The End of the Joint As We Know It

Willie Nelson may be a legendary country musician, but he is first and foremost the world’s most famous joint ambassador. Legend has it that he once smoked a joint — what he referred to in his 1988 autobiography as an “Austin Torpedo” — on the roof of the White House with Jimmy Carter’s middle son. Snoop Dogg, another self-appointed sticky-icky spokesman, says that when the two met for an Amsterdam stoner summit in 2008, Nelson showed up with not one but three smoking devices, and promptly puffed him to the floor. (“I had to hit the timeout button,” Snoop later said of smoking with Nelson.) A quick Google search will turn up an entire genre of Nelson portraiture in which the singer is framed by the haze of a freshly lit jay.

All that to say, you might be surprised to hear that Nelson is no longer much of a joint guy. “I use a vaporizer these days,” he told the British magazine Uncut in 2015. “Even though marijuana smoke is not as dangerous as cigarette smoke, any time you put any kind of smoke in your lungs it takes a toll of some kind.” GQ investigated Nelson’s claims later that year, uncovering that, while joints were still very much part of his rotation, a good portion of his pot consumption had shifted to vape pens so as to be more discreet. “And he eats candy or has oil at night for sleeping,” Nelson’s wife, Annie, added.

That the most famous stoner in the world is now exploring more healthful avenues for pot consumption is a sign of the times. According to the cannabis consumer insights firm BDS Analytics, which has logged more than 800 million transactions at dispensaries across Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and California, legal sales of concentrates (vape pen cartridges and dabs), topicals (patches, salves, lotions), and edibles are rapidly outgrowing those of loose-leaf weed product — what cannabis industry types refer to as “flower.” In 2014, the year that Colorado first began selling legal pot, 65 percent of sales revenue came from flower, while only 13 percent came from concentrates. Last year, flower made up only 47 percent of total sales in the state. The new majority of the market is distributed to concentrates at 29 percent and edibles — which barely existed at the dawn of the legal pot movement — at 15 percent. “There’s more choices available to people, and in that respect we’re seeing a lot of evolution in terms of consumption methods,” Linda Gilbert, the managing director of BDS Analytics’ consumer research division, told me. “There is an evolution of looking at marijuana in the consumer’s mind, from being about getting stoned to actually thinking of it as a wellness product.”

And also as a part of everyday life. Where there were once bowls, grinders, and rolling papers, there are now myriad sleek contraptions: dainty plastic oil pens and weed walkie-talkies and smokable iPhone cases. These days, the consumption method of choice may not even be inhalable. Maybe it’s a canister of Auntie Dolores’s vegan, sugar-free pretzels. Or a $6 bottle of Washington state’s Happy Apple cider. Perhaps you go the transdermal route and slather on some $90 Papa & Barkley THC-and-CBD-infused Releaf Balm. No matter the product, the packaging has traded the psychedelic pot leafs of yore for clean lines and Helvetica fonts. (...)

As smoking accessories have modernized in the past 10 years, and as more states have legalized sales, grinding and rolling up bud has gradually become a more obscure ritual. And the era of the hastily rolled marijuana cigarette — crystallized by everyone from Cheech and Chong to Barack Obama — is slowly coming to a close. “If you fast-forward 10 years and look back at the cannabis market, I’ll take a guess that in some ways we’ll think about consuming cannabis flower like we think about consuming a cigar now,” said Alan Gertner, the CEO of Hiku, a Canadian cannabis producer and retailer that aims to make pot consumption more mainstream. “It’s a ritual, it’s a heritage moment, it’s about celebration. But ultimately cannabis flower for any individual is somewhat hard to interact with. The idea that a 20-year-old is going to learn to roll a joint is sort of ludicrous.” (...)

As wellness-mania swept the nation, pot-trepreneurs saw a chance to capitalize on a portion of the estimated $3.7 trillion market worldwide. Over the past few years, cannabis and its nonpsychoactive byproducts have taken the form of medicine: inhalers designed to dole out exact dosages, supplements, patches, and tinctures. Though state laws still prohibit pot-related companies from advertising on any mainstream platform, many of them now see the value of building recognizable, commercially viable brands. The idea is that to encourage more first-time pot consumers, the point of entry must be significantly less complicated than it used to be. That can mean anything from offering a prerolled joint to a pill you take before going to bed. “Right now the market is still dominated by hardcore stoners,” Micah Tapman, a cofounder and managing director at the Colorado investment firm CanopyVentures said. “If they’re hitting something they want 50 milligrams. Whereas the new consumer that is coming up will be a much lighter-weight consumption. The soccer mom demographic is probably going to gravitate toward the very discreet vaporizers or topicals. They’re not typically going to want a bong sitting on their coffee table.”

In other words, less horticulture, more convenience. Gertner, who previously worked as a head of sales at Google before starting his own coffee, cannabis, and clothing brand, likens the current weed consumption landscape to that of the North American coffee market in the last 30 years. People smoke joints for the same reason they used to drink only plain black coffee: potency. “It was basically like: How quickly can I get caffeine into my system?” Gertner said. As companies like Starbucks introduced new nomenclature around coffee and a reworked guidebook for how to consume it, people began to see the beverage differently. “The coffee experience is now grounded in community, as opposed to grounded in the idea in just straight-up caffeine consumption,” Gertner said. “You went from a world where we optimized for potency to a world where we started to optimize for brand, convenience, and taste. You’re not necessarily drinking a Frappuccino because of caffeine content, you’re drinking a Frappuccino for other reasons.” The cannabis market is on a similar path of mass consumption. The earthy taste, smell, and delivery of weed smoke are being muted and manipulated. Just like drinking Frappuccinos, that means customers are sometimes ingesting extra calories or unsavory fillers in the process. And like most artisanal coffee brands, these professionalized cannabis brands can also charge a premium. The joint will always have a place in weed culture, but advanced technology has made it functionally outdated. “You start to think of this future where you say, I can have a cannabis drink, why would I smoke a joint?” Gertner said.

by Alyssa Bereznak, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency

On May 1, 2003, the day President George W. Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in front of the massive “Mission Accomplished” sign, I was in Baghdad performing what had become a daily ritual. I went to a gate on the side of the Republican Palace, in the Green Zone, where an American soldier was receiving, one by one, a long line of Iraqis who came with questions and complaints. I remember a man complaining that his house had been run over by a tank. There was a woman who had been a government employee and wanted to know about her salary. The soldier had a form he was supposed to fill out with each person’s request and that person’s contact information. I stood there as the man talked to each person and, each time, said, “Phone number?” And each person would answer some version of “The phone system of Iraq has been destroyed and doesn’t work.” Then the soldier would turn to the next person, write down the person’s question or complaint, and then ask, “Phone number?”

I arrived in Baghdad on April 12th of that year, a few days after Saddam’s statue at Firdos Square had been destroyed. There were a couple of weeks of uncertainty as reporters and Iraqis tried to gauge who was in charge of the country and what the general plan was. There was no electricity, no police, no phones, no courts, no schools. More than half of Iraqis worked for the government, and there was no government, no Army, and so no salaries for most of the country. At first, it seemed possible that the Americans simply needed a bit of time to communicate the new rules. By the end of April, though, it was clear: there was no plan, no new order. Iraq was anarchic.

We journalists were able to use generators and satellite dishes to access outside information, and what we saw was absurd. Americans seemed convinced things were going well in Iraq. The war—and the President who launched it—were seen favorably by seventy per cent of Americans. Then came these pictures of a President touting “Mission Accomplished”—the choice of words that President Trump used in a tweet on Saturday, the morning after he ordered an air strike on Syria. On the ground, we were not prophets or political geniuses. We were sentient adults who were able to see the clear, obvious truth in front of us. The path of Iraq would be decided by those who thrived in chaos.

