Bank Earnings are Soaring, but Congress Wants to Gut Post-Crisis Safeguards

Dick Bove, A high-profile banking analyst, was feeling contrite. For years, Bove, a regular on CNBC, has been arguing for the rollback of regulations imposed after the 2008 financial collapse.

“But lately I’ve been trying to figure how regulation has hurt the banking industry,” Bove confessed in an interview last spring. “And I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with an answer.”

This week, the Senate considers the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, a bill that represents the greatest threat to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law since its passage in 2010. The bill would relieve all but the country’s largest dozen banks of increased scrutiny and ease mortgage rules imposed after the financial crisis. It would undermine fair lending rules designed to counteract race discrimination and weaken the Volcker rule, which limits a bank’s ability to make speculative trades with federally insured deposits. The arguments that Bove has been making publicly for years are the same specious ones being offered by the bill’s co-sponsors, and the trade groups calling for a rollback of banking regulations: Banks are suffering and so, by extension, are consumers, businesses, and the economy at large.

“When you take a close look,” Bove says now, “it’s really hard to argue that regulation harmed the banking industry.” Bank earnings have gone up every year since 2010, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and soared more recently. “In 2014, and again in 2015 and 2016, bank earnings hit all-time records,” Bove said. “Loan volume, which was obviously lousy at the beginning of this period, picked up substantially in 2014, 2015, and 2016.”

Not that many inside the Beltway seem to care. To the extent pundits are talking about the bill, it’s to hail a rare show of bipartisanship. A dozen moderate Democrats are listed among the co-sponsors of what insiders refer to simply as the Crapo bill, after its main sponsor, Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, chair of the Senate Banking Committee.

“I don’t think that if you’re really thinking about the vast majority of Americans, you decide that your very first bipartisan bill is one that deregulates some of the biggest banks in the country,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, which pushes for tighter regulation of financial institutions. “But let’s take a step back and ask why there’s a bill at all. They’re saying, ‘We need ‘regulatory relief.’ How could you need regulatory relief if lending profits and every other metric you can look are at or approaching historic highs?”

The Community Bank Shuffle

The hardships purportedly faced by community banks come up a lot in the push for deregulation. “Since Dodd-Frank was signed into law in 2010, community banks in Tennessee and across our country have faced an overwhelming and disproportionate regulatory burden,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said when endorsing the Crapo bill in November. The “long overdue” unwinding of Dodd-Frank, Corker declared, “will help our community banks better serve hardworking Americans.” Mark Warner, D-Va., hailed the bill for making “targeted, commonsense fixes that will provide tangible relief to the community banks that are lifelines for smaller and rural communities.” Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D. — identified by the Washington Post as one of the top Senate recipients of donations from commercial banks so far in the 2018 campaign cycle — said it offered “needed relief to community banks and credit unions,” and was vital in “helping farmers get loans to support their farms, and allowing families to buy homes in rural communities across our state.”

Few in Congress oppose helping community banks. The country’s smaller banks played almost no role in the subprime disaster, and most agree that they shouldn’t be subjected to extra scrutiny because of the misdeeds of their larger brethren. “In the past, there’ve been 90 votes in the Senate for regulatory relief targeted at community banks with $10 billion or less in assets,” said Kelleher, who spent eight years as a Senate staffer. But that’s not the narrow target of the Crapo bill, he points out, which grants regulatory relief to banks with up to $250 billion in assets. Only 12 banks fall above the Crapo’s massive $250 billion threshold — under the bill, no other bank would be considered “systemically important” and thus, would be freed of additional oversight by federal regulators, such as fewer stress tests and lower capital requirements. Currently, only banks with under $50 billion in assets (the vast majority of the country’s 5,000-plus banks) are granted an exception from increased government scrutiny.

A $250 billion asset threshold gives a pass to Deutsche Bank, for example, which is at the center of Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and also to Barclays, Credit Suisse, and Santander — all large global banks with a significant footprint in the United States. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has pointed out that Countrywide Financial played an outsized role in the 2008 subprime meltdown while sitting on less than $250 billion in assets. Likewise below the cutoff is the publicly traded Ally Financial which, as GMAC Financial, was also a central culprit in triggering the 2008 crash.

Jon Tester, D-Mont., another of the Crapo bill’s dozen Democratic co-sponsors, invoked Main Street when talking up the bill during a November Senate Banking Committee meeting. “These folks are not wearing slick suits in downtown New York or Boston,” Tester said of the bill’s beneficiaries. Perhaps not, but as the bill would lift regulations for a long list of what are called “super regionals,” they’re likely wearing slick suits in Atlanta, where SunTrust has its headquarters, or Chicago, where Northern Trust is based.

The average community bank employs 133 workers, according to the website of its trade group, the Independent Community Bankers of America. SunTrust, a publicly traded company, has more than 24,000 employees and operates thousands of branches across 11 states in the southeast. In 2014, the bank paid just under $1 billion in fines for itsmisdeeds related to the subprime crisis. (“SunTrust’s conduct is a prime example of the widespread underwriting failures that helped bring about the financial crisis,” then-Attorney General Eric Holder said at the time.) More recently, the bank was fined in 2017 for improperly steering customers to high-fee mutual funds.

“Community banks are the most exhausted Trojan horse ever to be used,” Kelleher said. “The Wall Street PR machine has elevated community banks to the levels of motherhood, apple pie, and the American flag.” So, too, has Steven Mnuchin, a lifelong denizen of Wall Street, who claimed during his confirmation hearings that “regulation is killing community banks” — a sentiment as commonly expressed as it is false. A 2017 FDIC report shows that deposits in community banks have grown in each of the past six years. Another report showed that 96 percent of the country’s 5,294 community banks were profitable, as of the third quarter of 2017.

by Gary Rivlin and Susan Antilla, The Intercept | Read more:
[ed. See also: How Democrats Are Helping Trump Dismantle Dodd-Frank]

Victor Pivovarov, Onion, garlic and lemon, 2004

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There Is No Case for the Humanities

The humanities are not just dying — they are almost dead. In Scotland, the ancient Chairs in Humanity (which is to say, Latin) have almost disappeared in the past few decades: abolished, left vacant, or merged into chairs of classics. The University of Oxford has revised its famed Literae Humaniores course, "Greats," into something resembling a technical classics degree. Both of those were throwbacks to an era in which Latin played the central, organizing role in the humanities. The loss of these vestigial elements reveals a long and slow realignment, in which the humanities have become a loosely defined collection of technical disciplines.

The result of this is deep conceptual confusion about what the humanities are and the reason for studying them in the first place. I do not intend to address the former question here — most of us know the humanities when we see them.

Instead I wish to address the other question: the reason for studying them in the first place. This is of paramount importance. After all, university officials, deans, provosts, and presidents all are far more likely to know how to construct a Harvard Business School case study than to parse a Greek verb, more familiar with flowcharts than syllogisms, more conversant in management-speak than the riches of the English language. Hence the oft-repeated call to "make the case for the humanities."

Such an endeavor is fraught with ambiguities. Vulgar conservative critiques of the humanities are usually given the greatest exposure, and yet it is often political (and religious) conservatives who have labored the most mightily to foster traditional humanistic disciplines. Left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic inquiry — "Western civ and all that" — as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.

The humanities have both left and right defenders and left and right critics. The left defenders of the humanities are notoriously bad at coming up with a coherent, effective defense, but they have been far more consistent in defending the "useless" disciplines against politically and economically charged attacks. The right defenders of the humanities have sometimes put forward a strong and cogent defense of their value, but they have had little sway when it comes to confronting actual attacks on the humanities by conservative politicians. The sad truth is that instead of forging a transideological apology for humanistic pursuits, this ambiguity has led to the disciplines’ being squeezed on both sides.

Indeed, both sides enable the humanities’ adversaries. Conservatives who seek to use the coercive and financial power of the state to correct what they see as ideological abuses within the professoriate are complicit in the destruction of the old-fashioned and timeless scholarship they supposedly are defending. It is self-defeating to make common cause with corporate interests just to punish the political sins of liberal professors. Progressives who want to turn the humanities into a laboratory for social change, a catalyst for cultural revolution, a training camp for activists, are guilty of the same instrumentalization. When they impose de facto ideological litmus tests for scholars working in every field, they betray their conviction that the humanities exist only to serve contemporary political and social ends.

