typical policy that starts out with a maximum payout of $164,050 per person and then grows 3% a year to $333,000 when the couple is 85.People approaching 60, which is usually the latest these insurers will write policies, don’t have good options unless they have a net worth of over $2 million, since then it makes more sense to roll the dice and self insure. By contrast, some financial advisers argue that if you have less than $300,000 in assets, you are better off spending them down and going into a Medicaid home if need be. But there are plenty of people with more than $300,000 in assets (say some accumulated home equity plus some savings) who would find it hard to pay the premiums, even if they kept working past normal retirement age.
Given the plunge in people buying these policies, the US is clearly moving towards the neoliberal answer of “Die faster!” Better approaches for providing in-home care could reduce the overall burden, but there seems to be no policy will to move in that direction.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
The Literature of Bad Sex
At its most cursory level, the story is an account of predation and dubious consent, played out largely over text. As such, it was hailed as some kind of dispatch from the zeitgeist. The underlying notion, that literature is in service to the zeitgeist, or even that a story’s value resides in how loudly and righteously it speaks to the prevailing political wind, is a troubling fallacy. The power of that story, as with its forebears—by which I mean precise depictions of imprecise heterosexual relations—was in its fine-tuned ambivalence. This sort of ambivalence is the opposite of a cop-out: it’s generative, rather than reductive, and it comes from time, on the writer’s part, spent dwelling in uncertainty. Though many apparently received the story as an extended version of a #MeToo social media post, unable to grasp it as fiction, it did what the blunt tool of a hashtag cannot: specifically, provoke empathy for both parties.It’s a subtle oscillation of sympathies that Roupenian enacts: we feel for Margo, a 24-year-old student, who may or may not be attracted to Robert, her slightly overweight, 34-year-old date, and we also feel for him, at least until our sympathy is savagely revoked by the last word of the story. “Cat Person” then, is not about how guys are pigs and younger women are victims, but rather about the curious mechanics and currencies of desire, its necessary deceptions, both mutual and individual.
Margo wills herself into arousal by imagining Robert’s own desire for her. When she mentally tests out the idea of having sex with him—imagination is a prerequisite of action—she thinks: “Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.” Does this mean the desire is less hers? Is wanting to be wanted as valid as wanting for oneself? (...)
The state of not-knowing is intrinsic to love and sex and it’s also intrinsic in good fiction. Faking it, of course, can operate in the inverse too, not as an attempt to suppress real desire, as Frances does, but as an inability to prevent real desire arising out of something feigned. In Catherine Lacey’s terrifyingly incisive novel The Answers, Mary is a physically unwell young woman, desperate for money to afford a specialist treatment called PAKing. She answers a curious ad promising generous remuneration and finds herself employed by a famous movie actor and his team. Kurt has the sort of untrammeled wealth and solipsism that allows him to orchestrate something called The Girlfriend Experiment, in which all his needs will be met by an array of women paid to perform certain roles. Mary is assigned the role of Emotional Girlfriend. Obedient, if dispassionate, she meets her cues, recites her lines and follows all protocols. Soon, however, “it was unclear to her if she was just impersonating affection, or if this impersonation had changed her from within, synthesized a kind of love in her.” However clearly defined human schema are, their participants are subjective beings, subject, specifically, to uncertainty. Is a synthesized love any less valid, perturbing and painful than a “natural” love?
Synthesis takes other, less legible forms. When, in “Cat Person” Margo kisses Robert, she finds herself, “carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.” Ego, too, clouds the narrator of Emma Cline’s bewitching The Girls. Russell, the simultaneously charismatic and pathetic Charles Manson-like figure at the center of the novel, coerces teenage Evie into giving him a blowjob moments after she’s been introduced to him. Perhaps a more accurate term is “offered up to him.” Afterwards, she experiences the rest of the night, “as fated, me as the center of a singular drama.” The tepid, flat coke he hands her after coming in her 14-year-old mouth is, “as intoxicating as champagne.” A thing can be both disgusting and delicious, its value not intrinsic, but rather dependent on the person experiencing it. Because then there’s this, the sentence which ends the chapter and the preceding description of Russell’s calculated ways of “breaking down boundaries”: “But maybe the strangest part—I liked it, too.” As Margo notes in “Cat Person”: “humiliation […] was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal.”
by Hermione Hoby, LitHub | Read more:
Image: "Yawning cat", uncredited
Bitcoin Mania
The first time I bought virtual money, in October 2017, bitcoins, the cryptocurrency everyone by now has heard of, were trading at $5,919.20. A month later, as I started writing this, a single coin sold for $2,000 more. “Coin” is a metaphor. A cryptocurrency such as bitcoin is purely digital: it is a piece of code—a string of numbers and letters—that uses encryption techniques and a decentralized computer network to process transactions and generate new units. Its value derives entirely from people’s perception of what it is worth. The same might be said of paper money, now divorced from gold and silver, or of gold and silver for that matter. Money is a human invention. It has value because we say it does. (...)
The central obstacle to a fully automated monetary system run exclusively by computers is validation: how to ensure that the transactions on the network are legitimate. The bitcoin software devised by Nakamoto employs a number of features to deal with this. The first is basic encryption. A bitcoin is nothing more than a record of value—you have seven bitcoin, I have five bitcoin, and so on—encoded and stored on the bitcoin system as an address. To release that bitcoin to buy something or to cash it out, its owner must use a private encryption key, known only to him or her, which is associated with that account. Matching the private key with the address is done automatically by the decentralized network of computers. If they don’t match up, or if the owner of the private key is attempting to spend his or her bitcoin more than once, the computers reject the transaction.
The “miners” who verify and collect these transactions into a block—“miners” being a term for those who run the computers on the network—are also required by the bitcoin software to perform an additional validating function before the block can be added to the bitcoin ledger. Called “proof of work,” it is essentially a computational lottery in which all the mining computers vie to guess an algorithmically generated number between zero and 4,294,967,296 with the correct number of zeros preceding it. Finding the target number takes trillions of guesses and a tremendous amount of computing power.
The idea behind “proof of work,” according to Daniel Krawisz, of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, is that it is “an added complication, like a ritual, so as to make blocks more difficult to generate…. [It] is…a means for a group of self-interested people, none of whom is subordinate to any other, to establish a consensus against a considerable incentive to resist it.” Because it takes so much computing power to find this number, miners are motivated to ensure that the transactions they are processing are valid and nonconflicting. But they are motivated to participate in the first place because the software generates a reward: the miner who finds the “proof of work” number first is paid in (an algorithmically determined number of) bitcoins. Though that is how new bitcoins are created, or “mined,” and added to the system, as the Tapscotts point out, mining is
Still, it’s not exactly free money. Marco Streng, the cofounder of Genesis Mining, estimates that it costs his company around $400 in electricity alone to mine each bitcoin. That’s because bitcoin mining is not only computationally intensive, it is energy-intensive. By one estimate, the power consumption of bitcoin mining now exceeds that of Ireland and is growing so exponentially that it will surpass that of the entire United States by July 2019. A year ago, the CEO of BitFury, Valery Vavilov, reckoned that energy accounted for between 90 and 95 percent of his company’s bitcoin-mining costs. According to David Gerard—whose new book, Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain, is a sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency like the Tapscotts’—“By the end of 2016,” a single mining facility in China was using “over half the estimated power used by all of Google’s data centres worldwide at the time.”
One way bitcoin miners offset these costs is by collecting the very thing digital money, traded peer-to-peer, was supposed to make obsolete: transaction fees. By one estimate, these fees have risen 1,289 percent since March 2015. On any given day, the fees will be in the millions of dollars and now cost upward of twenty dollars per transaction. While transaction fees are not mandatory, they are a way for users to attempt to jump the queue in a system rife with bottlenecks, since those who offer miners a fee to have their transactions included in a block have a better chance of that happening. With so many transactions lined up, waiting to be processed, miners have discretion over which will make it to the head of the line; the higher the fee, the more likely it is to be chosen. As the explanatory website Unlock Blockchain puts it: “when miners mine a block, they become temporary dictators of that block. If you want your transactions to go through, you will have to pay a toll to the miner in charge…. The higher the transaction fees, the faster the miners will put [the transactions] up in their block.” As a consequence, transactions can be held up for hours or days or dropped altogether.
Bitcoin’s high transaction fees and slow transaction times were two of the reasons I chose to buy ether. But there was another reason as well: while bitcoin was invented to bypass traditional currency by tendering a new kind of money, ether, another cryptocurrency that can be bought, sold, and used to purchase goods and services, was created to raise capital to fund a project called the Ethereum network. The principals behind it are building out what is being trumpeted as the next iteration of the Internet, Web 3.0, also known as “the blockchain.”
A blockchain is, essentially, a way of moving information between parties over the Internet and storing that information and its transaction history on a disparate network of computers. Bitcoin, for example, operates on a blockchain: as transactions are aggregated into blocks, each block is assigned a unique cryptographic signature called a “hash.” Once the validating cryptographic puzzle for the latest block has been solved by a mining computer, three things happen: the result is timestamped, the new block is linked irrevocably to the blocks before and after it by its unique hash, and the block and its hash are posted to all the other computers that were attempting to solve the puzzle. This decentralized network of computers is the repository of the immutable ledger of bitcoin transactions. As the Tapscotts observe, “If you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you’d have to rewrite the coin’s entire history on the blockchain in broad daylight.”
While bitcoin operates on a blockchain, it is not the blockchain. The insight of Vitalik Buterin, the young polymath who created Ethereum, was that in addition to exchanging digital money, the blockchain could be used to facilitate transactions of other kinds of digitized data, such as property registrations, birth certificates, medical records, and bills of lading. Because the blockchain is decentralized and its ledger immutable, those transactions would be protected from hacking; and because the blockchain is a peer-to-peer system that lets people and businesses interact directly with each other, it is inherently more efficient and also cheaper than systems that are burdened with middlemen such as lawyers and regulators.
