The Cone of Uncertainty: Parenting on the Edge of Climate Change

There’s a special kind of dread that breeds in the path of a hurricane.

They call it the ‘cone of uncertainty’ – that brightly coloured funnel on the weather map that traces the possible paths of a storm. It’s a statistical mishmash created from dozens of predictions of varying quality, and when you see the dark red centre touch your part of the map, you can almost feel the barometric pressure dropping. You might have days to prepare, days before you know whether it’ll really hit you and how badly. You might not have days to get out, not if the roads are clogged and the gas stations are mobbed; certainly not if you have to work and don’t have cash on hand. You hunker down as best you can, waiting for the first rainbands and the next, for the eye to pass over and the eyewall to return.

Two months before Hurricane Irma, I take my seven-year-old daughter down Alligator Alley: the stretch of Interstate 75 that runs through the Everglades, the massive wetland that covers most of South Florida. It now spans only half the three million acres it once covered, thanks to the breakneck pace of agricultural development and suburban McMansions, but that’s still enough to make the maps look as though the Florida peninsula was dipped into a vat of green. Eight million people – a third of the state’s population – draw their drinking water from this wild and desolate place.

Travelers are advised to bring plenty of water, food, a canister of gas, and a first-aid kit, since there are no hospitals or restaurants and cellular coverage is minimal. Alligator Alley has only the Miccosukee and Seminole reservations and a few rest stops with bathrooms and vending machines. Flocks of turkey buzzards populate the picnic pavilions. A few feet from the parked cars, solid land drops off into sawgrass marsh. It would be easy to step out into the swamp and disappear: this is a protected reserve for the Florida panther, for birds and fish, and of course for alligators. Back when the Everglades was bigger, wilder, enslaved Africans escaped from sugarcane plantations and ran for their lives into those tall, sharp blades. Those who survived found aid and alliances with the local Seminole people.

I tell my daughter about this as we drive from my grandmother’s funeral in Miami to my parents’ house near Clearwater. We watch towering thunderheads sweep across the sea of grass, pouring furiously on us and then retreating into darkness, leaving a rainbow in the rear-view mirror. I want to take her to the Seminole reservation, to skim across the water in a noisy fan-powered airboat so she will remember this place. There is a museum there, too, with recreated houses on stilts, connected by little bridges. It’s a testament to human adaptation, to learning how to live in three feet of alligator-infested water. These are things I want her to learn – but the sun is brutal and the mosquitoes already have the taste of our blood, so we stay in the car. With no way to stream music, we sing our way through endless hours of the same view: water, sawgrass, power lines strung along the horizon, straight road ahead.

I remember what my cousin Ross, an Orlando comedian, told me about deciding to home-school his sons: ‘I want them to see Florida while it’s still here.’ I tell my daughter to remember, remember this. I want her to tell her grandchildren about it – as though it isn’t the height of arrogant optimism to imagine her grandchildren.

‘I want to go to space,’ she tells me. Seven-year-olds have a way of changing the subject abruptly, so I go with it. She’s always wanted to be a veterinarian. Why this sudden shift? ‘So we can still be alive even when the earth burns up.’

The impending planetary catastrophe is often on her mind. She thinks about death a lot. This is normal, of course – children ask the most important questions, especially at funerals, and God help the adults who don’t answer them seriously. She declares her desire to be buried, not cremated; she wants her beloved companion Doggy Pillow buried with her, so no one can bother it. ‘What kind of species will take over the earth after we’re gone?’ she asks. I admit I don’t know. ‘I don’t want them to mess with Doggy Pillow.’

If it has occurred to her that I will probably die before she does, she hasn’t mentioned it. But the planet will die before she does, that much seems clear – the planet as we know it, at any rate, the one that supports us and feeds us and slakes our thirst.

Her love of animals makes her a natural conservationist, and in the Anthropocene even books for children must address what is going on. Do you like sharks? Did you know that sharks can displace their jaws to snap at prey? Did you know that sharks are disappearing at an astonishing rate? My daughter declares that she will save the oceans by putting up signs telling people not to litter. It sounds no less effective than carbon offset trading.

She is surprised when I tell her about the icy, snowy Pennsylvania winters of my 1980s childhood. Her Pennsylvania winters are not like that. This February the ice-cream truck came by and we ate our cones on the back porch in the sunshine. Her friend’s ice-skating birthday party was cancelled due to a lack of ice.

Why, she asks, don’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be freaking out?

We read a book about second-graders who want to fight global warming. ‘What really freaks grown-ups out is not being in charge,’ the characters say. ‘If grown-ups weren’t scared of nature, they’d probably try harder to save it from global warming.’

We are freaking out, of course: quietly, while the oligarch-in-chief dismantles what little inadequate infrastructure might even notionally allow us do something on any major scale. We perform our anger, our disbelief, but the world is too busy ending to witness our performance. We go to work with an extra layer of sunscreen or an inhaler for the allergic asthma that flares when the trees, jarred from their seasonal rhythm, release their pollen all at once. We are scared of nature. We are most definitely not in charge.

At the end of June, a news conference: prominent figures from the UN and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, with an urgent message. Runaway irreversible climate change, the headlines read.

The Paris Accords, from which President Trump has made an undignified exit, were never enough, never even intended to be enough. They aimed for a rise of no more than 1.5° Celsius – but research indicates that this is unlikely, given that ‘average global temperatures were already more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38°C in February and March’ in 2016. ‘Sharp and permanent’ reductions to carbon emissions are needed in the next three years if we are even to mitigate the consequences. Chris Field of Stanford University, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, comments that ‘the 1.5°C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face.’ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is blunt: ‘The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.’

Three years. We thought we had twenty.

In July 2017, climate change seems imminent but still more or less distant. It’s possible, especially if you are a politician, to ignore something that is three years away. We inhabit the deep red centre of the cone of uncertainty, but the skies are still clear. We are the doomed Russian aristocrats who spent the summer of 1917 partying with wild abandon, their ears popping with the pressure of a brewing revolution. It’s not the proletariat or peasantry rising up to relieve us of our luxuries, though: it’s the earth itself, sea and sky working in coalition, trees and air conspiring.

We look at the numbers: If we cut all carbon emissions to net zero in the next twenty years – a feat that would require the overthrow of capitalism – we might, might, escape with a sea-level rise that is only catastrophic, with only mass migrations and hunger and thirst, with only a drastic reduction in our species instead of extinction.

Three years for a change so drastic as to be completely incompatible with capitalism. It feels impossible – but then, what changes felt impossible in 1914? In 1932? We laugh now at Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we had reached the ‘end of history’. Yet climate change presents, if not an end to history’s course, then a sharp and dangerous corner around which we cannot see. History’s pace quickens as the climate warms, events piling onto one another with disorienting speed, norms changing irreversibly. We will have to change faster, or the last opportunity will slip away without our even grasping for it. The task before us is mass expropriation on a scale not seen since perhaps the end of US slavery, a reversal of the colonial land grab that began the process – and if it doesn’t happen now, we can expect to abandon city after city to the rising waters. If that expropriation has the potential to be unfathomably violent, we have already begun to fathom the violence that awaits us if we eschew it. The world my daughter will know at seventeen is going to be radically different from this one; when she is old, our world maps will be even less familiar to her than 1914’s are to us.

by Sarah Grey, Salvage |  Read more:

Image: NOAA

Bulletproof Backpacks

The Unique Horror of a Bulletproof Backpack

Image: Guard Dog Security

A Reading on Collective Angst

Our Jerri-Lynn, who mainly lives overseas, was briefly in the US last month and dropped by our NYC meetup. She commented to me that she was very eager to leave because she could sense how high the general tension level was. She didn’t go on at great lengths why, but it was clear that at least some of it came from the success the press was having at whipping up outrage over Trump, and often not for the right reasons, such as over his mainly ineffective executive orders as opposed to his success in getting hard core conservative judges confirmed. It’s not hard to add to the list of topics that go beyond the usual media “If it bleeds, it leads” rule: the risk of nuclear war (even though those supposedly nutcase North Koreans appear to have diffused that with some Olympic diplomacy), Rooskies, #MeToo, more open hostility towards “out” groups ranging from immigrants to the white working class to Muslims. And that’s before we get to listing sources of stress: way too many people with student debt, older people with little to no likelihood of being able to afford retirement unless they leave the US, upper middle class parents spending and pulling strings to make sure their kids wind up in the right social stratum.