I had a similar feeling in December, 2007. I came late to the financial crisis. I had spent much of 2006 and 2007 naïvely swatting away warnings from my friends and sources who told me of impending disaster. Finally, I decided to take a deep look at collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.s, those financial instruments that would soon be known as toxic assets. I read technical books, talked to countless experts, and soon learned that these were, in Warren Buffett’s famous phrase, weapons of financial mass destruction. They were engineered in such a way that they could exponentially increase profits but would, also, exponentially increase losses. Worse, they were too complex to be fully understood. It was impossible, even with all the information, to figure out what they were worth once they began to fail. Because these C.D.O.s had come to form the core value of most major banks’ assets, no major bank had clear value. With that understanding, the path was clear. Eventually, people would realize that the essential structure of our financial system was about to implode. Yet many political figures and TV pundits were happily touting the end of a crisis. (Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economic adviser, led the charge of ignorance.)

In Iraq and with the financial crisis, it was helpful, as a reporter, to be able to divide the world into those who actually understand what was happening and those who said hopeful nonsense. The path of both crises turned out to be far worse than I had imagined.

I thought of those earlier experiences this week as I began to feel a familiar clarity about what will unfold next in the Trump Presidency. There are lots of details and surprises to come, but the endgame of this Presidency seems as clear now as those of Iraq and the financial crisis did months before they unfolded. Last week, federal investigators raided the offices of Michael Cohen, the man who has been closer than anybody to Trump’s most problematic business and personal relationships. This week, we learned that Cohen has been under criminal investigation for months—his e-mails have been read, presumably his phones have been tapped, and his meetings have been monitored. Trump has long declared a red line: Robert Mueller must not investigate his businesses, and must only look at any possible collusion with Russia. That red line is now crossed and, for Trump, in the most troubling of ways. Even if he were to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then have Mueller and his investigation put on ice, and even if—as is disturbingly possible—Congress did nothing, the Cohen prosecution would continue. Even if Trump pardons Cohen, the information the Feds have on him can become the basis for charges against others in the Trump Organization.

This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.

However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.

Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities. It has become commonplace to say that enough was known about Trump’s shady business before he was elected; his followers voted for him precisely because they liked that he was someone willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, and they also believe that all rich businesspeople have to do shady things from time to time. In this way of thinking, any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.

I believe this assessment is wrong. Sure, many people have a vague sense of Trump’s shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested, a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace. Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007, about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture. It took a long time for the nation to accept that these were not minor aberrations but, rather, signs of fundamental crisis. Sadly, things had to get much worse before Americans came to see that our occupation of Iraq was disastrous and, a few years later, that our financial system was in tatters.

The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad global operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.

by Adam Davidson, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Yana Paskova / Getty

[ed. I'm usually loathe to post anything about Trump, but in this case making an exception. With our lick spittle Congress (Republicans and Democrats) and generally absent and clueless American electorate, we shall see.] 

Dream Home

Carlos Diniz, Monarch Bay Homes, Entry from Street, 1961
via:

The Beach Boy

The friends met for dinner, as they did the second Sunday of every month, at a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were three couples: Marty and Barbara, Jerry and Maureen, and John and Marcia, who had recently returned from a weeklong island getaway to celebrate their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. “Were the beaches beautiful? How was the hotel? Was it safe? Was it memorable? Was it worth the money?” the friends asked.

Marcia said, “You had to see it to believe it. The ocean was like bathwater. The sunsets? Better than any painting. But the political situation, don’t get me started. All the beggars!” She put a hand over her heart and sipped her wine. “Who knows who’s in charge? It’s utter chaos. Meanwhile, the people all speak English! ” The vestiges of colonialism, the poverty, the corruption—it had all depressed her. “And we were harassed,” she told the friends. “By prostitutes. Male ones. They followed us down the beach like cats. The strangest thing. But the beach was absolutely gorgeous. Right, John?”

John sat across the table, swirling his spaghetti. He glanced up at Marcia, nodded, winked.

The friends wanted to know what the prostitutes had looked like, how they’d dressed, what they’d said. They wanted details.

“They looked like normal people,” Marcia said, shrugging. “You know, just young, poor people, locals. But they were very complimentary. They kept saying, ‘Hello, nice people. Massage? Nice massage for nice people?’ ”

“Little did they know!” John joked, furrowing his eyebrows like a maniac. The friends laughed.

“We’d read about it in the guidebook,” Marcia said. “You’re not supposed to acknowledge them at all. You don’t even look them in the eye. If you do, they’ll never leave you alone. The beach boys. The male prostitutes, I mean. It’s sad,” she added. “Tragic. And, really, one wonders how anybody can starve in a place like that. There was food everywhere. Fruit on every tree. I just don’t understand it. And the city was rife with garbage. _Rife! _” she proclaimed. She put down her fork. “Wouldn’t you say, hon?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘rife,’ ” John answered, wiping the corners of his mouth with his cloth napkin. “Fragrant, more like.”

The waiter collected the unfinished plates of pasta, then returned and took their orders of cheesecake and pie and decaffeinated coffee. John was quiet. He scrolled through photos on his cell phone, looking for a picture he’d taken of a monkey seated on the head of a Virgin Mary statue. The statue was painted in bright colors, and its nose was chipped, showing the white, chalky plaster under the paint. The monkey was black and skinny, with wide-spaced, neurotic eyes. Its tail curled under Mary’s chin. John turned the screen of his phone toward the table.

“This little guy,” he said.

“Aw!” the friends cried. They wanted to know, “Were the monkeys feral? Were they smelly? Are the people Catholic? Are they all very religious there?”

“Catholic,” Marcia said, nodding. “And the monkeys were everywhere. Cute but very sneaky. One of them stole John’s pen right out of his pocket.” She rattled off whatever facts she could remember from the nature tour they’d taken. “I think there are laws about eating the monkeys. I’m not so sure. They all spoke English,” she repeated, “but sometimes it was hard to understand them. The guides, I mean, not the monkeys.” She chuckled.

“The monkeys spoke Russian, naturally,” John said, and put away his phone.

The table talk moved on to plans for renovating kitchens, summer shares, friends’ divorces, new movies, books, politics, sodium, and cholesterol. They drank the coffees, ate the desserts. John peeled the wrapper off a roll of antacids. Marcia showed off her new wristwatch, which she’d purchased duty-free at the airport. Then she reapplied her lipstick in the reflection in her water glass. When the check came, they all did the math, divvying up the cost. Finally, they paid and went out onto the street and the women hugged and the men shook hands.

“Welcome home,” Jerry said. “Back to civilization.”

“Ooh-ooh ah-ah!” John cried, imitating a monkey.

“Jesus, John,” Marcia whispered, blushing and batting the air with her hand as if shooing a fly.

Each couple went off in a different direction. John was a bit drunk. He’d finished Marcia’s second glass of wine because she’d said it was giving her a headache. He took her arm as they turned the corner onto East Eighty-second Street toward the Park. The streets were nearly empty, late as it was. The whole city felt hushed, focussed, like a young dancer counting her steps.

Marcia fussed with her silk scarf, also purchased duty-free at the airport. The pattern was a paisley print in red and black and emerald green and had reminded her of the vibrant colors she’d seen the locals wearing on the island. Now she regretted buying the scarf. The tassels were short and fuzzy, and she thought they made the silk look cheap. She could give the scarf away as a gift, she supposed, but to whom? It had been so expensive, and her closest friends—the only people she would ever spend so much money on—had just seen her wearing it. She sighed and looked up at the moon as they entered the Park.

“Thank God Jerry and Maureen are getting along again,” Marcia said. “It was exhausting when they weren’t.”

