Public Service Announcement for Programmers

Triplebyte is a company that helps programmers find jobs. You sign up, take some coding assessments, and if you pass they do everything from sending your name out to appropriate companies, to fast-tracking you to the final interview stage, to representing you in salary negotiations, to even paying for your flights and hotels while you interview. It is free for you; if you get hired; your company pays them for finding you. FAQ here. Aside from the fact that I am getting paid to shill them, I really do think they’re great; they represent exactly the kind of resume-blind, credential-blind, demographics-blind hiring I think everyone should be aiming for, and they’re helpful for the sort of low-executive-function people who couldn’t handle a job search well on their own.

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[ed. Read the FAQ. Interesting service.]

Waste Management

For thousands of years, Homo sapiens flocked across continents in pursuit of bird, beast, and fresh water, leaving behind him a trail of gnawed bones and steaming waste. The moment we stopped removing ourselves from that waste, it had to be removed from us. Thus the origins of civilization, thus the glories of Rome, Paris, and Philadelphia. A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve.

“The first regulations with respect to waste go back to the code of Hammurabi,” said Steve Askew, superintendent of New York’s North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the world’s largest. “You have to bury your waste far from where you sleep.” And he gave me the look. Steve Askew never finished college, but that look had seen to the bottom of things. It was both spooky and intimidating, that particular look of pity and loathing the wise bestow upon the ignorant. He knew something I wanted to know: the ultimate fate of our waste.

“People wake up in the morning, they brush their teeth, flush the toilet,” said Askew. “They think it goes to the center of the earth.”

If you happen to live within one particular 5,100-acre patch of the West Side of Manhattan, instead of going to the center of the earth, your waste flows to Askew’s extraordinary concrete cesspit: twenty-eight concrete acres suspended above more than two thousand concrete caissons sunk into the shallows between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Constructed in the 1970s, topped by three swimming pools, a skating rink, and a carousel, North River cost the city a billion dollars, 100 million of which went straight into odor control.

North River is just one of New York City’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants, the first of which opened in 1886, along with the Statue of Liberty. These plants handle every conceivable kind of sewerable waste from the city’s eight million permanent residents, not to mention anything a commuter or a tourist might care to add. They separate the material that comes their way into solid, liquid, and gaseous parts, which they further subdivide into that which must be discarded, that which may be consumed, and that which someone, somewhere, might eventually be able to sell.

The substance that enters North River is mostly water, and the vast majority of that water leaves the plant after not much more than six hours, disinfected to the extent that it can merge inoffensively with the Hudson River. One flush on the Upper West Side at seven in the morning, and by three in the afternoon the water is back on the street, so to speak. What’s left over is a half-million gallons of concentrated daily waste, now known as sludge. (...)

The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when the city’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven a.m., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.

He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. By the time the morning flush finally rolls into North River, it has joined the downstream flow of all the other morning flushes from all the other sewage lines from Bank Street to the Upper West Side, and sunk fifty-four feet below sea level. It is here, at the extreme low point of this immense underground current, that North River gets to work. In the Stygian depths, its mighty diameter swollen to sixteen feet, the dark torrent branches into six channels, each of which must be pumped to the top floor of the plant, where gravity can once again take hold and set the outcast on a new journey.

Askew gazed into the inky pool of untreated wastewater and began to describe some of the marvels the interceptor had disclosed. Aside from the daily take of leaves, sticks, cans, and paper, the great rake had brought up quite a few vials of cocaine. When cops bang on the door, the toilet is a drug dealer’s best friend. Ditto for the professional forger: a good deal of counterfeit money has floated into Steve Askew’s hands. Twenty years ago a dog showed up, a living dog that became the mascot of a Brooklyn plant.

As we walked away from the pool, I asked about the wind. No matter what the weather is outside, no matter where we traveled inside, the thick concrete walls of North River generated bracing gusts. Askew explained that every minute, titanic blowing machines inhaled 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air and exhaled 750,000 cubic feet of carbon-filtered, bleach-scrubbed exhaust—six to twelve complete air changes per hour.

But the scouring of North River’s halitosis, while essential to community relations, has nothing to do with the plant’s core mission. The alchemy of purgative transformation starts in the warmth and humidity of the next chamber we visited, where submerged chemical mixers combine the waste with custom-made bacteria. “It’s volatizing off!” Askew yelled above the din of engines and bubbling brown water. Undeterred by the general uproar, Askew detailed the technical intricacies of fecal breakdown and development, but I’m afraid the cacophony blunted the nuances. So Askew dumbed down the lecture. “This looks really good!” he hollered. “Tan water! Light brown froth! Small bubbles! Musty smell! If the foam looks like chocolate mousse, that’s an indication of a bacteriological process!”

We headed to a low-ceilinged room so huge it did not appear to have walls. Here were the settling tanks, the final stop before the water returned to the world. Peace held sway among these last lagoons, and indistinct reservoirs misted into a concrete vanishing point hundreds of yards away. “On a cold morning, you will see the water vaporing off,” Askew said. “And it will rain inside the plant.”

He gave me the look. “When it is really cold, it snows inside the plant.” (...)

When the froth finally settled back into silence, Steve Askew backtracked through the concrete dungeons until we arrived at a perfectly normal conference room and a nice surprise—someone had ordered pizza!

Despite the skating rink and swimming pool, despite the bleach, the carbon filters, the white hard hats and the spotless lab coats of the technicians, despite the banks of UNIX computers and the sober talk of asymptotes and oxygen demand, despite the boardroom-size wood-veneer table and the well-upholstered ergonomic chairs and the rush of twenty thousand cubic feet of air per second, and despite, to put it bluntly, one of the most extraordinary concealments in all of human history, North River still managed to evoke unappetizing associations. But as I gazed at the cheese and red sauce and blackened crust, I recalled the words of one of the many wastewater professionals I had met that morning. “One of the things about the job—you still have to eat.”

So I sat down to lunch and learned about the glorious future of waste. Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the plant could recover ibuprofen, acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix, and I had a hunch the citizens of New York excreted boatloads of stimulant. Perhaps Starbucks would be interested. The technology was there.

“Twenty years from now we will be removing things we have no idea about,” said Askew. “Penicillin, mercury, heroin. Will this be a pharm business? An energy business? An agribusiness?”

by Frederick Kaufman, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482

via: Tumblr

James D. Morgan, Hillary Clinton with Maori performing arts group Te Kapa Haka o Whāngārā Mai Tawhiti
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[ed. Same reaction, wherever she goes.]