Because Lambert and I read so much of this sort of thing on a daily basis, we’re somewhat desensitized. But we’ve both noticed and regularly discussed in the last few weeks that the news flow has become, for lack of a more precise word, weird. The big stories somehow don’t seem that big, perhaps because they more and more seem like variants on shopworn themes. For instance, there is still news and jousting coming out of the Mueller investigations, but the media’s default posture of This Is Really Big and Will Finally Bring Trump Down has come to have a “Boy that cried ‘wolf'” flavor to it. Yet we both find the secondary stories, which ought to be more interesting and relevant in light of the “too much attention on Washington” orientation of the press, seem flatter than usual.

In other words, even though we’ve been cranking out articles, both Lambert and I have been struggling to find things that we deem to be interesting and postworthy. It may be that we’re overstimulated and our calibration is a bit off. For instance, I couldn’t get very worked up about the stock market tsuris of last week. Wake me up if it might endanger something that matters, like the financial system or the real economy.

With that as background, I have an odd confession to make. Even though I am a moody creature, I am able to trace precisely what has got me in the state I am in, whether good or bad. But all day, I’ve been very agitated, when absolutely nothing unusual happened, not even a dustup in the comments section.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. Exactly. It feels like something terrible is coming (and needs to happen), some cathartic form of resolution. See also: The Second Coming.]

As one commenter put it:

The economy is ambling a drunkard’s walk climbing a knife’s edge. The Corporations remain hard at work consolidating and building greater monopoly power, dismantling what remains of our domestic jobs and industry, and building ever more fragile supply chains. The government is busy dismantling the safety net, deconstructing health care, public education and science, bolstering the wealth of the wealthy, and stoking foreign wars while a tiff between factions within those who rule us fosters a new cold war and an arms build-up including building a new nuclear arsenal. In another direction Climate Disruption shows signs of accelerating while the new weather patterns already threaten random flooding and random destruction of cities. It already destroyed entire islands in the Caribbean. The government has proven its inability and unwillingness to do anything to prepare for the pending disasters or help the areas struck down in the seasons past. The year of Peak Oil is already in our past and there is nothing to fill its place. The world populations continue to grow exponentially. Climate Disruption promises to reduce food production and move the sources for fresh water and the worlds aquifers are drying up. It’s as if a whole flock of black swans is looking for places to land.

and another:

I’m starting to think that what we are experiencing is the realization that we’ve spent way too much time expecting that explaining our selves, our diverse grievances, and our political insights would naturally result in growing an irresistible movement that would wash over, and cleanse our politics of the filth that is the status quo. 

It is sobering to realize that it took almost four decades for the original Progressive Era organizers to bring about even the possibility of change. 

I think it’s dawning on us that we’re not re-experiencing the moment before the election of Franklin Roosevelt, and the beginning of the New Deal, we’re actually just now realizing the necessity of the daunting task of organizing, which makes our times resemble 1890 more than 1935. 

Government by the people, and for the people has been drowned in the bath-tub, and the murderers have not only taken the reigns of power, but have convinced half the population that their murderous act represents a political correction that will return America to greatness. 

It remains to be seen whether we will find it in our hearts to embrace both the hard, and un-glamorous work of relieving the pain inflicted by the regime that has engulfed us, and the necessity of embracing as brothers and sisters those who haven’t yet realized that it is the rich and powerful who are the problem, and not all the other poor and oppressed.

Blue Cross Of Idaho Takes The Plunge To Sell Non-ACA-Compliant Plans

On February 13, 2018, Blue Cross of Idaho filed five new individual market plans that will not comply with federal law under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These new “Freedom Blue” plans were filed in response to an executive order signed by Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter and implementing guidance issued by the Idaho Department of Insurance (DOI) in January 2018. Because the plans do not comply with the ACA, insurers that offer them are opening themselves up to significant legal risk and generating additional uncertainty for the market. To avoid this (and attempts by other states that to replicate Idaho’s path), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could step in to enforce the ACA’s consumer protections, as the agency is required to do so under the Public Health Service Act and federal regulations.

What’s In The New Plans?

Gov. Otter’s executive order and the bulletin issued by the DOI essentially authorize a state-level version of the “Cruz amendment,” which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) offered to the Better Care Reconciliation Act during efforts to repeal the ACA last year. The amendment—which would have allowed insurers to offer non-ACA-compliant plans in the individual market so long as they offered plans through the marketplace—was criticized for its potential to increase premiums in the ACA-compliant market and erode protections for consumers with preexisting conditions.

Idaho’s approach—which creates an uneven playing field of market rules—and the decision by Blue Cross of Idaho to offer these non-ACA-compliant “state-based plans” is likely to have similar effects on the Idaho market. Blue Cross will continue to offer marketplace plans that comply with the ACA through Your Health Idaho, the Idaho marketplace. However, they will also sell new “Freedom Blue” plans which are currently under review by the DOI. Blue Cross of Idaho hopes to begin selling the new plans in early March, with coverage going into effect in early April. These plans would be available on a year-round basis (rather than offered during an open enrollment period like ACA plans) and sold directly from Blue Cross.

Some media outlets are reporting that the state-based plans are similar to Blue Cross’ marketplace plans, but this is very misleading. The plans are quite dissimilar. They must be, or else the average rate for these plans would not be 25 to 50 percent lower than the rate of Blue Cross of Idaho’s bronze marketplace plans. These differences may not be immediately apparent from Blue Cross marketing materials; however, if they follow the DOI’s guidance, consumers who enroll in these plans may find themselves paying higher premiums based on health status, facing preexisting condition exclusions and benefit caps, and needing to pay much more money out-of-pocket before being protected financially.

The first major difference is that Blue Cross would take health status into consideration before calculating a consumer’s final premium—a significant return to the pre-ACA era. Under the DOI guidance, Blue Cross could charge individuals with a personal or family medical history up to 50 percent more in premiums based solely on health status. These plans could also exclude coverage for preexisting conditions unless a consumer had continuous coverage (meaning they were enrolled in health insurance before they enrolled in this policy without more than a 63-day break). Older Idahoans could also be charged more relative to the ACA and those who use tobacco could face heftier surcharges as well.