A company that aims to reduce drug counterfeiting is using the blockchain to follow pharmaceuticals from provenance to purchase. Another outfit is doing something similar with high-end sneakers. Yet another start-up, this one called Paragon, is currently raising money to create a blockchain that “registers everything that has happened to a cannabis product, from seed to sale, letting consumers, retailers and the government know where everything came from.” “We are treating cannabis as a normal crop,” Paragon’s founder and CEO Jessica VerSteeg, a former Miss Iowa, told a reporter for the website Benzinga. “So, the same way that you would want to know where the corn on your table came from, or the apple that you had at lunch came from, you want to know where the weed you’re consuming came from.”
While a blockchain is not a full-on solution to fraud or hacking, its decentralized infrastructure ensures that there are no “honeypots” of data available for criminals to exploit. Still, touting a bitcoin-derived technology as the answer to cybercrime may seem a stretch in light of the high-profile—and lucrative—thefts of cryptocurrency over the past few years. Gerard notes that “as of March 2015, a full third of all Bitcoin exchanges”—where people stored their bitcoin—“up to then had been hacked, and nearly half had closed.” There was, most famously, the 2014 pilferage of Mt. Gox, a Japanese-based digital coin exchange, in which 850,000 bitcoins worth $460,000,000 disappeared. Two years later another exchange, Bitfinex, was hacked and around $60 million in bitcoin was taken; the company’s solution was to spread the loss to all its customers, including those whose accounts had not been drained. Then there was the theft via malware of $40 million by a man in Pennsylvania earlier this year. He confessed, but the other thieves slipped away, leaving victims with no way to retrieve their funds.
Unlike money kept in a bank, cryptocurrencies are uninsured and unregulated. That is one of the consequences of a monetary system that exists—intentionally—beyond government control or oversight. It may be small consolation to those who were affected by these thefts that neither the bitcoin network nor the Ethereum network itself has been breached, which perhaps proves the immunity of the blockchain to hacking.
The central obstacle to a fully automated monetary system run exclusively by computers is validation: how to ensure that the transactions on the network are legitimate. The bitcoin software devised by Nakamoto employs a number of features to deal with this. The first is basic encryption. A bitcoin is nothing more than a record of value—you have seven bitcoin, I have five bitcoin, and so on—encoded and stored on the bitcoin system as an address. To release that bitcoin to buy something or to cash it out, its owner must use a private encryption key, known only to him or her, which is associated with that account. Matching the private key with the address is done automatically by the decentralized network of computers. If they don’t match up, or if the owner of the private key is attempting to spend his or her bitcoin more than once, the computers reject the transaction.
The “miners” who verify and collect these transactions into a block—“miners” being a term for those who run the computers on the network—are also required by the bitcoin software to perform an additional validating function before the block can be added to the bitcoin ledger. Called “proof of work,” it is essentially a computational lottery in which all the mining computers vie to guess an algorithmically generated number between zero and 4,294,967,296 with the correct number of zeros preceding it. Finding the target number takes trillions of guesses and a tremendous amount of computing power.The idea behind “proof of work,” according to Daniel Krawisz, of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, is that it is “an added complication, like a ritual, so as to make blocks more difficult to generate…. [It] is…a means for a group of self-interested people, none of whom is subordinate to any other, to establish a consensus against a considerable incentive to resist it.” Because it takes so much computing power to find this number, miners are motivated to ensure that the transactions they are processing are valid and nonconflicting. But they are motivated to participate in the first place because the software generates a reward: the miner who finds the “proof of work” number first is paid in (an algorithmically determined number of) bitcoins. Though that is how new bitcoins are created, or “mined,” and added to the system, as the Tapscotts point out, mining is
an awkward analogy because it conjures images of experts whose talent might confer some competitive advantage…. It doesn’t. Each miner is running the software like a utility function in the background, and the software is doing all the computations…. There’s no skill involved.When the bitcoin network began operating in 2009, people could run the validation program on their personal computers and earn bitcoins if their computer solved the puzzle first. As demand for bitcoin increased, and more people were vying to find the random, algorithmic proof of work validation number, speed became essential. Mining began to require sophisticated graphics cards and, when those proved too slow, special, superfast computers built specifically to validate transactions and mine bitcoins. Individual miners have dropped out for the most part, and industrial operators have moved in. These days, mining is so computer-intensive that it takes place in huge processing centers in countries with low energy costs, like China and Iceland. One of these, in the town of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, has a staff of fifty who oversee 25,000 computers in eight buildings that run day and night. A company called BitFury, which operates mining facilities in Iceland and the Republic of Georgia and also manufactures and sells specialized, industrial processing rigs, is estimated to have mined at least half a million bitcoins so far. At today’s price, that’s worth around $7.5 billion.
Still, it’s not exactly free money. Marco Streng, the cofounder of Genesis Mining, estimates that it costs his company around $400 in electricity alone to mine each bitcoin. That’s because bitcoin mining is not only computationally intensive, it is energy-intensive. By one estimate, the power consumption of bitcoin mining now exceeds that of Ireland and is growing so exponentially that it will surpass that of the entire United States by July 2019. A year ago, the CEO of BitFury, Valery Vavilov, reckoned that energy accounted for between 90 and 95 percent of his company’s bitcoin-mining costs. According to David Gerard—whose new book, Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain, is a sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency like the Tapscotts’—“By the end of 2016,” a single mining facility in China was using “over half the estimated power used by all of Google’s data centres worldwide at the time.”
One way bitcoin miners offset these costs is by collecting the very thing digital money, traded peer-to-peer, was supposed to make obsolete: transaction fees. By one estimate, these fees have risen 1,289 percent since March 2015. On any given day, the fees will be in the millions of dollars and now cost upward of twenty dollars per transaction. While transaction fees are not mandatory, they are a way for users to attempt to jump the queue in a system rife with bottlenecks, since those who offer miners a fee to have their transactions included in a block have a better chance of that happening. With so many transactions lined up, waiting to be processed, miners have discretion over which will make it to the head of the line; the higher the fee, the more likely it is to be chosen. As the explanatory website Unlock Blockchain puts it: “when miners mine a block, they become temporary dictators of that block. If you want your transactions to go through, you will have to pay a toll to the miner in charge…. The higher the transaction fees, the faster the miners will put [the transactions] up in their block.” As a consequence, transactions can be held up for hours or days or dropped altogether.
Bitcoin’s high transaction fees and slow transaction times were two of the reasons I chose to buy ether. But there was another reason as well: while bitcoin was invented to bypass traditional currency by tendering a new kind of money, ether, another cryptocurrency that can be bought, sold, and used to purchase goods and services, was created to raise capital to fund a project called the Ethereum network. The principals behind it are building out what is being trumpeted as the next iteration of the Internet, Web 3.0, also known as “the blockchain.”
A blockchain is, essentially, a way of moving information between parties over the Internet and storing that information and its transaction history on a disparate network of computers. Bitcoin, for example, operates on a blockchain: as transactions are aggregated into blocks, each block is assigned a unique cryptographic signature called a “hash.” Once the validating cryptographic puzzle for the latest block has been solved by a mining computer, three things happen: the result is timestamped, the new block is linked irrevocably to the blocks before and after it by its unique hash, and the block and its hash are posted to all the other computers that were attempting to solve the puzzle. This decentralized network of computers is the repository of the immutable ledger of bitcoin transactions. As the Tapscotts observe, “If you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you’d have to rewrite the coin’s entire history on the blockchain in broad daylight.”
While bitcoin operates on a blockchain, it is not the blockchain. The insight of Vitalik Buterin, the young polymath who created Ethereum, was that in addition to exchanging digital money, the blockchain could be used to facilitate transactions of other kinds of digitized data, such as property registrations, birth certificates, medical records, and bills of lading. Because the blockchain is decentralized and its ledger immutable, those transactions would be protected from hacking; and because the blockchain is a peer-to-peer system that lets people and businesses interact directly with each other, it is inherently more efficient and also cheaper than systems that are burdened with middlemen such as lawyers and regulators.
A company that aims to reduce drug counterfeiting is using the blockchain to follow pharmaceuticals from provenance to purchase. Another outfit is doing something similar with high-end sneakers. Yet another start-up, this one called Paragon, is currently raising money to create a blockchain that “registers everything that has happened to a cannabis product, from seed to sale, letting consumers, retailers and the government know where everything came from.” “We are treating cannabis as a normal crop,” Paragon’s founder and CEO Jessica VerSteeg, a former Miss Iowa, told a reporter for the website Benzinga. “So, the same way that you would want to know where the corn on your table came from, or the apple that you had at lunch came from, you want to know where the weed you’re consuming came from.”
While a blockchain is not a full-on solution to fraud or hacking, its decentralized infrastructure ensures that there are no “honeypots” of data available for criminals to exploit. Still, touting a bitcoin-derived technology as the answer to cybercrime may seem a stretch in light of the high-profile—and lucrative—thefts of cryptocurrency over the past few years. Gerard notes that “as of March 2015, a full third of all Bitcoin exchanges”—where people stored their bitcoin—“up to then had been hacked, and nearly half had closed.” There was, most famously, the 2014 pilferage of Mt. Gox, a Japanese-based digital coin exchange, in which 850,000 bitcoins worth $460,000,000 disappeared. Two years later another exchange, Bitfinex, was hacked and around $60 million in bitcoin was taken; the company’s solution was to spread the loss to all its customers, including those whose accounts had not been drained. Then there was the theft via malware of $40 million by a man in Pennsylvania earlier this year. He confessed, but the other thieves slipped away, leaving victims with no way to retrieve their funds.
Unlike money kept in a bank, cryptocurrencies are uninsured and unregulated. That is one of the consequences of a monetary system that exists—intentionally—beyond government control or oversight. It may be small consolation to those who were affected by these thefts that neither the bitcoin network nor the Ethereum network itself has been breached, which perhaps proves the immunity of the blockchain to hacking.
by Sue Halpern, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
Like Ducks? Thank a Hunter.