Caught in the middle are the humanities scholars who simply want to do good work in their fields; to read things and think about what they mean; to tease out conclusions about the past and present through a careful analysis of evidence; to delve deeply into language, art, artifact, culture, and nature. This is what the university was established to do.

To see this, one must first understand that the popular critiques of the humanities — overspecialization, overproduction, too little teaching — are fundamentally misguided. Often well-meaning critics think they are attacking the decadence and excess of contemporary humanities scholarship. In fact, they are striking at the very heart of the humanities as they have existed for centuries. (...)

To talk about the crisis of the humanities is to consider the survival of the university itself. The heart of the university is the arts, understood broadly. For the first centuries of the institution’s existence, every student had to traverse an arts curriculum before going on to achieve an employable degree in law, medicine, or theology. At any given time, the arts faculty and students would have formed by far the largest bloc in any university — the fact that students are still awarded B.A.s and M.A.s is an indication of their centrality. The arts were, in theory, the seven liberal arts, although in practice primarily grammar (including what we now call literary studies) and logic. The seven liberal arts had a wide mandate covering most of what we consider the humanities, as well as mathematics in all its branches and the physical and natural sciences. Alongside the arts were the three highers — theology, law, and medicine — which had a more professional orientation and sat in an occasionally uneasy truce with the arts.

What has happened relatively rapidly is the absorption of all areas of human endeavor into the university. One of the premises behind the land-grant universities dotting the American landscape is precisely that they could foster progress and innovation in agricultural science. That may well have been a fine idea, but there is no particular reason that you need a university to improve yields and reduce livestock mortality. When Illinois Industrial University was established, in 1867, it was supposed to be a purely technical institution. In 1885 it became the University of Illinois, and within decades, its presidents realized that they needed to build a proper humanities core to justify being a premier public university. The first decades of the 20th century saw both its departments of classics and English literature become leading American centers. As recently as 1992, a whole cadre of British polytechnics were officially dubbed universities. Some of them — Lincoln being one example — responded by building up a humanities core.

In short, the contemporary university is a strange chimera. It has become an institution for teaching undergraduates, a lab for medical and technological development in partnership with industry, a hospital, a museum (or several), a performance hall, a radio station, a landowner, a big-money (or money-losing) sports club, a research center competing for government funding — often the biggest employer for a hundred miles around — and, for a few institutions, a hedge fund ("with a small college attached for tax purposes," adds one wag).

Unbundling may well happen. If it does, where will the university be found amid the wreckage? Where it always has been: with the people who read stuff and think about it. What is fascinating and perverse about the current situation is that what was once peripheral to the university — engineering and technology — is now at its center, and what was once its center has been reduced to the margins and forced to make a case for its continued existence.

We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. We stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some phrases involving "skills," "relevance," "a changing economy," "engagement," or "values." The reason it is hard to articulate is that the ideas behind the words are hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.

What have the humanities ever been for? Some might say, as one humanities dean put it, that the humanities teach us about how to express our ideas and unleash our creativity. That case barely needs refutation. The puzzled glances of actual artisans, writers, and artists — who historically have had little university training — should be enough to disabuse us of the notion that "Introduction to Food Studies" is a necessary prerequisite to making pottery or writing novels.

Another says that the humanities is about the search for values. But "values" is a hard thing to put in a diachronic frame because it is not clear that there is any analogous notion in any culture besides our own. Values can hardly be a necessary component of the humanities, as there was no notion of them for most of the humanities’ history. Furthermore, making values, however specified, tends invariably to privilege certain disciplines over others. Values might have a lot to do with Spanish Golden Age literature, but what have they to do with historical linguistics?

A supposedly related goal for the humanities is that of ethical training. Indeed, the humane letters have long been regarded as imparting some sort of moral education. But do they? An informal survey of humanities scholars might not lead one to optimism on that score. Even then, incommensurate paradigms pose a challenge. A polyamorist who volunteers for Greenpeace may be one person’s ethical paradigm; a staunch monogamist who happens to drive an SUV is another’s. But they are not obviously compatible with each other. Which one would a humanistic education produce?

Another argument holds that the humanities are about truth. This is a slippery argument: Many things are true in one sense or another, and certainly most such things do not fall under the remit of the arts. Now, maybe there are truths that are more important than other truths, but that can be delineated only within a particular framework. For some, theology might provide that framework; for others, technology. Humanists obviously have their own framework, but the humanities are that framework. Hence, a petitio principii.

Finally, we are most commonly told that the humanities are about skills. There is something valid about this argument: learning to parse Sanskrit undoubtedly entails some general cognitive benefit. But those benefits are always byproducts. No one wants to learn Sanskrit because it will give them a leg up in a fast-moving economy. It will never be a compelling case for the humanities that they are like a gym for the mind. Forget about attracting administrators — that argument will not even get you any students. (...)

The world has seen an explosion in the number of universities in the 20th century. The vision driving this expansion, however, has been the notion that universities can become science labs, innovation incubators, professional schools, engines of meritocracy, agents of social change, and guardians of equality. Praiseworthy those may be, but they are tasks for high schools, research labs, institutes of technology, apprenticeship programs, activism workshops, and the like. They have no essential connection to the university but are simply wedded to it out of convenience. Even so, it is those roles that hold the position of greatest influence in the modern university.

For now, at least, the humanities are permitted to retain a much-diminished place. The most prestigious universities in the West are still those defined by their humanities legacy, which surrounds them with an aura of cultural standing that their professional purpose no longer justifies. The humanities continue to lend cachet to educational credentials, granting an elite status worth far more than any "marketable skills." That is why every technical institute with higher aspirations has added humanities programs: Accounting or law or engineering can be learned in many places, but courtoisie is passed along only in the university, and only through the humanities — and everyone knows it.

Meanwhile, the humanities provide cover for the economic engine that the contemporary university has become. The holder of an endowed chair would prefer not to think of himself as an accreditor of the next generation of corporate consultants, hedge-fund managers, and tech CEOs — even though that is the most socially "relevant" and visible effect of his work today. It is the lingering presence of the humanities that allows the modern university to think better of itself, and to imagine itself to be above commercial or political vulgarity. This "case" for the humanities is implicit in every glossy flier produced by a university development office, but no one could state it without blushing.

The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve. Perhaps we demand a case for the humanities only because we cannot fathom having to make a case for anything else. (...)

That is the current state of the humanities: derided by the public, an easy target for lazy attacks by politicians, a scapegoat and straw man for left and right alike, considered useless by industry, divorced from its historic patrons in the church. Platitudes will offer no shelter for the coming storm.

by Justin Stover, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:

Image: Gary Neill

Consent in the Digital Age

Now, apps aiming to help partners mitigate confusion in the bedroom have emerged, the newest of which approaches consent like a legal contract. LegalFling, which was introduced to users in beta on Monday, lets users give explicit sexual consent via an agreement, or a “live contract,” a dynamic document that users can continuously interact with and update.

And yes, these agreements could hold up in court, said Andrew D. Cherkasky, a former special victims prosecutor who now handles dozens of felony-level sexual assault cases each year as a criminal defense attorney. He emphasized, however, that what LegalFling offers are not technically contracts, but documentations of intent, which are legally viable.

LegalFling aims to make the sexual dos and don’ts explicit in a “fun and clear way,” according to its website.

Condom use, bondage, dirty talk, sexting: the app lets users set their boundaries before an encounter — boundaries that can be adjusted at any time with a tap and shared with a potential partner. (Sound familiar? Netflix’s twisted-tech series “Black Mirror” incorporated a similar transaction in its episode “Hang the DJ.”)

“A profile update is an event we store on the blockchain and will subsequently update the live contract,” Rick Schmitz, a co-creator of LegalFling, recently said. The transaction is encrypted, timestamped and stored. (A blockchain is a collection of digital transactions that are registered in a sequence of “blocks” of data.) (...)