Dan Perfect (British, b. 1965), Uproar, 2007.
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Hot Seats

In a studio apartment in downtown Philadelphia, off Rittenhouse Square, I stood awaiting a product demonstration. Stephen Kuhl, a founder of the start-up Burrow, apologized that he had only a beta version to show me — the actual production model would feature some minor aesthetic tweaks. The other founder, Kabeer Chopra, motioned for me to give it a try. I sat down. It was definitely a couch.

Burrow is on an enviable trajectory right now. The company is a graduate of the prestigious Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator; it also has a healthy list of pre-orders for its product’s planned debut in January. But given that pedigree, the product is an unusual one: couches. Not cloud-connected couches or remote-controlled couches — just couches. Technically, the company makes a couch, singular, available in a few different colors and configurations. The one I was sitting on belonged to Jess Goodman, a friend of the founders and an early supporter. Its design was midcentury modern unexceptional, and it was perfectly nice. But the couch is not Burrow’s main attraction. Burrow is selling a couch experience.

When customers order a Burrow couch online, the standard model will ship to their apartments in three or four boxes. A human of average size should be able to take those boxes up the stairs (if they have stairs) and build the couch alone, without tools and within minutes.

Chopra and Kuhl tell me that for urban professionals between 25 and 35, the physical process of buying a sofa and moving it into an apartment is a series of “pain points.” Some of these points are literally painful, like carrying a large sofa up a flight of stairs. But the term is business speak for any kind of friction, however abstract, between a customer and a new couch. Burrow doesn’t claim to have improved upon the couch itself: It’s a pain-management company. (...)

If a company can get to market first and establish itself as the singular way to buy a particular necessity online, it can clean up — even if it’s appealing to a relatively small millennial luxury market. Most of the founders I spoke with mentioned Casper as an inspiration, and it’s easy to see why. The venture-funded company was an overnight success in 2014 selling foam mattresses online and delivering them compressed into manageable boxes. Last year the company was valued at over half a billion dollars. It stands out even among Silicon Valley fairy tales, which makes “Casper for couches” a self-explanatory business pitch.

The best thing about this whole product category is that it might represent a step away from Ikea’s disposability without going all the way back to Grandma’s antique sofa. If consumers are already thinking about moving, portability is at least as big an obstacle to maintaining furniture as mediocre craftsmanship and cheap materials. These companies want to make a couch that will last for 10 or 20 years, even if the buyers have no idea where they’ll be or what they’ll be doing that far down the line. Buying a piece of furniture that you will realistically hold onto longer is a kind of forward-thinking thrift.

But this new approach also hints at something more sinister, more bad-future. Different furniture suggests different ways of being in the world: A heavy table says one thing, and a mattress on the floor beside a folding chair says another. Campaign takes its name from the furnishings that British colonial functionaries would take on assignments, ready to pack up if recalled by the Crown. It’s an apt fit with one version of upwardly mobile millennial living, which involves reducing all “personal” needs to an efficient minimum. It’s a style beloved by Silicon Valley — which finances accessories like the liquid food replacement Soylent — and exemplified by the Google engineer who blogged about the time he spent living in a small truck near the office.

This Silicon Valley lifestyle and the Silicon Valley business model are caught in a chicken-and-egg dialectic. Each holds that whatever work can be automated, eliminated or subcontracted to others should be, thus leaving all our valuable code ninjas and management rock stars free to do more work, pursue expensive enriching experiences and watch Netflix. This is the luxury that some of the valley’s most successful products are offering; there are now niche online services for doing your laundry, chopping your food, driving you around and delivering your toilet paper. The entire app-services economy can serve as a dispersed and techno-mystified mother, a caretaker who dotes on the implied bachelor user.

The various furniture founders — Burrow’s, Greycork’s, Campaign’s, Floyd’s — experienced the same series of pain points when it came to couch ownership. All are city-dwelling men with at least some postgraduate education; four of them are 29, the fifth is 28. It’s not surprising that they should encounter similar hassles or, because most attended business school, think of comparable entrepreneurial solutions. But given that investors and customers have encouraged them, it’s worth asking exactly what kind of pain they plan to remove from our world.

We want our customers to spend their time on things that are meaningful to them,” Brad Sewell, of Campaign, tells me, “not sweating a couch up flights of stairs.” But his company’s target market actually pays for experiences like Tough Mudder, an extreme obstacle course where participants shell out over $100 to race miles through the mud, scale walls slicked with grease and be otherwise abused with their friends. It’s most likely not physical hurt that’s the problem with real-world couch-buying: It’s the forced interaction with others, the loss of control. The most appealing part of buying furniture online is that it saves customers from a series of questions to which there are no answers in advance: What if there’s nothing that looks right? What if you can’t get a cab or can’t find one with a trunk big enough for your purchase? What if you get it home and can’t lift it up the stairs or fit it through the doorway? Unlike many issues in our lives, these things can’t really be looked up ahead of time. There are risks you can’t plan your way out of, and the process is virtually impossible for one person to manage without help, whether paid or cajoled.

Maxwell Ryan, of Apartment Therapy, is not optimistic about the prospects of companies like Burrow. “There’s this Silicon Valley mind-set where they solve a problem and so they think they’re going to make a million dollars,” he says. “But just because it’s a problem for them doesn’t mean it’s a problem for everyone.

by Malcolm Harris, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Craig Cutler for The New York Times

[ed. See also: Over 400 Startups Are Trying to Become the Next Warby Parker. Inside the Wild Race to Overthrow Every Consumer Category]

God Bless ContraPoints

One thing the left needs to do, I argued recently, is a better job of both engaging conservative arguments and using all forms of media effectively. I specifically mentioned YouTube, a dark realm that we have essentially ceded to the other side. YouTube is overflowing with videos from people like Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager (plus about a zillion miscellaneous reactionary ranters) but who is doing well-produced left-wing explanations of why all of these people are full of crap?

Well, I can tell you who is doing them. ContraPoints is doing them. And she’s doing them very well indeed. She’s on a one-woman blitzkrieg against the YouTube right. She knows how to use the medium as well as anybody, and she’s found a brilliantly inventive and totally unique way to convey left political ideas.