Ducks Were Saved By a Cartoonist
In the early 1900s, Americans realized they had a environmental crisis on their hands. Wild animals had initially been viewed by European settlers as an unlimited resource, but America’s exploding population, its westward expansion, industrialized agriculture, and unregulated hunting had all combined to decimate the population of wilfdlife—from deer to ducks.
This gave rise to the modern conservation movement, which used sport hunting as a tool to successfully save our wildlife. (I detail how that worked for elk here.)
Ducks and other waterfowl found themselves in a particularly tight spot due to massive losses of suitable habitat. The wetlands they depend on were disappearing across the continent. And that wasn’t going to be an easy trend to reverse. Cities had sprung up in marshes that were once home to millions of birds. The wheat we now grew filled in wetlands throughout the Mississippi River basin. The grasslands had become other crops, and those were filled with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. If their homes weren’t destroyed outright, ducks found their food supply diminished and their habitat poisoned.
And unlike hoofed mammals, protecting small, specific areas would do ducks no good. Their migrations span the continent.
The result of all this degradation: the estimated population of waterfowl on this continent fell as low as 27 million by the early 1930s. Efforts to reverse this trend had begun two decades previously. In 1916, the U.K. signed a treaty on behalf of Canada banning market hunting of waterfowl and protecting their habitats. In 1918, Congress ratified that treaty with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Mexico signed on in 1936.
Those efforts were well meant, but the treaty didn’t provide significant funding for protecting, restoring, or reclaiming habitats. Without a source of funding, ducks were still screwed.
Enter Ding Darling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and passionate duck hunter. In addition to ducks, Darling often drew President Franklin Roosevelt, whose policies and politics he ridiculed. By 1934, Roosevelt had had enough, and in an effort to eliminate two problems at once (Darling’s criticism and the waterfowl-population crisis), he appointed Darling as head of the U.S. Biological Survey, a predecessor to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
It wasn’t an easy job. Smack in the middle of both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, there wasn’t extra money to be spent on wildlife. If he was going to save the duck’s habitat, Darling needed to find a new source of funding from outside the government. He came up with a law called the Duck Stamp Act, which was passed almost immediately by Congress. It levied an additional $1 fee on waterfowl hunters, in addition to the licenses they already purchased from state and local governments. The proceeds would go toward reclaiming and protecting duck habitat. Darling designed the first stamp himself.
Today, the federal duck stamp costs $25, and its design is chosen from an annual art contest that receives hundreds of entries. 98 percent of revenue from duck stamps goes to protecting duck habitat, of which it’s purchased and protected 6.5 million acres to-date. Duck stamps are largely responsible for financing our nation’s Wildlife Refuge system, and purchase of one grants you access to those protected lands for the year. Many people buy two stamps—one to sign up for hunting, and one to keep as an appreciating collectible.
If you care about waterfowl conservation, there is no better way to help than by purchasing a duck stamp. You don’t need to be a hunter to buy one, but 1.1 million of the 1.6 million people who do get one each year are.
Darling has been called, “the best friend a duck ever had.” He would go on to found the National Wildlife Federation.
Skies Filled with Waterfowl
Darling may have been the pioneer, but he was soon joined by other hunters, who saw a need to go even further than the federal government could. Treaties could stretch across borders, but federal funding couldn't.
Enter Ducks Unlimited. With a mission to create “wetlands sufficient to fill the skies with waterfowl today, tomorrow and forever,” Ducks Unlimited is a non-profit dedicated to wetlands conservation. Founded in 1937, it now counts 600,000 members, 90 percent of whom are duck hunters. Last year, it raised $224 million—83 percent of which was spent directly to protect wetlands. In its 80-year history, Ducks Unlimited has protected 14 million acres of wetlands spanning North America.
Additionally, Ducks Unlimited is $1.82 billion in to raising $2 billion for a campaign it's calling Rescue Our Wetlands. Expected to meet its goal this year, it will be the largest wetlands restoration program in world history.
Combined, the duck stamp, and Ducks Unlimited have roughly doubled the population of waterfowl on this continent to 50 million. (Heck, it’s the duck stamp that pays for the birds to be counted.) It’s impossible to tabulate the benefit hunter-funded wetlands conservation has had on the over 900 non-game species that also rely on wetlands habitat—including 96 percent of all our birds.
This gave rise to the modern conservation movement, which used sport hunting as a tool to successfully save our wildlife. (I detail how that worked for elk here.)
Ducks and other waterfowl found themselves in a particularly tight spot due to massive losses of suitable habitat. The wetlands they depend on were disappearing across the continent. And that wasn’t going to be an easy trend to reverse. Cities had sprung up in marshes that were once home to millions of birds. The wheat we now grew filled in wetlands throughout the Mississippi River basin. The grasslands had become other crops, and those were filled with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. If their homes weren’t destroyed outright, ducks found their food supply diminished and their habitat poisoned.And unlike hoofed mammals, protecting small, specific areas would do ducks no good. Their migrations span the continent.
The result of all this degradation: the estimated population of waterfowl on this continent fell as low as 27 million by the early 1930s. Efforts to reverse this trend had begun two decades previously. In 1916, the U.K. signed a treaty on behalf of Canada banning market hunting of waterfowl and protecting their habitats. In 1918, Congress ratified that treaty with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Mexico signed on in 1936.
Those efforts were well meant, but the treaty didn’t provide significant funding for protecting, restoring, or reclaiming habitats. Without a source of funding, ducks were still screwed.
Enter Ding Darling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and passionate duck hunter. In addition to ducks, Darling often drew President Franklin Roosevelt, whose policies and politics he ridiculed. By 1934, Roosevelt had had enough, and in an effort to eliminate two problems at once (Darling’s criticism and the waterfowl-population crisis), he appointed Darling as head of the U.S. Biological Survey, a predecessor to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
It wasn’t an easy job. Smack in the middle of both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, there wasn’t extra money to be spent on wildlife. If he was going to save the duck’s habitat, Darling needed to find a new source of funding from outside the government. He came up with a law called the Duck Stamp Act, which was passed almost immediately by Congress. It levied an additional $1 fee on waterfowl hunters, in addition to the licenses they already purchased from state and local governments. The proceeds would go toward reclaiming and protecting duck habitat. Darling designed the first stamp himself.
Today, the federal duck stamp costs $25, and its design is chosen from an annual art contest that receives hundreds of entries. 98 percent of revenue from duck stamps goes to protecting duck habitat, of which it’s purchased and protected 6.5 million acres to-date. Duck stamps are largely responsible for financing our nation’s Wildlife Refuge system, and purchase of one grants you access to those protected lands for the year. Many people buy two stamps—one to sign up for hunting, and one to keep as an appreciating collectible.
If you care about waterfowl conservation, there is no better way to help than by purchasing a duck stamp. You don’t need to be a hunter to buy one, but 1.1 million of the 1.6 million people who do get one each year are.
Darling has been called, “the best friend a duck ever had.” He would go on to found the National Wildlife Federation.
Skies Filled with Waterfowl
Darling may have been the pioneer, but he was soon joined by other hunters, who saw a need to go even further than the federal government could. Treaties could stretch across borders, but federal funding couldn't.
Enter Ducks Unlimited. With a mission to create “wetlands sufficient to fill the skies with waterfowl today, tomorrow and forever,” Ducks Unlimited is a non-profit dedicated to wetlands conservation. Founded in 1937, it now counts 600,000 members, 90 percent of whom are duck hunters. Last year, it raised $224 million—83 percent of which was spent directly to protect wetlands. In its 80-year history, Ducks Unlimited has protected 14 million acres of wetlands spanning North America.
Additionally, Ducks Unlimited is $1.82 billion in to raising $2 billion for a campaign it's calling Rescue Our Wetlands. Expected to meet its goal this year, it will be the largest wetlands restoration program in world history.
Combined, the duck stamp, and Ducks Unlimited have roughly doubled the population of waterfowl on this continent to 50 million. (Heck, it’s the duck stamp that pays for the birds to be counted.) It’s impossible to tabulate the benefit hunter-funded wetlands conservation has had on the over 900 non-game species that also rely on wetlands habitat—including 96 percent of all our birds.
by Wes Siler, Outside | Read more:
Image: DOI
[ed. In my career as a habitat biologist in Alaska I frequently applied for grants from DU, Duck Stamp and FWS funds to purchase thousands of acres of wetlands for habitat protection and restoration. They're great programs.]
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Bundles of Joy
On December’s survey, I asked readers who had children whether they were happy with that decision. Here are the results, from 1 (very unhappy) to 5 (very happy):
The mean was 4.43, and the median 5. People are really happy to have kids!
This was equally true regardless of gender. The male average (4.43, n = 1768) and female average (4.49, n = 177) were indistinguishable.
To double-check this, I compared the self-reported life satisfaction of people with and without kids. People with kids were much more satisfied – but also did much better on lots of other variables like financial situation, romantic satisfaction, etc. So probably at least some of the effect was because people with kids tend to be older people in stable relationships who have their life more figured out, and maybe also more religious.
In order to compare apples to apples, I limited the comparison to married atheist men 25 or older. There was no longer a consistent trend for people with at least one child to be more satisfied. But there was a trend for increasing satisfaction with increasing number of children:
NUMBER OF CHILDREN : AVERAGE LIFE SATISFACTION ON 1-10 SCALE (total n = 1491):
0: 7.06
1: 7.09
2: 7.24
3: 7.31
4+: 7.43
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, since I would expect the biggest life change to be going from zero children to one child. Probably some residual confounders remain in the analysis – and commenter “meh” points out that people who are happiest with their existing children will be most likely to have more. But at the very least, people with children don’t seem to be less happy.