When yes becomes no.

Dr. Michelle Drouin, a leading expert on technology and relationships, said the apps are good at documenting consent, but don’t account much for fluctuating human emotions. They don’t necessarily allow for any immediacy of one’s feelings, she said.

Use of the app “has to be planned,” she said, “and it’s really difficult for us to even know how we feel in the present moment, much less trying to anticipate how we might feel an hour from now.”

Mr. Schmitz said that a LegalFling agreement does not override someone changing his or her mind in the moment or being too intoxicated, for example, to consent. The company suggests you withdraw consent via the app at that moment, but, of course, that’s not always possible.

If encounters leave users feeling violated, Mr. Schmitz said, they should notify the aggressor afterward in a message, and it will be added to the record.

Also possible with a tap: triggering cease-and-desist letters, according to the website. (...)

But Dr. Drouin is not sold on apps as a solution to a very human problem. The requirement to interact with an app during a sexual encounter is “completely unrealistic,” she said.

“It would be very awkward within the context of an intimate encounter to be like, ‘Wait a second, I’m changing my mind on the app and also with you,’” she said.

More important, she said, the app could persuade someone to fulfill acts simply because they agreed to them in advance, or to overcommit in an effort to appear more sexually adventurous.

by Maya Salam, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: LegalFling
[ed. What a world.]

Algorithmic Wilderness

I've tried many ways to free my brain from my iPhone. I’ve invented rules, bought books, deleted apps, installed other apps. But the only thing that reliably works is to leave the phone at home and to walk along a path through the nearby woods. With trees overhead, and mud below, you quickly forget the last social media notification. You escape the internet of things by surrounding yourself with things that can never be plugged in.

Nature and technology seem to pull us in different directions. Silicon Valley prophets talk of colonising new planets, conveniently sidestepping the challenge of saving our own. Smartphones drag our attention into a vortex of high-definition screens and endless notifications, while the demand for ‘innovation’ drives an endless cycle of consumption and waste. Amazon and Twitter take their names from the natural world, even as they invent products that seem bent on supplanting it. At Google and Facebook, the world’s best engineers are engaged in souping up our own species via artificial intelligence (AI), rather than protecting millions of others.

Behind all this tension is a cultural clash between the optimism of the tech industry and the pessimism of much of the green movement. In its crudest form, conservation tends to be about keeping people ‘out’ to minimise humanity’s destructive impact; it rejects the idea that we can improve places through our presence and inventions. Conservationists are disposed to have an inbuilt skepticism of grand projects – derived partly from bitter experience, such as Australia’s notorious decision to introduce cane toads in the 1930s to eat agricultural pests (now it’s the toads who have become the pests).

Yet the tech community has always had its hippies and its environmentalists. What if technologies were to become part of the natural world, woven more closely into its rhythms and processes? You might have heard of smart cities; now we have the conceptual seeds of smart countryside, forests and wetlands too. Picture green landscapes populated by an army of self-guided bots, responding to the shifting needs of the environment in which they’re embedded, and evolving alongside it, too. After all, the most recent wave of innovation has been driven by ‘machine learning’ or ‘deep learning’ – self-teaching algorithms that get better and better at detecting and predicting patterns in data, a computer-science version of an adaptive process.

Drawing a bright line between humans and nature has always been tricky. It’s all the more difficult now, when no ecosystem on Earth is free from human influence; in the Anthropocene, nowhere is truly pristine or wild. ‘The paradox, in a nutshell, is this,’ writes the journalist Oliver Morton in The Planet Remade (2015), ‘humans are grown so powerful that they have become a force of nature – and forces of nature are those things which, by definition, are beyond the power of humans to control.’

Perhaps the answer is not to try vainly to remove ourselves from the equation. Instead, we might create a different category of place, one shaped not just by humans and nature, but by thinking machines as well – what the philosopher Huw Price at Cambridge University has described as the ‘Machinocene’. But will this new era remove a source of wonder from our world, or create a whole new one?

To start to understand the dilemma, take Mallorca, the Spanish island where tourism has left a deep footprint in recent decades. Last year, I visited S’Albufera national park, one of the richest ecosystems in the area, which my Lonely Planet guide optimistically describes as having the best birdwatching in the Mediterranean.

The park’s entrance is located halfway down a road lined with luxury hotels and shops selling rubber inflatables. The land was farmed until the 19th century; even as a national park, it requires invasive infrastructure – cement paths, a visitor centre, bird-watching huts. Planes fly overhead. In other words, it’s a human-shaped environment masquerading as a natural one. ‘If you don’t explain to people that it’s human-made, they don’t realise,’ Maties Rebassa, the park’s director, told me. ‘I always say, it’s artificial, but very naturalised.’

The real problem lies beneath the surface. Over the past 15 years or so, S’Albufera has become overrun by carp. The park’s authorities are unsure how the population started, but their favoured hypothesis is that someone released the fish in the hope of later fishing them. You can now see the glistening bodies of the creatures, bobbing under the surface. By displacing sediment in the canals, the carps turn the water muddy, and prevent plant life from growing.

Each year, using nets, hooks and cages, the authorities extract hundreds of thousands of carp from the waterways. But the younger, smaller fish elude capture, and there are huge areas of reedbeds that the park officials can’t even reach. The result is a losing battle. The authorities can’t drain the park, because it’s connected to the sea. They’ve even considered using genetic alteration of the carp to somehow bring about a population collapse.

For people fighting such intractable environmental wars as this one, the appeal of new ‘smart’ technologies is clear. ‘The idea that autonomous systems could solve complex problems about conservation is inevitable,’ says James Canton, a self-described futurist who has held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University. As in S’Albufera, the reality is that we’ve damaged so many ecosystems that, if we want to experience something wild, much of the time it might have to be constructed.

‘A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.’ So claims the character of the real-life Facebook investor Sean Parker in the film The Social Network (2010). Lauren Fletcher, a former NASA engineer, has imbibed this calculus, but with a twist. ‘We’re going to plant 1 billion trees a year,’ he says in a promotional video for his business, which shows him tramping through the countryside in an anorak and glasses, before putting a plastic sheath on a seedling. ‘We’re going to change the world 1 billion trees at a time.’

BioCarbon Engineering, Fletcher’s company, with offices in Oxford, Dublin and Sydney, is banking on using drones to reforest large expanses of the Earth’s surface. Like many tech ideas, it has a beautiful simplicity. Planting by hand is an expensive process. So is planting by planes and helicopters, which has been done for decades. But drones could do the same thing in less time and for little cost. In places such as the Amazon and Borneo, where tropical forests have turned into dull pasture and plantations, mass plantation could restore some of their lost wonder.

BioCarbon Engineering’s drones scan the landscape for suitable soil, then fire out seedpods with sufficient force for them to break the surface. The company claims that it has already planted 25,000 trees in trials worldwide, and is working on replanting mangroves in Burma. A next step might be to use its drones to replenish areas hit by mining and forestry.

Despite its early promise, question marks hang over the venture. The biggest is whether it’s really ambitious enough. On its own, aerial planting seems best-suited to pioneer species – those trees that grow well on bare land – and even then, once seedlings are established, they generally need protection. What’s more, the fundamental worldwide problem with tackling climate change is not really reforestation – it’s preventing forests from being destroyed for agriculture and forestry in the first place. ‘Planting seeds isn’t going to solve that,’ says Glyn Davies, senior advisor at the World Wildlife Fund Malaysia.

Still, these experiments suggest that conservation is not the amateur, artisan pursuit some critics might imagine. Environmental scientists also use technology such as lidar – a form of laser surveying, similar to radar – to map forests and the threats to them. Lidar not only measures the height of the forest; it can also be used to gauge how much light penetrates the canopy, and what species might thrive below. Conservationists also deploy sensors and camera traps to detect animal movements, augmented by software that can, for example, help to identify tigers by building a three-dimensional model of their skin and stripes (no two tigers have exactly the same pattern). And machine learning has accelerated these developments. Researchers at Georgia Tech, IBM and the Smithsonian Institution are working on tools that can accurately model what will happen to whole ecosystems in response to environmental shocks – an exercise that requires AI capable of crunching decades-worth of data, from the specific mass of microorganisms to the growth processes of coral reefs.