“Marty was funny about the wine, wasn’t he?” John said. “I told him I was fine with Syrah. What does it matter? Que sera, sera.” He unhooked his arm from Marcia’s elbow and put it around her shoulder.

“It gave me such a headache,” Marcia complained. “Should we cut across the field, or go around?”

“Let’s be bold.”

They stepped off the gravel onto the grass. It was a dark, clear night in the Park, quiet except for the sound of distant car horns and ripping motors echoing faintly through the trees. John tried for a moment to forget that the city was right there, surrounding them. He’d been disappointed by how quickly his life had returned to normal after the vacation. As before, he woke up in the morning, saw patients all day long, returned home to eat dinner with Marcia, watched the evening news, bathed, and went to bed. It was a good life, of course. He wasn’t suffering from a grave illness; he wasn’t starving; he wasn’t being exploited or enslaved. But, gazing out the window of the tour bus on the island, he had felt envious of the locals, of their ability to do whatever was in their nature. His own struggles seemed like petty complications, meaningless snags in the dull itinerary that was his life. Why couldn’t he live by instinct and appetite, be primitive, be free?

At a rest stop, John had watched a dog covered in mange and bleeding pustules rub itself against a worn wooden signpost. He was lucky, he thought, not to be that dog. And then he felt ashamed of his privilege and his discontentedness. “I should be happy,” he told himself. “Marcia is.” Even the beggars tapping on car windows, begging for pennies, were smiling. “Hello, nice people,” the beach boys had said. John had wanted to return their salutations and ask what it was that they had to offer. He’d been curious. But Marcia had shushed him, taken his hand, and plodded down the beach with her eyes fixed on the blank sand.

Crossing the lawn in Central Park, John now tried to recall the precise rhythm of the crashing waves on the beach on the island, the smell of the ocean, the magic and the danger he’d sensed brewing under the surface of things. But it was impossible. This was New York City. When he was in it, it was the only place on earth. He looked up. The moon was just a sliver, a comma, a single eyelash in the dark, starless sky.

“I forgot to call Lenore,” Marcia was saying as they walked. “Remind me tomorrow. She’ll be upset if I don’t call. She’s so uptight.”

They reached the edge of the lawn and stepped onto a paved path that led them up to a bridge over a plaza, where people were dancing in pairs to traditional Chinese music. John and Marcia stopped to watch the dark shapes moving in the soft light of lanterns. A young man on a skateboard rumbled past them.

“Home sweet home,” Marcia said.

John yawned and tightened his arm around her shoulder. The silk of Marcia’s scarf was slippery, like cool water rippling between his fingers. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. There she was, his wife of nearly thirty years. As they walked on, he thought of how pretty she’d been when they were first married. In all their years together, he had never been interested in other women, had never strayed, had even refused the advances of a colleague one night, a few years ago, at a conference in Baltimore. The woman had been twenty years his junior, and when she invited him up to her room John had blushed and made a stuttering apology, then spent the rest of the evening on the phone with Marcia. “What did she expect from me?” he’d asked. “Some kind of sex adventure?”

“We can watch that movie when we get home,” Marcia said as they reached the edge of the Park. “The one about the jazz musician.”

“Whatever you like,” John said. He yawned again.

“Maureen said it was worth watching.”

by Ottessa Moshfegh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Brandon Geeting for The New Yorker / Design by Tamara Shopsin

Twenty Years Later: On Massive Attack and Mezzanine

In 1998, when I was a writer for Vibe magazine (which was the leading black culture journal), I went to London to interview the trip-hop kings Massive Attack. They were preparing to release their third album, the beautifully complex and brooding Mezzanine. Although they collaborated with other singers and musicians, the core Massive trio consisted of Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, Andy “Mushroom” Vowles, and Robert “3D” Del Naja. Del Naja penned most of the Dadaistic lyrics on Mezzanine and thought of its title.

As a pop journalist, I had already covered their contemporaries Portishead and Tricky, so of course I felt it was my duty and destiny to fly to London to cover Mezannine. I had to beg the cornball editor in chief to send me, and in the end, the story was never published. But I never forgot the experience of sitting with Massive, trying to refrain from being too much of a fanboy. The year before, when I’d visited Paris, I’d taken Blue Lines along to serve as my soundtrack of the city. Me and my beautiful homegirl Wendy Washington rode out to the Palace of Versailles as Massive’s remake of the soul classic “Be Thankful for What You Got” blared from the speakers.

“Mezzanine is that place in between, when you’re not sure if it’s yesterday or today,” Del Naja told me at Olympic Studios in London. “That little space where it’s quite scary and erotic.” Also known as an excellent graffitist and painter (inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat) and rumored to be the mysterious street artist Banksy (a claim he denied), Del Naja had seemingly become the leader of the group. He was its resident auteur, and his Francis Bacon view of the world was visible in the band’s videos, album designs, and stage lighting.

The band first came together in their hometown of Bristol. Though Del Naja was shorter than the lanky Daddy G or the equally tall Mushroom, who were both somewhat reserved, his presence towered over the group, and it caused an earthquake break between the brotherhood. “When we got together to record, we realized the amount of creative friction between us,” Mushroom would confess later. “In fact, we wound up recording in separate studios.” The producer Neil Davidge later described the process as “messy,” but from that angst, tension, and messiness, Massive Attack delivered a masterpiece.

Mezzanine, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary on April 20, was a departure from the gritty electronica of Massive Attack’s first two projects, Blue Lines and Protection. It incorporates more rock elements, including a newly hired band with the guitarist Angelo Bruschini, formerly of the New Wave band the Numbers, leading the charge and change. Mezzanine is an album best listened to loud, preferably on earphones, to properly hear the layers of weirdness and rhythms, a soulful sound collage that was miles away from the “Parklifes” and “Champagne Supernovas” of their Brit-pop contemporaries Blur and Oasis.

“In the beginning, the sampler was our main musical instrument,” Daddy G said in his slight West Indian accent. “When we first formed Massive Attack, basically we were DJs who went into the studio with our favorite records and created tracks. At the time, we tried to rip off the entire style of American hip-hop performers, but we realized, as artists, it’s important to be yourself. We realized it made no sense for us to talk about the South Bronx. Slowly but surely, we had to reclaim our identities as Brit artists who wanted to do something different with our music.”

Massive Attack unintentionally kicked off a new British Invasion in the nineties that was as powerful as the Beatles in the sixties, Led Zeppelin in the seventies, or Duran Duran in the eighties. Beginning with their sophisticated debut, Blue Lines, which featured the vocalist Shara Nelson on the masterful “Unfinished Sympathy” and “Safe from Harm,” there was something special about their blunted cinematic (Martin Scorsese was another hero) sound that had a paranoid artfulness. For me, having long grown bored with the stunted growth of many American rap artists during that era of “jiggy” materialism and thug tales of nineties rap, their slowed-down music (tape loops, samples, and beats) created an often dreamy, sometimes nightmarish sound that was fresh and futuristic. The author Will Self called it a “sinuous, sensual, subversive soundscape.”

Blue Lines was accessible avant-garde and comprehensible experimentation. From first listen, I could tell they were as inspired by the pioneering producers Marley Marl, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Prince as they were by Burt Bacharach, John Barry, and Brian Eno. The trip-hop label was bestowed on the group by the Brit journalist Jonathan Taylor to describe the trippy music that was simultaneously street and psychedelic. Trip-hop was a tag that, like jazz, was often rejected by the practitioners, but it fit perfectly. A few years later, when I started contributing short fiction to the Brown Sugar erotica series, I imagined the stories as textual films, and it was Massive Attack that supplied the seductive score.