ContraPoints produces YouTube videos. They are often quite long, and they are frequently strange. When I was first showed them several months ago, I had absolutely no idea what to make of them. Each is about a political topic, and is usually anchored by a monologue from Contra explaining the issue at hand. But they are unlike anything else I’ve seen. Contra argues with multiple versions of herself (a Stalinist alter ego, a fascist alter ego, an anarchist alter ego, a liberal professor) in a dozen different costumes. An explanation of how capitalism artificially manufactures desires might suddenly turn into a parody advertisement for suppositories. A video critiquing Jordan Peterson does not begin, as one might assume, with his dreary books and lectures, but with Contra as a bewigged French aristocrat called Lady Foppington discoursing on the sovereign faculty of reason. To my utter delight, Contra’s explanation of what’s wrong with capitalism does not end with the usual call for proletarians to take up arms but with Contra at the piano, serenading herself with a rendition of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” (one of my favorite songs).

But the bizarre and unpredictable aspects of Contra’s videos in no way compromise her analytical rigor. She understands right-wing arguments from front to back, and presents them far more articulately than most of those who espouse them sincerely. She concedes points where they’re valid, and is not shy about criticizing the left. (In fact, she has an entire video examining why some left-wing rhetorical tactics may be, shall we say, sub-optimal in building broad public support). On topics ranging from gender identity to free speech to Nazi-punching to trans-exclusionary feminism to Peterson’s stupid lobster thing and his concept of “postmodern neo-Marxism,” she painstakingly sorts through fallacies and flays bad arguments. She’ll tell the alt-right why their fears of “white genocide” are morally disgusting and statistically illiterate, or she’ll use the history of redlining and housing discrimination to show exactly how historic injustices created today’s racial disparities. And it’s fun all the way. She’ll explain the concept of race with an impersonation of an early 19th century phrenologist, or expose the cruelty of fat-shaming while recreating a 1980s home exercise video. And sometimes she’ll do these things in German or Japanese, or from the bathtub, or through a parody of Dave Rubin’s slobbering sycophantic interview show.

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

Video: YouTube

[ed. 10:27 - 12:30. Ice Cold MFs!]

How to Survive Your 40s

If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It’s like a public referendum on your face.

When I moved to Paris in my early 30s, waiters called me “mademoiselle.” It was “Bonjour, mademoiselle” when I walked into a cafe and “Voilà, mademoiselle” as they set down a coffee.

Around the time I turned 40, however, there was a collective switch, and waiters started calling me “madame.” These “madames” were tentative at first, but soon they were coming at me like a hailstorm. Now it’s “Bonjour, madame” when I walk in, “Merci, madame” when I pay my bill and “Au revoir, madame” as I leave. Sometimes several waiters shout this at once.

On one hand, I’m intrigued by this transition. Do these waiters gather after work for Sancerre and a slide show to decide which female customers to downgrade? (Irritatingly, men are “monsieur” forever.)

The worst part is that they’re trying to be polite. They believe I’m old enough that the title can’t possibly wound.

I realize that something has permanently shifted when I walk past a woman begging for money.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she calls out to the young woman in a miniskirt a few steps ahead of me.

“Bonjour, madame,” she says when I pass.

This has all happened too quickly for me to digest. I still have most of the clothes that I wore as a mademoiselle. There are mademoiselle-era cans of food in my pantry.

But the world keeps telling me that I’ve entered a new stage. While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter describes it bluntly: “Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young.”

What exactly is this not-young age? I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at 40?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book in 1985 about turning 40. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.” (...)

And age 40 still feels pivotal. “The 40s are when you become who you are,” a British author in his 70s tells me, adding ominously, “And if you don’t know by your 40s, you never will.”

I’m starting to see that as a madame, even a newly minted one, I am subject to new rules. When I try to act adorably naïve now, people aren’t charmed — they’re baffled. Cluelessness no longer goes with my face. I’m expected to wait in the correct line at airports and show up on time for my appointments.

And yet brain research shows that in the 40s, some of these tasks are harder: On average we’re more easily distracted than younger people, we digest information more slowly and we’re worse at remembering specific facts. (The ability to remember names peaks in the early 20s.) You know you’re in your 40s when you’ve spent 48 hours trying to think of a word, and that word was “hemorrhoids.”

But there are upsides, too. What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, controlling our emotions and resolving conflicts. We’re more skilled at managing money and explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.

Indeed, modern neuroscience and psychology confirm what Aristotle said more than 2,000 years ago when he described men in their “primes” as having “neither that excess of confidence which amounts to rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly.”

I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. We see the hidden costs of things. Our parents have stopped trying to change us. We can tell when something is ridiculous. And other minds are finally less opaque. The seminal journey of the 40s is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”

Even so, the decade is confusing. We can finally decode interpersonal dynamics, but we can’t remember a two-digit number. We’re at or approaching our lifetime peak in earnings, but Botox now seems like a reasonable idea. We’re reaching the height of our careers, but we can now see how they will probably end.

And this new age is strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, and get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your 20s and 30s you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.

In the 40s, we might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors and parents who used to rejoice in our achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If we have kids, we’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. (...)

What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the 40s — and an awareness of death — that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now plainly exclude others. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.

by Pamela Druckerman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rosalie Stroesser

Gimme Shelter Q1 2018 Update: Rents and House Prices All At or Near New Extremes

This post is a comprehensive update as to the cost of new and existing homes vs. renting, all measured compared with median household income. As such it is epistolary in length. So here is the TL:DR version:

• as a multiple of median household income, new home prices are at an extreme beyond even the peak of the housing bubble, while existing home prices are about 5% under theirs
• but unlike then, when apartment vacancies were high and rents cheap, now rents are *also* at an extreme as compared with median household income
• even with their recent increase, interest rates are still lower now than during the housing bubble, so the median monthly mortgage payment adjusted for median household income is even still about 10% less than it was at the peak of the housing bubble
• if the trends of rising prices and interest rates continue, at some point they will overcome the demographic tailwind of the large Millennial generation having reached typical home-buying age. At that point there may be another deflationary bust

____________________

Half a year ago I wrote a long post discussing “the real cost of shelter,” by which I meant not just the downpayment on a house, but the monthly carrying cost for a mortgage, and comparing both of those with median rent.