These are examples of conservationists exploiting technology to guide decision-making. Even people who might see nature in spiritual or semi-spiritual terms – to be kept as far away from human influence as possible – probably wouldn’t object. But we should also prepare for technology to go further: to start making choices on its own, with less and less intervention from human reviewers.

by Henry Mance, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Pierre Andrieu/AFP/Getty

Carolyn Drake, Two Rivers
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The First Four Minutes

It was a typical British afternoon in early May: wet, cool and blustery. Not exactly the ideal conditions for running four laps around a track faster than many thought humanly possible.

A lanky Oxford medical student named Roger Bannister looked up at the white-and-red English flag whipping in the wind atop a nearby church and figured he would have to call off the record attempt.

But then, shortly after 6 p.m. on May 6, 1954, the wind subsided. Bannister glanced up again and saw the flag fluttering oh-so gently. The race was on.

With two friends acting as pacemakers, Bannister churned around the cinder track four times. His long arms and legs pumping, his lungs gasping for air, he put on a furious kick over the final 300 yards and nearly collapsed as he crossed the finish line.

The announcer read out the time:

"3..."

The rest was drowned out by the roar of the crowd. The 3 was all that mattered.

Bannister had just become the first runner to break the mythical 4-minute barrier in the mile - a feat of speed and endurance that stands as one of the seminal sporting achievements of the 20th century.

The black-and-white image of Bannister, eyes closed, head back, mouth wide open, straining across the tape at Oxford's Iffley Road track, endures as a defining snapshot of a transcendent moment in track and field history.

Bannister died peacefully in Oxford on Saturday at the age of 88. He was "surrounded by his family who were as loved by him, as he was loved by them," the family said in a statement Sunday. "He banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends."

British Prime Minister Theresa May remembered Bannister as a "British sporting icon whose achievements were an inspiration to us all. He will be greatly missed."

Bannister's time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds captured the world's imagination and buoyed the spirits of Britons still suffering through post-war austerity.

"It's amazing that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the 4-minute mile," Bannister said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2012.

Bannister followed up his 4-minute milestone a few months later by beating Australia's John Landy in the "Miracle Mile" or "Mile of the Century" at the Empire Games in Vancouver, British Columbia with both men going under 4 minutes. Bannister regarded that as his greatest race because it came in a competitive championship against his fiercest rival.

While he will forever be remembered for his running, Bannister considered his long medical career in neurology as his life's greatest accomplishment.

"My medical work has been my achievement and my family with 14 grandchildren," he said. "Those are real achievements."

The quest to break the 4-minute mile carried a special mystique. The numbers were easy for the public to grasp: 1 mile, 4 laps, 4 minutes.

When Sweden's Gunder Hagg ran 4:01.4 in 1945, the chase was truly on. But, time and again, runners came up short. The 4-minute mark seemed like a brick wall that would never be toppled.

Bannister was undaunted.

"There was no logic in my mind that if you can run a mile in 4 minutes, 1 and 2/5ths, you can't run it in 3:59," he said. "I knew enough medicine and physiology to know it wasn't a physical barrier, but I think it had become a psychological barrier."

by Chris Lehourites, AP |  Read more:

Image: Getty

"We All Wear Black Every Day": Inside Wall Street's Complex, Shameful, and Often Confidential Battle With #MeToo

It could be the script for a movie. A brave woman comes forward to talk about the sexual harassment she’s experienced in the office. She feels terrified and alone. But many others have been in similar situations, and soon her voice is joined by a chorus, backing her up and supporting her. Then it spreads. Using the hashtag #MeToo, nearly five million people generate 12 million posts, comments, and reactions on Facebook in a 24-hour period. At one of her industry’s premier events, men and women alike wear black to show support for the cause, while Hollywood celebrities come together to form a group called Time’s Up, to fight sexual harassment. The list of powerful, allegedly abusive men who are no longer invincible grows to include a Hollywood mogul, famous journalists, radio personalities, and even a Las Vegas casino owner. Yet no one thinks it’s over.

Many believe the movement is changing the world, but in many places, including one industry that has long been regarded as a path to great wealth, there is mostly silence—in fact, it’s been “eerily silent,” as one woman puts it. She is talking about the world of finance. “#MeToo is not an equal-opportunity movement,” says Nicole Page, a lawyer at New York’s Reavis Page Jump, which handles employment cases, including those involving harassment and discrimination. Or as a recently retired senior Wall Street woman puts it, somewhat ruefully, “We all wear all black every day, and it doesn’t help.”

On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. Dennis Chookaszian, an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, recently polled his 130 students to see whether they have personally experienced harassment or observed it happening. Seventy percent of the women said they have been harassed, and roughly half the men and two-thirds of the women in the class said they’ve observed it or were aware of it happening. “Wall Street has to be the worst,” a senior Wall Street man tells me. He says that’s because of the nature of the work: the long hours, the travel, the pyramid-like structure, where there are plenty of junior women, but disproportionately fewer and fewer as you get toward the top. One woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s and eventually became a partner at her firm recounts having lunch with a prominent male banker, who asked her, “Did it [sexual harassment] happen to you?” “I guarantee it happened to every woman in this restaurant,” she replied. “It impacts every aspect of your career.”

In private groups, women, especially those who have been on Wall Street for decades, are talking about it. Some believe that a tidal wave is coming. But a close look at the industry’s shameful history, and at the realities of being a woman in finance, belies that optimism.

I was the only woman,” recalls the woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s. “My very first day of work, all the men and I were given office assignments. There was an odd number. So all the men got offices to share. I got a reconfigured utility closet. I was told it was in case I needed to change my nylons. And it just went on from there.”

“It was no-holds-barred,” says Sallie Krawcheck, who started at a junior level at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and rose to run wealth management at Citigroup. “One day [at Salomon Brothers], I leaned over a colleague’s desk to work on a spreadsheet, and heard loud laughter from behind me; one of the guys was pretending to perform a sex act on me,” she wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times. “Almost every day, I found a Xerox copy of male genitalia on my desk.” In a recent conversation, she added that “the attitude was ‘Tough it out.’ You had no choice. I was 22 years old and from Charleston, South Carolina. I didn’t have any money, and there wasn’t anywhere to turn.”

Maureen Sherry, who became the youngest managing director at Bear Stearns, in the 1990s, and fictionalized her experiences in a 2016 novel called Opening Belle, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that on her first day on Wall Street she opened up a pizza box to find unwrapped condoms instead of pepperoni slices.

“You’d hear shit every day like ‘I want to lick your pussy,’ ” says a woman who worked on a trading floor in the 1980s. Another longtime Wall Streeter recalls being at a work dinner in Houston. On one side of her was a senior leader at her bank; on the other, a prominent politician. They simultaneously put their hands up her skirt. She recalls thinking, This is going to get really interesting when their hands touch. Thankfully, a male colleague across the table noticed her distress signals and called her out for a conference call.

On the flip side, some women who work on Wall Street say that gender has never been an issue for them, and some even say that being a woman in a mostly male world confers certain advantages for those who are strategic about it. “I will always assert that the women who are liked and who succeed in finance . . . actually see their femininity as a strength,” says a close friend of mine who has worked in finance for decades. “I would also go so far as to say that for every moment when a woman feels slighted or downright harassed, there are as many opportunities where she can capitalize on her attractiveness and gain an unfair advantage over men. . . . Perhaps a controversial view, but I truly believe it.”

But physical attributes can also divide women from one another. The woman who started her career in the late 1980s recalls that certain women were made fun of for the way they looked or dressed. One was dubbed “Crickets” because of the noise her stockings made when she walked. “Crickets persistently and consistently extended herself as a mentor to me and I ignored her,” the woman recalls. “I felt I could intellectually muscle my way through anything on my own and . . . she was Crickets.”