“Angel,” the third single from Mezzanine, would go on to become one of their most licensed songs, used for the opening credits of the series House as well as by the director George Miller in Mad Max: Fury Road. Over the years, Massive Attack’s music has been used in many movies (Pi, The Matrix, The Insider) and television programs (Luther, True Blood, Power). The videos for their own songs, including the four singles from Mezzanine (“Risingson,” “Teardrop,” “Angel,” and “Inertia Creeps”), were always sinister and disturbing. Massive’s hybrid music achieved pop-cult status, selling millions of copies while still being critically lauded.

Yet in 1998, at least, the group itself was still somewhat anonymous. They could walk around the city without being bothered. Mushroom and I popped out of the studio and went to a juice stand. He told me about his years living in New York, where he was the protégé of Devastating Tito from the rap group the Fearless Four. “Have you ever heard of them?” he asked shyly. When I told him my best friend Jerry Rodriguez had directed their video for “Problems of the World” in 1983, Mushroom smiled. “Finally,” he replied, “someone who knows about the old school.”

by Michael A. Gonzales, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Massive Attack, uncredited

The Mortgage Business Is No Fun Anymore

[ed. See: Wells Fargo Pays $1 Billion to Federal Regulators.]

Mortgages.

A few years ago I tried to add up all the fines that Bank of America Corp. had paid for doing bad mortgage stuff. There were a lot of them, enough that, as the internet decays, the chart that I put together appears to no longer be readable. The headline number -- $68 billion of fines, settlements, etc. at the time -- was big, but more interesting to me was the repetitiveness of the fines. Countrywide Financial Corp. sold bad mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 2004 and 2008, and Bank of America bought Countrywide in 2008, and everyone sued, and Bank of America reached settlements with Freddie (in 2011) and Fannie (in 2013) over those mortgages. And then it reached a settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency over those mortgages in 2014. And then it lost a trial and was ordered to pay more money to the Justice Department over some of those loans, though that was later overturned. And then later in 2014 it reached a $16.7 billion settlement with the Justice Department and other agencies covering, among other things, those same loans. Bank of America basically spent the first half of this decade revisiting its mortgage misdeeds, over and over again, and paying for them each time.

It must have been pretty tedious for Bank of America! I wrote at the time:

A popular criticism of the modern approach to punishing bank misdeeds -- giant fines imposed on the banks, not much in the way of individual punishments and a preference for settlements rather than trials -- is that it turns the fines into just a "cost of doing business," normalizing misbehavior rather than preventing future wrongdoing. 

If a bank does a bad mortgage thing, and you find the person who did the thing (or who signed off on the thing, or who ran the bank when it did the thing, or whatever), and you put him in prison, then that sends a powerful message that the thing was a crime, that it was not business as usual, that it could not be tolerated. If, on the other hand, you hold no individuals responsible, but come back to the bank every year and say "hey remember that mortgage thing? that'll be another $2 billion," then arguably you send the message that the bad mortgage thing was expected in the mortgage business, and that fines for doing it are just a normal part of life.

But you could say that same thing with a different emphasis. If a bank does a bad mortgage thing, and you find the person who did the thing and put him in prison, then the bank could reasonably conclude that the problem was that person, that the bad thing was anomalous, that there is nothing wrong with its mortgage business model as a whole. If, on the other hand, you come back to the bank every year and fine it a few billion dollars for the same mortgage thing, then that will send the bank a message about the costs and benefits of the mortgage business. The message is that the misconduct is not the work of a few bad criminals who are Not Like Us, but that it is endemic to the business model. The bank might reasonably conclude that frequent multibillion-dollar fines are a cost of doing business, and not worth it.

Which approach is correct depends on the facts, of course. If the mortgage business is great, and reliably adds to the long-term prosperity of the nation, but occasionally a mortgage banker murders a customer, then you should probably put the murder bankers in prison and not mess with the business model. But if an aspect of the mortgage business -- say, the originate-to-distribute model that many commentators blame for creating moral hazard, loose underwriting standards and a bubble in house prices -- seems to be pervasively bad and dangerous for the broader economy, and if every bank involved in the mortgage business seems to be getting in trouble for the same sorts of misbehavior, then maybe you do want to add to the costs of doing business. Maybe the way to think about it is not as anomalous crime but as a bad business model that imposes social costs, and to force banks to internalize those costs in the form of huge and frequent fines.

Anyway:

One measure of how much things have changed in the last decade at Bank of America Corp.: The firm has stopped reporting fees from its mortgage business. ... 

After billions in fines and payouts to regulators and investors in the years after the financial crisis, Bank of America has moved away from securitizing and servicing residential mortgages. The firm originated $9.4 billion of new mortgages in the first quarter; in 2009, it topped $100 billion in one quarter.

There is still plenty of mortgage interest from loans held on Bank of America's balance sheet, "but the business of making mortgages to sell them -- the specialty of subprime lender Countrywide Financial Corp. that Bank of America bought in 2008 -- has largely become a relic." Regulators and prosecutors made it incredibly tedious for Bank of America to be in that business, and now Bank of America ... just ... isn't.

Of course this is not purely a story of the fines; the decline of demand for private-label mortgage securitizations matters too. Nor is it a story of the decline of the originate-to-distribute model generally: Nonbank lenders like Quicken Financial have stepped in to replace the big banks in the originate-to-distribute model. (Nor is it even that new: After all, Countrywide was an originate-to-distribute upstart that competed with the big banks, until Bank of America bought it.) Still it is worth commemorating. People spent years arguing that any mortgage fines, no matter how huge and repetitive, didn't matter, that they were less than the profits the banks made from their misconduct, that they were just a "cost of doing business," that they would change nothing. But the fines were enough of a cost of doing business for Bank of America that it's now more or less out of the business.

by Matt Levine, Bloomberg |  Read more:
[ed. Or you could do both: fine banks and prosecute bank executives who 'did the thing'. Why is it an either or proposition?]

DC's Low Graduation Rates

US News: DC Schools Brace For Catastrophic Drop In Graduation Rates. “Catastrophic” isn’t hyperbole; the numbers are expected to drop from 73% (close to the national average of 83%) all the way down to 42%.

There’s no debate about why this is happening – it’s because the previous graduation rate was basically fraudulent, inflated by pressure to show that recent “reforms” were working. Last year there was a big investigation, all the investigators agreed it was fraudulent, DC agreed to do a little less fraud this year, and this is the result. It’s pretty damning, given how everybody was praising the reforms and holding them up as a national model and saying this proved that Tough But Fair Education Policy could make a difference:

As far as scandals in the education policy world go, D.C. schools so profoundly miscalculating graduation rates at a time when the high-profile school district had been so self-laudatory about its achievements may be difficult to top […] Indeed, when Michelle Rhee took the reins of the flailing school system a decade ago, it galvanized the education reform movement, which had just begun blossoming around the country, and ushered in a host of controversial changes that included the shuttering of multiple schools, firing of hundreds of teachers and the institution of new teacher evaluation and compensation models. 

The changes not only dramatically altered the local political landscape in Washington but also shined a national spotlight on D.C. schools that prompted other urban school districts and education policy researchers to consider the nation’s capital a bellwether for the entire education reform movement.

Well, darn.

But the interesting bit isn’t just that DC schools are doing worse than we thought. It’s that DC schools are doing amazingly, uniquely, abysmally bad, below what should even be possible. We make fun of states like Mississippi and Alabama, but both have graduation rates around 80%. The lowest graduation rate in any of the fifty states is in Oregon, which still has 69%. And we are being told DC is 42%!

When we discussed this in the last links thread, people had a couple of explanations:

1. Washington DC has a terrible school system, with uniquely incompetent administrators.

2. Washington DC is poorer, blacker, and more segregated than any other state, and that leads to unique challenges other school systems don’t face. Even though everyone is doing their best, they face insurmountable structural difficulties.

3. Maybe the fraud was so bad that DC over-corrected, and now has stricter standards than anywhere else.

Which of these is most important?