Some additional differences are highlighted in Blue Cross marketing materials; consumers could see significant increases in their medical costs thanks to dollar caps on benefits and caps on annual out-of-pocket expenses that are nearly twice as high as under the ACA. The state-based plans have an annual benefit cap of $1 million and dollar caps on certain benefits such as physical therapy, both of which are prohibited under the ACA. The state-based plans also have significantly higher annual out-of-pocket maximums relative to ACA plans: up to $12,000 for an individual and $24,000 for a family. There is also what appears to be a separate annual out-of-pocket maximum of $6,500 for prescription drugs. These changes alone could more than double the cost of medical care for an individual or family. And, although some press reports suggest that most plans will cover maternity care, there is no detail in the Blue Cross marketing materials and nothing to suggest that other benefit categories that are missing under state law (such as pediatric vision and dental care) would be covered.

by Katie Keith, Health Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. "Freedom Blue"(...as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted). I guess if you name anything Freedom someone will buy it. Want some Freedom fries with that?]

Magnus Åström

via:

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.

With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.

Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today because he wrote them down.)

“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.

It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.

People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”

Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.” (...)

Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”

by Julie Beck, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: John Frederick Peto/Getty

The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis

When he was thirty-five, Kieran Setiya had a midlife crisis. Objectively, he was a successful philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had written the books “Practical Knowledge” and “Knowing Right from Wrong.” But suddenly his existence seemed unsatisfying. Looking inward, he felt “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”; looking forward, he saw only “a projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death.” What was the point of life? How would it all end? The answers appeared newly obvious. Life was pointless, and would end badly.

Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.

Setiya finds that the history of the midlife crisis is both very long and very short. On the one hand, he identifies a text from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, circa 2000 B.C., as the earliest description of a midlife crisis and suggests that Dante might have had one at the age of thirty-five. (“Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”) On the other, he learns that the term itself wasn’t coined until 1965, when a psychologist named Elliott Jaques wrote an essay called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” (Jaques quotes a patient’s eloquent lament: “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight.”) John Updike published “Rabbit Redux” in 1971. (“What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do.”) Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter” in 1986. (“You can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up.”) In between, Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” published in 1977, explored the midlife crisis from a psychological point of view. Sheehy, an accomplished investigative journalist—she also wrote “The Secret of Grey Gardens”—became an anthropologist of middle age. After interviewing many midlifers, she concluded that women, too, experienced midlife crises; they just had them earlier than men. “The years 35 to 39 are the infidelity years for women,” she told People, in 1976. Having “packed their last child off to school,” middle-aged women “want to restore illusions of youthful appearance, romantic love.”

After Sheehy’s book was published, everybody seemed to be having a midlife crisis. Perhaps, Setiya writes, people married too early during the conservative postwar decades, then reëvaluated their lives as the counterculture flowered. On the whole, though, research on the frequency of midlife crises tends to be equivocal. Many long-term studies of well-being show that people actually get happier as they age. (This lends credence, Setiya suggests, to Aristotle’s view that we grow into a “prime of life,” with the body achieving its fullest development at thirty-five and the mind at forty-nine.) Other studies show that there is a “U-shaped curve” to life satisfaction, such that we’re happiest when we’re young and old and unhappiest in between. (There are even studies of great apes, conducted by zoologists, which show that they get sad in middle age.) “Shit happens in midlife,” Setiya writes, “with kids and parents, work and health.” He is drawn to the work of the German economist Hannes Schwandt, which shows that “younger people tend to overestimate how satisfied they will be, while midlifers underestimate old age.” According to this theory, we could avoid midlife crises by calibrating our expectations.

If you’re a jerk, it’s useful to have a midlife crisis; it gives your irresponsible behavior an existential sheen. Almost certainly, the term is overused. Still, having experienced a midlife crisis himself, Setiya ends up convinced that they are an ordinary part of a well-lived life. He identifies a number of intellectual traps into which even the most levelheaded people can fall. Many have to do with the way we think about freedom and choice. Because the lives of middle-aged people have settled into more or less permanent shapes, for instance, people in midlife often become nostalgic for the feeling of choosing: they think, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills. With philosophical exactitude, Setiya explains the flaws in this kind of thinking. Suppose, he writes, that you can have just one of three desirable things—A, B, or C, in order of preference. Because there’s value in having a choice, there are situations in which a choice between B and C is actually preferable to A. Even so, the satisfaction offered by choice has a limit. Most of the time, the value of B or C plus the value of choosing won’t actually add up to the value of A. It’s exciting to choose a new career, but you’ll probably end up with an inferior job; it’s fun to date again, but your new spouse probably won’t be better than your current one.

Some middle-aged people wonder if they shoulda, coulda, woulda, or spend time wishing they could undo their worst mistakes; Setiya, for instance, wonders if he should’ve become a doctor rather than a philosophy professor. He urges the middle-aged to think in detail about what the alternative realities they contemplate would actually entail. Thanks to the “butterfly effect,” he argues, the alternative world in which you hadn’t made those mistakes would almost certainly exclude many of the things you currently value. (Had you chosen a different career, your children might not exist.) Setiya points out that the decisions that vex us most in retrospect also tend to be choices between “incommensurable goods.” Should you have worked on your novel or spent time with your family? Become a musician or an engineer? In Setiya’s view, regrets over such choices are good signs, since they reflect a healthy, multidimensional appreciation of life. “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it,” he writes. (Someone with a darker sensibility might have put it differently: there is no escaping loss, no matter how rich your life is.)

To many people, the increasing proximity of death is the worst thing about middle age. It doesn’t seem to bother Setiya very much: he points out that immortality would probably get frustrating after a while, and suggests getting over your own death in advance by imagining yourself coming to terms with the death of a friend. Instead, what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore. “Having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide,” he writes. There’s a sense in which all goal-directed behavior is ironic: “In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.” Setiya quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom”; according to Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of existence, we spend our days struggling, then are rewarded for struggle with emptiness. “This is the problem with being consumed by plans,” Setiya concludes. “They are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.”

In an effort to evade this conundrum, Setiya brings out the philosophical heavy artillery. He draws on an Aristotelian distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake.

The secret to avoiding Schopenhauerian ennui, Setiya argues, is either to do things that are complete and atelic or to find ways of engaging with your projects atelically. Setiya cautions against the “false allure of early retirement,” since “there is nothing inherently telic about work”; instead of quitting your job, you might find ways to engage with it atelically, as a practice rather than a project. Certain middle-aged habits—golf, yoga, gardening—can help to create an atelic mind-set. Setiya recommends mindfulness meditation; buying a sports car may also be permissible, if it includes “a switch in focus from the value of getting there to the value of being on the way.”

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Bernd Vogel / Getty

Nissan Embeds Self-Parking Tech in Pillows and Slippers

Nissan, like every other car manufacturer that doesn't want to be rendered mostly obsolete within the next few decades, has been gradually developing autonomous technology for its vehicles. They've been going about it very sensibly, introducing discrete modules like highway assist and parking assist, and they've managed to get the parking bit working well enough to take it beyond cars. One such attempt at an even more challenging and important self-parking application: slipper arrangements.

At first glance, the ProPILOT Park Ryokan looks like any other traditional Japanese inn, or ryokan. Slippers are neatly lined up at the foyer, where guests remove their shoes. Tatami rooms are furnished with low tables and floor cushions for sitting. What sets this ryokan apart is that the slippers, tables and cushions are rigged with a special version of Nissan's ProPILOT Park autonomous parking technology. When not in use, they automatically return to their designated spots at the push of a button.

