The Best Jarred Pasta Sauce There Ever Was

We have a complicated relationship with jarred pasta sauce. Between the no-cook, quick stovetop, and easy butter-roasted options, making your own tomato sauce is pretty easy. But sometimes, you just can’t bring yourself to make sauce. Your day was horrible. Your week was horrible. Your year was horrible. You don’t need to explain. We get it. In that case, we reach for a jar. But not just any jar. We have a pretty loyal relationship with Rao’s Marinara Sauce and firmly believe that it’s the best jarred pasta sauce around. Everyone that works here has daily Rao’s rituals. Songs. Sayings. Handshakes. It’s a cult.

OK, we’re not really in a cult. But we do think Rao’s is the best. Generally speaking, jarred pasta sauce is pretty terrible. Sometimes that’s because there are added preservatives or coloring. But mostly, it’s because they taste too sweet, too salty, or maybe even a combination of the two.

But Rao’s is none of those things. Rao’s is a pasta sauce that falls in line with the sauces we’d cook, and it starts with the ingredients. Rao’s uses high quality tomatoes and olive oil, without any added preservatives or coloring. The rest of the ingredients won’t surprise you: salt, pepper, onions, garlic, basil, and oregano. You know, the stuff you’d expect to be in tasty marinara. And the biggest omission from that list is added sugar. Which already tells you something about how it tastes. (...)

The flavor tastes...homemade. Yeah, we’d be pretty happy if we made this sauce. It's the kind of sauce we want to spoon over pasta and dip stromboli or calzones in. Compared to other national brands, Rao’s sits on an entirely different plane.

While all of these flavors and ratios are important, there’s one ingredient that sticks out more than the rest. In fact, you can tell it’s there immediately. Rao’s uses a large amount of olive oil. You can see it sitting right on top of the sauce, before you even crack open the jar. We love that commitment to the fatty, olive oil-y side of the sauce. That fat is the key to a fantastic, well-rounded marinara.

by Alex Delany, Bon Appetit/Basically |  Read more:

Image: Mathew Zucker/Rao's
[ed. See also: Welcome to Rao’s, New York’s Most Exclusive Restaurant]

Don't Skype Me

How Microsoft Turned Consumers Against a Beloved Brand

It's relatively easy these days to find critics of Skype, the popular online calling service that Microsoft acquired in 2011 for $8.5 billion. Former devotees routinely gripe on social media that the software has become too difficult to use. On the Apple App store and Google Play store, negative reviews of the smartphone app are piling up, citing everything from poor call quality to gluttonous battery demand.

In March tech investor and commentator Om Malik summarized the negativity by tweeting that Skype was “a turd of the highest quality” and directing his ire at its owner. “Way to ruin Skype and its experience. I was forced to use it today, but never again.”

Microsoft Corp. says the criticism is overblown and reflects, in part, people's grumpiness with software updates. There are also other factors undermining users’ affection for an internet tool that 15 years ago introduced the idea of making calls online, radically resetting the telecommunications landscape in the process.

Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use, prompting many Skypers to defect to similar services operated by Apple, Google, Facebook and Snap.

The company hasn’t updated the number of Skype users since 2016, when it put the total at 300 million. Some analysts suspect the numbers are flat at best, and two former employees describe a general sense of panic that they’re actually falling. The ex-Microsofters, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential statistics, say that as late as 2017 they never heard a figure higher than 300 million discussed internally. (...)

Founded in 2003 by a pair of Nordic entrepreneurs, Skype freed tens of millions of people from the tyranny of the phone companies by offering cheap overseas calls. Most chatted free, and Skype made money charging for prepaid calls to regular phones. The company has cycled through various owners, including EBay. By 2011, the company was controlled by a Silver Lake-led consortium of investors and shopping itself to potential acquirers including Google and Microsoft even as it prepared for an initial public offering.

Keen to reduce Microsoft’s reliance on the personal computer, former CEO Steve Ballmer saw in Skype an internet brand that was so popular it had become a verb. Having erred previously by acquiring No. 2 players to save money, Ballmer decided to buy the leading incumbent and pay a 40 percent premium over what Skype valued itself at the time.

“It was the biggest asset in the space at the time with the most recognized brand,” says Lori Wright, who joined the Skype team as general manager last year from video-conference rival BlueJeans. “It was an opportunistic way for Microsoft to enter into something that was going to be significant.” (...)

Today, Microsoft is using Skype for Business to help sell subscriptions to its cloud-based Office 365 and steal customers from Cisco. Microsoft has essentially turned Skype into a replacement for a corporate telephone system—with a few modern features borrowed from instant messaging, artificial intelligence and social networking. Teams, the company’s year-old version of Slack, is being merged with Skype for Business. LinkedIn, another acquisition, will provide work bios of the people Skypers are about to call. Drawing on Microsoft’s pioneering work in AI, Skype can now translate calls into 12 languages. (...)

But Microsoft has paid a price for prioritizing corporations over consumers. The former seek robust security, search and the ability to host town halls; the latter ease-of-use and decent call quality. Inevitably, the complexity of the corporate software crowds out the simplicity consumers prefer. While the company maintains two separate apps, the underlying technology is the same and it's built with workers in mind. (...)

“There was a demographic that loved Skype for what it was; it was clean and simple,” says Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies. “That's no longer the case.” Milanesi once paid for a Skype subscription for her mother in Italy. Then her mom got an iPad and now they talk on Apple Facetime. Millions do the same, despite the fact that Skype apps are a download away on iPhone and Android smart phones and tablets.