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:

[Addendum/Edit: More discussion at Highlights From The Comments On DC Graduation Rates. Main update is that I underestimated the importance of absences, which are what’s causing a lot of the non-graduations, which there might be more of in DC, and which DC might be stricter about than other areas.]

[ed. Do read the Comments link above, it's a no-win situation. See also: Labor Renaissance in the Heartland]

Why a Cashmere Sweater Can Cost $2,000 … or $30

A plain, yet meticulously crafted, sweater made of the world’s finest cashmere can cost $2,000 or more from premier fashion labels such as Loro Piana. You can also grab a simple sweater of 100 percent cashmere off a discount rack at Uniqlo for as little as $29.90.

Made from the softest wool produced by certain breeds of goats, such as the Zalaa Ginst white goat and Tibetan Plateau goat, cashmere was once reserved for the wealthiest fashionistas. (Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife helped popularize the fabric.) But over the past two decades, its cachet skyrocketed and cheaper garments flooded the market.

Nearly $1.4 billion of cashmere garments were exported globally in 2016, up from $1.2 billion in 2010, according to United Nations trade data. That's nearly 5 million kilograms worth of pullovers, cardigans, and other tops. Now it’s seemingly everywhere, at every price point. Ubiquity can spell trouble for a product as it becomes more of a commodity, especially one that’s been historically marketed as a luxury item.

So what makes one sweater better than another? The price depends on the quality of the yarn, where the garment was manufactured, the number of units purchased by the brand, and the markup.  (...)

Cashmere goats are bred in various locations around the world, including Australia, China, and Mongolia, but Scotland and Italy are known for cashmere-manufacturing prowess. Luxury fashion houses such as Loro Piana and Brunello Cuccinelli depend on the expertise of their workers to wash, treat, and refine the fabric. Cashmere, for instance, repels a lot of dye. Italy, however, has developed ways to achieve strong saturation.

Not every manufacturer takes such care. Blended versions of cashmere sweaters, available at most retailers these days, can contain varying quantities of the fabric. In some cases, as little as 5 percent of a garment is made from the good stuff, with the rest a combination of mass-market fabrics such as polyester or nylon. The product is still marketed as a “cashmere-blend.”

Occasionally, even fake cashmere makes it to store shelves. "There is certainly fraud on this front,” says Frances Kozen, a director at the Cornell Institute of Fashion and Fiber Innovation. Deceitful sellers and counterfeiters sometimes create cashmere blends labeled 100 percent cashmere that contain wool, viscose rayon, and acrylic—and possibly even rat fur, she says.

by Kim Bhasin and Justina Vasquez, Bloomberg | Read more:

Image:Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg

Gil Scott Heron

[ed. No one like Gil. See also: I Think I'll Call It Morning (...be no rain) and The Bottle.]

via:

The Uses and Abuses of “Neoliberalism”

Neoliberalism is the linguistic omnivore of our times, a neologism that threatens to swallow up all the other words around it. Twenty years ago, the term “neoliberalism” barely registered in English-language debates. Now it is virtually inescapable, applied to everything from architecture, film, and feminism to the politics of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Search the ProQuest database for uses of “neoliberalism” between 1989 and 1999, and you turn up fewer than 2,000 hits. From the crash of 2008–9 to the present, that figure already exceeds 33,000.

On the left, the term “neoliberalism” is used to describe the resurgence of laissez-faire ideas in what is still called, in most quarters, “conservative” economic thought; to wage battle against the anti-tax, anti-government, and anti-labor union agenda that has swept from the Reagan and Thatcher projects into the Tea Party revolt and the Freedom Caucus; to describe the global market economy whose imperatives now dominate the world; to castigate the policies of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s centrist Democratic Party; and to name the very culture and sensibilities that saturate our minds and actions.

Vital material issues are at stake in all these debates. But the politics of words are in play as well. Naming matters. It focuses agendas and attention. It identifies causation and strategies of action. It collects (or rebuffs) allies. Is the overnight ubiquity of the term “neoliberalism” the sign of a new acuteness about the way the world operates? Or is it a caution that a word, accelerating through too many meanings, employed in too many debates, gluing too many phenomena together, and cannibalizing too many other words around it, may make it harder to see both the forces at loose in our times and where viable resistance can be found? (...)

Prying “neoliberalism” apart

For some of those startled by this sudden turn in political language, the success of “neoliberalism” is a measure of its substantive hollowness. After careful study, two political scientists labeled it a “conceptual trash-heap” in 2009: a word into which almost any phenomenon can be tossed and any number of meanings piled up for composting. Others have called it a vacant, empty epithet.

But the problem with neoliberalism is neither that it has no meaning nor that it has an infinite number of them. It is that the term has been applied to four distinctly different phenomena. “Neoliberalism” stands, first, for the late capitalist economy of our times; second, for a strand of ideas; third, for a globally circulating bundle of policy measures; and fourth, for the hegemonic force of the culture that surrounds and entraps us. These four neoliberalisms are intricately related, of course. But the very act of bundling them together, tucking their differences, loose ends, and a clear sense of their actually existing relations under the fabric of a single word, may, perversely, obscure what we need to see most clearly. What would each of these phenomena look like without the screen of common identity that the word “neoliberalism” imparts to them?

by Daniel Rodgers, Dissent |  Read more:

Image: R. Barraez D’Lucca
[ed. See also: How Neoliberalism Worms Its Way Into Your Brain.]

Prince

Nothing Compares 2 U: the secrets of Prince's original recording, unheard until today (The Guardian).

[ed. Worth viewing just to see Prince rehearsing his cool moves.]

The Science of Better Beer

Designed from scratch today, a modern, profit-minded brewery would do no brewing. Instead, it would be a distillery — a lean, sterile study in efficiency that churns out pure alcohol from a cheap source of carbohydrates.

Artificial flavors and colors would go into that blank alcoholic base, the precise formulation depending on the desired style of beer. Maybe a little more color for a brown ale, a little less for pilsner. Fruitier flavors for hefeweizen, a chocolatey tone for stout.

For the finishing flourish, the “beer” would be hissed full of foam, then packaged and shipped off to thirsty drinkers across the globe.

“I hate it,” says enzymologist Charlie Bamforth of this futuristic vision. “I hate it,” repeats the grand old man of beer-making, holder of the esteemed Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professorship of Malting and Brewing Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Still, one can’t deny the inefficiency of standard brewing methods. “Viewed dispassionately, this time-honored process lacks logic,” Bamforth wrote in a recent scholarly review that outlined how a sane, modern-minded person would craft beer today.

Of course, the historical and cultural roots of this millennia-old practice, and the passion of brewers and drinkers, run too deep for any such apocalyptic overhaul. But that doesn’t mean that the art remains static. There are unexplored corners of the ancient recipe of water, carb-laden grain, flavorful hops and yeast that spins sugar into beer — and brewers and scientists are starting to probe those nooks. (...)

“Fermenting a sweet, bitter soup into a beer is a very complex thing,” says biotechnologist Troels Prahl of White Labs in Copenhagen, a company that supplies yeast strains to brewers. The broad strokes of that process were illuminated years ago, partly by researchers at large, brewery-based labs. (Some fundamental scientific tools originated in breweries, too: Scientists at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen developed the pH scale in 1909, and the statistical staple known as the student’s t-test was devised by a brewer at Guinness around the same time.)

At its heart, brewing is chemistry, enzymes and microorganisms, and beer science at breweries was once a positive bustle. When Bamforth joined the Bass brewery in beer-loving Britain as a research manager in the 1980s, he led a team of 30 ambitious scientists — fundamental chemists, molecular biologists and biochemists. Other breweries, including Guinness in Ireland and Foster’s in Australia, housed large research teams, too. “There were meetings all over the place, and people would be racing to be the first to present the science of malting and brewing,” Bamforth recalls.