These results broadly match existing research, which usually finds that parents report being very happy to have children, but that this is not reflected in life satisfaction numbers. The main difference is that existing research usually claims parents have lower life satisfaction than non-parents. But this is different in different countries, either for cultural or for policy reasons. The survey respondents form a culturally unusual group and are of a higher socioeconomic status; they may be more similar to countries like Norway (where parents are happier) than to countries like the United States (where they are less happy).
(also, we should at least consider the Caplanian perspective that people more informed about genetics will be happier parents, since they’ll be less neurotic about the effect of their parenting styles.)
The View From Hell blog argues that the discrepancy between the direct question (“Are you happy to have kids?”) and the indirect one (“How happy are you?”, compared across parents vs. childless people) is pure self-deception; children suck, but parents refuse to admit it. I haven’t looked in depth at the study they cite, which purports to show that the more you prime parents with descriptions of the burdens of parenthood, the more great they insist everything is. But I wonder about the philosophical foundations we should be using here. There’s happiness, and there’s happiness: I am happy to be giving money to charity and making the world a better place, but I don’t think my self-reported life satisfaction would be noticeably higher after a big donation. It might even be lower if it cut into my luxury consumption. The wanting/liking/approving trichotomy may also be relevant.
People were happier with their decision to have children if they were (all results are binomial correlations and highly significant even after correction): more gender-conforming (0.14), had fewer thoughts about maybe being transgender (0.20), were more right-wing (0.10), considered themselves more moral people (0.15), were less autistic (0.12), were less extraverted (0.10), were more emotionally stable (0.15), and were more agreeable (0.13). All of these effects were very small compared to the generally high level of happiness at having children, no matter who you were and what your personality was like.
I included this survey question because I’m considering whether or not to have kids. Even though the survey only reinforced the (confusing) results of past research, I still find it helpful. After all, a lot of the survey-takers here are pretty skeptical of other aspects of traditional lifestyles: monogamy, gender norms, religion, etc. It’s impressive how strongly approval of parenting survives even in this weird a population; I consider this a new and exciting fact beyond the ones established by previous studies.
The mean was 4.43, and the median 5. People are really happy to have kids!
This was equally true regardless of gender. The male average (4.43, n = 1768) and female average (4.49, n = 177) were indistinguishable.
To double-check this, I compared the self-reported life satisfaction of people with and without kids. People with kids were much more satisfied – but also did much better on lots of other variables like financial situation, romantic satisfaction, etc. So probably at least some of the effect was because people with kids tend to be older people in stable relationships who have their life more figured out, and maybe also more religious.
In order to compare apples to apples, I limited the comparison to married atheist men 25 or older. There was no longer a consistent trend for people with at least one child to be more satisfied. But there was a trend for increasing satisfaction with increasing number of children:
NUMBER OF CHILDREN : AVERAGE LIFE SATISFACTION ON 1-10 SCALE (total n = 1491):
0: 7.06
1: 7.09
2: 7.24
3: 7.31
4+: 7.43
This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, since I would expect the biggest life change to be going from zero children to one child. Probably some residual confounders remain in the analysis – and commenter “meh” points out that people who are happiest with their existing children will be most likely to have more. But at the very least, people with children don’t seem to be less happy.
These results broadly match existing research, which usually finds that parents report being very happy to have children, but that this is not reflected in life satisfaction numbers. The main difference is that existing research usually claims parents have lower life satisfaction than non-parents. But this is different in different countries, either for cultural or for policy reasons. The survey respondents form a culturally unusual group and are of a higher socioeconomic status; they may be more similar to countries like Norway (where parents are happier) than to countries like the United States (where they are less happy).
(also, we should at least consider the Caplanian perspective that people more informed about genetics will be happier parents, since they’ll be less neurotic about the effect of their parenting styles.)
The View From Hell blog argues that the discrepancy between the direct question (“Are you happy to have kids?”) and the indirect one (“How happy are you?”, compared across parents vs. childless people) is pure self-deception; children suck, but parents refuse to admit it. I haven’t looked in depth at the study they cite, which purports to show that the more you prime parents with descriptions of the burdens of parenthood, the more great they insist everything is. But I wonder about the philosophical foundations we should be using here. There’s happiness, and there’s happiness: I am happy to be giving money to charity and making the world a better place, but I don’t think my self-reported life satisfaction would be noticeably higher after a big donation. It might even be lower if it cut into my luxury consumption. The wanting/liking/approving trichotomy may also be relevant.
People were happier with their decision to have children if they were (all results are binomial correlations and highly significant even after correction): more gender-conforming (0.14), had fewer thoughts about maybe being transgender (0.20), were more right-wing (0.10), considered themselves more moral people (0.15), were less autistic (0.12), were less extraverted (0.10), were more emotionally stable (0.15), and were more agreeable (0.13). All of these effects were very small compared to the generally high level of happiness at having children, no matter who you were and what your personality was like.
I included this survey question because I’m considering whether or not to have kids. Even though the survey only reinforced the (confusing) results of past research, I still find it helpful. After all, a lot of the survey-takers here are pretty skeptical of other aspects of traditional lifestyles: monogamy, gender norms, religion, etc. It’s impressive how strongly approval of parenting survives even in this weird a population; I consider this a new and exciting fact beyond the ones established by previous studies.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: SSC
[ed. I asked a friend recently: if you could do it over again, would you still marry the same person? The answer (ambiguously enough) was: yes, if it meant having the children they have now.]
[ed. I asked a friend recently: if you could do it over again, would you still marry the same person? The answer (ambiguously enough) was: yes, if it meant having the children they have now.]
How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us
Facebook and Google are the most powerful companies in the global economy. Part of their appeal to shareholders is that their gigantic advertising businesses operate with almost no human intervention. Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.
Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions. No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil. No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective. The European Union challenged Google’s shopping price comparison engine on antitrust grounds, citing unfair use of Google’s search and AdWords data. The harm was clear: most of Google’s European competitors in the category suffered crippling losses. The most successful survivor lost 80 percent of its market share in one year. The EU won a record $2.7 billion judgment—which Google is appealing. Google investors shrugged at the judgment, and, as far as I can tell, the company has not altered its behavior. The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election. We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost. Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
We still don’t know the exact degree of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. But the debate over collusion, while important, risks missing what should be an obvious point: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
Awareness of the role of Facebook, Google, and others in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has increased dramatically in recent months, thanks in large part to congressional hearings on October 31 and November 1. This has led to calls for regulation, starting with the introduction of the Honest Ads Act, sponsored by Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar, and John McCain, which attempts to extend current regulation of political ads on networks to online platforms. Facebook and Google responded by reiterating their opposition to government regulation, insisting that it would kill innovation and hurt the country’s global competitiveness, and that self-regulation would produce better results.
But we’ve seen where self-regulation leads, and it isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
First, we must address the resistance to facts created by filter bubbles. Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader. The platforms will claim this is too onerous. Facebook has indicated that up to 126 million Americans were touched by the Russian manipulation on its core platform and another twenty million on Instagram, which it owns. Together those numbers exceed the 137 million Americans who voted in 2016. What Facebook has offered is a portal buried within its Help Center where curious users will be able to find out if they were touched by Russian manipulation through a handful of Facebook groups created by a single troll farm. This falls far short of what is necessary to prevent manipulation in 2018 and beyond. There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session. As Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, demonstrated in the October 31 Senate Judiciary hearing, the general counsel of Facebook in particular did not provide satisfactory answers. This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
These two remedies would only be a first step, of course. We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed. At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition. An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants. But decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
by Roger McNamee, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: Chris Matthews
Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions. No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil. No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective. The European Union challenged Google’s shopping price comparison engine on antitrust grounds, citing unfair use of Google’s search and AdWords data. The harm was clear: most of Google’s European competitors in the category suffered crippling losses. The most successful survivor lost 80 percent of its market share in one year. The EU won a record $2.7 billion judgment—which Google is appealing. Google investors shrugged at the judgment, and, as far as I can tell, the company has not altered its behavior. The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election. We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost. Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
We still don’t know the exact degree of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. But the debate over collusion, while important, risks missing what should be an obvious point: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
Awareness of the role of Facebook, Google, and others in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has increased dramatically in recent months, thanks in large part to congressional hearings on October 31 and November 1. This has led to calls for regulation, starting with the introduction of the Honest Ads Act, sponsored by Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar, and John McCain, which attempts to extend current regulation of political ads on networks to online platforms. Facebook and Google responded by reiterating their opposition to government regulation, insisting that it would kill innovation and hurt the country’s global competitiveness, and that self-regulation would produce better results.
But we’ve seen where self-regulation leads, and it isn’t pretty. Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
First, we must address the resistance to facts created by filter bubbles. Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader. The platforms will claim this is too onerous. Facebook has indicated that up to 126 million Americans were touched by the Russian manipulation on its core platform and another twenty million on Instagram, which it owns. Together those numbers exceed the 137 million Americans who voted in 2016. What Facebook has offered is a portal buried within its Help Center where curious users will be able to find out if they were touched by Russian manipulation through a handful of Facebook groups created by a single troll farm. This falls far short of what is necessary to prevent manipulation in 2018 and beyond. There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session. As Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, demonstrated in the October 31 Senate Judiciary hearing, the general counsel of Facebook in particular did not provide satisfactory answers. This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
These two remedies would only be a first step, of course. We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed. At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition. An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants. But decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
by Roger McNamee, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: Chris Matthews
[ed. If ever there were a flashing red signal... See also: When Speculation Has No Limits and
Beware the $500 Billion Bond Exodus.]
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Google's Memory Loss
I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better.
Evidence · This isn’t just a proof, it’s a rock-n-roll proof. Back in 2006, I published a review of Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal album. Back in 2008, Brent Simmons published That New Sound, about The Clash’s London Calling. Here’s a challenge: Can you find either of these with Google? Even if you read them first and can carefully conjure up exact-match strings, and then use the “site:” prefix? I can’t.