Microsoft’s focus on the corporate market may also have blinded it to the rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Tencent’s WeChat. Microsoft killed off Windows Live Messenger five years ago, right when WhatsApp was amassing hundreds of millions of users around the globe. The instant messaging service now has 1.5 billion users and has started adding key Skype features. Meanwhile, upstarts like Discord, a free voice and text chat app for gamers, are gaining users.

by Dina Bass and Nate Lanxon, Bloomberg| Read more:
Image:studioEAST/Getty Images

Hawaiian Lava Flows

Video: YouTube

One Madison

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[ed. Condo for sale, and life is good - especially if you're Tom Brady.]

Inside the Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers

Anyone who works in the $200 billion digital advertising industry should be scared of people like Mark Drobnak, because the ad blocker he uses is way more powerful than yours. The college freshman says it feels as though everyone at Rochester Institute of Technology, from his roommate to his professors, has installed some way to ward off online ads. Drobnak is one of the die-hards who goes further, working with a handful of comrades to build what they call “a black hole for advertisements.” His parents say the one he built them works great.

Pi-hole (as in “shut your …”) is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a basic computer that’s popular with DIYers, fits in the palm of your hand, and retails for about $35. Most ad blockers have to be installed on individual devices and work only in web browsers, but Pi-hole blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps. (Two big exceptions, both for technical reasons, are YouTube and Hulu.) It can’t block ads inside Facebook, but it can stop Facebook from following you around the web. It’ll let you play Bejeweled without seeing ads between games, watch Mr. Robot ad-free in the USA app, stream NPR with silence in place of the sponsor messages, and avoid the banner ads that have become common on internet-connected TVs. If friends come over and connect to your Wi-Fi, it’ll block ads for them, too.

Drobnak discovered Pi-hole in high school in 2015, after he and his siblings had already used their Raspberry Pi to play tic-tac-toe, program an elaborate light show, and monitor their respective addictions to electronics. The ad blocker, created by a Minnesota programmer named Jacob Salmela, was 2 years old and still fairly rudimentary. Less than a month after installing it at home, Drobnak hacked together a web interface to let users more easily block or whitelist sites. Two months later, Salmela invited him to join a tiny, all-volunteer development team. “Ads are annoying,” Drobnak says. “Pi-hole gives you control over that.”

About 18 percent of U.S. web users have an ad blocker, says PageFair Ltd., a company that helps advertisers find technical ways to work around the software. (Its estimates are among the more conservative ones.) Outside the U.S., the numbers are more dramatic. Desktop ad-blocker penetration is 24 percent in Canada, 29 percent in Germany, and 39 percent in Greece, according to PageFair. The practice is growing fastest on mobile devices in Asia, where data allowances are typically lower. In Indonesia, 58 percent of users block mobile ads. “In the early days, it was privacy activists and people who had an objection to capitalism in principle,” says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive officer of PageFair. “These days, it’s just average people.”

Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw ad-blocking software as akin to stealing. But online advertising has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it’s started to seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile, the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every user based on web habits. (...)

Pi-hole is installed on only 140,000 networks. Unlike more popular ad-blocking browsers (Brave, which claims 2 million users) or browser extensions (Adblock Plus, 105 million), it requires a dedicated computer and some tech savvy to set up. Still, it has assumed an outsize role in the ad-blocking movement. Its 22,000 true believers on Reddit help a lot, says Drobnak, who’s spending 5 hours to 20 hours a week working on Pi-hole between computer science classes. The developers have discovered spying by internet-connected TVs (which collect data for ad targeting), lightbulbs (users have reported some LED bulbs mysteriously connecting with the manufacturer’s server every 2 seconds), and printers (including one that sent out 34 million queries in a day).

Drobnak’s fellow core developers, all volunteers, say what unites them most is resentment of just how far the advertising industry has overreached in building its online empire of distraction and surveillance. There’s a corollary motivator, too: Puzzling out ways to frustrate the industry’s efforts—to zap millions upon millions of ads—can be really, really fun. “There’s a huge community behind it,” Drobnak says. “It’s just tinkerers trying to figure stuff out.”

The rise of ad blocking mirrors an explosion in online advertising technology. Barely 100 digital-only ad-tech companies operated in 2011; today there are about 2,000. Most arose with what’s known as programmatic advertising, automated systems run by the likes of Google and Microsoft Corp. that promise to match every ad with the person the ad is most likely to influence.

Dissect how such systems work, and it’s easy to be outraged. When you load a website, it sends a series of requests to other web domains to auction your eyeballs to the highest bidders. The number of intermediaries involved changes with every page load, but on a recent visit, the homepage for one popular U.S.-based news site sent 20 requests to 10 ad exchanges, each of which likely offered the space to hundreds of advertisers. It also set 47 cookies with unique tracking IDs, many of which log user data such as location, gender, age, and likes and dislikes based on browsing behavior. These data give advertisers a sense of how valuable you might be as a customer, and therefore how much to bid to show you an ad. When one of the advertisers wins the auction, an ad appears on your screen. The whole process takes less than a tenth of a second.