Many of those robust programs are now gone, and most of the big questions about brewing have been answered. These days, people can easily access the tools and knowledge needed to make good beer.

But for all that early research, there are still large swaths of unmapped territory, says hops chemist Tom Shellhammer of Oregon State University in Corvallis, who delights in finding and filling these knowledge gaps. “It’s like, ‘Wow, this is an open spot on a plot of land that people have been walking around on for 5,000 years.’” (...)

... brewers’ understanding of yeast is still incomplete. Today, many keep to their own special yeast strain or two and consider them sacrosanct, key to churning out a consistent and delicious brew. Yet a prized strain may still be quite mysterious, with hazy origins (given by a friend, or even illicitly purloined at some point in the past) and poorly understood genetics and physiology. “It might make the beer they want to make, but it’s not always the best yeast,” Verstrepen says.

To bring some knowledge and order to the scene, Verstrepen, Prahl and collaborators scrutinized the genomes and behavior of 157 distinct strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used in brewing and baking. “We’re cataloging what’s out there,” Verstrepen says. Most of these strains were brewing yeasts, but the samples included a handful of yeasts that make wine, spirits, bioethanol fuel and bread, as well as a few strains scientists use in labs for basic research.

The detailed genetic catalog, published in 2016 in Cell, describes the wild early days and eventual taming of many of the strains, as well as their beer-making abilities. It’s a guidebook for adventurous brewers, one that might ultimately point to superior yeast strains that can brew more efficiently, or imbue the beer with different flavors.

The DNA of flavor

With such data, and with cheap and thorough genome-sequencing tools in hand, scientists can start linking particular genetic attributes of yeast to flavors — because hops don’t tell the whole story. Explaining a taste in biochemical terms is tricky, says molecular cell biologist Johan Thevelein of KU Leuven. Flavor molecules can be influenced by many genes, and in many cases there’s no easy way to predict what kinds of flavors a yeast strain will make without actually fermenting with it.

That’s what led Thevelein and colleagues to conduct a giant experiment in which they created thousands of genetically different S. cerevisiae strains through breeding. Then they set up thousands of tiny fermentations for each offspring, each one enough to yield about two shot glasses’ worth of beer. The search was for yeast strains that produced lots of the rose- or honey-flavored chemical phenylethyl acetate, and then to pinpoint the responsible parts of the yeast genome. After combing through the results, the researchers found DNA sequences at two spots in the genome that could each cause a big uptick of rose flavor.

The initial discovery was made with brute force. But a slick new genome-editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9 allowed the researchers to recreate those same flavor-linked DNA sequences and thus prove that the two regions truly were behind the sweet rose characteristic. The same tool could enable scientists to create rosier flavors in whatever yeast strain they chose.

Advances like CRISPR editing hold great potential, says Verstrepen. His research group does a lot of old-fashioned yeast breeding, but he’s also got genetically modified yeast sitting in his lab freezer. “With breeding, we can go to 50 percent more fruity,” he says. “But with genetic engineering, you can go tenfold or more.”

Buckets of something better

Sophisticated genome techniques also allow scientists to take a census of the microbial fermenters that nature has already provided, including ones that may have escaped brewers’ notice. Geneticist Maitreya Dunham of the University of Washington and colleagues wanted to see if a method they’d developed, called Hi-C sequencing, could help parse the still somewhat mysterious ecosystem of a barrel of beer. (Dunham has a financial stake in a biotech company based on the method, which allows one to distinguish the genetic material of closely related species.)

So the scientists left their gleaming genetics lab in the heart of Seattle and ventured south, to a dusty warehouse. An eclectic brewer named Cody Morris had been tinkering there with wild beers — brews that start in open buckets and get fermented by whatever microbes happen by. The basement had a dirt floor, Dunham recalls. “There was junk all over the place, cobwebs.” Morris had let nature take its course in buckets of sugary wort that were scattered around the space. One of Morris’s favorite buckets, a beer he sold as “Old Warehouse,” had just been topped off with fresh wort and was full of action, brimming with bubbles. The team took a sample and headed back to the lab.

Their analyses, which appeared online October 19 in the journal Yeast, identified four different yeast species, including one particularly exotic specimen: a hybrid brand new to scientists. One of its parents seems to be a species called Pichia membranifaciens, an under-studied yeast that may protect grapes from a fungal disease but also rots strawberries and other foods. The other parent is unknown. News of Dunham’s discovery spread, and experimental brewers have been requesting the yeast, which the researchers informally call Pichia apotheca, for “warehouse.”

by Laura Sanders, Knowable Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Oregon State University
[ed. I don't know... beer seems to taste pretty good already.]

Attempting to Understand North Korea

Attempting to Understand North Korea
Image: Nicholas Bonner

The Perks and Pressures of the Modern Tour Caddie

Mike Christensen never had any intention of becoming a caddie when he graduated from Duke in 2000. His dream was to play on the PGA Tour. If that didn’t work out, he had his degree in sociology. He played mini-tours for several years, often spending time with Kevin Streelman, one of his college teammates. But by the end of 2007, Christensen was beginning to think about graduate school or looking for a job.

“It was just time,” he says. “Time to get on with my life.”

And then fate intervened. Streelman was heading back to Q school, and Christensen’s cousin, Mark, was supposed to caddie for him but had a last-minute conflict, so Streelman asked his old teammate to step in.

“He made five birdies on the last six holes to make it on the number,” Christensen says. “Turned out to be life-changing for both of us.”

Streelman wanted Christensen with him for second stage. Christensen said yes. Then, the finals. When Streelman made it through to the tour, he asked Christensen if he would consider coming out with him for a year.

“I figured, why not?” Christensen says. “I thought the travel would be fun, and the potential to make decent money was there if Kevin played well.”

Streelman made more than $1.3 million as a tour rookie, meaning that Christensen made about $100,000—far more than he’d ever made playing mini-tours, and probably considerably more than he would have made at an entry-level job in corporate America. Plus, it was fun.

So, he agreed to come back for one more year. And then another.

It was all good, until a Sunday afternoon in 2010 when Streelman began the final round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational tied for sixth, meaning he played in one of the last groups. Late Sunday afternoon, a huge lightning storm swept through Bay Hill, and the players were evacuated from the golf course. Everyone headed for shelter.

Except the caddies.

“They wouldn’t let us inside,” Christensen says. “Kevin and the other players did everything but beg, pointing out it was dangerous outside. No. The rules said no caddies in the clubhouse—period. There were probably no more than 20 of us still on the course at that point, but that didn’t matter. It was frightening and humiliating. I was really shocked.” (...)

“If you stayed in a motel, it was usually four to a room. Now, it’s completely different. But I wouldn’t trade those days. Today, caddies make a lot more money. They’re treated with a lot more respect. But I’m pretty sure they don’t have nearly as much fun. There’s just too much money at stake.”

The money ratchets up the pressure everyone feels. One thing that hasn’t changed on tour is the old caddie mantra: “If your man’s going bad, he’s going to fire someone. It can be his wife or his caddie. Firing his caddie is a lot cheaper.”

Today, a lot of caddies make six figures—often well into six figures. Many are college graduates; often they’re players like Christensen who weren’t quite good enough to make it to the tour. Some, like Lance Ten Broeck, are former tour players. Sometimes, they’re family members—like Phil Mickelson’s brother, Tim. Most are white.

That’s all very different from the old days. Years ago, many caddies came from the clubs where tournaments were being played or were caddies at seasonal clubs—like Augusta National—who would come out on tour when the club closed for the summer.