That comparison showed that, while the “real” cost of a house downpayment was at a new high, the “real” cost of median asking rent was even higher. By contrast, the monthly carrying cost of a mortgage was quite moderate. This meant that, if a buyer could find a way to put together a downpayment, home-owning was a bargain compared to renting.

As I’ll show below, six months of price and interest rate increases later, there is even more stress on both homebuyers and renters.

By way of a quick recap, I wrote six months ago that I had never seen a discussion of the relationship between the relative cost of homeownership vs. renting, particularly as a function of the household budget. The choice (or ability) to live in the residence one desires isn’t a matter of its cost by itself, but also the relative cost of the type of residence. What is the cost of a house compared with the cost of an apartment? How expensive are each of them compared with a household’s income? If both are too expensive, maybe the choice is made to live with mom and dad as an extended family.

So, here are the three relationships I’ll look at again in this post

1. the “real cost” of a downpayment on a house.
2. the “real cost of renting
3. the “real monthly carrying cost” of a mortgage

The best metric for calculating these “real” costs on a household is median household income.

by NewDealDemocrat, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

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The United States of Japan

Thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood, the United States is still the world’s leading cultural exporter. But, in recent years, American culture has increasingly been following a playbook made in Japan. Consider the fascination with “the Japanese art of decluttering.” Its guru, Marie Kondo, lives in Japan. She generally relies on an interpreter, and it has been four years since she published a book in the U.S. While she has largely fallen off the radar in her home country, her popularity shows no signs of waning among Americans. One video of Kondo folding clothes, dubbed in English, has close to four million views on YouTube. On Valentine’s Day, Netflix sparked joy among fans with an announcement that it had greenlit a Kondo reality show.

Stripped down to its most minimalist outlines (an approach that Kondo would surely approve), a life of uncluttered simplicity represents a fantasy. Why should Americans be so compelled by one from Japan? Close to twenty years ago, the answer would have been “because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,” as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. “The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.” Gibson was referring to a Japan of trendy gadgets and services, such as high-tech cell phones and robot sushi bars, the flashy products of a hyper-consumer metropolis that inspired the creators of such films as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the “normal” milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up. We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.

A cynic would point out that the life-changing Japanese magic of tidying up is a ploy to divest ourselves of all the Walkmans and Tamagotchis and other tchotchkes that Japan convinced us to buy in the first place. But Kondo didn’t write her books for us; they were the product of a training seminar, a sort of literary incubator, for the Japanese marketplace. And she is only the most internationally successful of many writing on the topic in Japan. Kondo’s first book appeared at the tail end of a fad for things danshari—a Buddhist term for tidying up that is written with the characters for refusal, disposal, and separation—that swept Japan in the aughts. The first salvoes in what might be called Japan’s “war on stuff” date back even earlier, to the first half of the nineteen-nineties. That is when the sudden crash of the Japanese real-estate and stock markets ushered in twenty years of stagnation so severe that the period is now known as the Lost Decades.

Amid the suffering economy and the collapse of social safety nets such as the promise of lifetime employment, younger Japanese lost the ambition for acquiring things that fuelled an earlier, more financially stable generation. Hiroshi Aoi, the president of the Marui Group, which operates Japan’s largest retail chain, was uniquely positioned to see how drastically consumers cut back. In an interview in 2016, he told me that the Lost Decades represented a “turning away from outward expressions of fashion.… The idea of personal fulfillment became the product, with things like foods, dining out, and leisure experiences rising to the forefront.” If this sounds familiar, it is because the same pattern is now repeating among America’s millennials. Some call it the “experience economy.” Others call it “post-materialism.” But this great turning inward in the face of economic uncertainty could just as accurately be called Japanization.

“Japanization” (and the related “Japanification”) is a term as loaded as it is fluid. During the dark colonial period of the nineteen-thirties and forties, it evoked yellow peril, conjuring images of Japanese imperial forces conquering their Asian neighbors and compelling them to adopt Japanese ways. By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Japanization had taken on a wholly different meaning: “the diffusion of Japanese management systems and practices” in non-Japanese organizations, as the researcher Barry Wilkinson put it, in a paper written with Jonathan Morris and Nick Oliver, “Japanizing the World: The Case of Toyota,” from 1992. Two decades later, the word took on a sinister pall once again, at least among economic pundits. “Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians,” William Pesek, the author of the book “Japanization” wrote. In that book, he defines the term as a “a noxious mix of trifling growth, high debt, falling consumer prices, waning confidence, and political dysfunction.” (Paul Krugman, of the Times, is a fan of the term, frequently invoking Japanification in his descriptions of slowing growth and ageing populations in the U.S., the E.U., and China.) (...)

Yet when the bubble burst, in 1990, plunging Japan into its Lost Decades, this marginalized community proved a resilient incubator of trends. Chief among these was the Pokémon video-game series, whose creator, Satoshi Tajiri, is a self-proclaimed otaku. (“Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one thing,” the then thirtysomething told Time in 1999: “Pokémon.”) That the geeky exports dreamed up by people like Tajiri retain their appeal today is a testament to the passions of their creators. But it’s also a testament to the fact that all of us now spend huge amounts of time the way they did: sitting in front of screens, rummaging through our own pop-culture databases, obsessing over our virtual identities while indulging in our own childlike pleasures, which range from the aughts fad for cupcakes to cosplay or the latest Marvel superhero flick. The resounding box office success of Steven Spielberg’s cross-cultural mash-up “Ready Player One” is only the most recent affirmation of a societal trend: we’re all otaku now. Japan was, once again, simply ahead of the curve.

by Matt Alt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Boczarski / Getty

The Magical Mystery Chord

You could call it the magical mystery chord. The opening clang of the Beatles' 1964 hit, "A Hard Day's Night," is one of the most famous and distinctive sounds in rock and roll history, and yet for a long time no one could quite figure out what it was. 

In this fascinating clip from the CBC radio show, Randy's Vinyl Tap, the legendary Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman unravels the mystery. The segment is from a special live performance, "Guitarology 101," taped in front of an audience at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto back in January, 2010. As journalist Matthew McAndrew wrote, "the two-and-a-half hour event was as much an educational experience as it was a rock'n'roll concert." 