As a side business, every company involved in any step of the process may also try to place a cookie or tracker to collect more data on you for later use. Such companies often swap data to try to identify users they have in common, and they may pull in your email address, name, public records, and credit card history. “Ad blocking has grown in response to a lot of legitimate problems,” says PageFair’s Blanchfield. His previous venture, Jolt Online Gaming, collapsed because 30 percent of its users were blocking ads. He and his co-founder were, too.

By acting as a traffic cop at the network level, rather than in a browser, Pi-hole can cut off the nested bidding and tracking processes from the start. It takes on the role of your network’s Domain Name Server (DNS), meaning it translates IP addresses into URLs and vice versa. So if a website tries to contact what the Pi-hole knows to be an ad server, “it sends a request to the Pi-hole for the ad, and the Pi-hole is like, ‘Hah, I’m just going to return an empty page to you,’ and the ad server is never contacted,” Drobnak says. In the ad slots, the user typically sees blank white rectangles. (...)

After three weeks, my Pi-hole logs reported the system had blocked more than 39,000 requests, 29 percent of the total on just two devices (a phone and a laptop). They were all ads or ad-related tracking from places such as analytics.localytics.com, static.doubleclick.net, googleadservices.com, graph.facebook.com, app-measurement.com, sb.scorecardresearch.com, and capture.condenastdigital.com. It’s fascinating to look at Pi-hole’s dashboard, a colorful layout of numbers and graphs, and think about what the network is doing—and just how many entities are keeping watch.

by Adrienne Jeffries, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Scott Gelber, Bloomberg
[ed. Still too complicated for the average user, but nice to see the technology heading in the right direction.]

Breathalyzer Flaws Cast Doubt on Countless Convictions

The source code behind a police breathalyzer widely used in multiple states -- and millions of drunk driving arrests -- is under fire.

It's the latest case of technology and the real world colliding -- one that revolves around source code, calibration of equipment, two researchers and legal maneuvering, state law enforcement agencies, and Draeger, the breathalyzer's manufacturer.

This most recent skirmish began a decade ago when Washington state police sought to replace its aging fleet of breathalyzers. When the Washington police opened solicitations, the only bidder, Draeger, a German medical technology maker, won the contract to sell its flagship device, the Alcotest 9510, across the state.

But defense attorneys have long believed the breathalyzer is faulty.

Jason Lantz, a Washington-based defense lawyer, enlisted a software engineer and a security researcher to examine its source code. The two experts wrote in a preliminary report that they found flaws capable of producing incorrect breath test results. The defense hailed the results as a breakthrough, believing the findings could cast doubt on countless drunk-driving prosecutions. (...)

The breathalyzer has become a staple in law enforcement, with more than a million Americans arrested each year for driving under the influence of alcohol -- an offense known as a DUI. Drunk driving has its own economy: A multi-billion dollar business for lawyers, state governments, and the breathalyzer manufacturers -- all of which have a commercial stake at play.

Yet, the case in Washington is only the latest in several legal battles where the breathalyzer has faced scrutiny about the technology used to secure convictions.

Trial by Machine

When one Washington state driver accused of drunk-driving in 2015 disputed the reading, his defense counsel petitioned the court to obtain the device's source code from Draeger.

Lantz, who was leading the legal effort to review the Alcotest 9510 in the state, hired two software engineers, Falcon Momot, a security consultant, and Robert Walker, a software engineer and decade-long Microsoft veteran, who were tasked with examining the code. The code was obtained under a court-signed protective order, putting strict controls on Momot and Walker to protect the source code, though the order permitted the researchers to report their findings, with some limitations. Although the researchers were not given a device, the researchers were given a binary file containing the state's configuration set by Washington State Patrol.

Although their findings had yet to be verified against one of the breathalyzers, their preliminary report outlined several issues in the code that they said could impact the outcome of an alcohol breath test.

In order to produce a result, the Alcotest 9510 uses two sensors to measure alcohol content in a breath sample: An infrared beam that measures how much light goes through the breath, and a fuel cell that measures the electrical current of the sample. The results should be about the same and within a small margin of error -- usually within a thousandth of a decimal point. If the results are too far apart, the test will be rejected.

But the report said that under some conditions the breathalyzer can return an inflated reading -- a result that could also push a person over the legal limit.

One attorney, who read the report, said they believed the report showed the breathalyzer "tipped the scales" in favor of prosecutors, and against drivers.

One section in the report raised issue with a lack of adjustment of a person's breath temperature.

Breath temperature can fluctuate throughout the day, but, according to the report, can also wildly change the results of an alcohol breath test. Without correction, a single digit over a normal breath temperature of 34 degrees centigrade can inflate the results by six percent -- enough to push a person over the limit.

The quadratic formula set by the Washington State Patrol should correct the breath temperature to prevent false results. The quadratic formula corrects warmer breath downward, said the report, but the code doesn't explain how the corrections are made. The corrections "may be insufficient" if the formula is faulty, the report added. (...)

Draeger's breathalyzer is widely used across the US, including in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. It's often the only breathalyzer used in the states where they were bought.

In both New Jersey and Massachusetts, defense lawyers raised concerns. By acquiring the devices used by the states, lawyers commissioned engineers to analyze the code who say they found flaws that they say could produce incorrect results.

But defense teams in both states largely failed to stop their state governments from using the devices, public records show.

by Zack Whittaker, ZDNet | Read more:
Image: uncredited

America’s Housing Crisis Is Spreading To Smaller Cities

“Have you considered the racket and the lights and the crowds and the traffic, and everything that’s going to happen to those of us who live here?”