[Update: Now you can, because this piece went a little viral. But you sure couldn’t earlier in the day.]
Why? · Obviously, indexing the whole Web is crushingly expensive, and getting more so every day. Things like 10+-year-old music reviews that are never updated, no longer accept comments, are lightly if at all linked-to outside their own site, and rarely if ever visited… well, let’s face it, Google’s not going to be selling many ads next to search results that turn them up. So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure.
My pain here is purely personal; I freely confess that I’d been using Google’s global infrastructure as my own personal search index for my own personal publications. But the pain is real; I frequently mine my own history to re-use, for example in constructing the current #SongOfTheDay series.
Competition · Bing can find it! DuckDuckGo can too! Both of them can find Brent’s London Calling piece, too.
What Google cares about · It cares about giving you great answers to the questions that matter to you right now. And I find that if I type in a question, even something complicated and obscure, Google often surprises me with a timely, accurate answer. They’ve never claimed to index every word on every page.
My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.
What I’m going to do · When I have a question I want answered, I’ll probably still go to Google. When I want to find a specific Web page and I think I know some of the words it contains, I won’t any more, I’ll pick Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Evidence · This isn’t just a proof, it’s a rock-n-roll proof. Back in 2006, I published a review of Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal album. Back in 2008, Brent Simmons published That New Sound, about The Clash’s London Calling. Here’s a challenge: Can you find either of these with Google? Even if you read them first and can carefully conjure up exact-match strings, and then use the “site:” prefix? I can’t.
[Update: Now you can, because this piece went a little viral. But you sure couldn’t earlier in the day.]Why? · Obviously, indexing the whole Web is crushingly expensive, and getting more so every day. Things like 10+-year-old music reviews that are never updated, no longer accept comments, are lightly if at all linked-to outside their own site, and rarely if ever visited… well, let’s face it, Google’s not going to be selling many ads next to search results that turn them up. So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure.
My pain here is purely personal; I freely confess that I’d been using Google’s global infrastructure as my own personal search index for my own personal publications. But the pain is real; I frequently mine my own history to re-use, for example in constructing the current #SongOfTheDay series.
Competition · Bing can find it! DuckDuckGo can too! Both of them can find Brent’s London Calling piece, too.
What Google cares about · It cares about giving you great answers to the questions that matter to you right now. And I find that if I type in a question, even something complicated and obscure, Google often surprises me with a timely, accurate answer. They’ve never claimed to index every word on every page.
My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.
What I’m going to do · When I have a question I want answered, I’ll probably still go to Google. When I want to find a specific Web page and I think I know some of the words it contains, I won’t any more, I’ll pick Bing or DuckDuckGo.
by Tim Bray, Ongoing | Read more:
Image: Home Depot via:
The Star Chef Hiding in Plain Sight on Lānaʻi
Lānaʻi City is not a city at all but a tiny village on the least populated of Hawai‘i’s publicly accessible islands. Home to nearly all of Lānaʻi’s 3,200 inhabitants, it’s centered around Dole Park, a town square lined with low-slung, plantation-style buildings that date to the early 1900s, when the island was transformed into the pineapple capital of the world.
There are no stoplights and just a handful of businesses, which include a market that sells great poke, a Korean café with a good burger, an art gallery, and a movie theater that was recently modernized by Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire who bought 97 percent of the island in 2012 for a reported $300 million. Ellison also owns roughly a third of the buildings in Lānaʻi City, including the Hotel Lānaʻi, a two-story white clapboard structure. The 11-room hotel, which has Wi-Fi but no TVs, also houses the Lānaʻi City Bar & Grille.
The restaurant, which takes up most of the first floor, was remodeled last year in a cool, contemporary color palette with modernist black booths — a radical change from the old-timey charm of its original decor. In November, Jimi Lasquete, a chef who trained with Alice Waters early in his career and under Michael Mina at San Francisco’s Aqua, took over; the word around town is that he has transformed a restaurant serving passably good fare, which had consisted of simple dishes like roasted chicken, to one serving top-flight cuisine.
On a summer evening, I settle in and order the pohole fern namasu, a twist on the traditional cucumber and carrot salad that uses local fiddleheads and is dressed with a sesame vinaigrette. The next dish, blistered green beans from a farm on Maui, is served with an equally memorable Hong Kong-style black bean sauce. By the time I sample the vibrant gojuchang dipping sauce for the popcorn shrimp and house-made chicharrones, I’m gobsmacked — how often does one experience such artful cooking in a relatively remote setting?
In the course of the meal, Lasquete emerges from the kitchen for his nightly round of chatting up the diners, a practice he took up while cooking at the 12-table Evans American Gourmet Café, a fine-dining restaurant in Lake Tahoe. He points to the sauces I’m oohing over and credits his Filipino father, a former Navy chef, for helping develop his palate; he goes on to praise the Korean home cooks in his hometown of Newark, California, from whom he learned the painstaking process of making kimchi, an essential element in the pan-Asian cuisine he’s undertaking here.
The day that Lasquete first set foot on Lānaʻi, during a visit with his girlfriend in the summer of 2016, he instantly fell in love with the place. “Here was this amazing peace and quiet,” he says. “And the people I met on the ferry, who were coming home after shopping on Maui, they were so gracious, so reflective of the small-town atmosphere. It reminded me of my upbringing, of my cousins and my family.” (...)
Lānaʻi, like the island of Ni‘ihau, has a long history of private ownership. For centuries, Hawaiians, including those on Lānaʻi, had divided their land into tracts that could be used by an individual but not owned. In 1862, Walter Murray Gibson, an erstwhile entrepreneur and newly anointed Mormon leader, arrived on Lānaʻi and began buying plots of land with church money. (He was eventually excommunicated for embezzling church funds, among other crimes.) By the time he died in 1888, Gibson had purchased most of the island, which he passed on to his heirs.
After attempts at sugarcane cultivation and sheep ranching, Lānaʻi was sold in 1922 to James Drummond Dole, who was two decades into building his fruit empire. He covered the island with pineapples and built Lānaʻi City for his employees, along with the two-story building as a guesthouse for his friends. The island was owned by the Doles until 1985, when billionaire David Murdock acquired Dole parent company Castle & Cooke and, with it, the island of Lānaʻi. Out went the pineapples, which still irks some islanders, and in went two resorts, one near Lānaʻi City at Kō‘ele and the other at Mānele Bay.
At a public meeting a year after Ellison purchased the island, the billionaire’s representatives explained that his vision was for Lānaʻi to be the world’s “first economically viable, 100 percent green community.” There are plans for a desalination plant, still on the drawing board, and for restoration of the ancient fishponds, which is in the works. The Four Seasons Resort Lānaʻi at Manele Bay recently underwent a $450 million upgrade, and the Four Seasons Resort, The Lodge at Koele has been in the midst of a massive remodel for the last two years. Pūlama Lānaʻi also purchased a state-of-the-art, USDA-approved butchering trailer so that meat from the roughly 30,000 axis deer living on the island — an invasive species that first arrived in the 1920s — could be used in the restaurants. Each week, Pūlama Lānaʻi’s game management division delivers a pair of deer to Lasquete, and he uses every part of the animal, including in his bolognese sauce, while venison loin with a black cherry cabernet demi-glace has become one of his signature entrees.
[ed. See also: The Eater Guide to Hawaii]
There are no stoplights and just a handful of businesses, which include a market that sells great poke, a Korean café with a good burger, an art gallery, and a movie theater that was recently modernized by Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire who bought 97 percent of the island in 2012 for a reported $300 million. Ellison also owns roughly a third of the buildings in Lānaʻi City, including the Hotel Lānaʻi, a two-story white clapboard structure. The 11-room hotel, which has Wi-Fi but no TVs, also houses the Lānaʻi City Bar & Grille.
The restaurant, which takes up most of the first floor, was remodeled last year in a cool, contemporary color palette with modernist black booths — a radical change from the old-timey charm of its original decor. In November, Jimi Lasquete, a chef who trained with Alice Waters early in his career and under Michael Mina at San Francisco’s Aqua, took over; the word around town is that he has transformed a restaurant serving passably good fare, which had consisted of simple dishes like roasted chicken, to one serving top-flight cuisine.On a summer evening, I settle in and order the pohole fern namasu, a twist on the traditional cucumber and carrot salad that uses local fiddleheads and is dressed with a sesame vinaigrette. The next dish, blistered green beans from a farm on Maui, is served with an equally memorable Hong Kong-style black bean sauce. By the time I sample the vibrant gojuchang dipping sauce for the popcorn shrimp and house-made chicharrones, I’m gobsmacked — how often does one experience such artful cooking in a relatively remote setting?
In the course of the meal, Lasquete emerges from the kitchen for his nightly round of chatting up the diners, a practice he took up while cooking at the 12-table Evans American Gourmet Café, a fine-dining restaurant in Lake Tahoe. He points to the sauces I’m oohing over and credits his Filipino father, a former Navy chef, for helping develop his palate; he goes on to praise the Korean home cooks in his hometown of Newark, California, from whom he learned the painstaking process of making kimchi, an essential element in the pan-Asian cuisine he’s undertaking here.
The day that Lasquete first set foot on Lānaʻi, during a visit with his girlfriend in the summer of 2016, he instantly fell in love with the place. “Here was this amazing peace and quiet,” he says. “And the people I met on the ferry, who were coming home after shopping on Maui, they were so gracious, so reflective of the small-town atmosphere. It reminded me of my upbringing, of my cousins and my family.” (...)
Lānaʻi, like the island of Ni‘ihau, has a long history of private ownership. For centuries, Hawaiians, including those on Lānaʻi, had divided their land into tracts that could be used by an individual but not owned. In 1862, Walter Murray Gibson, an erstwhile entrepreneur and newly anointed Mormon leader, arrived on Lānaʻi and began buying plots of land with church money. (He was eventually excommunicated for embezzling church funds, among other crimes.) By the time he died in 1888, Gibson had purchased most of the island, which he passed on to his heirs.