One highlight of the show was Bachman's telling of his visit the previous year with Giles Martin, son of Beatles' producer George Martin, at Abbey Road Studios. The younger Martin, who is now the official custodian of all the Beatles' recordings, told Bachman he could listen to anything he wanted from the massive archive--anything at all. Bachman chose to hear each track from the opening of "A Hard Day's Night." As it turns out, the sound is actually a combination of chords played simultaneously by George Harrison and John Lennon, along with a bass note by Paul McCartney. Bachman breaks it all down in an entertaining way in the audio clip above.

by YouTube

Pirate Radio Stations Explode on YouTube

Luke Pritchard and Jonny Laxton were 13 when they met at a boarding school in Crowthorne, England, in 2011. They bonded over a shared love of underground music and in 2014 started a YouTube channel, College Music, to promote the artists they liked.

At first, the channel grew slowly. Then, in the spring of 2016, Mr. Pritchard discovered 24/7 live-streaming, a feature that allows YouTube’s users to broadcast a single video continuously.

College Music had 794 subscribers in April 2015, a year before Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming. A month after they began, they had more than 18,440. In April 2016, they had 98,110 subscribers and as of last month, with three active live streams, they have more than triple that amount, with 334,000. They make about $5,000 a month from the streams.

The boys stumbled upon a new strategy, one that, in the past two years, has helped a certain kind of YouTube channel achieve widespread popularity. Hundreds of independently run channels have begun to stream music nonstop, with videos that combine playlists with hundreds of songs and short, looped animations, often taken from anime films without copyright permission.

Live streams come in many different genres. Two of College Music’s streams are part of a family of channels that broadcast what the broadcasters call lofi (low-fidelity) hip-hop, mellow music that would sound familiar to fans of J. Dilla and Nujabes.

Such videos, with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands, are some of most popular continuously streaming music stations on the site. Many are run by young Europeans, who may have only a passing familiarity with the history of the music they are spreading.

And they don’t know why, but their users really do insist on the anime images.

The channels occupy a precarious space between YouTube’s algorithm and its copyright policing, drawing comparisons to the unlicensed pirate radio stations of the 20th century, recreated in the digital sphere. Many of the channels blink in and out of existence within a week, but their presence has become a compelling part of the site’s musical ecosystem. And while competitors like Spotify are gaining, YouTube still dominates the streaming world, according to the latest Music Consumer Insight Reportfrom the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

When Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming, they ran the channel from Mr. Pritchard’s dorm, which was right above the housemaster’s room.

Live streams like theirs succeed in part by exploiting user behavior. According to channel operators, YouTube users often click off a video after several minutes, before the clip has concluded. But users who listen to live streams tend to play them for a half-hour or more, often as background music. That boosts the videos’ retention rates, which compels YouTube to promote them more widely.

by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:

Video: YouTube

Cable TV Double and Triple-Plays are Becoming Irrelevant

Last week, Comcast decided to exact some vengeance on internet subscribers who have abandoned its cable TV service.

While Comcast is providing significant internet speed boosts to its TV subscribers in certain markets (including Houston, Texas; Portland, Oregon; and southwestern Washington state), customers who have only internet service won’t get those upgrades. Given that Comcast has been raising internet prices with the justification that customers are getting more for their money, cord-cutters are effectively being punished with stagnant speeds.

The move probably won’t stop Comcast from bleeding TV subscribers—it lost 96,000 of them last quarter—but it does underscore how cable providers are becoming desperate to prop up the kind of double- and triple-play deals that were once a cornerstone of their business. While Comcast holds internet speeds for ransom, other companies are creating better service bundles outside the cable system, allowing cord-cutters to save money even after they lose the bundle discounts that cable once provided. [ Further reading: The best TV streaming services ]

Meet the new double play

Now that TV service is uncoupling itself from cable, wireless carriers are starting to step in with bundle deals that cater to cord-cutters.

Last year, for instance, AT&T started providing a $15-per-month discount on DirecTV Now service for customers with certain unlimited wireless data plans, knocking the base price of DirecTV Now down to just $20 per month. When AT&T launches a more limited version of its TV service for $15 per month later this year, wireless subscribers will get it for free. (That service could be more of a PR play by AT&T as it tries to acquire Time Warner, but that’s another story.)

Meanwhile, other wireless carriers have started assembling TV deals of their own. T-Mobile offers free Netflix (an $11-per-month value) for subscribers with unlimited data plans and at least two active lines, and briefly threw in a free year of MLB TV streaming (normally $116) when the baseball season began. Sprint’s unlimited plans include a free subscription to Hulu, which normally costs $8 per month.

Expect to see even more wireless double-play deals in the future, especially as carriers try to market their upcoming 5G wireless networks. T-Mobile has already announced plans to build its own TV service this year, fueled by an acquisition of IPTV startup Layer3 TV. Verizon has also been hinting at a TV offering, which it now says will launch later this year alongside its initial 5G network.

It’d be foolish to view wireless carriers as saviors—they’re often just as underhanded and anti-consumer as wired internet providers—but at least they’ve recognized that bundling their service with TV is a natural fit for a growing audience of cable TV defectors.
New kinds of bundles

Even if you don’t adopt a double play deal from a wireless carrier, there are an increasing number of ways to bundle and save outside of the cable TV world.

by Jared Newman, TechHive |  Read more:

Image: via

You Should Care About the Bank Exactly as Much as It Cares About You

David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years opens with the story of a conversation he had with a wealthy Londoner ostensibly interested in social justice. Graeber tells the Londoner about his work trying to ease the insane debt loads and anti-democratic restrictions that the masters of global finance use to control so-called developing countries and their governments. The Londoner’s response catches him off-guard: “Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”

Doesn’t one? Isn’t repaying your debts, i.e. fulfilling your promises, a basic moral principle? Well, no, not really. Graeber does a thorough takedown of this idea in the arena of sovereign debts, where the debt is often (literally) “owed” by a previously-colonized nation for the privilege of having been colonized. But Graeber shouldn’t have been surprised to hear this, even from someone well-versed in social causes. The idea that we are morally required to pay our debts is ubiquitous. People convicted of crimes have to pay a debt to society. We “owe” people “debts of gratitude.” Sometimes we even “owe” people our lives. Hell, even the Lannisters repay their debts.

And we’ve been judging people for failing to pay their debts probably since debts existed. We have specific words for people who don’t pay: they’re “deadbeats” or they’re “loafers.” Even the word “debtor” feels judgmental. What’s more, debtors’ prisons have a long and storied history, including in the US. And despite debtors’ prisons having been abolished, you can still find people going to jail just because they can’t pay back debt (including student loans). In short, lots of people firmly believe that paying back one’s debts is a moral requirement, and many people who can’t pay back their debts feel like bad people because of it.