It is a familiar sight in America: the public meeting, the angry residents, the housing developer trying to explain himself over the boos.

“Take the money you’ve got and get out of here,” one person shouts. A chant begins: “Oppose! Oppose! Oppose!”

Except this is not San Francisco or L.A. or Boston. It is Boise, Idaho.

And it is a preview of the next chapter in the housing crisis. Rising rents, displacement and, yes, NIMBYism are spreading from America’s biggest cities to those in its middle tier. Last year, according to an Apartment List survey, the fastest-rising rents in the country were in Orlando, Florida; Reno, Nevada; and Sacramento, California. Another survey, by RentCafe, found exactly one city with a population greater than 500,000 ― Las Vegas ― in the top 25.

Small cities are starting to face the same challenges as larger ones. Renting a two-bedroom apartment in Jacksonville, Florida, requires earning at least $18.63 per hour ― $10.53 more than the state minimum wage. In Tacoma, Washington (pop. 211,000), a property management company is evicting low-income residents so it can flip their building into luxury units. Boise, where downtown condos are going for $400,000, was the seventh most unequal city in America in 2016, a jump from 79th place just five years earlier.

And it’s only going to get worse. As the poor get pushed inward from the coasts and as young workers seek out the few affordable places left, they will arrive in America’s smaller cities ― which may not be ready to take them.

Rising rents in small and midsize cities are a humanitarian crisis

Boise is, by some measures, the fastest-growing city in America. It added 3 percent to its population last year and Idaho is projected to add another 200,000 people by 2025.

This should be good news. The city’s growth is driven by a booming, diversified economy and an influx of skilled, educated young people. But Boise isn’t adding homes fast enough to keep up. According to an analysis from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there’s a demand for more than 10 times as many homes as the city is building. Without anything new available, incoming residents are scooping up what’s already there, bidding up costs and pricing out current residents.

The impact is devastating. Nearly half of Boise’s renters are living in apartments that eat up over 30 percent of their income. Since 2005, as living costs have exploded, Boise’s median income has fallen and the number of homeless children has more than doubled. Last month, a 5-year-old died when the car her family was sleeping in caught fire in a Walmart parking lot.

“I’ve been doing this for 21 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Watson says. One voucher recipient lives in an old hotel converted into apartments. He uses a motorized wheelchair and needs live-in care. His rent has gone up $275 in the last 18 months, and he’s falling behind. “We’ve got people spending 80 to 90 percent of their income on rent, even with a rental assistance voucher,” Watson says. “And if they get evicted, or leave on their own, there’s no place for them to move.”

The perverse incentives don’t end there. Boise’s federal voucher allotment is determined each year by the previous year’s spending. With the apartment vacancy rate at 1 percent, and landlords refusing to rent to Boiseans who receive housing assistance (which is legal under Idaho law), it can take months for low-income residents to find anywhere that will take them.

To federal administrators, though, every unused rental voucher looks like unspent funding. Watson says it’s nearly impossible for the local housing authority to predict how many of the vouchers will actually get used. If the agency underspends, HUD will cut its budget. If it overspends, the city will have to make up the difference. Boise’s 2015 Housing Needs Assessment notes that since 2010, as the need for subsidized housing has increased, the use of rental vouchers has fallen. “When the need goes up,” Watson says, “the funding goes down.”

The same vulnerabilities are showing up in small cities across the country. In Orlando, where rents rose by almost 8 percent last year, the median rent already takes up 71 percent of the median income. According to Apartment List, Memphis, Tennessee, had the highest per capita eviction rate in the country between 2015 and 2017. Montana has seen a 33 percent rise in homelessness in the last decade. Smaller cities have lower rents, but they also have lower wages, less diverse economies and fewer social services. Everything that makes it easier to get onto the housing ladder in places like Boise also makes it easier to fall off.

American cities are still catching up from the recession

It’s tempting to look at the housing crisis in Boise as just a miniature version of what’s already happened in the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest and the Northeastern corridor. But in the last 10 years, the American economy has transformed in ways that are going to make it even harder for smaller cities to respond to growth.

In 2007, the city of Boise was issuing more than twice as many building permits as it is now. Despite having 125,000 more residents, Boise’s metro area built fewer homes in 2016 than it did in 2004.

The reason, says Gary Hanes, a retired HUD administrator based in Boise, is that the recession wiped out the city’s construction sector. Between 2008 and 2012, Boise home prices fell by 40 percent. With homebuilding stalled, thousands of construction workers took other jobs or left for North Dakota or Alaska. By 2012, once all the low-cost and foreclosed homes had been scooped up and the city needed new housing again, there was no one left to build it.

This isn’t just a Boise problem. Construction workers, even in high-paid jobs and booming cities, are in short supply. Plus, thanks to increasing international demand, prices for timber, steel and concrete are going up nationwide. Banks have gotten more risk-averse since the recession, preferring to finance “sure bets” ― such as McMansions in the suburbs ― over “riskier” projects like urban apartment blocks or affordable housing. (...)

Neighbors are fighting growth

Ultimately, the housing crisis is not about housing. It is about the inability of American cities to grow.

“It’s hard to acknowledge change,” says Mike Kazmierski, the president of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. He’s been watching Reno, another medium-size boomtown, play out the same debates as Boise for over six years now. “If you say your city is going to grow, that means you need another fire station, more schools, more staff. Cities don’t have the budgets for that, and asking for it means raising taxes. The pushback is, ‘We don’t want to pay for that growth. Let them pay for it when they get here.’”