For its primary application, Nissan's ProPILOT Park system uses an array of four cameras and twelve sonar sensors to wedge its host vehicle into even the smallest of parking spaces—whether it's nose-in parking, butt-in parking, or trickiest of all, parallel parking. It seems unlikely that the slippers use quite the same technology, although Nissan does suggest that the technology is at least similar, which would mean that the slippers are operating autonomously rather than relying on someone off-camera with a remote control. If you'd like to investigate further, Nissan is offering a free night for a pair of travelers at this particular ryokan, which located in Hakone, Japan—a lovely place that you should consider visiting even if self-parking slippers aren't on the amenities list.

Our only question now is, why limit this technology to cars, slippers, and pillows? I'd like my cereal bowls to be self parking. And my socks. And how about the toothpaste? Just think about how much more convenient it would be if all of these things were self-parking, too. So let's get going with this, Nissan. Make our lives better already.

by Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:

Image: Nissan

Holding On

I remember the first time I held my daughter’s hand. She was just minutes old, and I knew nothing about babies, so I was impressed to find that even a newborn could hold on. “Look, she’s holding my hand!” I exclaimed to myself, to the air, to anyone in the room. That she could cling to me and me to her was the most natural thing in the world, it turned out. It comes to us from the unknown depths of our biology, pre-birth. Our first skill is hanging on, no practice necessary. What I didn’t know yet was that learning to let go would also come easily, maybe naturally, to her. That she would master it quicker than me.

I know every time I’ve let go of Zelda, in fact, what’s actually happened is that she let go of me, and I simply allowed it, overcoming my natural inclinations to cling, to hold tight. I felt her pull away from me as she stood up on her fat wobbly legs to walk for the first time, and I worried that she would fall. She did, of course, fall down, and though she cried real tears of failure and frustration, and though she looked over at me, she didn’t reach for me. She didn’t need me, not right that second. She told me then what I didn’t want, couldn’t stand to hear, not yet, not yet: “Sometimes, I need you; sometimes I do not.”

I let her arms disentangle from my own in a swimming pool, her confidence in the floaters strapped to her was so much stronger than my own. She floated; she floats.

I remember almost nothing of the first day I took her to school, at 16 months old, beyond the image of her little turquoise dress fluttering in the wind as she took her teacher’s hand and walked away from her father and me without a word of goodbye. The rest of the day, beyond her walking away, the gate banging shut, closing me off, sending me home, is a blur. Many of my best and most acute memories of her are this: she turned away from me.

Just this morning I took her to school a few minutes early, had a conference with her teacher while she played with her friends in the other room. “Come say goodbye, don’t leave without saying goodbye,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me as we split up. Twenty minutes later, armed with the overwhelming joy of her progress report, I wandered across the hall, to where she was now seated with 10 other children, doing a puzzle, where the goal was to put together a bear, only five pieces, dressed in a tutu. She had the head and the feet already locked in, and was puzzling over the middle section when I came to her. “I came to say goodbye,” I knelt down to her, touching her face. I saw her little shoulder shrug me away, her concentration has improved: just last year, her teacher told me in the conference, any interruption broke her away from her work. Now, she is focused, she was focused on the bear, not me. What she requested just minutes before—to see me once more before I left—she no longer wanted or needed. Only I needed it.

by Laura June, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Erasing History

The Honolulu Advertiser doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to publish a regular “Health Bureau Statistics” column in its back pages supplied with information from the Hawaii Department of Health detailing births, deaths, and other events. The paper, which began in 1856 as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, since the end of World War II was merged, bought, sold, and then merged again with its local rival, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, to become in 2010 The Honolulu Star Advertiser. But the Advertiser archive is still preserved on microfilm in the Honolulu State Library. Who could have guessed, when those reels were made, that the record of a tiny birth announcement would one day become a matter of national consequence? But there, on page B-6 of the August 13, 1961, edition of The Sunday Advertiser, set next to classified listings for carpenters and floor waxers, are two lines of agate type announcing that on August 4, a son had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway.

In the absence of this impossible-to-fudge bit of plastic film, it would have been far easier for the so called birther movement to persuade more Americans that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But that little roll of microfilm was and is still there, ready to be threaded on a reel and examined in the basement of the Honolulu State Library: An unfalsifiable record of “Births, Marriages, Deaths,” which immeasurably fortified the Hawaii government’s assertions regarding Obama’s original birth certificate. “We don’t destroy vital records,” Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo says. “That’s our whole job, to maintain and retain vital records.”

Absent that microfilmed archive, maybe Donald Trump could have kept insinuating that Barack Obama had in fact been born in Kenya, and granting sufficient political corruption, that lie might at some later date have become official history. Because history is a fight we’re having every day. We’re battling to make the truth first by living it, and then by recording and sharing it, and finally, crucially, by preserving it. Without an archive, there is no history.

For years, our most important records have been committed to specialized materials and technologies. For archivists, 1870 is the year everything begins to turn to dust. That was the year American newspaper mills began phasing out rag-based paper with wood pulp, ensuring that newspapers printed after would be known to future generations as delicate things, brittle at the edges, yellowing with the slightest exposure to air. In the late 1920s, the Kodak company suggested microfilm was the solution, neatly compacting an entire newspaper onto a few inches of thin, flexible film. In the second half of the century entire libraries were transferred to microform, spun on microfilm reels, or served on tiny microfiche platters, while the crumbling originals were thrown away or pulped. To save newspapers, we first had to destroy them.

Then came digital media, which is even more compact than microfilm, giving way, initially at least, to fantasies of whole libraries preserved on the head of a pin. In the event, the new digital records degraded even more quickly than did newsprint. Information’s most consistent quality is its evanescence. Information is fugitive in its very nature.

“People are good at guessing what will be important in the future, but we are terrible at guessing what won’t be,” says Clay Shirky, media scholar and author, who in the early 2000s worked at the Library of Congress on the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Project. After the obvious—presidential inaugurations or live footage of world historical events, say—we have to choose what to save. But we can’t save everything, and we can’t know that what we’re saving will last long. “Much of the modern dance of the 1970s and 1980s is lost precisely because choreographers assumed the VHS tapes they made would preserve it,” he says. He points to Rothenberg’s Law: “Digital data lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first,” which was coined by the RAND Corporation computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg in a 1995 Scientific American article. “Our digital documents are far more fragile than paper,” he argued. “In fact, the record of the entire present period of history is in jeopardy.”

On the other hand, says archivist Dan Cohen, “One of the good developments of our digital age is that it is possible to save more, and to provide access to more.” Fifteen years ago, he began work on Digital History, a book co-authored with Roy Rosenzweig. “There was already a good sense of how fragile born-digital materials are,” he explains, stressing that most archivists’ concerns aren’t new. “Historians have always had to sift through fakes and half-truths. What’s gotten worse is the sheer ease of creating fake documents and especially of disseminating them far and wide. People haven’t gotten any less gullible.”

In the 21st century, more and more information is “born digital” and will stay that way, prone to decay or disappearance as servers, software, Web technologies, and computer languages break down. The task of internet archivists has developed a significance far beyond what anyone could have imagined in 2001, when the Internet Archive first cranked up the Wayback Machine and began collecting Web pages; the site now holds more than 30 petabytes of data dating back to 1996. (One gigabyte would hold the equivalent of 30 feet of books on a shelf; a petabyte is a million of those.) Not infrequently, the Wayback Machine and other large digital archives, such as those in the care of the great national and academic libraries, find themselves holding the only extant copy of a given work on the public internet. This responsibility is increasingly fraught with political, cultural, and even legal complications.

by Maria Bustilllos, CJR |  Read more:

Image: Shannon Freshwater

Inside T-Mobile's Big, Brash Comeback

The crowd in the ballroom at the Westin New York at Times Square on this February afternoon is in a partying mood well before sundown. They’re enjoying the buzz of being an elite crew: some 200 employees handpicked by managers as top performers. They’re nodding their heads to a pounding soundtrack (Beck’s “Wow,” “Havana” by Camila Cabello and Young Thug, some Coldplay). They’re competing in cheering contests. And they’re antsy for the big moment when they’ll pull the triggers that set off a fusillade of confetti cannons.