We need to cut this out. It’s certainly not a moral failing to be unable to pay back your debts, nor is it a moral failing to choose not to pay back your debts. The people and institutions most responsible for pushing the idea that one must pay back one’s debts are, unsurprisingly, the lenders. And while the lenders are out moralizing about how their customers must pay or else they’re irresponsible deadbeats, corporations, including the lenders themselves, frequently refuse to pay money they owe even when they can afford to do so. That is, they really only fulfill their promises (debts and other contractual promises) when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. If it will cost them more to fulfill a promise than they will get out of it, they just don’t. This is common enough for there to be a term for it: strategic default. (Default is a fancy term for failing to fulfill your end of a contract. It usually applies to loans but really can be any contract.)

This double standard is infuriating but we can find real harm living behind this hypocrisy. Lots of people feel really bad when they can’t afford to pay back debts even though it is in no way their fault. And the shame and anguish associated with finding yourself trapped in debt doesn’t only prevent people from taking actions that are best for them as an individual, it also serves as a barrier to collective action against abusive creditors.

To understand strategic defaults, you need just a little bit of contract theory. I will try to make this painless. (What follows, all of it, is very much not legal advice. That should be obvious.)

The basic principle behind a contract is that some number of people decide to exchange promises. I promise to paint a portrait of your dog in a military uniform and you promise to pay me an exorbitant amount of money. You promise to give me enough money to buy a house and I promise to pay that money back to you over time, plus interest. Quid pro quo. This for that.

If you and I are very close friends and we trust each other then we probably won’t bother writing this down or even thinking about it as a “contract.” Instead, we make contracts because we’re not friends with and don’t trust everyone. Contracts are for if/when we disagree about something. And when we do disagree, what happens will depend on the contract itself, but also on the law surrounding it. No contract is an island. To understand just one contract you have to swallow the world, or at least the world of contract law. Like with laws in general, what’s written down in a contract only means something in the context of contract enforcement. If I don’t live up to my end of the deal, what are you going to do about it? If you go to court, what is the court going to do? This is what the contract is actually about. It’s the agreement, but it’s mostly how we interpret the agreement and what happens when things don’t go as planned. When things go awry, what can you take from me or what can I take from you? (...)

Defaults can happen for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they can’t be helped. If you give me a mortgage but I lose my job and can’t afford the payment, I will probably default. I don’t want to default, but I can’t really help it.

Sometimes, though, defaults are strategic. That is, sometimes I might decide that I’ll be better off by defaulting than I would be by doing what I agreed to do. This is the gist of strategic default, both the totally fine corporate kind and the shockingly immoral individual kind: even considering the worst thing that you can do to me if I default, I’m still better off defaulting. (...)

A particularly Byzantine (but fun!) recent example is the Hovnanian strategic default. Basically, a company called GSO made a bet that another company called Hovnanian would default on some of its debt (the bet took the form of credit default swaps). Rather than waiting around for this to happen, GSO decided to essentially pay Hovnanian to default on that debt. Goldman Sachs, who made the bet with GSO and is now down a lot of money on the deal, is very unhappy about this and of course there’s a lawsuit about it. It’s similar to another strategic default from a few years ago (also involving credit default swaps).

But, again, this is more complicated than it has to be. Companies often have incentives to default on their agreements. Economists think a lot about strategic defaults because economists think a lot about incentives and costs/benefits and effects on behavior. You can find some basically incomprehensible finance papers worrying that strategic defaults are making credit more expensive, and others worrying that companies need to strategically default more than they currently do. (Here’s Bloomberg’s Matt Levine making that latter paper at least a little bit more understandable.) The point is that corporate finance is complicated and everyone is always thinking about how they can squeeze a little more money out of a deal. Sometimes they do that by defaulting on an agreement. It’s just shrewd business, like corporate bankruptcy and tax avoidance. (...)

This morality vs. strategy double standard makes its race preferences particularly clear in bankruptcy. Recent journalism and academic studies show that whether a person gets the benefit of a post-bankruptcy fresh start largely depends on their race. Put simply, many bankruptcy attorneys—the people who are supposed to help their clients get a fresh start—steer black clients into more expensive bankruptcy plans that force them to pay more money to their lenders. ProPublica revealed this trend in a fantastic series on bankruptcy in the south.

There are two types of bankruptcy for most people: Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7 is faster and cheaper and wipes away most debts quickly, but doesn’t help when people have lots of assets or have problems with their mortgage. Chapter 13 takes three or five years and involves paying your lenders on payment plans over time. Chapter 13 only gets you out from under debt if you manage to make your payments for three or five years. Many people fail on these extended payment plans and end up worse off than they were before they filed bankruptcy. Chapter 13 also costs more in attorney fees.

ProPublica found that bankruptcy attorneys nationwide, but especially in the south, were far more likely to put their black clients into Chapter 13 plans and their white clients into Chapter 7 plans. One attorney, who filed mostly Chapter 13 for his mostly black clients but was twice as likely to file Chapter 7 for a white client than for a black client, explained: “A Chapter 13 shows people how to live without buying things for that 60-month plan,” and “[w]ith a Chapter 7, wham bam it’s over, and they’re back to the same old thing, the bad habits that got them in trouble to begin with,” and “[t]hey need to learn how to live not buying things on credit.”

These attitudes from a bankruptcy attorney are not anomalous. A study recounted in a disturbing 2012 paper sent surveys to bankruptcy attorneys across the country. The survey had short descriptions of client situations and asked the attorneys to recommend Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 based on the facts given. The surveys had identical facts, except that some clients were named Todd and Allison and went to United Methodist church (implicit signals that Todd and Allison are white), while others were named Reggie and Latisha and went to African Methodist Episcopal Church (implicit signals that Reggie and Latisha are African American). Despite having identical facts, bankruptcy attorneys recommended Chapter 13 to Reggie and Latisha around half the time (47%), and recommended Chapter 13 to Todd and Allison less than a third of the time (32%). Not only that, the attorneys considered Todd and Allison more competent if they wanted Chapter 7, but considered Reggie and Latisha more competent if they wanted Chapter 13. These results show that even bankruptcy attorneys, who are supposed to help people get the best financial results through a process set up to eliminate debt, nonetheless have implicit or explicit biases that black people ought to pay back more of their debt than white people—that black people should “learn how to live not buying things on credit” while white people should do what’s in their financial best interests. (...)