This is where Boise starts to look depressingly familiar. In the last few years, as the city’s growth has become more visible, NIMBY groups have taken over the political conversation. Of the 21 speakers at a town hall meeting last month, only two said they welcomed more growth. Signs reading “OVERCROWDING IS NOT SUSTAINABLE” are showing up in front yards. Some local residents, taking a page from the San Francisco playbook, are trying to get their neighborhood classified as a “conservation district” to block new buildings from going in.

Some of the complaints have merit ― it’s hard not to be sympathetic to residents asking for sidewalks on their streets or more frequent bus service ― but many are simply pleas for the growth itself to stop. A comment on the Facebook page for Vanishing Boise, one of the local anti-development groups, is emblematic of the argument: “Why are they coming in the first place?????”

As in other cities, this dynamic reveals a fundamental weakness in the American political system: Opposition to growth comes from homeowners and voters, entrenched interests who already have the ear of local politicians. Supporters of growth, the beneficiaries of all the new development, haven’t even moved here yet.

This means, says Zoe Olsen, the executive director of the Intermountain Fair Housing Council, that local opposition is often focused on preventing growth rather than managing it. “Everyone wants to preserve the farmland around us,” she says. “But these neighborhood groups are fighting for things like, ‘Let’s have one home per acre.’ The only way we’re going to preserve our parks and our beautiful pastoral feeling is by building upwards.”

But there is no political constituency for this argument. Boise’s homeownership rate is 68 percent ― 25 points higher than San Francisco’s. Despite a Boise State University study showing that the city will lose twice as much of its farmland if it continues to expand through sprawl rather than density, most local advocacy groups are making the same argument San Francisco homeowners have made for decades: If we don’t build it, they won’t come.

by Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post | Read more:

Image: Joe Jaszewski, Washington Post via Getty Images

The Action Bias

It's long been known that bad investment decisions can be caused by our susceptibility to emotions and cognitive errors. But to really understand these behavioural risks and how to avoid them, it helps to see how they work in different ways. The analyst James Montier once used some research about goalkeepers to do just this, and this is how he put it...

Imagine you're a goalkeeper facing a penalty kick. As the striker hits the ball, is it best to dive left, right or stay in the centre? In research, goalkeepers have been found to dive one way or the other a massive 94 percent of the time. Yet the optimal strategy is to remain unmoved in the middle of the goal.

So why do goalkeepers tend to dive one way or the other? The answer is that faced with a likelihood of conceding a goal, their instinct is to be seen to be doing something to stop it. If the ball flies into the top left or right corner, they'd surely be berated for remaining unmoved. But if they dive the wrong way… well, at least their intentions were good.

This is called action bias, and it manifests itself in different ways. It could be changing queues at a supermarket checkout, taking an alternative route on a congested road or trading shares absent-mindedly. This instinctive desire to take action gives us a sense of control, yet the outcome is likely to be the same or very possibly worse.

by Stockopedia, Seeking Alpha | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The Mother of All Biases: The Action Bias and the Power of Restraint.]

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PF Bently
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Varieties of Argumentative Experience

In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point.

And that’s why, ever since 2008, Internet arguments have generally been civil and productive.

Graham’s hierarchy is useful for its intended purpose, but it isn’t really a hierarchy of disagreements. It’s a hierarchy of types of response, within a disagreement. Sometimes things are refutations of other people’s points, but the points should never have been made at all, and refuting them doesn’t help. Sometimes it’s unclear how the argument even connects to the sorts of things that in principle could be proven or refuted.

If we were to classify disagreements themselves – talk about what people are doing when they’re even having an argument – I think it would look something like this:

Most people are either meta-debating – debating whether some parties in the debate are violating norms – or they’re just shaming, trying to push one side of the debate outside the bounds of respectability.

If you can get past that level, you end up discussing facts (blue column on the left) and/or philosophizing about how the argument has to fit together before one side is “right” or “wrong” (red column on the right). Either of these can be anywhere from throwing out a one-line claim and adding “Checkmate, atheists” at the end of it, to cooperating with the other person to try to figure out exactly what considerations are relevant and which sources best resolve them.

If you can get past that level, you run into really high-level disagreements about overall moral systems, or which goods are more valuable than others, or what “freedom” means, or stuff like that. These are basically unresolvable with anything less than a lifetime of philosophical work, but they usually allow mutual understanding and respect.

I’m not saying everything fits into this model, or even that most things do. It’s just a way of thinking that I’ve found helpful. More detail on what I mean by each level:

Meta-debate is discussion of the debate itself rather than the ideas being debated. Is one side being hypocritical? Are some of the arguments involved offensive? Is someone being silenced? What biases motivate either side? Is someone ignorant? Is someone a “fanatic”? Are their beliefs a “religion”? Is someone defying a consensus? Who is the underdog? I’ve placed it in a sphinx outside the pyramid to emphasize that it’s not a bad argument for the thing, it’s just an argument about something completely different.

“Gun control proponents are just terrified of guns, and if they had more experience with them their fear would go away.”

“It was wrong for gun control opponents to prevent the CDC from researching gun statistics more thoroughly.”

“Senators who oppose gun control are in the pocket of the NRA.”

“It’s insensitive to start bringing up gun control hours after a mass shooting.”