Other women view resorting to sex appeal as a necessary evil, but one that inevitably backfires. “Women absolutely feel compelled to use their looks,” says a woman who had a successful career at a big bank. “From your first day, the deck is stacked against you,” she says. “We all talk about it at every stage of our careers. As our male peers did, we attended the best universities, achieved excellent academic records, usually went to top M.B.A. programs, but as a woman, your discount rate [a financial term that measures what something is worth] is double or triple that of any man. . . . That’s why women since the beginning of time have used their looks—to climb out of that very hole. These are your cards, and you play them. You have been told you don’t have other cards of value. That’s the beginning of how all of this happens.” (...)

With so many stories of sexual harassment spanning decades, why aren’t the women on Wall Street leading the #MeToo charge? An obvious answer: the money. Wall Streeters often have a great deal of money tied up in their firms in the form of stock, and they usually have to sign non-disclosure agreements, either as a condition of employment or to get money when they depart. “For many senior women there is way too much on the table,” says a retired senior woman. “That’s the base reason why you haven’t heard more.”

But it goes beyond the money. “When you are rewarded for toughness there’s a big disincentive . . . to come forward with a story that would put a dent into your armor,” writes a current Wall Street woman in an e-mail. “That over time becomes identity.”

“It was always just stick your head down and get the work done,” says another woman. “When you are senior, you will be the change you want to see. But we weren’t.” In addition, there’s a belief that the consequences are much worse for a woman who complains than for a man who is the subject of complaints.

Among women I spoke to, the fear was often palpable. Fear of being labeled a complainer. Fear of being ostracized. Fear of being fired. I heard current stories that I cannot print, even anonymously, because the women are terrified that someone, somehow, will figure out they talked. They wish they were braver, several say. But the consequences are too great. The stories that are printed in this piece are scrubbed of telltale details for that reason.

by Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Frank Fournier/Contact Press Images; Digital alteration by Vanity Fair

How the AR-15 Became ‘America’s Rifle’

Jeff Swarey bought his AR-15 rifle five years ago after shooting guns in video games. Jessie K. Fletcher, a former Marine sniper, was given one by his platoon after he stepped on a bomb in Afghanistan that blew off his legs. Jessica Dorantes, a Texas police officer, will not go on patrol without hers.

Their shared communion is a firearm that has in recent decades become a staple of American gun culture. Its iconic silhouette is immediately recognizable — and polarizing.

The AR-15 won its place in American culture through a confluence of circumstances, described in interviews by more than 15 gun industry professionals, hobbyists, lawyers and gun owners. They pointed to 2004, when the AR-15 re-entered the gun market after the end of the federal assault weapons ban, at a time of heightened interest in the military. It was popularized by the rise of a video game culture in which shooting became an accessible form of mass entertainment, and it was marketed as accessible and easy to personalize.

For those who love the rifle, it is seen as a testament to freedom — a rite of passage shared between parents and children, a token to welcome soldiers home, a tradition shared with friends at the range. But in its relatively short life span, the AR-15 has also become inextricably linked with tragedy and has been vilified as the weapon of mass murder.

Nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz confessed to gunning down 17 people last month at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in which an AR-15 was used, the latest mass shooting to prompt a new round of the intractable gun debate.

Whether beloved or reviled, the AR-15 is more than just a gun for much of the United States.

‘America’s Rifle’

Light, precise and with little recoil, the Colt Armalite Rifle-15 Sporter hit the market in the early 1960s as the first civilian version of the military’s M16 rifle. What set it apart was, much like its military counterpart, the inventor Eugene Stoner’s patented gas operating system, which allowed for rapid fire and reloading. The weapon could easily handle a 20-round magazine, was easy to disassemble and was marketed, in one of Colt’s early advertisements, to hunters, campers and collectors.

Billed as “America’s rifle” by the National Rifle Association, the AR-15 is less a specific weapon than a family of them. When Mr. Stoner’s rights to the gas system expired in 1977, it opened the way for dozens of weapons manufacturers to produce their own models, using the same technology. The term AR-15 has become a catchall that includes a variety of weapons that look and operate similarly, including the Remington Bushmaster, the Smith & Wesson M&P15 and the Springfield Armory Saint.

Over the ensuing decades, as the American military modified the M16’s exterior to allow for accessories such as sights, grips and flashlights, the civilian market followed. Today, gun enthusiasts consider the AR-15 the Erector Set of firearms. Online message boards, video games and advertisements all provide how-to guides for customizing the rifle.

by Ali Watkins, John Ismay and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, NY Times | Read more:
Image:brian.ch

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There's not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory,
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

W.B. Yeats

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Eagles (Joe Walsh)

Our Newest Culture Warriors: Activist C.E.O.s

In the wake of the school shootings in Parkland, Fla., companies like Delta, Hertz and Symantec distanced themselves from the National Rifle Association by eliminating benefits to their members.

Dick’s Sporting Goods, which owns 35 Field and Stream stores (which feature hunting gear and supplies), took it a step further: The company announced that it had unilaterally raised the age limit for firearms sales and stopped selling the AR-15, the weapon used in Parkland and other recent mass shootings. The chief executive, Edward Stack, said that the company was “going to take a stand and step up and tell people our view and, hopefully, bring people along into the conversation.” Less than 24 hours later, Walmart joined Dick’s in raising the age limit on firearm sales (Walmart stopped selling AR-15s years ago).

They exemplify a recent phenomenon, “C.E.O. activism,” in which corporations and their chief executives pick a side in the culture war.

Some companies have benefited, through gains in popularity or even sales, by taking such stands. Patagonia reportedly saw a revenue surge after announcing its lawsuit against the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the size of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. My research with Michael Toffel of Harvard Business School finds that consumers were more likely to buy Apple products after hearing Tim Cook’s statement opposing Indiana’s religious freedom bill.

But other firms have faced angry consumers and had to retrench, as Target did when hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition in protest of its trans-inclusive bathroom policy. The chief executive of Papa John’s, who blamed the National Football League’s handling of the national anthem controversy for his company’s declining sales, stepped down after he was criticized for his comments.

What has not happened in any of these cases is a cooling of partisan tensions. Even in rare cases when pragmatic business leaders helped to broker agreements, which was reportedly the case in North Carolina with the repeal of the so-called bathroom bill, a culture war still festers.

C.E.O. activism has typically not brought people together, working from the middle out. Instead, this type of activism, largely from the progressive side, has begun to galvanize conservatives. For example, in Georgia, lawmakers stripped tax breaks for Delta over its decision to cut ties with the N.R.A.

In the short term, Dick’s will become another corporate poster child for how political polarization and so-called negative partisanship — an automatic rejection of members of the opposing party — are infecting our society. There will be a rash of news stories about increased sales from liberal consumers rushing into Dick’s stores to vote with their wallets. Conservative media will point to boycotts and highlight other retailers that are stepping in to serve disaffected consumers.

But the real story will be the long game. C.E.O. activism represents a historic shift in the way corporations intersect with national politics. Rather than chief executives shaping political discourse, however, our toxic political environment is dictating corporate strategy. Instead of being cast as practical technocrats who could unite us, chief executives will be swept up in our cultural war, just like university presidents, celebrities, professional athletes and religious leaders before them.

Brands are likely to become even more segmented into red and blue, strengthening the association between liberals and Priuses and conservatives and Cracker Barrel. Corporate brand campaigns could soon resemble political campaigns, with efforts to identify the most intensely loyal consumers for repeat purchases as opposed to attracting new ones.

Mainstream brands may become as common as moderate politicians — that is, a rare, perhaps extinct, species in today’s political environment. Twitter and PayPal serve diverse customers today, but their recent efforts to regulate their own platforms have led to allegations of political bias and incited competitors.

Most companies are not prepared for this new world of politics. Pepsi and Starbucks have already been victims of orchestrated fake news campaigns; there will be many more. As more companies take stands, those remaining will be named and shamed on social media, creating impossible choices in an environment where neutrality is not an option.