“A lot of them were great caddies and real characters,” says Neil Oxman, who first caddied in the early 1970s to make enough summer money for college and then law school. “They taught the young guys how to be caddies. But as the money went up and players were allowed to bring their own caddies to all the tournaments, things changed.”

“Indoor plumbing and food,” says Jim Mackay, Phil Mickelson’s longtime caddie, who came out on tour in 1990. “Those are the two biggest changes. When I was first out, if you wanted food, you went to a concession stand. Sometimes you got discount tickets, sometimes not. And no one went inside a locker room or a clubhouse.”

Now, caddies are always allowed inside the locker room at the start of the week and at the end of the week. At the end of the Honda Classic in March, they were allowed to shower once their player was finished playing for the week. There is clubhouse access now at some tournaments—though not all.

And the tournaments are now required to give them shelter during a dangerous weather situation. “I’m really proud of the improvements our tournaments have made for caddies,” says Andy Pazder, the tour’s executive vice president and COO. “I think we’ve come a long way and done a lot for the caddies—which is the right thing to do. They deserve it.”

But it isn’t all hearts and flowers between the tour and the caddies. Three years ago, 168 caddies filed a $50-million class-action lawsuit against the tour, asking for health insurance and a share of the money the tour is paid by title sponsors to have their corporate logos on caddie bibs. (...)

The case was dismissed by a judge early in 2016 but was appealed later that year and is still under appeal. As a result, the tour won’t comment because, as Pazder puts it, “It’s still under adjudication.”

In court, the tour took the position that caddies are paid for wearing the corporate logos—through purse money. Most players agree with that position.

by John Feinstein, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: GLYN KIRK/AFP/GettyImages

Traveling.

via: Fender Guitars

via: 

‘The Organic Side, to Me, Is Scarier Than the Ad Side’

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in front of Congress this week. To accompany the testimony, Select All is publishing transcripts of interviews with four ex-Facebook employees and one former investor, conducted as part of a wider project on the crisis within the tech industry that will be published later this week. These interviews include:

• Former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas on privacy, addiction, and why Facebook must “dramatically” change its business model.

• Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on Facebook propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.

• Former Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo on Facebook’s commitment to users, what the media gets wrong, and why regulation is unnecessary.

• Former Zuckerberg speechwriter Kate Losse on how the Facebook founder thinks and what is hardest for him to wrap his mind around.

This interview is with Antonio Garcia Martinez, a product manager on the Facebook Ads team between 2011 and 2012. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Kindle.

There’s an assumption that what Facebook does for advertisers is hugely influential. But on the other hand, as Zuckerberg said right after the election, it was a pretty crazy idea that fake news could influence an election in a meaningful way. Where do you think that dissonance kind of came from? As somebody who worked on the ad side.

So you’re referring to his somewhat jaw-dropping initial post after the election on November 11th or 12th or whatever it was, right? The one where he basically dismissed the claim that Facebook could have impacted the election. I mean, that was kind of a crazy claim. I also was clearly astonished when I read it. Until literally a few days before, this entire ad sales team at Facebook was literally telling every politician with any budget that Facebook can actually hand them the election. It is incredibly disingenuous and strange for an exec to get up and say that there’s no way Facebook could have potentially impacted the election.

Two or three days later someone sat him down, and he very quickly backpedaled. I mean, that I think is the combination of a few factors. At the exec level, it might just be a function of the fact that he doesn’t know too much about ads, and when I say that it sounds horrible, but I don’t mean it in a necessarily critical way. Zuck has famously never been very interested in either money or revenue of the company. Obviously he understands that it’s a necessary evil, but it’s the sort of thing that he just outsources to Sheryl and whatever lieutenants that are taking care of the ad system.

He’s a micromanager, and I never even saw him once in the ads area micromanaging anything. He just doesn’t care. I’m sure he knows but not in a top-of-mind sort of way that there’s an ad political sales force numbering in the hundreds and a huge D.C. office and that there’s this entire effort actually to make politics more sensational. Look, it’s probably not something that he thought of when he sat down in a postelection moment of panic or emotion or whatever to write about, right? So I think some of it’s just that. Some of it’s … people always approach this with this kind of overweening techno-optimism, right?

They only ever see the positive side of the technologies they create. I mean, part of that is because we really, at heart, really are just such optimists, they can’t imagine negative scenarios, they don’t have some kind of, sort of tragic history.

At what moment would you say that blindness actually became a really big problem? It feels like the election was just sort of the bubbling over of a lot of long-simmering kinds of issues in this realm.

I do think the election was, certainly in the case of Facebook, a key inflection point, not just in how the public perceives them but how they perceive themselves, right? The biggest sign that things are seriously amiss, or that there’s real turmoil in Facebook is the number of leakers that journalists have managed to find. Historically, Facebook was like the most impenetrable company ever. Nobody would ever leak or talk bad about it and now they are, and a lot of this dirty laundry and the palace intrigue, all that shit is leaking out now in a way that it wouldn’t in the past. I think the election definitely fractured that internal sort of mission focus and cohesion that Facebook has traditionally enjoyed. I mean, to your broader question of when was there a transition point? I don’t know, I think it certainly fits the narrative to say, “Aha, the key moment in the movie, when everything changed …”

I think a lot of the save-the-world stuff comes from the origins of the Valley. If you go back to the Seventies and the counterculture, the hippy flower children dropped out, and Silicon Valley was this alternative to mainstream, industrial life. Steve Jobs would never have gotten a job at IBM or a more conventional firm. He had to create this other thing, which was imbued with a lot of that hippy dippy whatever. After a while, the whole thing became more sharp elbowed. It wasn’t hippies showing up any more.

There was a lot more of the libertarian, screw-the-government ethos. That whole idea of move fast, break things, and damn the consequences — which by the way is a very powerful philosophy. I’m not completely dinging it, you kind of need to have that attitude to get things done but, yeah, you do end up in situations like you did in this.

I think Silicon Valley has changed. It still flies under this marketing shell of “making the world a better place.” But under the covers it’s this almost sociopathic scene. Even me, when I had my shitty little start-up that I acquired, I was also in total asocial personality disorder mode, and I think it characterizes a lot of people in this world. (...)

What changes could have been made in the ad business and in the business models of internet advertising that could have averted some of this at least? Take Cambridge Analytica just as a recent example of this. I’m kind of curious about the ways in which the business model could have been reoriented to avoid some of this.

Look, I mean, advertising sucks, sure. But as the ad tech guys say, “We’re the people who pay for the internet.” It’s hard to imagine a different business model other than advertising for any consumer internet app that depends on network effects. I just can’t think of many examples of viable businesses of that nature that weren’t based on advertising. What else are you going to do? How else do you pay for this?

One proposal would be something like subscriptions. Is there an alternative that is meant for the public benefit, that you think makes sense? Is that something that resonates at all?

Normally I just discard the subscription proposal. Facebook’s actual average revenue per user in developed nations like the U.S. is pretty damn high. So it would put it on the order of a Netflix subscription, or more, potentially. Even though people might derive that much value from it, it’s unlikely that they’re just going to fork out a couple hundred bucks a year for Facebook.

Maybe in mature markets where everyone who is going to become a Facebook user is already a Facebook user, maybe there you could do it, if you combined it with some premium features, like I post a lot on Facebook and I have a blue checkmark and I guess I’m a power user, whatever. Posting on Facebook is at least as much about pumping my own personal brand as it is keeping touch with friends. Yeah, would I pay 23 bucks a month for really nice, advanced feature and a better UI, and posts that went out a certain time and better analytics? Yeah, maybe I would. It’s not crazy.