This is definitely not what most companies do on quarterly earnings day. But the company hosting this bash is T-Mobile (TMUS, +0.96%), the formerly downtrodden wireless carrier—where rebounding employee morale and rising revenue are almost inextricably linked.

After one last cheer-off, the star of the show arrives. John Legere, T-Mobile’s tirelessly trash-talking, 59-year-old CEO, stalks in with a phalanx of senior execs, to the beat of a standing ovation. He quickly gets to the point: “Rowdy crowd? There’s a good reason to be rowdy … We announced results today that were just phenomenal, the best financial results since I’ve been CEO here.”

It’s true: Despite a year marked by a major disappointment—merger talks with rival Sprint broke down in November, with no deal—the numbers T-Mobile has just announced are formidable. Its 2017 revenue was $40.6 billion, up 8% from 2016, and more than double its total in 2012, the year Legere took over; net income, meanwhile, reached a record $4.54 billion. While it remains far behind Verizon (VZ, -0.44%) and AT&T (T, +0.66%) in number of subscribers, T-Mobile, which makes its debut on the Fortune Best Companies list this year, has undeniable momentum. It’s intent on shaking up both the wireless world—it has its eye on other acquisitions—and the cable industry, with a tantalizing move into mobile video.

That success, insiders and industry experts agree, is fueled by rah-rah rallies like this one. The crowd chants “Are you with us?,” a slogan from the diversity-themed ad T-Mobile unveiled during the Super Bowl. The confetti cannons do indeed fire confetti. And then it’s question time: For 30 minutes, Legere and his team field inquiries from employees in the ballroom and others watching via webcast. Legere keeps the pace rapid and the tone solicitous, doling out cash rewards (peeled off a stash of rolled-up $20 bills) for those brave enough to query him. Some questions are jokey (Have we bought stock in confetti cannons?), but others are sincere and probing. Afterward, dozens of employees line up to shake hands with the CEO and pose with him for pictures. Legere hangs around for almost half an hour until the entire line gets through.

“He’s like an amazing person, different from everyone I’ve ever seen as a CEO,” Donald Smith, who works in a T-Mobile store in the Bronx, says after snapping a selfie with Legere. “He seems like he actually cares.”

Legere certainly cares about making a ruckus. Famously brash and competitive, he’s best known for castigating his competitors (he routinely dismisses AT&T and Verizon as “dumb and dumber”), uttering public profanities, and engaging in the occasional Twitter war—including with then-candidate Donald Trump, in 2015, in a spat over tweets in which Trump criticized mixed-martial-arts star Ronda Rousey. (After the election, Legere said he had “got way past” the feud and was optimistic about the impact of a less restrictive regulatory climate.) Still, there is method to Legere’s madness, and it has helped T-Mobile become the fastest-growing and best performing wireless company during his tenure.

Legere came on as CEO at the end of 2012, a low point for the company. T-Mobile, then a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, was shedding customers as it waited to be acquired by AT&T—only to see regulators block the $39 billion deal. Legere quickly shored up the business with savvy moves. T-Mobile got a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone. It bought more spectrum rights to improve its network. And in 2013 it went public, so its stock could be used for dealmaking. (Deutsche Telekom remains the majority owner.)

Just as key to T-Mobile’s success was its decision to make an enemy of its own industry, launching a messaging war in which Legere’s f-bomb-throwing was central to the assault. (Its opponents’ flacks used to respond with indignation; now they rarely take the bait.) The strategy: Get rid of typical plans and prices. Embrace customer desires and eliminate their pain points. That meant no more two-year contracts, no more roaming fees, no more incomprehensible charges at the bottom of every bill. Most significantly, T-Mobile was far ahead of AT&T and Verizon in 2016 in scrapping monthly data limits and the annoying overage charges they generated—forcing its bigger rivals to follow suit.

The numbers show how well it all worked: Boosted by its 2013 acquisition of MetroPCS, T-Mobile’s subscriber base has grown faster than any other carrier’s, to 73 million. Since going public as part of that deal, its stock has soared, trouncing its rivals. Perhaps most important, its customers are loyal: According to a recent survey by Business Insider’s BI Intelligence, almost one-quarter of T-Mobile’s customers say they would never switch to a competitor for any reason, vs. 16% of AT&T’s customers, 15% at Verizon, and just 7% at Sprint. (...)

Legere’s first CEO stints, at the Asian unit of telecom-services company Global Crossing and then at the parent company, were anything but fun. As the Internet and telecom bubbles burst, Global Crossing careened into bankruptcy, and Legere laid off thousands of employees. The company’s Asian unit also paid to settle two sexual discrimination complaints during Legere’s tenure, after female employees alleged that Legere made belittling remarks and behaved aggressively in the company’s offices. (Legere did not comment on the settlements at the time; T-Mobile declined to comment for this story.) Managing the company’s decline took years, and Legere stayed on until he engineered its sale in 2011.

At T-Mobile he got to start over, at one of the biggest brands in a fast-growing industry—one with a major image problem among consumers. His first move as CEO was to draft a manifesto which began, “We’re not like the other carriers … we are unapologetically the un-carrier,” and included lines like, “We will give customers new phones right now instead of later.” Early on, Legere had a line installed in his office to listen in on customer service conversations, which he would do for hours, often late into the night. Most of his “un-carrier” ideas, like getting rid of contracts or dumping fees, came from listening to customers talk with staffers. “My entire strategy that I coined early on,” he says, “was listen to employees, listen to customers, shut the fuck up, and do what they tell you.”

T-Mobile is doubling down on “do what they tell you” under an effort called “Team of Experts,” which has given call-center employees unprecedented authority. Under the plan, which launched last year, T-Mobile divided its customers into blocks of about 120,000, who are each assigned to a specific group of a few dozen employees at a specific call center. When customers call for support, they are routed to their assigned team, instead of being assigned to a random rep at the least busy center in the country, as is typical in the industry. There’s no transferring of calls elsewhere in a frustrating ducking of accountability. Reps are held responsible for the outcomes of their customer group, measured by metrics such as how frequently customers defect to another carrier or how often they call support, and reps and their managers are empowered to hand out service credits or alter bills.

“People in the industry told us we were crazy to do non-randomized routing,” says Callie Field, T-Mobile’s executive vice president in charge of customer care. But T-Mobile’s cost to serve customers has dropped by 9% overall since it was implemented, while customer satisfaction scores increased by 20 percentage points, Field says. Legere says that the customer-care team’s new responsibilities give them even more data they can use to assess how promotions are going or whether customers understand new plans. “These people talk to 20 customers a day; that’s your gold mine.” (...)

At an event in Nashville in early February for retail-store employees, Legere made a surprise appearance. “He walked in the door, and you would have thought it was Snoop Dogg,” says attendee Lindsay Carter, a store manager from Atlanta who was recently promoted to a regional sales job. In a Q&A session, Carter had a big question for the CEO. You completely dominated this industry in five years, she asked; in your next five years, are you going to run for President? “Uh, no,” Carter says he replied, as he handed her a $100 bill.