Sometimes meta-debate can be good, productive, or necessary. For example, I think discussing “the origins of the Trump phenomenon” is interesting and important, and not just an attempt to bulverizing the question of whether Trump is a good president or not. And if you want to maintain discussion norms, sometimes you do have to have discussions about who’s violating them. I even think it can sometimes be helpful to argue about which side is the underdog.

But it’s not the debate, and also it’s much more fun than the debate. It’s an inherently social question, the sort of who’s-high-status and who’s-defecting-against-group-norms questions that we like a little too much. If people have to choose between this and some sort of boring scientific question about when fetuses gain brain function, they’ll choose this every time; given the chance, meta-debate will crowd out everything else.

The other reason it’s in the sphinx is because its proper function is to guard the debate. Sure, you could spend your time writing a long essay about why creationists’ objections to radiocarbon dating are wrong. But the meta-debate is what tells you creationists generally aren’t good debate partners and you shouldn’t get involved.

Social shaming also isn’t an argument. It’s a demand for listeners to place someone outside the boundary of people who deserve to be heard; to classify them as so repugnant that arguing with them is only dignifying them. If it works, supporting one side of an argument imposes so much reputational cost that only a few weirdos dare to do it, it sinks outside the Overton Window, and the other side wins by default.

“I can’t believe it’s 2018 and we’re still letting transphobes on this forum.”

“Just another purple-haired SJW snowflake who thinks all disagreement is oppression.”

“Really, do conservatives have any consistent beliefs other than hating black people and wanting the poor to starve?”

“I see we’ve got a Silicon Valley techbro STEMlord autist here.”

Nobody expects this to convince anyone. That’s why I don’t like the term “ad hominem”, which implies that shamers are idiots who are too stupid to realize that calling someone names doesn’t refute their point. That’s not the problem. People who use this strategy know exactly what they’re doing and are often quite successful. The goal is not to convince their opponents, or even to hurt their opponent’s feelings, but to demonstrate social norms to bystanders. If you condescendingly advise people that ad hominem isn’t logically valid, you’re missing the point.

Sometimes the shaming works on a society-wide level. More often, it’s an attempt to claim a certain space, kind of like the intellectual equivalent of a gang sign. If the Jets can graffiti “FUCK THE SHARKS” on a certain bridge, but the Sharks can’t get away with graffiting “NO ACTUALLY FUCK THE JETS” on the same bridge, then almost by definition that bridge is in the Jets’ territory. This is part of the process that creates polarization and echo chambers. If you see an attempt at social shaming and feel triggered, that’s the second-best result from the perspective of the person who put it up. The best result is that you never went into that space at all. This isn’t just about keeping conservatives out of socialist spaces. It’s also about defining what kind of socialist the socialist space is for, and what kind of ideas good socialists are or aren’t allowed to hold.

I think easily 90% of online discussion is of this form right now, including some long and carefully-written thinkpieces with lots of citations. The point isn’t that it literally uses the word “fuck”, the point is that the active ingredient isn’t persuasiveness, it’s the ability to make some people feel like they’re suffering social costs for their opinion. Even really good arguments that are persuasive can be used this way if someone links them on Facebook with “This is why I keep saying Democrats are dumb” underneath it.

This is similar to meta-debate, except that meta-debate can sometimes be cooperative and productive – both Trump supporters and Trump opponents could in theory work together trying to figure out the origins of the “Trump phenomenon” – and that shaming is at least sort of an attempt to resolve the argument, in a sense.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:
Images: SSC

Baldness Cure Could Be Found in an Osteoporosis Drug

A drug originally designed as a treatment for the bone-thinning disease, osteoporosis, is being considered as a possible breakthrough treatment for bald people.

Currently only two drugs — minoxidil and finasteride — are available for treatment of male-pattern balding (androgenetic alopecia). A project by The University of Manchester's Centre for Dermatology Research in England began work by examining an immunosuppressive drug that had long been known to cause hair growth as a side effect.

This drug, Cyclosporine A (CsA), has been commonly used since the 1980s to suppress transplant rejection and autoimmune diseases. The project team discovered that CsA restricts a protein that when otherwise left alone, slows the growth of hair follicles. Hair growth, however, is the least problematic side-effect of CsA, leading project leader, Nathan Hawkshaw, to look for another solution.

After some research, he discovered that a separate compound developed to tackle osteoporosis also suppressed the bald-causing protein in the same manner. Better yet, scientists believe this drug, titled "WAY-316606," can be administered without dramatic side-effects.

The study was published Tuesday in the open access journal PLOS Biology. On release of the report, Hawkshaw said successful experiments were carried out using scalp hair follicles that had been donated by over 40 patients.

"This makes our research clinically very relevant, as many hair research studies only use cell culture," he said.

by David Reid, CNBC |  Read more:

Image:Huseyin Turgut Erkisi | Getty Images

[ed. PLOS Study here.]

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America Loses Big as Trump Jettisons the Nuclear Deal

“We’re out of the deal. We’re out of the deal.” That was national security advisor John Bolton’s summary of President Donald Trump’s decision over the nuclear agreement with Iran. Over the next six months, the sanctions that the deal waived and revoked will roll back into place. Iran’s response remains to be seen. President Hassan Rouhani stated that Tehran would hold discussions with the remaining parties to the deal on paths forward; if Iran’s national interests are secured, they’ll remain, “but if the nuclear deal turns into a mere document under which Iran’s national interests are not taken into account, then our decision will be clear.” Rouhani also directed Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to be ready to resume “industrial [uranium] enrichment without restriction.” Trump, for his part, said he was “ready, willing, and able” to negotiate “a new and lasting deal.”