The other question is what do you charge, right? How does the pricing work? Part of the point of advertising is that it’s a price-discovery mechanism. You just don’t know what that time is worth until you actually subject it to an ads auction model. So, I mean, how’s it going to work? The reality is, it could end up being the developed world subsidizing Facebook for the developing world. Which is already the case, I guess, in the sense that the amount of money that Facebook makes in ads sort of provides Facebook for India. India doesn’t pay for itself, frankly. The U.S. and Europe pay for Facebook and then the marginal cost of it is relatively small, so they give it away in Brazil or India, or whatever, right?

You get into these pricing problems because there’s going be an old lady in Arkansas who’s only willing to pay 50 bucks for Facebook and then there’s me, I’d pay $1,000 a year probably for it, for personal branding reasons. But, I mean, how do you distinguish those two?

by Noah Kulwin and Antonio Garcia Martinez, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Helena Price

Risk-Aversion Meets a Hypervalued Market

Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.
– Roger Babson, September 5, 1929

Roger Babson’s first rule of investing was “keep speculation and investments separate.” He is remembered not only for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, but also for his speech at the National Business Conference, warning of an impending crash just two days after the 1929 peak, at the very beginning of a decline that would wipe out 89% of the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

As I’ve observed before, the back-story is that Babson’s presentation began as follows: “I’m about to repeat what I said at this time last year, and the year before…” The fact is that Babson had been “proven wrong” by an advance that had taken stocks relentlessly higher, doubling during those two preceding years. Over the next 10 weeks, all of those market gains would be erased. If Babson was “too early,” it certainly didn’t matter. From the low of the 1929 plunge, the stock market would then lose an additional 79% of its value by its eventual bottom in 1932 because of add-on policy errors that resulted in the Great Depression.

To slightly paraphrase Ben Hunt, how does something go down 90%? First it goes down 50%, then it goes down 80% more.

This lesson has been repeated, to varying degrees, at every market extreme across history. For example, the 1973-1974 decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index (market returns over and above T-bill returns) all the way back to October 1958. The 2000-2002 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to May 1996. The 2007-2009 market decline wiped out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to June 1995. I expect that the completion of the current market cycle will wipe out the entire excess total return of the S&P 500 Index all the way back to about October 1997. That outcome wouldn’t even require the most reliable valuation measures we identify to breach their pre-bubble norms.

The chart below presents several valuation measures we find most strongly correlated with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns in market cycles across history. They are presented as percentage deviations from their historical norms. At the January peak, these measures extended about 200% above (three times) historical norms that we associate with average, run-of-the-mill prospects for long-term market returns. No market cycle in history – not even those of recent decades, nor those associated with low interest rates – has ended without taking our most reliable measures of valuation to less than half of their late-January levels.

Don’t imagine that a market advance “disproves” concerns about overvaluation. In a steeply overvalued market, further advances typically magnify the losses that follow, ultimately wiping out years, and sometimes more than a decade, of what the market has gained relative to risk-free cash.

Daily news versus latent risks

I’ve been increasingly asked my opinion of the recent market volatility. The proper answer, I think, is that we’re observing the very early effects of risk-aversion in a hypervalued market. To some extent, the actual news events are irrelevant. I certainly wouldn’t gauge market risk by monitoring the day-to-day news on potential tariffs or even prospects for rate changes by the Fed.

Indeed, when our measures of market internals have been unfavorable (signaling risk-averse investor psychology), the S&P 500 has historically lost value, on average, even during periods of Fed easing, falling interest rates, or interest rates pinned near zero. The reason is that when investors are inclined toward risk-aversion, safe liquidity is a desirable asset rather than an inferior one, so creating more of the stuff doesn’t provoke speculation.

This distinction – that Fed easing can strongly amplify existing speculative pressures but is often wholly ineffective when investors are inclined to risk-aversion – is likely to smack believers in a “Fed put” like a ton of bricks over the completion of this cycle. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the financial memory of investors wasn’t so selective. Recall that the Fed eased aggressively and persistently throughout the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses.

In a speculative market, bad news is good news and good news is good news. In a risk-averse market, the opposite is true. When investors have to argue among themselves about which news event is causing them to worry, the news is probably just providing day-to-day occasions for investors to act on more general concerns, like extreme valuation.

Does anyone really think the market crashed in October 1987 because of a larger-than-expected trade deficit with Germany? That’s the only news event people could find that day, and investors would fearfully monitor every blip in trade reports months afterward. Attributing the market change of the day to the particular news of the day is an exercise in spurious correlation. Unless there’s an event that will materially alter the long-term stream of cash flows that will be delivered by companies to investors for decades to come, what you’re actually seeing is a daily dance of surface-level investor psychology that gradually reveals or obscures the latent fundamentals below. (...)

Investment and speculation

Both Benjamin Graham and Roger Babson were careful to distinguish investment from speculation. This remains a critical distinction today. Understanding it will make an enormous difference to investors in the coming years.

When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.

At its core, investment is about valuation. It’s about purchasing a stream of expected future cash flows at a price that’s low enough to result in desirable total returns, at an acceptable level of risk, as those cash flows are delivered over time. The central tools of investment analysis include an understanding of market history, cash flow projection, the extent to which various measures of financial performance can be used as “sufficient statistics” for that very long-term stream of cash flows (which is crucial whenever valuation ratios are used as a shorthand for discounted cash flow analysis), and a command of the basic arithmetic that connects the current price, the future cash flows, and the long-term rate of return.

At its core, speculation is about psychology. It’s about waves of optimism and pessimism that drive fluctuations in price, regardless of valuation. Value investors tend to look down on speculation, particularly extended periods of it. Unfortunately, if a material portion of one’s life must be lived amid episodes of reckless speculation that repeatedly collapse into heaps of ash, one is forced to make a choice. One choice is to imagine that speculation is actually investment, which is what most investors inadvertently do. The other choice is to continue to distinguish speculation from investment, and develop ways to measure and navigate both.

The central tools of speculative analysis focus on the observable prices, trading volume, sentiment, and other objects that emerge as the expression of investor psychology. For our part, two sorts of measures are useful; one dealing with the uniformity or divergence of price behavior, and the other dealing with overextended extremes.

We gauge investor preferences toward speculation or risk-aversion by extracting a signal from what we call “market internals” – the behavior of thousands of securities; individual stocks, industries, sectors, and security-types, including debt securities of varying creditworthiness. While we do keep our methods proprietary on that front, we’re very open about the underlying concepts: 1) when investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it, and 2) when two securities diverge, the dispersion provides information about factors that they do not share in common. As a simple example, consider junk bonds versus high-grade bonds. Uniform market action conveys information or investor perceptions about interest rate pressures. Divergence conveys information or investor perceptions about oncoming credit risk and default.

With regard to overextended extremes, prior episodes of speculation in market cycles across history usually ended, or encountered sharp air-pockets, at the point where valuations, price extremes, and investor sentiment simultaneously reflected overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions. Unfortunately, we learned the very hard way in recent years that, faced with zero interest rate policies, these syndromes were virtually useless in signaling even a pause in the relentless yield-seeking speculation and “there is no alternative” mindset that the Federal Reserve deliberately encouraged. So we had to adapt, ultimately restricting our discipline from taking a negative outlook unless we also observed explicit deterioration in our measures of market internals.

At present, stock market investors are faced with offensively extreme valuations, particularly among the measures best-correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history. Investment merit is absent. Investors largely ignored extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes through much of the recent half-cycle advance, yet even since 2009, the S&P 500 has lost value, on average, when these syndromes were joined by unfavorable market internals.

We observed a clear deterioration in our measures of market internals in the week of February 2nd. While we have to be open to changes in market internals that might signal a resumption of speculative investor psychology, we don’t see that here. So speculative merit is also absent (apart than the rather weak potential that emerges from short-term “oversold” conditions). When we examine market collapses across history, the common feature is that both investment merit and speculative merit are absent.

by John P. Hussman Ph.D., Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Funds