Support for the frontline staff goes far beyond the freebies. All employees get tuition assistance and paid time off. T-Mobile started offering spousal benefits and insurance coverage for gay couples even when it wasn’t legally required to, and it enforces a nondiscrimination policy that protects LGBTQ employees. The company was the lead sponsor for last June’s NYC Pride, one of the largest LGBTQ events in the country. “It’s not about trying to sell phones,” says Chris Frederick, managing director at NYC Pride, of T-Mobile. “It’s creating an inclusive culture year-round.”

by Aaron Pressman, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Ian Allen

David Byrne

Can Washington Be Automated?

Washington, D.C. - It’s a brisk late November afternoon in an 8th-floor office overlooking downtown Washington’s Thomas Circle. The White House is an easy five block walk; the Hart Senate Office Building, a 15-minute cab ride. Outside, the streets are filled with people bustling about, protected against the chill in dark suits and authoritative shoes, moving between power centers with the confidence of essential players in the workings of the American government. Here, in his office, Tim Hwang is walking me through a piece of software that is already shaking the ground beneath their feet, even if they’ve yet to feel the rumbling.

Hwang is the CEO of a four-year-old firm called FiscalNote, which makes a kind of technology that is quickly raising questions about who—or what—is still an essential player in Washington. Hwang, in sharp-edged glasses and a blue blazer, taps on his MacBook Air, and what appears on the screen is a full assessment of the legislative record of Senator Orrin Hatch, the 83-year-old Utah Republican.

Hatch’s varied career is the longest ever for a Senate Republican; he’s been a video-game critic and an advocate for the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and in his four decades on Capitol Hill he has championed hundreds of bills and taken thousands of votes both obscure and important. Figuring out Orrin Hatch isn’t a trivial job, even for a seasoned D.C. hand. But FiscalNote has all that data distilled, analyzed and weaponized. The display tells us that Hatch is formidable not just for his seniority, but because he’s in the top 3 percent of all legislators when it comes to effectiveness—or at least he was, before he announced his impending retirement. When he throws his weight behind a bill, it’s likely to become law. What’s more, his effectiveness varies: It’s high when the topic is health, but drops some on tech issues.

The software drills deeper. One immediate surprise it delivers is that the lawmaker most similar to Hatch’s interests and patterns is Louisiana’s John Kennedy, a 66-year-old Republican who’s been on Capitol Hill all of 11 months. Then, with a few more clicks, it’s crunching the woeful record of a shall-remain-nameless member of Congress who occupies the bottom third of legislators in the house, and who, the software dryly notes, is “fairly ineffective as a primary co-sponsor.”

There’s more. Much more. Hwang’s system analyzes interests, not just people, and quickly summarizes everything knowable about who is trying to pass what kind of rules about the most obscure topic I can come up with on the spot: “dairy.” A couple more clicks after that, and we’re looking at a summarized version of a bill tackling cybersecurity that the software has considered and rendered a judgment on, when it comes to the probability that it will become law. We’re not talking a rough estimate. There’s a decimal: 78.1 percent.

This kind of data-crunching might sound hopelessly wonky, a kind of baseball-stats-geek approach to Washington. But if you’ve spent years attempting to make sense of the Washington information ecosystem—which can often feel like a swirling mass of partially baked ideas, misunderstandings and half-truths—the effect is mesmerizing. FiscalNote takes a morass of documents and history and conventional wisdom and distills it into a precise serving of understanding, the kind on which decisions are made. Here, the software is telling us that if we’re looking for an up-and-coming Republican to get on board a health bill Hatch is pushing, Kennedy’s a good bet. Want it bipartisan? The system will suggest likely Democratic backers, too.

If you’re an aide, one of the people walking on the street outside from a power breakfast to a meeting on the Hill, there’s another way to think about what FiscalNote is doing: It’s doing your job. Washington, D.C., is a notoriously imprecise place, trading on memory and relationships and gut. And a huge amount of what people do in the city, the way they make their living, is guiding others through the morass. The things FiscalNote is doing—sifting through murky bills and votes and patterns of behavior—is precisely why you hire an experienced staffer. Without much in the way of human involvement, says Hwang, the system can “enable the top attorney at McDonald’s to immediately understand every single law and regulation pertaining to their industry.”

That’s tremendous power, the kind that threatens to rattle the bedrock of the capital. If there’s one central cog in the modern city of Washington, with its bustle of influence and steakhouses and exorbitant home prices, it’s the in-the-know lobbyist or staffer or government-affairs liaison. There are thousands of them here, paid, often quite well, for that know-how. This machine handily replaces much of that, and without running up huge bills at Brasserie Beck.

Could the swamp really be automated? The question feels almost alien. At the moment, if “automation” and “Washington” are used in the same sentence, it’s usually to decry how behind the curve policymakers are on a transformative economic issue like industrial robots or self-driving cars. In its own workings, Washington seems almost a uniquely un-automatable place, a constitutionally erected edifice of institutions and people driven by irreplaceable experience and relationships.

Hwang is demonstrating that’s not true. FiscalNote isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, grad-school project. The firm employs 160 people today, with 1,300 clients and upward of $28 million in backing from hugely prominent tech industry investors (Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Steve Case). Toyota and the National Institutes of Health use FiscalNote to keep tabs on the political realm. Hwang’s also got a healthy client roster among world governments, which need to understand D.C. for their own reasons: FiscalNote is used by the foreign ministries of Canada, Mexico and South Korea. He has a competitor, a bootstrapped firm called Quorum in nearby Dupont Circle, that specializes in giving clients the ability to respond instantaneously to what the political world’s talking about right now.

For all the anxiety about modern robots, Washington has been automating itself for generations. Harry Truman is believed to have been the first president to regularly use the autopen, a machine that reproduces a human signature on documents. Since then, it has become routine for government officials to use the autopen on everyday transactions and promotional materials, and Barack Obama made history in 2011 when he signed a bill into law with it for the first time.

FiscalNote sits at the front edge of a change that goes far beyond the lobbying world. “Washington” writ large is a dense entanglement of politics, rulemaking, legal work, journalism and jurisprudence—all fields that have seen significant, if often quiet, incursions from machines. Washington’s law firms, a linchpin of the local economy, have already automated much of their paralegal work. Journalism, another mainstay here, is more of a challenge to automate, but that’s happening too: The Washington Post experimented with machine-written coverage during the 2016 Rio Olympics, and is now trying to do the same thing with House, Senate and gubernatorial races in every state in the Union. Stranger still are attempts to inject automation into the judicial branch, inspired by those who argue that computers are better and fairer at some kinds of decision-making jobs than human beings in black robes.

As quickly as technological change is coming to Washington, the profound questions it raises about both ethics and economics—what is “democracy” if it has machines at its core? whither the United States’ capital city if there are far fewer people left?—are lagging behind. It might be time for us to take them seriously. “We’re still going to need a lot of them,” Hwang says of those professionals hustling down the streets outside, “but I don’t think we’re going to need them at the scale at which Washington operates today.” When it comes to the nation’s capital, he says, “People vastly, vastly underestimate what automation is going to do.”

by Nancy Scola, Politico |  Read more:

Image: André Chung

Brenda Cablayan, Weke Road
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New Study Finds Sea Level Rise Accelerating

Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.