After attempts at sugarcane cultivation and sheep ranching, Lānaʻi was sold in 1922 to James Drummond Dole, who was two decades into building his fruit empire. He covered the island with pineapples and built Lānaʻi City for his employees, along with the two-story building as a guesthouse for his friends. The island was owned by the Doles until 1985, when billionaire David Murdock acquired Dole parent company Castle & Cooke and, with it, the island of Lānaʻi. Out went the pineapples, which still irks some islanders, and in went two resorts, one near Lānaʻi City at Kō‘ele and the other at Mānele Bay.
At a public meeting a year after Ellison purchased the island, the billionaire’s representatives explained that his vision was for Lānaʻi to be the world’s “first economically viable, 100 percent green community.” There are plans for a desalination plant, still on the drawing board, and for restoration of the ancient fishponds, which is in the works. The Four Seasons Resort Lānaʻi at Manele Bay recently underwent a $450 million upgrade, and the Four Seasons Resort, The Lodge at Koele has been in the midst of a massive remodel for the last two years. Pūlama Lānaʻi also purchased a state-of-the-art, USDA-approved butchering trailer so that meat from the roughly 30,000 axis deer living on the island — an invasive species that first arrived in the 1920s — could be used in the restaurants. Each week, Pūlama Lānaʻi’s game management division delivers a pair of deer to Lasquete, and he uses every part of the animal, including in his bolognese sauce, while venison loin with a black cherry cabernet demi-glace has become one of his signature entrees.
by Ann Herold, Eater | Read more:
Image: Lanai City Bar & Grille[ed. See also: The Eater Guide to Hawaii]
Public Transportation is Cool
New Adidas Trainers Double as Berlin Transit Passes
The shoes, which feature the same camouflage pattern used on the city’s train seats, double up as an annual transit pass. It’s embedded in the tongues of the trainers, which are styled as a fabric version of the BVG annual ticket, and can be used just like a regular ticket covering the bus, tram and underground in zones A and B. While the cheapest annual ticket available from the BVG is currently €728, the shoes cost just €180.
Image: uncredited
[ed. Pretty smart, and a great travel discount too.]
Monday, January 15, 2018
The TL:DR Guide to Michael Wolff's 'Fire and Fury'
A quick note about Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, which upon a second pass still has, to put it mildly, some serious issues: As any art historian can pick out a forgery, veteran journalists reading this book will quickly spot an oversold narrative and perhaps unprecedented sourcing issues.
The tortured "Author's Note" preceding the prologue almost reads like a novel in itself. In fact, trying to follow Wolff's idea of what "off the record" means or does not mean is like trying to follow the hands of a three-card monte dealer. It just can't be done.
As a White House source put it, Wolff's narrative personality is almost like a comedy act in itself:
"He's like the old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live," the source said. "You know – 'Yeah, I went to Harvard, that's the ticket. And, yeah, I was on the couch in the West Wing for months, that's the ticket.'"
Fire and Fury is really two books rolled into one. The first is a compelling nonfiction book about the intellectual divide in the modern right, as candidly hashed out to Wolff by influential figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes and (seemingly?) Rupert Murdoch.
The second is a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House, based on a few bits and pieces of fact, which are offset by mountains of eye-rollingly insupportable supposition, spiced with occasional stretches of believable analysis.
There is considerable debate in the media world, on both the left and the right, about the value of this book (even I've gone back and forth on it). In the end, I think it's like a piece of moldy rye bread – you have to cut around the hairily sourced parts to keep from getting poisoned. But on a broad level, there is something to dig into.
Reading the book, there are at least a few real points about Trump that shine through:
1) Trump has almost no ideological convictions and is motivated almost entirely by the classic narcissistic value equation, i.e. how much praise or scorn he gets on a second-to-second basis, from whom, and why. Had he not run as a Republican – and in particular won on a platform scripted by a nationalist true believer like Bannon – he might very well by now have been pushed into a completely different kind of presidency. Trump wants so badly to be liked that, especially with the influence of Kushner and Ivanka, he might easily have allowed his White House to drift back toward his original politics, which (as New Yorkers and furious conservatives alike will clearly remember) was once squarely in the Bob Rubin rich-guy sort-of Democrat mold.
2) However, as Bannon points out in the book – correctly – Trump by now is so firmly entrenched in the consciousness of America's intellectual elite as a villain that he will never be accepted by that crowd. The constant battering Trump gets from the press, especially, ensures that he will continue to lash out at them, forcing him continually to tack back to the only people who still like him – Bannon's angry-man followers. This despite the fact that what Trump clearly craves is, instead, the approval of members of his own class.
3) The result is an insane paradox of an America led by a doomed and trapped psyche. This is a president who in another era might have been confined to the impact of an ordinary bad commander-in-chief (we've had many), i.e., sedated and/or scripted in public, and kept on the golf course the rest of the time while the empire runs on the dreary autopilot of donors, P.R. flacks and military advisers.
Instead, we get a leader whose most dangerous moments come during his ever-expanding calendar of hyper-tweeting downtime (incidentally, is anything more certain than the term "executive time" replacing "taking my talents to South beach" as this generation's euphemism for masturbation?). All those crazed Trump tweets guarantee an endless cycle of paranoia and rebuke – and a permanently paralyzed White House.
Anyway, it's a fascinating book. But too long for most people in the Internet age to actually read. So without further ado, here's shorter Michael Wolff, in chapter form:
a) The Author's Note:
See if you can make sense of this passage:
"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."
In other words: The unattributed facts you're about to read are sometimes my best guess as to the truth, and sometimes someone else's more dubious version, and you won't know which is which, but – whatever, enjoy!
b) Prologue: Ailes and Bannon
This is the most interesting part of the book, and not just because Wolff has the stones to use the word "louche" in a sentence early on (there's an "I went to college, honest" word choice about once every four pages in Fire and Fury). This passage alone sums up 30 years of the history of right-wing thinking:
"Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody – and Ailes thought it might be on him."
This is the main theme of the book: That both the Republican establishment (as represented by the likes of Ailes and Murdoch) and the alt-right revolution (as represented by Bannon) think Trump is a fumbled football they can pick up and run into the end zone of power.
In the end, of course, the joke is on everyone, as Trump's brain fumbles hopelessly out of bounds and neither side successfully appropriates his presidency, which becomes an endlessly circular, purposeless, narcissistic tweet-storm.
1. ELECTION DAY
Wolff becomes roughly the 40,000th writer to compare Trump's campaign to The Producers. In classic Hollywood formula-script fashion, the Trump campaign is presented as composed of characters that each have their own desperate motivation to lose, only to each be crushed in their own way by the shocker result.
This chapter reads a lot like Shattered, the acid catalogue of finger-pointing that took place among high-ranking Clinton campaign figures after Hillary's loss, except here it's backwards. In this case, the characters start to blame each other for somehow transforming what Steve Bannon called a surefire "broke dick" loser campaign into a winner.
The only person who truly believed from the start that Trump would win is Melania, who had learned to expect, with religious certainty, that her husband would deliver upon the worst-case scenario in every situation. She was right.
The tortured "Author's Note" preceding the prologue almost reads like a novel in itself. In fact, trying to follow Wolff's idea of what "off the record" means or does not mean is like trying to follow the hands of a three-card monte dealer. It just can't be done.
As a White House source put it, Wolff's narrative personality is almost like a comedy act in itself:
"He's like the old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live," the source said. "You know – 'Yeah, I went to Harvard, that's the ticket. And, yeah, I was on the couch in the West Wing for months, that's the ticket.'"
Fire and Fury is really two books rolled into one. The first is a compelling nonfiction book about the intellectual divide in the modern right, as candidly hashed out to Wolff by influential figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes and (seemingly?) Rupert Murdoch.The second is a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House, based on a few bits and pieces of fact, which are offset by mountains of eye-rollingly insupportable supposition, spiced with occasional stretches of believable analysis.
There is considerable debate in the media world, on both the left and the right, about the value of this book (even I've gone back and forth on it). In the end, I think it's like a piece of moldy rye bread – you have to cut around the hairily sourced parts to keep from getting poisoned. But on a broad level, there is something to dig into.
Reading the book, there are at least a few real points about Trump that shine through:
1) Trump has almost no ideological convictions and is motivated almost entirely by the classic narcissistic value equation, i.e. how much praise or scorn he gets on a second-to-second basis, from whom, and why. Had he not run as a Republican – and in particular won on a platform scripted by a nationalist true believer like Bannon – he might very well by now have been pushed into a completely different kind of presidency. Trump wants so badly to be liked that, especially with the influence of Kushner and Ivanka, he might easily have allowed his White House to drift back toward his original politics, which (as New Yorkers and furious conservatives alike will clearly remember) was once squarely in the Bob Rubin rich-guy sort-of Democrat mold.
2) However, as Bannon points out in the book – correctly – Trump by now is so firmly entrenched in the consciousness of America's intellectual elite as a villain that he will never be accepted by that crowd. The constant battering Trump gets from the press, especially, ensures that he will continue to lash out at them, forcing him continually to tack back to the only people who still like him – Bannon's angry-man followers. This despite the fact that what Trump clearly craves is, instead, the approval of members of his own class.
3) The result is an insane paradox of an America led by a doomed and trapped psyche. This is a president who in another era might have been confined to the impact of an ordinary bad commander-in-chief (we've had many), i.e., sedated and/or scripted in public, and kept on the golf course the rest of the time while the empire runs on the dreary autopilot of donors, P.R. flacks and military advisers.
Instead, we get a leader whose most dangerous moments come during his ever-expanding calendar of hyper-tweeting downtime (incidentally, is anything more certain than the term "executive time" replacing "taking my talents to South beach" as this generation's euphemism for masturbation?). All those crazed Trump tweets guarantee an endless cycle of paranoia and rebuke – and a permanently paralyzed White House.