Such a deal will be a long time coming, if it comes at all. The restored sanctions will only be fully in place by the midterm elections, and may take longer to bite. The original nuclear deal took years to realize even after the strongest sanctions were put in place. The original sanctions had support from key Iranian trading partners in Europe, and were helped along by then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s severe economic bungling. The broader deal Trump seeks, if talking points circulated by the White House reflect the president’s convictions, will require Iran to make the sorts of steep concessions usually only offered by states defeated in war. The odds are long.

We are giving up a fine bird in the hand for those two in the bush. The deal itself was fairly solid—serious restrictions on Iranian enrichment capacity, uranium stockpiles, enrichment levels, pathways to plutonium, and enrichment methods, coupled with implementation (though not guaranteed ratification) of an Additional Protocol monitoring agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. No state of the 129 with an Additional Protocol has ever acquired nuclear weapons.

The Trump administration had inadvertently made the deal better still with its many months of ambiguity. Iran’s desire to keep America in the deal and the Europeans off America’s side must have had something to do with the sudden and sustained end to Iranian harassment of U.S. Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf. American troops have largely been safe from Iranian militia violence in Syria and Iraq, and Iran hasn’t made a serious attempt to retaliate against Israel for repeated strikes on Iranian assets in Syria.

The benefits of Trump’s ambiguity stood to grow. There are many points of friction between America and Iran these days, and many are getting worse. Iran-friendly militias in Iraq have been warning for months that they might take action against America’s presence there now that ISIS is on the ropes. It’s a similar story for U.S. troops in Syria. Iran’s puppet Hezbollah had a strong showing in Lebanon’s elections last weekend; Iran’s friends in Iraq have their turn at the polls this weekend. Israel’s northeastern frontier is poised to explode—shortly before Trump’s speech, residents of the Golan were warned to prepare bomb shelters due to unusual Iranian movements. The loss of ambiguity may make war there more likely.

Trump’s decision makes a direct U.S.-Iranian war more likely, too. Iran now has less to lose in its relations with America, and less incentive to avoid negative and inflammatory actions that could contribute to crises. If the deal continues to fall apart and Iran resumes significant uranium enrichment, the pressure will grow on the United States and Israel to attempt to destroy the nuclear program. In the tense days before the last round of negotiations began in earnest, U.S. Central Command analysts were reportedly even watching moon phases in an attempt to anticipate the night of an imminent Israeli strike. Improvements in Iran’s defenses and options against Israel since then have made it more likely that the task would instead fall to America. And a strike, mind you, might only delay the Iranian nuclear program, meaning later strikes could follow—a process Israeli analysts describe as “mowing the lawn.” The strongest criticism of the nuclear deal had been that it only delayed an Iranian bomb. But unlike strikes, the deal didn’t kill anyone, cost anything, or risk a wider war.

Trump’s withdrawal from the deal wasn’t his only option for taking action against it. He could have stayed in without sitting on his hands. A deep report by Washington Institute Iran policy wizard Patrick Clawson highlighted the many points of presidential discretion in the array of sanctions laws that apply to Iran. (...)

Where will things go from here? Watch Brussels. Henry Kissinger in his Arab-Israeli diplomacy days used to say that there could be “no war without Egypt, and no peace without Syria.” In nuclear talks with Iran, there can be no decisive impact without Europe, and no settlement without America. Europe is the pivot player. Iran wants to do business with Europe; even with the nuclear deal, much U.S. business with Iran was illegal. Trump will either need to get Europe on board with new sanctions that hurt European businesses, or he will need to target European companies himself, creating a serious diplomatic crisis. (The middle path, sanctioning Iran unilaterally while letting Europe slide, would significantly reduce pressure on Tehran.) Europe so far has shown no appetite for putting fresh pressure on Iran. And all this, again, is for the chance of creating enough leverage to begin broader negotiations, and comes at real technical and strategic cost. One thing alone is sure: Iran’s main strategic goal on the nuclear issue has been achieved. America and Europe are split, and the UN sanctions are off. Now Tehran can choose whether it would like an enriched cherry on top.

by John Allen Gay, The American Conservative | Read more:

Image: via:

[ed. I'm sure N. Korea is viewing this with interest. See also: The Stupidity of Reneging on the Nuclear Deal]

The Drug Revolution That No One Can Stop

The Drug Revolution That No One Can Stop

Image: Tim Marrs

Three Red Sweaters

Do we need our memories when we can document virtually every aspect of our lives?

Grainy 8mm and 16mm film now tends to evoke nostalgia but, in the decades before digital cameras, home movies were the only immediate way to visually document the present. The US filmmaker Martha Gregory makes wonderful use of her family’s trove of home movies, shot by her grandfather Charles from the 1950s to the 1970s, to craft her short documentary Three Red Sweaters and ask what happens to memories when we document our lives. Charles’s amateur filmmaking was mostly for his own enjoyment – and occasionally a means of social avoidance – but his sharp eye yielded lovely images of daily life, family vacations and children growing up.

[ed. This was my childhood.]