This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise projected by 2100 when compared to projections that assume a constant rate of sea level rise, according to lead author Steve Nerem. Nerem is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and a member of NASA's Sea Level Change team.

If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100 -- enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities, according to the new assessment by Nerem and colleagues from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; CU Boulder; the University of South Florida in Tampa; and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The team, driven to understand and better predict Earth’s response to a warming world, published their work Feb. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is almost certainly a conservative estimate," Nerem said. "Our extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we are seeing in the ice sheets today, that's not likely."

Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere increase the temperature of air and water, which causes sea level to rise in two ways. First, warmer water expands, and this "thermal expansion" of the ocean has contributed about half of the 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) of global mean sea level rise we've seen over the last 25 years, Nerem said. Second, melting land ice flows into the ocean, also increasing sea level across the globe.

These increases were measured using satellite altimeter measurements since 1992, including the Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3 satellite missions, which have been jointly managed by multiple agencies, including NASA, Centre national d’etudes spatiales (CNES), European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the U.S. portion of these missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The rate of sea level rise in the satellite era has risen from about 0.1 inch (2.5 millimeters) per year in the 1990s to about 0.13 inches (3.4 millimeters) per year today.

"The Topex/Poseidon/Jason altimetry missions have been essentially providing the equivalent of a global network of nearly half a million accurate tide gauges, providing sea surface height information every 10 days for over 25 years," said Brian Beckley, of NASA Goddard, second author on the new paper and lead of a team that processes altimetry observations into a global sea level data record. "As this climate data record approaches three decades, the fingerprints of Greenland and Antarctic land-based ice loss are now being revealed in the global and regional mean sea level estimates."

by Katie Weeman and Patrick Lynch, NASA |  Read more:

Image: NASA

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Financial Markets Have Taken Over the Economy

Ours is, without a doubt, the age of finance—of the supremacy of financial actors, institutions, markets, and motives in the global capitalist economy. Working people in the advanced economies, for instance, increasingly have their (pension) savings invested in mutual funds and stock markets, while their mortgages and other debts are turned into securities and sold to global financial investors (Krippner 2011; Epstein 2018). At the same time, the ‘under-banked’ poor in the developing world have become entangled, or if one wishes, ‘financially included’, in the ‘web’ of global finance through their growing reliance on micro-loans, micro-insurance and M-Pesa-like ‘correspondent banking’ (Keucheyan 2018; Mader 2018). More generally, individual citizens everywhere are invited to “live by finance”, in Martin’s (2002, p. 17) evocative words, that is: to organize their daily lives around ‘investor logic’, active individual risk management, and involvement in global financial markets. Citizenship and rights are being re-conceptualized in terms of universal access to ‘safe’ and affordable financial products (Kear 2012)—redefining Descartes’ philosophical proof of existence as: ‘I am indebted, therefore I am’ (Graeber 2011). Financial markets are opening ‘new enclosures’ everywhere, deeply penetrating social space—as in the case of so-called ‘viaticals’, the third-party purchase of the rights to future payoffs of life insurance contracts from the terminally ill (Quinn 2008); or of ‘health care bonds’ issued by insurance companies to fund health-care interventions; the payoff to private investors in these bonds depends on the cost-savings arising from the health-care intervention for the insurers. Or what to think of ‘humanitarian impact bonds’ used to profitably finance physical rehabilitation services in countries affected by violence and conflict (Lavinas 2018); this latter instrument was created in 2017 by the International Red Cross in cooperation with insurer Munich Re and Bank Lombard Odier.

Conglomerate corporate entities, which used to provide long-term employment and stable retirement benefits, were broken up under pressure of financial markets and replaced by disaggregated global commodity-chain structures (Wade 2018), operating according to the principles of ‘shareholder value maximization’ (Lazonick 2014)—with the result that today real decision-making power is often to be found no longer in corporate boardrooms, but in global financial markets. As a result, accumulation—real capital formation which increases overall economic output—has slowed down in the U.S., the E.U. and India, as profit-owners, looking for the highest returns, reallocated their investments to more profitable financial markets (Jayadev, Mason and Schröder 2018).

An overabundance of (cash) finance is used primarily to fund a proliferation of short-term, high-risk (potentially high-return) investments in newly developed financial instruments, such as derivatives—Warren Buffet’s ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ that blew up the global financial system in 2007-8. Financial actors (ranging from banks, bond investors, and pension funds to big insurers and speculative hedge funds) have taken much bigger roles on much larger geographic scales in markets of items essential to development such as food (Clapp and Isakson 2018), primary commodities, health care (insurance), education, and energy. These same actors hunt the globe for ‘passive’ unearthed assets which they can re-use as collateral for various purposes in the ‘shadow banking system’—the complex global chains of credit, liquidity and leverage with no systemic regulatory oversight that has become as large as the regulated ‘normal’ banking system (Pozsar and Singh 2011; Gabor 2018) and enjoys implicit state guarantees (Kane 2013, 2015).

Pressed by the international financial institutions and their own elites, states around the world have embraced finance-friendly policies which included reducing cross-border capital controls, promoting liquid domestic stock markets, reducing the taxation of wealth and capital gains, and rendering their central banks independent from political oversight (Bortz and Kaltenbrunner 2018; Wade 2018; Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2018). What is most distinctive about the present era of finance, however, is the shift in financial intermediation from banks and other institutions to financial markets—a shift from the ‘visible hand’ of (often-times relationship) regulated banking to the axiomatic ‘invisible hand’ of supposedly anonymous, self-regulating, financial markets. This displacement of financial institutions by financial markets has had a pervasive influence on the motivations, choices and decisions made by households, firms and states as well as fundamental quantitative impacts on growth, inequality and poverty—far-reaching consequences which we are only beginning to understand.

Setting the Stage

... This view of the superiority of a ‘market-based’ financial system rests on Friedrich von Hayek’s grotesque epistemological claim that ‘the market’ is an omniscient way of knowing, one that radically exceeds the capacity of any individual mind or even the state. For Hayek, “the market constitutes the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the market converts them into prices, or objective facts” (Metcalf 2017). After his ‘sudden illumination’ in 1936 that the market is the best possible and only legitimate form of social organisation, Hayek had to find an answer to the dilemma of how to reformulate the political and the social in a way compatible with the ‘rationality’ of the (unregulated) market economy. Hayek’s answer was that the ‘market’ should be applied to all domains of life. Homo œconomicus—the narrowly self-interested subject who, according to Foucault (2008, pp. 270-271), “is eminently governable ….” as he/she “accepts reality and responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment—had to be universalized. This, in turn, could be achieved by the financialization of ‘everything in everyday life’, because financial logic and constraints would help to impose ‘market discipline and rationality’ on economic decision-makers. After all, borrowers compete with another for funds—and it is commercial (profit-oriented) banks and financial institutions which do the screening and selection of who gets funded. (...)

This Hayekian legacy underwrites, and quietly promotes, neoliberal narratives and discourses which advocate that authority—even sovereignty—be conceded to (in our case: financial) ‘markets’ which act as an ‘impartial and transparent judge’, collecting and processing information relevant to economic decision-making and coordinating these decisions, and as a ‘guardian’, impartially imposing ‘market discipline and market rationality’ on economic decision-makers—thus bringing about not just ‘socially efficient outcomes’ but social stability as well. This way, financialization constitutes progress—bringing “the advantages enjoyed by the clients of Wall Street to the customers of Wal-Mart”, as Nobel-Prize winning financial economist Robert Shiller (2003, p. x) writes. “We need to extend finance beyond our major financial capitals to the rest of the world. We need to extend the domain of finance beyond that of physical capital to human capital, and to cover the risks that really matter in our lives. Fortunately, the principles of financial management can now be expanded to include society as a whole.”