Contracts for loans are both priced for the risk of default and carry with them enforcement powers in case of default. What happens if I don’t pay is built into the transaction. The lender expects me at the beginning to do what’s best for me and prices my loan accordingly. Any future invocation of morality is, I think, hypocritical at best.

If we can get past the shame of stigma of having debt, and the judgment that comes with not paying it back, we might find some powerful options in terms of collective action. Being an individual debtor isn’t unlike being an individual employee or an individual renter. You yourself may be vulnerable and, to an extent, disposable to your employer or landlord or lender. But if you could unite with others and act as a group you would have more leverage.

This is not a secret in finance. There’s an oft-repeated saying: “If you owe the bank $100k, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100m, you own the bank.” It’s a variant on too-big-to-fail—the more of a lender’s business is tied up in you, the more the lender depends on your success to survive.

We can’t all go get loans big enough to own the bank, so to speak. But you could imagine a large-scale debt strike forcing loan modifications en masse, just like a job strike can force contract renegotiation and a rent strike can force lease modification. Like with employment and rent, the success of a debt strike would depend on what the lenders could do about it, i.e. the enforcement options. It would also need appropriate scale: a lender that deals with 10,000 non-strike defaults per year will not be especially put out by dealing with an additional 100 strikers.

Both enforcement and scale present problems for the recent attempts at federal student loan debt strikes. Federal student loans are about the most enforceable debts in existence—they have no statute of limitations and the feds can garnish your wages without going to court and you usually can’t escape them through bankruptcy. So defaulting doesn’t create as much leverage as it would with other debts where the lender might need to take you to court within a certain amount of time if they want to collect. And scale is also an obvious challenge. There are more than 40 million people with student loans and more than a million default every year. So a few dozen or even a few thousand victimized students refusing to pay their fraud-induced debt won’t create much actual leverage against the federal government. (That’s not to say these strikes are wholly ineffective. They managed to get decent publicity and called attention to the dual problems of for-profit schools peddling worthless degrees, and the federal government lending money to those schools’ victims and then aggressively collecting on it for decades.)

But you could imagine, for example, an online community of people with debt from deferred-interest credit cards. If a large number of customers of the same deferred-interest card decided that they were deceived about how the cards worked and they were going to refuse to pay, that might force the lender to the table. (This would function somewhat similarly to a class action lawsuit but may avoid the card’s inevitable rip-off clause.) If the lender still attempted to confront people individually, they could share information about tactics and offers. It would also create a source of information for regulators or attorneys or researchers who want to find out how the cards were actually sold and marketed. There would be an already-convened group of people willing to share their experiences. (The CFPB’s consumer complaint database serves as a valuable research tool now but it doesn’t connect people with each other and doesn’t provide any identifying information so there’s no organizing potential. And the CFPB’s banker-friendly current leadership wants to close it to the public.)

by K.M. Lautrec, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Can You Overdose on Happiness?

The science and philosophy of deep brain stimulation.

It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy Is Too Happy?”

Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was written by two Germans and an American, and they were grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feeling of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line?

The authors were asking this question because of a patient who wanted to decide the matter for himself: a 33-year-old German man who had been suffering for many years from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety syndrome. A few years earlier, the doctors had implanted electrodes in a central part of his reward system—namely, the nucleus accumbens. The stimulation had worked rather well on his symptoms, but now it was time to change the stimulator battery. This demanded a small surgical procedure since the stimulator was nestled under the skin just below the clavicle. The bulge in the shape of a small rounded Zippo lighter with the top off had to be opened. The patient went to the emergency room at a hospital in Tübingen to get everything fixed. There, they called in a neurologist named Matthis Synofzik to set the stimulator in a way that optimized its parameters. The two worked keenly on the task, and Synofzik experimented with settings from 1 to 5 volts. At each setting, he asked the patient to describe his feeling of well-being, his anxiety level, and his feeling of inner tension. The patient replied on a scale from 1 to 10.

The two began with a single volt. Not much happened. The patient’s well-being or “happiness level” was around 2, while his anxiety was up at 8. With a single volt more, the happiness level crawled up to 3, and his anxiety fell to 6. That was better but still nothing to write home about. At 4 volts, on the other hand, the picture was entirely different. The patient now described a feeling of happiness all the way up to the maximum of 10 and a total absence of anxiety.

“It’s like being high on drugs,” he told Synofzik, and a huge smile suddenly spread across his face, where before there had been a hangdog look. The neurologist turned up the voltage one more notch for the sake of the experiment, but at 5 volts the patient said that the feeling was “fantastic but a bit too much.” He had a feeling of ecstasy that was almost out of control, which made his sense of anxiety shoot up to 7.

The two agreed to set the stimulator at 3 volts. This seemed to be an acceptable compromise in which the patient was pretty much at the “normal” level with respect to both happiness and anxiety. At the same time, it was a voltage that would not exhaust the $5,000 battery too quickly. All well and good.

But the next day when the patient was to be discharged, he went to Synofzik and asked whether they might not turn the voltage up anyway before he went home. He felt fine, but he also felt that he needed to be a “little happier” in the weeks to come.

The neurologist refused. He gave the patient a little lecture on why it might not be healthy to walk around in a state of permanent rapture. There were indications that a person should leave room for natural mood swings both ways. The positive events you encounter should be able to be experienced as such. The patient finally gave in and went home in his median state with an agreement to return for regular checkups.

“It is clear that doctors are not obligated to set parameters beyond established therapeutic levels just because the patient wants it,” Synofzik and his two colleagues wrote in their article. After all, patients “don’t decide how to calibrate a heart pacemaker.”

That’s true, but there is a difference. Few laymen understand how to regulate heartbeat, but everyone is an expert on his or her own disposition. Why not allow patients to set their own moods to suit their own circumstances and desires?

Yeah, well, the three researchers reflected, it may well come to that—sometime in the future, that is—people will demand deep brain stimulation purely as a means for mental improvement. (...)

Questions of pleasure and desire go right to the core of what being a human in the world is all about. The ability to stimulate selected functional circuits in the brain purposefully and precisely raises some fundamental questions for us.

What is happiness? What is a good life?