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Chris Thile & Brad Mehldau

RealSelf: The TripAdvisor of Boob Jobs and Botox

Very few people these days will buy beauty products, go to a restaurant, or travel without checking online forums like Makeup Alley, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. So why would you think about getting Botox or a boob job without doing a little research first? That’s the premise behind RealSelf, an online community for cosmetic procedures that launched in 2006.

The company just landed $40 million in funding. Following an investment of $2 million in the first two years, this round is one sign that noninvasive cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery are having a moment. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 17.5 million surgical and minimally invasive (meaning things like injections and lasers) procedures were performed in the US, a 2 percent increase compared to 2016. More than 7.2 million of these were Botox injections. But prices and individual experiences can vary wildly, so consumers get real talk, and pictures, at RealSelf.

The TripAdvisor of cosmetic procedures

RealSelf is free for users and features reviews of every procedure you can imagine — and some you probably can’t — written by real people. While there are reviews of specific doctors, RealSelf is more focused on procedures in general. The Yelp equivalent would be like reviewing how much you liked your spaghetti rather than how great you thought Carmine’s was.

It also provides a “worth it” rating analogous to Amazon’s star ratings. Many procedures score in the high 80s and 90s. For example, a “mommy makeover” (usually a breast lift plus a tummy tuck) has been deemed 97 percent worth it; Fraxel, a popular facial laser treatment, is only 69 percent worth it, per users.

The company says the five most researched surgical procedures on the site are breast enhancement, tummy tuck, butt enhancement, nose jobs, and liposuction. The most researched noninvasive procedures are nonsurgical fat reduction, fillers, orthodontics, Botox-like treatments, and facial lasers.

When searching for a procedure, users have the option of reading reviews, scrolling through pictures, reading through a Q&A section, watching videos, chatting in a Reddit-like forum, reading information articles, and searching for doctors and pricing. It’s part shopping guide, part therapy session. (...)

Pricing and doctor listings on the site are also a big deal. Each procedure lists an average price, as well as price ranges based on geography. Conversations and advice from users on how they financed procedures also abound, since they can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and are rarely covered by insurance.

While there is a stripped-down free listing available for doctors and practices, RealSelf charges anywhere from $200 a month to about $5,000 a month for doctors to advertise on the site. (The higher range applies to “really competitive markets where there’s a lot of audience,” like New York or Los Angeles.)

The site makes sure that potential consumers see doctors who provide services they’re shopping for, but RealSelf also requires that the doctors maintain a positive consumer rating on the site and actively engage with the community. Doctors aren’t always happy about the transparency of procedure pricing on the site, though.

“[Doctors] think that it’s not information that should be shared,” Seery says. “We just politely disagree and believe that it’s important, as a purchase out of your own pocket, that you have greater insight into pricing information. And also: Why does it cost what it does?” 

by Cheryl Wischhover, Racked | Read more:
Image: Paul Hakimata/Getty Images/EyeEm

The Social Network Employers Love to Raid

Piazza Technologies Inc. is a stealth company—largely unknown by the general public but familiar to almost anyone who’s studied computer science in the past few years. Some 2.5 million students use its free website to ask and answer one another’s questions about computers, engineering, math, and science, all under the supervision of their professors. Seven years in, Piazza says 98 percent of computer science students at the top 50 universities access its site; students report using it on average for at least three hours a day. (Or, more likely, per night.) Piazza fans abound in Silicon Valley: “I have used Piazza extensively throughout my education,” Vickram Gidwani, a Stanford grad student in electrical engineering, writes in an email. “It provides a great forum for any topic in the course.”

Now the Palo Alto company is doing the obvious thing—monetizing all those eyeballs. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Pooja Nath Sankar says it gradually dawned on her that Piazza was an ideal space for tech employers and students to meet. In late 2016 the company launched Piazza Careers. Companies pay for access to students who opt in; they can see professors’ evaluations of the students’ participation on the site, and they can narrow searches to, say, teaching assistants for artificial intelligence classes who are graduating in 2018. In April, Piazza lured Apple Inc.’s director of global recruiting projects, Sean Celli, to head client partnerships.

Piazza says 90 percent of the messages companies send to students get opened. The career feature is particularly appealing to companies that need tech talent but aren’t necessarily on students’ radar. So far, 80 are on board, including Whirlpool, Airbnb, Nvidia, Quicken Loans, Barclays, and Roche.

On the strength of its networking potential, Piazza (the Italian word for plaza, a meeting place) has attracted $32 million in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and SV Angel. “Piazza has a unique relationship to up-and-coming technical talent,” says Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures. “I sensed a real sort of affection for Piazza among the students. They would, like, smile.”

Sankar, 37, didn’t envision the site as a career platform. The original idea—and still her priority—was to help the kind of student she herself once was: a young woman who struggled to learn programming on her own because she was left out of all-male campus study groups. “I would be alone on the sidelines, too shy to ask for help,” she recalls. The online question-and-answer boards break down the barriers of gender and shyness. Students can choose to ask and answer questions anonymously. “I obsessed about the product based on my own experience,” Sankar says. (...)

Now Sankar is using her homework site to help others overcome disadvantages. Piazza provides an alternative to the discussion tools in education management systems such as Blackboard Learning and Moodle, “which are sometimes found to be frustrating,” Lydia Kavanagh, a professor at Australia’s University of Queensland who researched learning tools, wrote in an email. The only disadvantage about Piazza her study identified: “not suitable for conversation.” (Nonetheless, Sankar says some nerds have managed to set up dates on the site.)

by Peter Coy, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Illustration 731