Like our politicians, corporate chiefs will have to quickly figure out what stand they should take on the issue of the day by reflecting on their core convictions and estimating how their (customer) base will react. Like pollsters, they will have to assess which kind of consumers they can write off and which ones to curry favor with. The right answer will vary by a company’s geographic location, who their employees are and how much they depend on favorable government regulation.

by Aaron K. Chatterji, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Niv Bavarsky

Maybe Taxi Drivers Don't Hate Progress, Maybe They Just Don't Want to be Poor

As ride-sharing apps have decimated the taxi industry over the last few years, Uber has consistently presented itself as being good for drivers. It has released absurdly overinflated estimates of average driver compensation. In 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a typical Uber driver takes in more than $100,000 a year in gross sales” based on figures from the company. The company had to pay a large settlement after it recruited drivers using compensation figures that were flat-out false. In 2015 Princeton economist Alan Kreuger, the former head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, partnered with Uber’s head of research to produce an “analysis of Uber’s driver-partners” with impressive earnings statistics, showing that average drivers earned well above minimum wage, with their compensation significantly exceeding that of taxi drivers. Here’s a chart from the paper:

These statistics were cited as proof Uber improves drivers’ lives. The Economist (who else?) ran the headline “Princeton economist explains why we should all stop worrying and learn to love Uber,” saying that the “ambitious study” had shown that fears of Uber driving down wages were overblown. (The press has credulously parroted Uber’s fabricated statistics since the beginning, with headlines like “Could Uber’s 90k salary disrupt the taxi business?“) The Kreuger and Hall paper’s findings, with a highly accredited economist’s name attached, were a formidable public relations tool for Uber, which has long be en fighting allegations that it underpays and exploits its drivers. The numbers proved, though, that if you’re mad at Uber, you should be even madder at the taxi industry, and that Uber is actually improving driver compensation. They also bolstered the pro-“disruption” argument that the taxi industry was little more than a cartel trying to protect the corrupt oligopoly that it had established over time. If Uber drivers earn more than taxi drivers, the arguments against Uber’s erosion of the taxi industry could not possibly be based on legitimate concerns for the financial well-being of those who drive for a living. The more Uber grew, the better it would be for drivers.

But the above chart is almost entirely meaningless. That’s because, as it notes at the bottom, it doesn’t factor Uber drivers’ expenses (gas, taxes, insurance, repairs, depreciation, or possibly even renting the car itself) into its “earnings” calculations. If one column is “pre-expenses” and the other is “post-expenses,” then what conclusions can anyone possibly draw from this chart? Unless we know what drivers actually ended up with, we don’t know anything of value. I actually think it’s deeply intellectually dishonest for a reputable economist to produce a chart like this. Krueger said he didn’t include expenses in the chart because he didn’t have the data with which to calculate them. But if you don’t have the data, then you can’t make a comparison between Uber compensation and taxi compensation. Instead of declining to answer a question that he didn’t have the answer to, Krueger made a chart that showed an unsupportable claim.

(This is one reason why serious economists shouldn’t accept money from corporations to produce research about those corporations. The Uber-funded Krueger and Hall study was almost ludicrously propagandistic, from its use of “driver-partners” to its constant touting of “flexibility.” Look at this quote: “When asked directly in [Question 38], ‘If both were available to you, at this point in your life, would you rather have a steady 9-to-5 job with some benefits and a set salary or a job where you choose your own schedule and be your own boss?’ 73 percent chose the latter.” Talk about a biased question: do you want to be your own boss or do you want to have things “set” for you with “some” benefits? Shockingly, 73 percent of people would rather not have bosses!)

When you try to produce a real comparison of what Uber drivers make compared to what taxi drivers make (as opposed to a fabricated and nonsensical comparison), the situation becomes much, much murkier. Krueger and Hall were criticized for presenting such a misleading statistic, and two years later they updated their paper to include estimates of the effect of expenses on what Uber drivers actually take home. In the new version, they came to the much less impressive conclusion that “taking expenses into account, the average Uber driver-partner is likely to earn at least as much per hour, and probably more, than the average taxi driver and chauffeur.” (Emphasis added.) Even with this estimate, for part-time drivers they “disregard fixed costs, assuming that drivers are using a car they already owned which would have depreciated regardless of driving on the platform.” The expense estimates vary, but can be almost $6.50 per hour for a full-time driver of a large sedan or SUV. (In the original paper, the authors wrote that unless driver expenses ended up being “more than $6 per hour,” their central conclusion would still hold, implying that this was very unlikely.) (...)

We don’t really know, then, what an Uber driver makes compared to a taxi driver. There are reasons to believe Uber drivers might do worse on the whole than taxi drivers. A BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Uber’s own internal data from 2016, found that in states with high auto insurance rates like Michigan, expenses for drivers could eat up almost 1/3 of the “earnings” that Uber touts. Detroit Uber drivers ended up taking home about $8.77 on average, not much above the state’s minimum wage at the time of $8.50. (And below Michigan’s current minimum wage of $9.25.) According to BuzzFeed, Uber is not eager to try to figure out what its drivers actually end up with, and “says it doesn’t know how much drivers on its platform actually earn per hour, after expenses.” The company “explicitly discourages employees from comparing [Uber’s] estimates to the minimum wage.” Here‘s an anecdotal account from a taxi driver who previously drove for Uber and Lyft, reporting that his income from ride-share apps was dismal compared to his taxi income. That doesn’t in itself prove anything, but it does mean we shouldn’t allow Uber to treat this as an obviously settled question.

A new study out of MIT actually suggests that things may be much worse for Uber drivers than previously thought. From a survey of more than 1,100 drivers, the study’s authors concluded that the median pre-tax profit earned from driving is actually a miserable $3.37 an hour, and that 30 percent of drivers “are actually losing money once vehicle expenses are included.” Their results actually show the median per-mile expenses exceeding the median per-mile profit. If this is true, it certainly helps us better understand why 96% of Uber drivers quit after less than a year. (Hall and Krueger suggest that this is simply because Uber is used as a “bridge” between jobs, though one wonders why those people even need to find another job if driving is as lucrative as the company says.)

There is reason to be skeptical of the MIT number, because they’re so different from prior estimates, and it’s hard to evaluate them given that we only have access to a short summary of the findings. That’s why this needs to be looked at seriously, in research that isn’t just company propaganda or back-of-the-envelope calculations from industry-sponsored bloggers.

There are important reasons to figure out what Uber drivers really earn. The debate over regulating Uber/Lyft in many cities has been framed as pitting innovation/disruption against “taxi company profits.” Language about monopoliesand cartels is ubiquitous. Taxi companies just don’t want competition, they want to keep fares high and squeeze money out of consumers. Framed that way, regardless of what you think of Uber, it’s difficult to see any good argument for the taxi lobby’s desire to put restrictions on ride-share apps and keep local licensing requirements in place. But if Uber is creating a “race to the bottom” effect that is causing considerable economic hardship to people who have spent decades driving for a living, we’re in a different situation. And since Uber fares are obviously far lower than taxi fares, with drivers paying more in expenses, the idea that it’s going to end up being better for workers is… counterintuitive to say the least. The whole success of the gig economy is based on the fact that it’s all cheap, and it’s not just cheap because it’s disrupting cartels, but because it cuts costs that companies would previously have had to pay. (Such as, for example, driver safety training, which ride-share apps don’t offer because they’re worried it will lead the government to conclude that drivers are actually employees who deserve benefits. Being a taxi driver is actually one of the most dangerous jobs in America: you’re more likely to be murdered as a taxi driver than doing any other job, and risks of car accidents and robberies also.)

It would be easy, of course, to fix everything. We don’t need to reclassify “driver-partners” as actual employees instead of contractors, or even try to get them unionized. What we really need is a rideshare system owned and operated by drivers themselves. Libertarians have snarkily pointed out that the “sharing economy allows workers to own the means of production,” which is every socialist’s dream. Why doesn’t the left love this? Well, we know exactly why: because it’s not about “owning the tools you use at your job” it’s about not being exploited by your employer, i.e. not having to turn over a substantial portion of your earnings to them merely because you happen to be dependent on them. But there is a point here: ride-sharing can be good for workers, if corporate profit is out of the picture. We need an alternative, not for profit service that actually operates in a way that servers its workers.