Hedonia. There is something about this word. It rolls across the tongue like walking on a red carpet and leaves a pleasant sensation behind. Hedonia might well have been the name of the Garden of Eden before the serpent made its malicious offer of wisdom and insight. And more than anything else, hedonism has become the watchword for how we should live.

The absence of joy and pleasure—anhedonia—has, in its way, become a popular issue in the wake of the disease depression. A quarter of us are affected by it over the course of a lifetime, various studies suggest, and its frequency is increasing in the industrialized world. The treatment of depression has become both a window display and a battleground for deep brain stimulation.

It was with the American neurologist Helen Mayberg and the Canadian surgeon Andres Lozano that the method got its breakthrough in psychiatry. It struck a sweet spot in the media when, in 2005, the two published the first study of deep brain stimulation for the treatment of severe chronic depression—the kind of depression, mind you, that does not respond to anything—not medicine, not combinations of medicine and psychotherapy, not electric shock. Yet suddenly, there were six patients on whom everyone had given up who got better.

At once, Helen Mayberg became a star and was introduced at conferences as “the woman who revived psychosurgery.” Later, others jumped on the bandwagon, and now they are fighting about exactly where in the brain depressed patients should be stimulated. It is not just a skirmish between large egos but a feud about what depression really is. Is it at its core a psychic pain or, rather, an inability to feel pleasure? (...)

Mayberg focused on a little area of the cerebral cortex with a gnarly name, the area subgenualis or Brodmann area 25. It is the size of the outermost joint of an index finger, located near the base of the brain almost exactly behind the eye sockets. Here, it is connected to not only other parts of the cortex but to areas all over the brain—specifically, parts of the reward system and of the limbic system. That system is a collection of structures surrounding the thalamus encompassing such major players as the amygdala and the hippocampus and often referred to as the “emotional brain.” All in all they are brain regions involved with our motivation, our experience of fear, our learning abilities and memory, libido, regulation of sleep, appetite—everything that is a affected when you are clinically depressed.

“Area twenty-five proved to be smaller in depressed patients,” Mayberg relates, adding that it also looked as though it were hyperactive. “At any rate, we could see that a treatment that worked for the depression also diminishes activity in area twenty-five.”

At the same time, it was an area of the brain that we all activated when we thought of something sad, and the feeling that area 25 was a sort of “depression central” grew and grew as the studies multiplied. Mayberg was convinced that this must be the key—not just for understanding depression but also for treating those for whom nothing else worked. This small, tough core of patients who had not only fallen into a deep, black pit but were incapable of getting out again. These were the chronically ill for whom nothing helped, the kind of depressive patients who often wound up taking their own lives; it was this type of patient that, 50 years ago, were warehoused in state hospitals.

If only Mayberg could reach into their area 25!

by Lone Frank, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Pasieka / Getty Images

Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

Amazon.com Inc. is offering to pass along the discounts it gets on credit-card fees to other retailers if they use its online payments service, according to people with knowledge of the matter, in a new threat to PayPal Holdings Inc. and card-issuing banks.

The move shows Amazon is willing to sacrifice the profitability of its payments system to spread its use. Swipe fees are a $90 billion-a-year business for lenders such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., networks including Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., and payment processors like First Data Corp. and Stripe Inc., which pocket a fraction of every sale when shoppers swipe cards or click “buy now.”

The financial industry’s fees amount to about 2 percent of a typical credit-card transaction, or 24 cents for debit. But big stores such as Amazon and Walmart Inc. have long been able to negotiate lower rates for themselves based on their massive sales volume. Now, Amazon is offering to pass its discount along to at least some smaller merchants if they agree to embrace its Amazon Pay service, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to discuss the plan publicly.

Shares of PayPal dropped 4.1 percent Wednesday, the most since Feb. 8. Mobile payments company Square Inc. erased most of its 3.7 percent gain from earlier in the day, leaving the stock up less than 1 percent. Visa fell 0.9 percent. (...)

Previously, online merchants using Amazon’s service have paid about 2.9 percent of each credit-card transaction plus 30 cents, which is divvied up among Amazon, card issuers and payment networks. As part of its experiment, Amazon is offering to negotiate lower fees with merchants making long-term commitments to use the service, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Amazon is able to export the rates it has negotiated with banks and payment networks because, like PayPal, it’s acting as a so-called payments facilitator. That means it aggregates smaller merchants to help them reduce the cost of accepting electronic payments.

Gaining Traction

Amazon Pay, which has attracted more than 30 million users since the company revived it in 2013, lets online shoppers log into their Amazon accounts from other websites, enabling them to complete the transaction using credit cards and delivery addresses already stored rather than having to enter them again. For Amazon, that means drawing additional revenue from e-commerce sales on other sites.

The service mostly appeals to smaller merchants who benefit from the trust shoppers place in Amazon, as well as minimizing the data entry required to complete a mobile transaction. Customers include Gogo Inc., which provides in-flight internet access.

Merchants aren’t eager, however, to share too much information with Amazon, which may compete with them to sell similar products on its own site. Amazon dominates the U.S. e-commerce market, with 43.5 percent of all sales in 2017, according to EMarketer Inc. PayPal has emphasized its status as a non-retail competitor to differentiate itself. (...)

Single Button

Amazon’s move is part of an escalating battle in the U.S. between traditional financial firms and technology giants to develop a dominant digital payments system -- akin to what Jack Ma’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay have achieved in China.

Last month, Visa and Mastercard said they’re teaming up on their own combined online checkout button, abandoning their separate Visa Checkout and Masterpass initiatives. For its part, Visa is betting there will be just one button at the online checkout in the future, Chief Executive Officer Al Kelly said on a conference call with analysts last month.

The networks’ joint effort has been seen as a challenge to Amazon Pay, as well as to PayPal, which is considered the U.S. leader in digital wallets with 237 million global accounts.

“There’s way too much clutter in the e-commerce checkout environment, and it’s just not good for users, and it’s not good for merchants,” Kelly said. The ultimate future, he said, is “a single button, which is much more analogous to the situation that you see in the physical world where there’s a single terminal and all products run through that terminal.”

by Jennifer Surane and Spencer Soper, Bloomberg | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. The Borg just keeps getting bigger. See also: Jeff Bezos doesn’t care if you think Amazon is too powerful. (Recode)]

via:
[ed. See also: Life's Swell]