Anyway, it's a fascinating book. But too long for most people in the Internet age to actually read. So without further ado, here's shorter Michael Wolff, in chapter form:
a) The Author's Note:
See if you can make sense of this passage:
"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."
In other words: The unattributed facts you're about to read are sometimes my best guess as to the truth, and sometimes someone else's more dubious version, and you won't know which is which, but – whatever, enjoy!
b) Prologue: Ailes and Bannon
This is the most interesting part of the book, and not just because Wolff has the stones to use the word "louche" in a sentence early on (there's an "I went to college, honest" word choice about once every four pages in Fire and Fury). This passage alone sums up 30 years of the history of right-wing thinking:
"Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody – and Ailes thought it might be on him."
This is the main theme of the book: That both the Republican establishment (as represented by the likes of Ailes and Murdoch) and the alt-right revolution (as represented by Bannon) think Trump is a fumbled football they can pick up and run into the end zone of power.
In the end, of course, the joke is on everyone, as Trump's brain fumbles hopelessly out of bounds and neither side successfully appropriates his presidency, which becomes an endlessly circular, purposeless, narcissistic tweet-storm.
1. ELECTION DAY
Wolff becomes roughly the 40,000th writer to compare Trump's campaign to The Producers. In classic Hollywood formula-script fashion, the Trump campaign is presented as composed of characters that each have their own desperate motivation to lose, only to each be crushed in their own way by the shocker result.
This chapter reads a lot like Shattered, the acid catalogue of finger-pointing that took place among high-ranking Clinton campaign figures after Hillary's loss, except here it's backwards. In this case, the characters start to blame each other for somehow transforming what Steve Bannon called a surefire "broke dick" loser campaign into a winner.
The only person who truly believed from the start that Trump would win is Melania, who had learned to expect, with religious certainty, that her husband would deliver upon the worst-case scenario in every situation. She was right.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Carolyn Kaster/AP
Beware the Lessons of Growing Up Galapagos
I'm wary of all conclusions drawn about media in the scarcity age, including the idea that people went to see movies because of movie stars. It's not that Will Smith isn't charismatic. He is. But I suspect Will Smith was in a lot of hits in the age of scarcity in large part because there weren't a lot of other entertainment options vying for people's attention when Independence Day or something of its ilk came out, like clockwork, to launch the summer blockbuster season.
The same goes for the general idea that any one star was ever the chief engine for a film's box office. If the idea that people go see a movie just to see any one star was never actually true, we can stop holding the modern generation of movie stars to an impossible standard.
The same mistake, I think, is being made about declining NFL ratings. Owners blame players kneeling for the national anthem, but here's my theory: in an age of infinite content, NFL games measure up poorly as entertainment, especially for a generation that grew up with smartphones and no cable TV and thus little exposure to American football. If I weren't in two fantasy football leagues with friends and coworkers, I would not have watched a single game this season, and that's a Leftovers-scale flash-forward twist for a kid who once recorded the Superbowl Shuffle to cassette tape off a local radio broadcast just to practice the lyrics.
If you disregard any historical romantic notions and examine the typical NFL football game, it is mostly dead time (if you watch a cut-down version of a game using Sunday Ticket, only about 30 minutes of a 3 to 3.5 hr game involves actual game action), with the majority of plays involving action of only incremental consequence, whose skill and strategy on display are opaque to most viewers and which are explained poorly by a bunch of middle-aged white men who know little about how to sell the romance of the game to a football neophyte. Several times each week, you might see a player hit so hard that they lie on the ground motionless, or with their hands quivering, foreshadowing a lifetime of pain, memory loss, and depression brought on by irreversible brain damage. If you tried to pitch that show concept just on its structural merits you'd be laughed out of the room in Hollywood.
Cultural products must regenerate themselves for each successive age and generation or risk becoming like opera or the symphony is today. I had season tickets to the LA Phil when I lived in Los Angeles, and I brought a friend to the season opener one year. A reporter actually stopped us as we walked out to interview us about why we were there, so mysterious it was to see two attendees who weren't old enough to have been contemporaries of the composer of the music that night (Mahler).
Yes, football has been around for decades, but most of those were in an age of entertainment scarcity. During that time the NFL capitalized on being the only game in town on Sundays, capturing an audience that passed on the game and its liturgies to their children. Football resembles a religion or any other cultural social network; humans being a tribal creature, we find products that satisfy that need, and what are professional sports leagues but an alliance of clans who band together for the network effects of ritual tribal warfare?
Because of its long incubation in an era of low entertainment competition, the NFL built up massive distribution power and enormous financial coffers. That it is a cultural product transmitted by one generation to the next through multiple channels means it's not entirely fair to analyze it independent of its history; cultural products have some path dependence.
Nevertheless, even if you grant it all its tailwinds, I don't trust a bunch of rich old white male owners who grew up in such favorable monopolistic conditions to both understand and adapt in time to rescue the NFL from continued decline in cultural relevance. They are like tortoises who grew up in the Galapagos Islands, shielded on all sides from predators by the ocean, who one day see the moat dry up, connecting them all of a sudden to other continents where an infinite variety of fast-moving predators dwell. I'm not sure the average NFL owner could unlock an iPhone X, let alone understand the way its product moves through modern cultural highways.
Other major sports leagues are in the same boat though most aren't as oblivious as the NFL. The NBA has an open-minded commissioner in Adam Silver and some younger owners who made their money in technology and at least have one foot in modernity. As a sport, the NBA has some structural advantages over other sports (for example, the league has fewer players whose faces are seen and who are active on social media in an authentic way), but the league also helps by allowing highlights of games to be clipped and shared on social media and by encouraging its players to cultivate public personas that act as additional narrative fodder for audiences.
I remember sitting in a meeting with some NFL representatives as they outlined a long list of their restrictions for how their televised games could be remixed and shared by fans on social media. Basically, they wanted almost none of it and would pursue take-downs through all the major social media companies.
Make no mistake, one possible successful strategy in this age of abundant media is to double down on scarcity. It's often the optimal strategy for extracting the maximum revenue from a motivated customer segment. Taylor Swift and other such unicorns can only release their albums on CD for a window to maximize financial return from her superfans before releasing the album on streaming services, straight from the old media windowing playbook.
However, you'd better be damn sure your product is unique and compelling to dial up that tactic because the far greater risk in the age of abundance is that you put up walls around your content and set up a bouncer at the door and no one shows up because there are dozens of free clubs all over town with no cover charge. (...)
My other test of narrative value is a variant of the previous compression test. Can you enjoy something just as much by just watching a tiny fraction of the best moments? If so, the narrative is brittle. If you can watch just the last scene of a movie and get most or all the pleasure of watching the whole thing, the narrative didn't earn your company for the journey.
Much more of sports fails this second test than many sports fans realize. I can watch highlights of most games on ESPN or HouseofHighlights on Instagram and extract most of the entertainment marrow and cultural capital of knowing what happened without having to sit through three hours of mostly commercials and dead time. That a game can be unbundled so easily into individual plays and retain most of its value to me might be seen as a good thing in the age of social media, but it's not ideal for the sports leagues if those excerpts are mostly viewed outside paywalls.
This is the bind for major sports leagues. On the one hand, you can try to keep all your content inside the paywall. On the other hand, doing so probably means you continue hemorrhaging cultural share. This is the eternal dilemma for all media companies in the age of infinite content.
The same goes for the general idea that any one star was ever the chief engine for a film's box office. If the idea that people go see a movie just to see any one star was never actually true, we can stop holding the modern generation of movie stars to an impossible standard.
The same mistake, I think, is being made about declining NFL ratings. Owners blame players kneeling for the national anthem, but here's my theory: in an age of infinite content, NFL games measure up poorly as entertainment, especially for a generation that grew up with smartphones and no cable TV and thus little exposure to American football. If I weren't in two fantasy football leagues with friends and coworkers, I would not have watched a single game this season, and that's a Leftovers-scale flash-forward twist for a kid who once recorded the Superbowl Shuffle to cassette tape off a local radio broadcast just to practice the lyrics.If you disregard any historical romantic notions and examine the typical NFL football game, it is mostly dead time (if you watch a cut-down version of a game using Sunday Ticket, only about 30 minutes of a 3 to 3.5 hr game involves actual game action), with the majority of plays involving action of only incremental consequence, whose skill and strategy on display are opaque to most viewers and which are explained poorly by a bunch of middle-aged white men who know little about how to sell the romance of the game to a football neophyte. Several times each week, you might see a player hit so hard that they lie on the ground motionless, or with their hands quivering, foreshadowing a lifetime of pain, memory loss, and depression brought on by irreversible brain damage. If you tried to pitch that show concept just on its structural merits you'd be laughed out of the room in Hollywood.
Cultural products must regenerate themselves for each successive age and generation or risk becoming like opera or the symphony is today. I had season tickets to the LA Phil when I lived in Los Angeles, and I brought a friend to the season opener one year. A reporter actually stopped us as we walked out to interview us about why we were there, so mysterious it was to see two attendees who weren't old enough to have been contemporaries of the composer of the music that night (Mahler).
Yes, football has been around for decades, but most of those were in an age of entertainment scarcity. During that time the NFL capitalized on being the only game in town on Sundays, capturing an audience that passed on the game and its liturgies to their children. Football resembles a religion or any other cultural social network; humans being a tribal creature, we find products that satisfy that need, and what are professional sports leagues but an alliance of clans who band together for the network effects of ritual tribal warfare?
Because of its long incubation in an era of low entertainment competition, the NFL built up massive distribution power and enormous financial coffers. That it is a cultural product transmitted by one generation to the next through multiple channels means it's not entirely fair to analyze it independent of its history; cultural products have some path dependence.