At the beginning of last month, Doug Schifter, a New York City livery driver, committed suicide on the steps of City Hall with a shotgun. Schifter left a note, explaining that he was taking his life because conditions for him as a driver had become impossible. With the industry collapsing, he had lost his health insurance, was deep in debt, and said he was working up to 100 hour weeks. The New York Times described Schifter as a “casualty of the gig economy,” a man who had driven five million miles in his career only to see everything evaporate.” (Bill deBlasio apparently didn’t accept Schifter’s stated motivation for his act, saying it must have been due to an “underlying mental health issue.”) This situation is happening to career drivers across the country. Uber “devastated” the taxi industry in cities like Los Angeles. The executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance said that never she had “never seen anything like the despair she was witnessing now — the bankruptcies, foreclosures and eviction notices plaguing drivers who were calling her with questions about how to navigate homelessness and paralyzing depression.”

Before Doug Schifter took his own life, he wrote:

We are not a government of the People, by the People and for the People any more. We are turning into a Government of the People, by the Corporation for the Rich. People are becoming enslaved and destroyed by politicians and companies with the aid of the rich and the corporations they control… Forget about great country….we are not even good people if we do not care for others in need. Most of the civilized world cares for their own except here where republicans who do not need more money to survive seek to get all they can get from companies and the rich and then take away all they can from the people… I hope with the public sacrifice I make now that some attention to the plight of the drivers and the people will be done to save them and it will have not have been in vain…

In Tunisia, when one fruit vendor committed suicide publicly after conditions had become intolerable, it sparked an uprising that toppled the existing regime. In America, when a livery driver takes his life, the country barely bats an eye. After all, Schifter will be only one of 40,000 people who commit suicide in our country this year. And we’ve decided to accept the ruin of people’s lives as the price of cheap fares.

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

Image: Alan Kreuger and Uber

Inside the Home of Japan's Fake Food Industry

With a gentle swish through hot water, and some deft tearing and shaping, Kurumi Kono turns a rectangular sheet of white and green wax into what, improbably, is quickly coming to resemble an iceberg lettuce.

Kono makes it look deceptively easy. “Place it in your hands and pull out the edges like this,” she says. “Then roll the remaining wax into a ball to make a small lettuce. Place it onto your hand and, starting from the back, fold the bigger leaf towards the middle. Using both hands, gently form a sphere. And there you have it.”

She then drips a yellowy liquid wax from a paper cup into the hot water. Within seconds, it forms a solid coating, in which she encases a “cooked prawn” to produce a flawless piece of tempura. It really does look good enough to eat.

A godsend to foreign tourists who, faced with a Japanese-language menu, can simply point and order, shokuhin sanpuru (food samples) have been tempting diners into Japan’s restaurants for almost a century. (...)

Gujo Hachiman, a picturesque town tucked in the mountains more than three hours west of Tokyo, lays claim to being the home of a replica food industry now worth an estimated $90m.

It is said that the father of replica food, Takizo Iwasaki, was inspired by the drops of candle wax that formed on the tatami-mat floor at the home he shared with his wife, Suzu, in Osaka, according to his biography, Flowers of Wax.

After months of perfecting his technique, Iwasaki made Suzu a fake omelette, garnished with tomato sauce, that she initially failed to distinguish from the real thing.

While some artisans had already started making rudimentary food models in the 1920s, Iwasaki pioneered a production method that combined accuracy with volume, and opened a workshop in his hometown of Gujo Hachiman.

His omelette appeared at a department store in Osaka in 1932, and an industry was born.

The more prosaic theory is that the replica food boom grew out of demand by restaurants for models that re-created the increasingly eclectic range of Japanese and foreign dishes that appeared on menus in the postwar period.

“Eating out could be a challenge for some people in those days, so restaurateurs saw display models as a way of putting customers at ease,” says Katsuji Kaneyama, president of Sanpuru Kobo (Sample Kobo), one of several replica food firms in Gujo Hachiman, whose products account for about two-thirds of the domestic market. (...)

“The trick is in striking a balance between realism and aestheticism – the model that looks the most delicious isn’t necessarily the most realistic,” says Kaneyama, whose 10 full-time artists produce as many as 130,000 samples a year, made from durable PVC rather than wax. 

by Justin McCurry, The Guardian |  Read more:

Video: The Guardian

Katsunori Hamanishi, Kimono n°1 2011

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Killing a Parasite — Canceling Student Debt

In America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt. That giant pile of financial obligations isn’t just a burden on individual borrowers, but on the nation’s entire economy.

In the world of parasites, the job of the parasite is to benefit from the harm it does to the host, but not to kill the host, at least not until the parasite is done with it:

In biology, parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has characterised parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”…. 

Unlike predators, parasites, with the exception of parasitoids [examples: wasps that lay eggs in paralyzed spiders, or the beast in Alien], typically do not kill their host, are generally much smaller than their host, and often live in or on their host for an extended period. Parasitism is a type of consumer-resource interaction. [Footnotes removed]

Parasites are not the same as predators. Predators kill, eat, and move on. Parasites disable, then live off the energy system of the disabled host for as long as they can keep the host alive.

Viruses are a form of parasite. So are credit card companies.

Loan Companies as Parasites

The parasite first disables the host’s ability to reject the parasite, then derives its own energy (that which sustains it) by robbing the host’s energy system. It attempts to do this for as long as possible. Loan companies whose “business plan” — survival strategy — is to prolong the loan, and at the maximum sustainable rate, are by definition parasites.

But there is a scale of parasitism among loan companies. The least parasitic are mortgage companies, in that mortgages typically don’t destroy incomes; they just feed off them. When the host goes into bankruptcy (usually for other reasons, such as illness, divorce or job change), the host (the home-owner) is abandoned, but mortgage company parasites don’t typically cause these bankruptcies by themselves.

In addition, if a host wants to repay her debt and free herself from the parasite, she is allowed to do so, though typically, hosts usually seek a new parasite, either by necessity or because of cultural pressure.

At the less gentle end of the parasitic spectrum are payday lenders and loan sharks, who actually disable the host’s income capability by extracting so much money that the host almost certainly goes bankrupt, often first drawing on the resources of others and transferring those resources to the parasite as well before they do.

Payday lenders thrive in an environment rich in new hosts, since so many of their former ones become useless. By contrast, most mortgaged homeowners (hosts of mortgage banks) don’t go bankrupt — just some of them.

Student Debt Parasites Feed on Especially Vulnerable Hosts

Not far up the parasitic scale from payday lenders and loan sharks are owners and beneficiaries of student debt, i.e. the lending companies.

First, as the chart above shows, there’s a large and growing population of prospects in the student loan world. New hosts, it seems, are everywhere.

Second, the loan amounts are extraordinarily large and extraordinarily long-lived (my emphasis throughout):

The average debt load for students who graduated in the class of 2016 was around $30,000, and the average rises every year. 

But some students graduate with far more debt than that, especially those who pursue graduate degrees or professional degrees. Nearly 17 percent of those who borrow for education costs will graduate owing more than $50,000, according to the recent study by the Brookings Institution. That is a much higher rate than in 2000, when five percent of new graduates owed that much money. 

Today, many of those who graduate with more than $50,000 in debt aren’t the students who are pursuing highly-lucrative careers, such as becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but undergraduate students and their parents. On the other hand, more people who are pursuing a professional degree are graduating with well over $100,000 in student loans.

While a student debt load of $30,000 doesn’t sound large compared to mortgage debt, remember that these hosts almost never have a source of income when they incur the debt. In contrast, mortgage holders generally have to prove income prior to acquiring the debt.

For high-debt graduates — greater than $50,000, greater than $100,000 — the situation is much worse. The debt burden can hobble their entire lives. I’ve met men and women in their thirties whose most common complaint is, “I will never get out of debt, and I will never get a job in my profession.” I’ve met high-tech workers in high-mortgage-cost regions of the country with incomes greater than $150,000 per year, student loan repayments of nearly $2,000 per month, more than one child, and no way to break even on a month-to-month basis.