Attentive readers might argue that faith in the social efficiency of financial markets has waned—after all, Hayek’s grand epistemological claim was falsified, in a completely unambiguous manner, by the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 which brought the world economy to the brink of a systemic meltdown. Even staunch believers in the (social) efficiency of self-regulating financial markets, including most notably former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, had to admit a fundamental ‘flaw in their ideology’.

And yet, I beg to disagree. The economic ideology that created the crash remains intact and unchallenged. There has been no reckoning and no lessons were learned, as the banks and their shareholders were rescued, at the cost of about everyone else in society, by massive public bail-outs, zero interest rates and unprecedented liquidity creation by central banks. Finance staged a major come-back—profits, dividends, salaries and bonuses in the financial industry have rebounded to where they were before, while the re-regulation of finance became stuck in endless political negotiations. Stock markets, meanwhile, notched record highs (before the downward ‘correction’ of February 2018), derivative markets have been doing rather well and under-priced risk-taking in financial markets has gathered steam (again), this time especially so in the largest emerging economies of China, India and Brazil (BIS 2017; Gabor 2018). In the process, global finance has become more concentrated and even more integral to capitalist production and accumulation. The reason why even the Great Financial Crisis left the supremacy of financial interests and logic unchallenged, is simple: there is no acceptable alternative mode of social regulation to replace our financialized mode of co-ordination and decision-making.

‘Really-Existing’ Finance Capitalism

Financialization underwrites neoliberal narratives and discourses which emphasize individual responsibility, risk-taking and active investment for the benefit of the individual him-/herself—within the ‘neutral’ or even ‘natural’ constraints imposed by financial markets and financial norms of creditworthiness (Palma 2009; Kear 2012). This way, financialization morphs into a ‘technique of power’ to maintain a particular social order (Palma 2009; Saith 2011), in which the delicate task of balancing competing social claims and distributive outcomes is offloaded to the ‘invisible hand’ which operates through anonymous, ‘blind’ financial markets (Krippner 2005, 2011). This is perhaps illustrated clearest by Michael Hudson (2012, p. 223):

“Rising mortgage debt has made employees afraid to go on strike or even to complain about working conditions. Employees became more docile in a world where they are only one paycheck or so away from homelessness or, what threatens to become almost the same thing, missing a mortgage payment. This is the point at which they find themselves hooked on debt dependency.”

Paul Krugman (2005) has called this a ‘debt-peonage society’—while J. Gabriel Palma (2009, p. 833) labelled it a ‘rentiers’ delight’ in which financialization sustains the rent-seeking practices of oligopolistic capital—as a system of discipline as well as exploitation, which is “difficult to reconcile with any acceptable definition of democracy” (Mann 2010, p. 18).

In this regime of social regulation, income and wealth became more concentrated in the hands of the rentier class (Saith 2011; Goda, Onaran and Stockhammer 2017) , and as a result, productive capital accumulation gave way before the increased speculative use of the ‘economic surplus of society’ in pursuit of ‘financial-capital’ gains through asset speculation (Davis and Kim 2015). This took the wind out of the sails of the ‘real’ economy, and firms responded by holding back investment, using their profits to pay out dividends to their shareholders and to buy back their own shares (Lazonick 2014). Because the rich own most financial assets, anything that causes the value of financial assets to rise rapidly made the rich richer (Taylor, Ömer and Rezai 2015).

In the U.S., arguably the most financialized economy in the world, the result of this was extreme income polarization, unseen after WWII (Piketty 2014; Palma 2011). The ‘American Dream’, writes Gabriel Palma (2009, p. 842), was “high jacked by a rather tiny minority—for the rest, it has only been available on credit!” Because that is what happened: lower- and middle-income groups took on more debt to finance spending on health care, education or housing, spurred by the deregulation of financial markets and changes in the tax code which made it easier and more attractive for households with modest incomes to borrow in order to spend. This debt-financed spending stimulated an otherwise almost comatose U.S. economy by spurring consumption (Cynamon and Fazzari 2015). In the twenty years before the Great Financial Crash, debts and ‘financial excess’—in the form of the asset price bubbles in ‘New Economy’ stocks, real estate markets and commodity (futures) markets— propped up aggregate demand and kept the U.S. and global economy growing. “We have,” Paul Krugman (2013) concludes, “an economy whose normal condition is one of inadequate demand—of at least mild depression—and which only gets anywhere close to full employment when it is being buoyed by bubbles.”

But it is not just the U.S. economy: the whole world has become addicted to debt. The borrowings of global households, governments and firms have risen from 246% of GDP in 2000 to 327%, or $ 217 trillion, today—which is $70 trillion higher than 10 years ago. It means that for every extra dollar of output, the world economy cranks out more than almost 10 extra dollars of debt. Forget about the synthetic opioid crisis, the world’s more dangerous addiction is to debt. China, which has been the engine of the global economy during most of the post-2008 period, has been piling up debt to keep its growth process going—the IMF (2017) expects China’s non-financial sector debt to exceed 290% of its GDP in 2022, up from around 140% (of GDP) in 2008, warning that China’s current credit trajectory is “dangerous with increasing risks of a disruptive adjustment.” China’s insatiable demand for debt fueled growth, but also led to a property bubble and a rapidly growing shadow banking system (Gabor 2018)—raising concerns that the economy may face a hard landing and send shockwaves through the world’s financial markets. The next global financial catastrophe may be just around the corner.

by Servaas Storm, Naked Capitalism via: Institute for New Economic Thinking | Read more:
Image: uncredited (INET)

How to Die

You may complain, “But he was snatched away when I didn’t expect it.” Thus all are deceived by their own trust and a willed forgetfulness of mortality in the case of things they cherish. Nature promised no one that it would make an exception to necessity. Every day there pass before our eyes the funerals of the famous and the obscure, yet we are busy with other things, and we find a sudden surprise in the thing that, our whole life long, we were told was coming. It’s not the unfairness of the fates, but the warped inability of the human mind to get enough of all things, that makes us complain of leaving that place to which we were admitted as a special favor. How much more just was he who, having learned of his son’s death, spoke a word worthy of a great man: “I knew then, when I fathered him, that he would die.” … His son’s death came as no news to him; for what news is it that someone has died whose whole life was nothing else than a journey toward death? “I knew then, when I fathered him, that he would die.” Then he added something of even greater sagacity and insight: “And it was for that that I raised him.” It’s for that that we are all brought up; whoever is brought into life is destined for death. Let’s rejoice in what will be given, but let’s return it when we’re asked for it back. The fates will seize hold of one person now, another later, but they will overlook no one. Let the soul stand girded for battle; let it never fear what must be, let it always expect what’s unknown. … There’s no single end fixed for all; for one, life departs in mid-course, but abandons another at its very beginning, and barely dispatches a third who is already worn out with extreme old age and longing to go. Each in his or her own time, we all bend our course to the same place. Is it more stupid to ignore the law of mortality, or more impudent to reject it? I don’t know.

by Seneca via: Charlotte Smalley, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: The Death of Seneca by Manuel Domínguez Sánchez, 1871