Nevertheless, even if you grant it all its tailwinds, I don't trust a bunch of rich old white male owners who grew up in such favorable monopolistic conditions to both understand and adapt in time to rescue the NFL from continued decline in cultural relevance. They are like tortoises who grew up in the Galapagos Islands, shielded on all sides from predators by the ocean, who one day see the moat dry up, connecting them all of a sudden to other continents where an infinite variety of fast-moving predators dwell. I'm not sure the average NFL owner could unlock an iPhone X, let alone understand the way its product moves through modern cultural highways.
Other major sports leagues are in the same boat though most aren't as oblivious as the NFL. The NBA has an open-minded commissioner in Adam Silver and some younger owners who made their money in technology and at least have one foot in modernity. As a sport, the NBA has some structural advantages over other sports (for example, the league has fewer players whose faces are seen and who are active on social media in an authentic way), but the league also helps by allowing highlights of games to be clipped and shared on social media and by encouraging its players to cultivate public personas that act as additional narrative fodder for audiences.
I remember sitting in a meeting with some NFL representatives as they outlined a long list of their restrictions for how their televised games could be remixed and shared by fans on social media. Basically, they wanted almost none of it and would pursue take-downs through all the major social media companies.
Make no mistake, one possible successful strategy in this age of abundant media is to double down on scarcity. It's often the optimal strategy for extracting the maximum revenue from a motivated customer segment. Taylor Swift and other such unicorns can only release their albums on CD for a window to maximize financial return from her superfans before releasing the album on streaming services, straight from the old media windowing playbook.
However, you'd better be damn sure your product is unique and compelling to dial up that tactic because the far greater risk in the age of abundance is that you put up walls around your content and set up a bouncer at the door and no one shows up because there are dozens of free clubs all over town with no cover charge. (...)
My other test of narrative value is a variant of the previous compression test. Can you enjoy something just as much by just watching a tiny fraction of the best moments? If so, the narrative is brittle. If you can watch just the last scene of a movie and get most or all the pleasure of watching the whole thing, the narrative didn't earn your company for the journey.
Much more of sports fails this second test than many sports fans realize. I can watch highlights of most games on ESPN or HouseofHighlights on Instagram and extract most of the entertainment marrow and cultural capital of knowing what happened without having to sit through three hours of mostly commercials and dead time. That a game can be unbundled so easily into individual plays and retain most of its value to me might be seen as a good thing in the age of social media, but it's not ideal for the sports leagues if those excerpts are mostly viewed outside paywalls.
This is the bind for major sports leagues. On the one hand, you can try to keep all your content inside the paywall. On the other hand, doing so probably means you continue hemorrhaging cultural share. This is the eternal dilemma for all media companies in the age of infinite content.
by Eugene Wei, Remains of the Day | Read more:
Image:Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
Hawaii and Human Error
The Cold War came to an end, somehow, without any of the world’s tens of thousands of nuclear warheads being fired. But there were decades-worth of close calls, high alerts, and simple mistakes that inched world leaders shockingly close to catastrophe.
Saturday’s terrifying, 38-minute episode in Hawaii will not go down as one of those close calls: Residents of the state waited for the bombs to fall after receiving text messages that a ballistic missile was on its way. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Sunday said “the government of Hawaii did not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false alert”—a case of human error, in other words.
But the episode did reveal the glaring deficiencies of an early-warning system that can easily misfire, along with some frightening truths about the speed at which policymakers and presidents must make decisions in the event that missiles really do fly. “Mistakes have happened and they will continue to happen,” the Arms Control Association’s Daryl Kimball told me. “But there is no fail safe against errors in judgment by human beings or the systems that provide early warning.”
As such, worries about miscalculation remain vivid. Vipin Narang, a political science professor at MIT focused on nuclear issues, tweeted one scenario on Saturday. “POTUS sees alert on his phone about an incoming toward Hawaii, pulls out the biscuit, turns to his military aide with the football and issues a valid and authentic order to launch nuclear weapons at North Korea. Think it can’t happen?”
The United States operates a series of radar and missile-defense systems across the Pacific. It includes satellites monitoring the Korean peninsula and fleets of American and Japanese warships equipped with the Aegis system, a powerful computing network that detects and tracks missile launches and aircraft. Those systems are tied to the U.S. Strategic Command’s Global Operations Center, buried deep underground in Nebraska, which monitors events around the world in real time and pumps that information to the Pentagon and the White House.
In the Hawaii incident, there was little danger of the United States firing off a nuclear response. Military officials knew within minutes of receiving the alert that there was no threat to U.S. territory; none of the Pentagon and U.S. spy satellites or the ground and sea-based radars detected any sign of missile launches from North Korea, government officials told me.
But with a president obsessed with cable news and Twitter, the erroneous alert could have easily triggered an angry or provocative tweet, which could have been interpreted by the North Koreans or Russians as an imminent threat. According to pool reports, Trump was briefed on the false alarm while at his private golf course in Florida. Hours later, he tweeted about Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails and the performance of the stock market. He has yet to comment on the incident despite knowing within minutes that all was safe, even as horrified Hawaiians continued to expect the worst. (...)
While the United States has a series of sophisticated early warning systems, potential adversaries do not, making initial statements from American officials critical in tense situations. “We have to be concerned about our adversaries early warning systems and their interpretation of these signals and messages,” Kimball said.
Entering this complex array of political signaling, high-tech surveillance, and careless tweeting, is the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review, the first since 2010. Originally slated for release next month, a draft of the document leaked this past week shows the Trump administration is lowering the bar for what would trigger an American nuclear response. It includes an entire section about non-nuclear strategic attacks that could spur an American nuclear response: cyber warfare, massive blows to critical infrastructure, and certain catastrophic attacks on civilians.
That is a “major expansion over Clinton, Bush and Obama,” all of whom attempted to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, Jon Wolfsthal, a former Obama official who worked on nuclear issues, told me. The new strategy views nuclear weapons as “a swiss army knife that can be pulled out to solve a range is issues,” he added. Among several new weapons the document proposes are so-called “low-yield nukes,” which could be placed on existing Trident ballistic missiles launched from submarines, lowering the threshold for use by causing less fallout, limiting the impact zone, and causing fewer civilian casualties.
As one defense official involved in nuclear issues put it: “We are self-deterred because our nuclear weapons are too big, and would cause too much damage if used.” The new strategy paper, then, expands the types of scenarios under which the United States would choose the nuclear option, which in turn “could lead to a new round of testing of nuclear weapons,” the official said.
Saturday’s terrifying, 38-minute episode in Hawaii will not go down as one of those close calls: Residents of the state waited for the bombs to fall after receiving text messages that a ballistic missile was on its way. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Sunday said “the government of Hawaii did not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false alert”—a case of human error, in other words.
But the episode did reveal the glaring deficiencies of an early-warning system that can easily misfire, along with some frightening truths about the speed at which policymakers and presidents must make decisions in the event that missiles really do fly. “Mistakes have happened and they will continue to happen,” the Arms Control Association’s Daryl Kimball told me. “But there is no fail safe against errors in judgment by human beings or the systems that provide early warning.”As such, worries about miscalculation remain vivid. Vipin Narang, a political science professor at MIT focused on nuclear issues, tweeted one scenario on Saturday. “POTUS sees alert on his phone about an incoming toward Hawaii, pulls out the biscuit, turns to his military aide with the football and issues a valid and authentic order to launch nuclear weapons at North Korea. Think it can’t happen?”
The United States operates a series of radar and missile-defense systems across the Pacific. It includes satellites monitoring the Korean peninsula and fleets of American and Japanese warships equipped with the Aegis system, a powerful computing network that detects and tracks missile launches and aircraft. Those systems are tied to the U.S. Strategic Command’s Global Operations Center, buried deep underground in Nebraska, which monitors events around the world in real time and pumps that information to the Pentagon and the White House.
In the Hawaii incident, there was little danger of the United States firing off a nuclear response. Military officials knew within minutes of receiving the alert that there was no threat to U.S. territory; none of the Pentagon and U.S. spy satellites or the ground and sea-based radars detected any sign of missile launches from North Korea, government officials told me.
But with a president obsessed with cable news and Twitter, the erroneous alert could have easily triggered an angry or provocative tweet, which could have been interpreted by the North Koreans or Russians as an imminent threat. According to pool reports, Trump was briefed on the false alarm while at his private golf course in Florida. Hours later, he tweeted about Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails and the performance of the stock market. He has yet to comment on the incident despite knowing within minutes that all was safe, even as horrified Hawaiians continued to expect the worst. (...)
While the United States has a series of sophisticated early warning systems, potential adversaries do not, making initial statements from American officials critical in tense situations. “We have to be concerned about our adversaries early warning systems and their interpretation of these signals and messages,” Kimball said.
Entering this complex array of political signaling, high-tech surveillance, and careless tweeting, is the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review, the first since 2010. Originally slated for release next month, a draft of the document leaked this past week shows the Trump administration is lowering the bar for what would trigger an American nuclear response. It includes an entire section about non-nuclear strategic attacks that could spur an American nuclear response: cyber warfare, massive blows to critical infrastructure, and certain catastrophic attacks on civilians.
That is a “major expansion over Clinton, Bush and Obama,” all of whom attempted to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, Jon Wolfsthal, a former Obama official who worked on nuclear issues, told me. The new strategy views nuclear weapons as “a swiss army knife that can be pulled out to solve a range is issues,” he added. Among several new weapons the document proposes are so-called “low-yield nukes,” which could be placed on existing Trident ballistic missiles launched from submarines, lowering the threshold for use by causing less fallout, limiting the impact zone, and causing fewer civilian casualties.
As one defense official involved in nuclear issues put it: “We are self-deterred because our nuclear weapons are too big, and would cause too much damage if used.” The new strategy paper, then, expands the types of scenarios under which the United States would choose the nuclear option, which in turn “could lead to a new round of testing of nuclear weapons,” the official said.
by Paul McCleary, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ben Jennings via The Guardian
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