All of these people are one bad-luck accident away from bankruptcy — which means good-bye to the next good job for more than a decade afterward.

Student Loan Parasites Also Feed on the Economy as a Whole

But student loan parasites don’t just eat and diminish the host — they eat and diminish the economy as a whole. It’s an axiom in economics that aggregate debt repayment subtracts from GDP, a measure of overall economic production. In practical terms, a dollar spent repaying a debt to a lender is a dollar that doesn’t buy bread, purchase services like health care, or build a factory.

As a nation’s private debt burden increases, private sector demand and spending falls. In the extreme, if everyone in a country decided or were forced to pay all debts at once, the overall economy would collapse. (The same would happen if everyone in an economy went on a savings spree.)

This is what today’s high levels of student debt are doing to our economy. Writes Eric Levitz at New York magazine:

In America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt. That giant pile of financial obligations isn’t just a burden on individual borrowers, but on the nation’s entire economy. The astronomical rise in the cost of college tuition — combined with the stagnation of entry-level wages for college graduates — has depressed the purchasing power of a broad, and growing, part of the labor force. Many of these workers are struggling to keep their heads above water; 11 percent of aggregate student loan debt is now more than 90 days past due, or delinquent. Others are unable to invest in a home, vehicle, or start a family (and engage in all the myriad acts of consumption that go with that).

Note that number: U.S. aggregate student debt has reached almost $1.5 trillion.

A Debt Jubilee to Rejuvenate the Economy

The obvious solution to this problem has been practiced since ancient times — a debt jubilee in which all student debts are cancelled. Keep in mind that the U/S. government owns or controls 90% of all student debt in this country:

Thus, if the government were to forgive all the student debt it owns (which makes up more than 90 percent of all outstanding student debt), and bought out all private holders of such debt, a surge in consumer demand — and thus, employment and economic growth — would ensue. 

According to the Levy Institute paper [here], authored by economists Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum, canceling all student debt would increase GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion per year, over the next decade. This would add between 1.2 and 1.5 million jobs to the economy, and reduce the unemployment rate by between 0.22 and 0.36 percent.

Note that the ancient concept of “debt jubilee” doesn’t necessarily apply to all debt, just unproductive debt.

Economist Michael Hudson writes this about debt jubilees in Sumerian and Babylonian times:

The Bronze Age core economies coped with the debt problem simply by canceling society’s unproductive debts when they grew too large. However, the Sumerians and Babylonians only annulled consumer barley-debts; they left commercial silver-debts intact. … This implicit distinction between productive and unproductive debt represents a third way in which Babylonian economics may be deemed more sophisticated than modern economics (in addition to the afore-mentioned focus on the destabilizing role of debts multiplying at compound interest, and the phenomenon of wealth addiction.)

Note his mention of the socially “destabilizing role of debs multiplying at compound interest,” as well as the (similarly destabilizing) role of “wealth addiction.” Our society is hobbled by both.

Student loan debt is by definition unproductive debt — a debt owed to parasites, in other words. There is no question that cancelling it would free both hosts — the millions of graduates (and those who failed to graduate) themselves, and the larger economy as well.

by Gaius Publius, Down With Tyranny |  Read more:

Image: People’s Policy Project
[ed. See also: We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake and Alone among all kinds of debt, we don’t allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy.]

Taxpayers, You’ve Been Scammed

So you go out for dinner with a wealthy acquaintance. “I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and orders you a hamburger. Then he orders himself an expensive steak and a bottle of wine, which he doesn’t share. And when the waiter comes with the check, he points at you and says, “Charge it to his credit card.”

Now you understand the essence of the Trump tax cut, signed into law a little over two months ago.

The key thing you need to know is that right now the U.S. government has no business cutting taxes. We need more revenue, not less.

Why? The federal government, as an old line says, is a giant insurance company with an army. Most of its costs come from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and all three programs are becoming more expensive as ever more baby boomers reach retirement age. This means that unless we cut back sharply on benefits that middle-class Americans count on, we will need to raise more revenue than in the past. (...)

And we already know what will give, if Republicans get their way: programs that benefit working Americans. In fact, the usual suspects like Paul Ryan were talking about the need for “entitlement reform” — meaning cuts in Medicare and Medicaid — to reduce deficits even as they were passing a huge tax cut that will make those deficits much worse.

Hence my analogy about the guy who “gives” you a hamburger, then bills it to your credit card. Ryan celebrated the tax cut with a tweet about a teacher saving $1.50 a week on her taxes; that’s like saying you should feel grateful for a “gift” that’s actually being charged to your own credit card. How’s that $75-a-year saving going to look when the teacher finds out that, partly because of that tax cut, her mother’s Medicare plan has been converted into an inadequate voucher system and Medicaid won’t pay for her father’s nursing home care?

Meanwhile, about your companion’s steak dinner: Most of the tax cut actually consisted of huge tax breaks for corporations, which is in effect a big tax cut for stockholders. And while many Americans own a bit of stock via their retirement accounts, even if you include these indirect holdings, more than 80 percent of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. So on the face of it, the wealthy are giving themselves a big gift, and sending the bill to the middle class.

Now, the tax cut’s defenders insist that it won’t really work that way, that the benefits of lower corporate taxes will trickle down to workers instead. How’s that supposed to happen?

Well, the theory is that lower corporate taxes will draw in lots of money from overseas, which corporations will invest in new plants and equipment, which will drive up the demand for labor, which will raise wages. And to be fair, there’s probably something to this theory — something, but not very much.

First of all, even if the process were to work as advertised, it would take a long time — probably decades. Even the most optimistic analyses suggest that there would be little effect on wages for the first few years, which means that for now what looks like a tax break for the wealthy is, in fact, a tax break for the wealthy.

Second, the story relies on a long chain of events with multiple weak links. For example, corporations with monopoly power won’t see lower taxes as a reason to invest more; they’ll just take the money. Meanwhile, there’s growing evidence that big employers are using their power to suppress wages; cutting their taxes won’t change that fact. So even in the long run we shouldn’t expect a lot of trickle-down.

But wait — weren’t there a lot of stories about companies using the tax cut to give their workers bonuses? Yes, there were — but only because the news media let themselves get played. Most of those bonuses would have happened anyway: In an economy with low unemployment, there are always some companies deciding to pay a bit more to attract workers. But companies had every incentive to pretend that the tax cut was responsible, if only to curry favor with the Trump administration.

And in any case the bonus hype was out of all proportion to the reality. So far, we’ve seen about $6 billion in bonuses versus more than $170 billion in stock buybacks, that is, handing money to wealthy stockholders. And money spent on buybacks is money that isn’t being invested in plants and equipment, the supposed point of the tax cut.

So the message to middle-class taxpayers is, if you think you were helped by the tax cut, think again. Donald Trump and his allies pretended to give you a gift, but they gave themselves and their wealthy patrons much bigger gifts — and they’re going to stick you with the bill. You’ve been scammed.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

In the Dark All Cats Are Grey

Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress (1745)

June 25, 1745

My dear Friend,

I know of no Medicine fit to diminish the violent natural Inclinations you mention; and if I did, I think I should not communicate it to you. Marriage is the proper Remedy. It is the most natural State of Man, and therefore the State in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness. Your Reasons against entering into it at present, appear to me not well-founded. The circumstantial Advantages you have in View by postponing it, are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the Thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being. Separate, she wants his Force of Body and Strength of Reason; he, her Softness, Sensibility and acute Discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the World. A single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union. He is an incomplete Animal. He resembles the odd Half of a Pair of Scissars. If you get a prudent healthy Wife, your Industry in your Profession, with her good Economy, will be a Fortune sufficient.

But if you will not take this Counsel, and persist in thinking a Commerce with the Sex inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice, that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

1. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stor'd with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a 1000 Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc'd may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8thly and Lastly They are so grateful!!

Thus much for my Paradox. But still I advise you to marry directly; being sincerely Your affectionate Friend.

by Benjamin Franklin |  Read more:

via: Swarthmore College History 41: The American Colonies; Image via: