The U.S. Computer Industry is Dying and I’ll Tell You Exactly Who is Killing It and Why

The truth is that much (but not all) of the American technology industry is being led by what my late mother would have called “assholes.” And those assholes are needlessly destroying the very industry that made them rich. It started in the 1970s when a couple of obscure academics created a creaky logical structure for turning corporate executives from managers to rock stars, all in the name of “maximizing shareholder value.”

Lawyers arguing in court present legal theories – their ideas of how the world and the law intersect and why this should mean their client is right and the other side is wrong. Proof of one legal theory over another comes in the form of a verdict or court decision. We as a culture have many theories about institutions and behaviors that aren’t so clear-cut in their validity tests (no courtroom, no jury) yet we cling to these theories to feel better about the ways we have chosen to live our lives. In American business, especially, one key theory says that the purpose of corporate enterprise is to “maximize shareholder value.” Some take this even further and claim that such value maximization is the only reason a corporation exists. Watch CNBC or Fox Business News long enough and you’ll begin to believe this is the God’s truth, but it’s not. It’s just a theory.

It’s not even a very old theory, in fact, only dating back to 1976. That’s when Michael Jensen and William Meckling of the University of Rochester published in the Journal of Financial Economics their paper Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.

Their theory, in a nutshell, said there was an inherent conflict in business between owners (shareholders) and managers, that this conflict had to be resolved in favor of the owners, who after all owned the business, and the best way to do that was to find a way to align those interests by linking managerial compensation to owner success. Link executive compensation primarily to the stock price, the economists argued, and this terrible conflict would be resolved, making business somehow, well, better.

There are many problems with this idea, which appears to be more of a solution in search of a problem. If the CEO is driving the company into bankruptcy or spends too much money on his own perks, for example, the previous theory of business (and the company bylaws) say shareholders can vote the bum out. But that’s so mundane, so imprecise for economists who see a chance to elegantly align interests and make the system work smoothly. The only problem is the alignment of interests suggested by Jensen and Meckling works just as well – maybe even better – if management just cooks the books and lies. And so shareholder value maximization gave us companies like Enron (Jeffrey Skilling in prison), Tyco International (Dennis Kozlowski in prison), and WorldCom (Bernie Ebbers in prison).

It’s just a theory, remember.

The Jensen and Meckling paper shook the corporate world because it presented a reason to pay executives more – a lot more – if they made their stock rise. Not if they made a better product, cured a disease, or helped defeat a national enemy – just made the stock go up. Through the 1960s and 1970s, average CEO compensation in America per dollar of corporate earnings had gone down 33 percent as companies became more efficient at making money. But now there was a (dubious) reason for compensation to go up, up, up, which it has done consistently for almost 40 years until now we think this is the way the corporate world is supposed to work – even its raison d’etre. But in that same time real corporate performance has gone down. The average rate of return on invested capital for public companies in the USA is a quarter of what it was in 1965. Sure productivity has gone up, but that can be done through automation or by beating more work out of employees.

Jensen and Meckling created the very problem they purported to solve – a problem that really hadn’t existed in the first place.

Maximizing shareholder return has given us our corporate malaise of today when profits are high (but are they real?) stocks are high, but few investors, managers, or workers are really happy or secure. Maximizing shareholder return is bad policy both for public companies and for our society in general. That’s what Jack Welch told the Financial Times in 2009, once Welch was safely out of the day-to-day earnings grind at General Electric: “On the face of it,” said Welch, “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products. Managers and investors should not set share-price increases as their overarching goal. … Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.”

Now let’s look at what this has meant for the U.S. computer industry.

First is the lemming effect where several businesses in an industry all follow the same bad management plan and collectively kill themselves. We saw it in the airline industry in the 1980s and 90s. They all wanted to blame regulation, then deregulation, then something else. The result was decimation and consolidation of America’s storied airlines and the services of those consolidated companies generally sucks today as a result. Their failings made necessary Southwest, Jet Blue, Virgin America and other lower-cost yet better-service airlines.

The IT services lemming effect has companies promising things that can not be done and still make a profit. It is more important to book business at any price than it is to deliver what they promise. In their rush to sign more business the industry is collectively jumping off a cliff.

by Robert X. Cringely, I Cringely |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. It not just the technology industry.]

Tom Petty & Eddie Vedder

Colorado Says Fishing Next to Private Land is Trespassing

If you care about fishing or boating Colorado’s rivers, this ongoing legal case should have relevance for you. Roger Hill is a 76-year-old Coloradan who likes to fish while standing on the bed of a stream. One of his favorite spots is a stretch of the Arkansas River below Salida.

A local landowner claims that Hill is trespassing when he stands on the streambed adjacent to the landowner’s property. He has responded by repeatedly throwing rocks at Hill while he is fishing and leaving threatening notes on his car. The landowner even shot at one of Hill’s fishing buddies, though he was thrown in jail for that little stunt.

Hill claims a right to fish from the streambed on the grounds that the stretch of the Arkansas River where he fishes is navigable and that the state of Colorado thereby owns the bed of the stream. So he sued the landowner.

Now, Colorado has moved to dismiss the case, arguing that it cannot go forward without the state’s participation. In a complicated argument, the state also claims that because it has not consented to being sued, the case must be dismissed. Mind you, the state could simply waive its immunity claim and support the right of people like Hill to fish. Instead, the state is actively seeking to block Hill’s claim that he has the right to access navigable streams.

The notion that states own the beds of navigable streams derives from a constitutional principle known as the “equal footing doctrine.” It provides that when states enter the union, they do so on an “equal footing” with other states. Though Colorado is home to many substantial rivers and streams, none have ever been officially declared “navigable” for purposes of determining title to the bed.

This is a much bigger problem in Colorado than in most states. In Colorado, you are deemed a trespasser if you merely float over a riverbed adjacent to private property. As a result, Colorado recreational boaters and fishers use Colorado’s waterways at the sufferance of private landowners. One good way around this problem is to have them declared “navigable” for title purposes, and that is what Roger Hill is seeking to do on the Arkansas River.

The U.S. Supreme Court considers waterways to be navigable for title purposes if they were used or could have been used at the time of statehood as highways for commerce. It is well known that fur traders used the Arkansas River to move their furs, and loggers once sent hundreds of thousands of logs downstream for use as railroad ties. That seems to be evidence that the state owns the bed of the river — not in the conventional sense of a party owning land, but as a protector of public rights.

The Supreme Court’s most eloquent expression of the state as protector of access came in the context of a decision upholding Illinois’ rights to the bed of Lake Michigan in Chicago Harbor. According to the Supreme Court, title to the bed of navigable water bodies “is a title different in character from that which the state holds in lands intended for sale. … It is a title held in trust for the people of the state, that they may enjoy the navigation of the waters, carry on commerce over them, and have liberty of fishing therein, freed from the obstruction or interference of private parties.”

If the state were properly exercising its trust responsibility to the people of Colorado, then it would have filed this case itself on behalf of Roger Hill. Short of that, it might at least have intervened on his side after the lawsuit was filed, or even just stayed out of the dispute.

Instead, it seeks to dismiss the case and thereby undermine all the boaters and fishers who merely want to exercise the rights guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution. Think about what this means: State leaders charged with protecting public rights in navigable waters are actively seeking to block those rights.

by Mark Squillace, High Country News | Read more:

Image: via
[ed. If true, this is a terrible abrogation of the state's responsibililty re: public trust doctrine. Navigability was a big issue in Alaska. So much so, the state maintained a special Section in the Dept. of Natural Resources specifically to document current and historical use of state waterways to preserve public use and access.] 

Forget New Robots. Keep Your Eye on the Old People.

Bloomberg asked readers a year ago: “Are you about to be replaced by a robot?” Next the question became a statement: “Robots Are Coming for Jobs of as Many as 800 Million Worldwide.”

Does the real-world experience so far back up the fears? Japan and the U.S. are two of the countries most advanced in robot deployment, and yet both are very close to full employment. To be sure, introducing more software and more robots into the workplace introduces very real problems of training and retraining, but there will always be more work to be done.

Scary as the rise of robots apparently is, perhaps it’s a fixation because it’s actually less scary than the real social issues ahead. One of those is how to integrate growing numbers of elderly into the workplace. More elderly workers will force many people to confront their biases, fears and prejudices, probably leading to a bigger cultural clash than that with the machines.

No matter how much they may disavow explicit age discrimination, many companies try to portray themselves as cool places to work for young people. And indeed these companies are especially interested in hiring younger people: The median age at the hot tech companies ranges from 27 to 31. It’s 38 at IBM and 39 at Hewlett Packard, still young by most standards, but in the tech industry those are viewed as much stodgier places to work. Overall, the median age of American workers is a little over 42.

It is not a surprise that tech companies should have so many younger workers, because younger people probably are on average more in touch with the latest developments in rapidly changing fields, such as programming and software. Younger people also seem more interested in putting in the sometimes crazy hours behind many startups, because they have a higher overall career return from doing so.

Of course, American business is becoming more like the tech sector as more companies are incorporating tech innovations. That development may not favor elderly workers.

Squeamishness about the elderly manifests itself in advertising too. Retirement products and Viagra are exceptions, but so many ads use young actors because companies are image-conscious. Collectively it amounts to a harmful form of age discrimination. These biases toward youth may be a greater problem in America, which typically has prided itself on being a young, dynamic culture, always riding the next wave of change.

There is also a practice, hard to avoid even in efficient workplaces, to reward workers to some extent on the basis of seniority alone. In the longer run that makes elderly workers a potential target for cost-cutting, even if they are doing a good job.

Of course, the age structure of America’s workforce is moving in the opposite direction of these trends. The populations of the U.S. and many other developed nations are aging, and the big surprise has been that older people want to work more than in previous generations. Against many prior expectations, the labor-force-participation rate of older Americans started rising in the 1980s and 1990s. For instance, the labor-force-participation rate for men ages 65 to 69 was 25 percent in 1985 but 37 percent in 2016. By 2020, over one-quarter of the workforce will be over 55 years of age.

I would suggest that the ability to spot, mobilize and deploy older workers is the next biggest source of competitive advantage in the U.S. The sober reality is that many companies should retool their methods to fit better with the experience and sound judgment found so often in older workers. That also will involve a retooling of the glamour notion to valorize the young less and the idea of maturity more. HR departments may have to work harder to help older workers keep up with new technologies.

That prospect doesn’t make for exciting headlines as a robot takeover does. But most of the story of economic success involves such small changes. And do you know which group of workers often understands that best? The older ones.

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. Then again, they may end up mostly in part-time and service industry jobs that pay low wages and which young people seem to be avoiding. Ageism is a problem and definitely needs a #metoo moment (too).]

via:

The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now

Enjoy it while you can

I’ve got a great idea for a start-up. Want to hear the pitch?

It’s called the 75 Cent Dollar Store. We’re going to sell dollar bills for 75 cents — no service charges, no hidden fees, just crisp $1 bills for the price of three quarters. It’ll be huge.

You’re probably thinking: Wait, won’t your store go out of business? Nope. I’ve got that part figured out, too. The plan is to get tons of people addicted to buying 75-cent dollars so that, in a year or two, we can jack up the price to $1.50 or $2 without losing any customers. Or maybe we’ll get so big that the Treasury Department will start selling us dollar bills at a discount. We could also collect data about our customers and sell it to the highest bidder. Honestly, we’ve got plenty of options.

If you’re still skeptical, I don’t blame you. It used to be that in order to survive, businesses had to sell goods or services above cost. But that model is so 20th century. The new way to make it in business is to spend big, grow fast and use Kilimanjaro-size piles of investor cash to subsidize your losses, with a plan to become profitable somewhere down the road.

Over all, 76 percent of the companies that went public last year were unprofitable on a per-share basis in the year leading up to their initial offerings, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business. That was the largest number since the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000, when 81 percent of newly public companies were unprofitable. Of the 15 technology companies that have gone public so far in 2018, only three had positive earnings per share in the preceding year, according to Mr. Ritter.

Silicon Valley wrote the playbook for spending money in pursuit of growth, and the tech industry remains a hotbed of fast-growing yet unprofitable companies. Uber, which is expected to go public next year, reportedly lost $4.5 billion last year as it sought to expand internationally and fought price wars with competitors including Lyft. Snap lost $3.4 billion last year, its first as a public company. Airbnb just had its first profitable year after a decade of investor-backed losses. (...)

The rise in unprofitable companies is partly the result of growth in the technology and biotech sectors, where companies tend to lose money for years as they spend on customer acquisition and research and development, Mr. Ritter said. But it also reflects the willingness of shareholders and deep-pocketed private investors to keep fast-growing upstarts afloat long enough to conquer a potential “winner-take-all” market. Today’s public tech companies generally earn more revenue than their dot-com era counterparts, and could find it easier to flip the profit switch once they’ve reached a sufficient size.

“The fact that Google and Facebook were able to generate such enormous profits and growth does give hope to some companies,” Mr. Ritter said. If start-ups can figure out to convert a large user base into paying customers, he added, “it can be enormously profitable.”

Perhaps the buzziest money-loser of the year is MoviePass, which has upended the film industry by essentially giving away millions of free movie tickets. Until recently, MoviePass members could pay $9.95 for a monthly subscription that allowed them to watch up to one movie per day in theaters, with MoviePass paying the face value of the ticket on a preloaded debit card. Since the average cost of a movie ticket in the United States is around $9, going to just two movies per month resulted in a good deal for the customer, and a loss for the company. (MoviePass has started placing more restrictions on which films its customers can see, perhaps in an effort to trim costs.)

MoviePass’s business model — which Slate described as “creatively lighting money aflame in order to subsidize the movie-going habits of some 3 million customers” — has turbocharged its growth. And the company maintains that it can make money by striking revenue-sharing deals with theater chains, or charging movie studios to advertise inside its app.

But investors aren’t convinced. Shares of MoviePass’s parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, have fallen more than 90 percent since October, and the company recently reported that it has been burning through its cash reserves, spending an average of $21.7 million per month with just $15.5 million left in the bank at the end of April. On Tuesday, Helios reported that MoviePass lost $98.3 million in the first quarter, despite adding more than a million net subscribers. (...)

Ultimately, companies like MoviePass illustrate the perilous tightrope many growing businesses must walk. Spend too little on acquiring new customers and drawing business away from your competitors, and you won’t make it off the ground. Give too many freebies away, and you risk running out of cash before you’re big enough to cash in.

by Kevin Roose, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Glenn Harvey

Core Values

My favorite bit in Thursday's Wall Street Journal story about Wells Fargo & Co.'s latest regulatory screw-up was this statement from the bank's public relations department:

Over the past several months we've built more robust internal processes that reinforce our values, and if we find any situations where behavior violates those values, we take swift action to correct.

To which the only proper response is: What values?

After sidestepping both the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Libor scandal — creating the impression that Wells Fargo actually did have values — the bank has spent the last few years cleaning up one awful mess after another. The biggest came first: Low-level bank officials had felt so pressured to meet impossible sales targets that they created fake accounts that customers didn’t ask for and didn't even know existed. (Richard Kovacevich, Wells's former chief executive, was a fervent believer in cross-selling, which created the pressure.)

The fake accounts were exposed by the Los Angeles Times in 2013. Did that scandal cause Wells Fargo to reform itself? Hardly. According to an article by Bethany McLean in Vanity Fair, Kovacevich, who retired in 2007, would later describe the problems that took place on his watch as "infinitesimal" — even though bank employees had been creating fake accounts since the 1990s. After a plaintiff's lawyer filed suit in 2015, then-CEO John Stumpf wrote an email to another Wells executive.

"I will fight this one to the finish," he wrote. "Did some do things wrong — you bet and that is called life. This is not systemic."

Alas, it was systemic, and by 2016, Stumpf had been forced into retirement, with some $41 million in stock awards clawed back. The bank, meanwhile, was fined $185 million by the federal government, and 5,300 employees were let go. In September of that year, after the bank had agreed to settle with the government, it issued a news release that said "Wells Fargo is committed to putting our customers' interests first 100 percent of the time." It added that those who had been disciplined or fired had "acted counter to our values." Naturally.

That was just the beginning. In January 2017, the bank admitted that it had found evidence that senior managers had retaliated against workers who had tried to blow the whistle on the fake accounts.

March 2017: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which rarely rebukes a national bank, accused Wells Fargo of an "extensive and pervasive pattern" of violations of the Community Reinvestment Act, including selling black homebuyers more expensive mortgages than white homebuyers.

July: Wells Fargo acknowledged that 570,000 customers were charged for auto insurance they didn't need — and 20,000 of those customers may have defaulted on their cars as a result.

August: Wells Fargo admitted it had found an additional 1.4 million fake accounts.

October: Wells Fargo had to repay $3.4 million to brokerage customers because the company's brokers put them in investments that regulators said were "highly likely to lose value over time."

November: Wells Fargo agreed to pay $5.4 million in a Justice Department settlement because it illegally repossessed service members' cars.

April 2018: Wells Fargo was fined $1 billion for the auto and mortgage infractions.

Are you getting the picture?

On Thursday, Wells Fargo was accused of improperly altering information on "documents related to corporate customers." Although the bank insisted that no customer had been hurt by this sleight of hand, the behavior appears to have stemmed from the same cultural flaws that were at the heart of the original fake account scandal.

"Wells Fargo," wrote the Wall Street Journal, "was trying to meet a deadline to comply with a regulatory consent order related to the bank's anti-money-laundering controls." In other words, at Wells Fargo, when you are under pressure to meet a tough goal, you do whatever you need to do, even if it’s fraudulent. That appears to be Wells Fargo’s real core value.

by Joe Nocera, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

via:

Hapa

[ed. Getting ready to move and feeling a little homesick already. Enjoy - Nathan Aweau of Hapa.]
Lyrics (substitute Nuuanu for Manoa)

Cyril Pahinui

Ka Ipo Lei Manu (lyrics and story)

How to Accept a Compliment

Alone in my office one afternoon, I unpeeled the wrapper from a square of chocolate with a deliberate curiosity not associated with office snacking. As the minty candy dissolved in my mouth, I read the words printed inside the wrapper: “Accept a compliment.”

I would normally not say yes to suggestions from strangers who work in what I assume is the marketing department of Dove Chocolate, Promises Division. But they aren’t alone in their advice. “Ladies, why the heck can’t we take a compliment?” a Prevention writer asked in a January headline. The message: C’mon women. Quit being apologists. Fully accept the compliments you deserve — without any self-deprecation or changing of the subject.

Until this point, I would have responded to a compliment — say, on my hair — with half acknowledgment and half distraction. “Thanks, but [acknowledge recent struggle with hair or hairdresser]. Ha ha ha.” Doing so restored order. But while a simple “Thank you” was not my style, I decided to try it.

Walking home from work, I approached a neighbor on a ribbon of sidewalk that passes for Main Street in our Wisconsin town. I smiled and waved as we neared each other. Caren smiled and waved back and when I was within earshot, she shouted, “I like your dress!”

I assumed this was an easy audition for the New and Improved Way to Accept Compliments and simply said, “Thank you.”

A short pause followed. It was so deeply still and awkward that had our entire exchange been filmed and replayed, a viewer might reasonably think the video had paused.

When we reanimated, Caren’s eyes acquired a hard look. “It’s appropriate,” she said. “I like when people dress appropriately.”

“Oh. Ummm. Ugh,” I sputtered and continued my walk home, embarrassed. What had I missed by failing to add a remark about how old or inexpensive my dress was?

The answer: a coded linguistic invitation.

Up until that candy wrapper advice — and my social faux pas — I hadn’t given much thought to the purpose of compliments, but others certainly had. In recent years, compliments and our reactions to them have been placed under a microscope. (...)

According to experts at the university’s Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, two thirds of the time, Americans respond to compliments with something other than, or in addition to, “Thank you.” We shift credit (“My mom picked this dress out for me.”), make a historical comment (“I bought it on sale.”), question the complimenter (“Hmm, you think so?”) or lob back a compliment (“I like your outfit, too.”). Other times we downgrade the compliment (“This thing is so old I was about to give it to Goodwill.”), reject it outright (“I feel like I look like a hobo.”) or treat the compliment as a request (“You want to borrow it?”).

In other words, in the United States, the compliment is a coded invitation to chitchat, and simply saying, “Thank you” linguistically slams the door in the complimenter’s face.

by Carolyn Bucior, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Janet Hansen

Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia

Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are all said to be considering the plan.

I’ve pushed for a basic income guarantee before, and basic job guarantees sure sound similar. Some thinkers have even compared the two plans, pointing out various advantages of basic jobs: it feels “fairer” to make people work for their money, maybe there’s a psychological boost from being productive, you can use the labor to do useful projects. Simon Sarris has a long and excellent article on “why basic jobs might fare better than UBI [universal basic income]”, saying that:

UBI’s blanket-of-money approach optimizes for a certain kind of poverty, but it may create more in the long run. Basic Jobs introduce work and opportunity for communities, which may be a better welfare optimization strategy, and we could do it while keeping a targeted approach to aiding the poorest.

I am totally against this. Maybe basic jobs are better than nothing, but I have an absolute 100% revulsion at the idea of implementing basic jobs as an alternative to basic income. Before getting into the revulsion itself, I want to bring up some more practical objections:

1. Basic jobs don’t help the disabled

Only about 15% of the jobless are your traditional unemployed people looking for a new job. 60% are disabled. Disability has doubled over the past twenty years and continues to increase.

Experts disagree on how much of the rise in disability reflects deteriorating national health vs. people finding a way to opt out of an increasingly dysfunctional labor market, but everyone expects the the trend to continue. Any program aimed at the non-working poor which focuses on the traditionally unemployed but ignores the disabled is only dealing with the tip of the iceberg.

The current disability system has at least three major problems which I would expect basic income to solve.

First, the disability application process is a mess. Imagine the worst DMV appointment you’ve ever had to obtain the registration to a sketchy old car you got from a friend, then multiply it by a thousand – then imagine you have to do it all while being too disabled to work. Even clear-cut applications can take months to go through, inflicting an immense burden on people who don’t know where their money is coming from during that time. And people with harder-to-prove conditions like mental illness and chronic pain might require multiple appeals – dragging the process out for years – or never get it at all. The disabled people I have talked to generally hate everything about this.

Second, disability is becoming a catch-all for people who can’t find employment. This is a useful function that needs to be served. But right now, it involves unemployed people faking and exaggerating disability. This rewards liars and punishes the honest. If society labels the system “FOR DISABLED PEOPLE ONLY”, basic fairness – to the disabled, to taxpayers, and to honest workers who aren’t gaming the system – require them to gatekeep entry. Right now they spend lots of time and money on gatekeeping and still mostly fail. But any attempt to crack down would exacerbate the first problem, the one where real disabled people have to spend months or years in a Kafka novel before getting recognized.

Third, because of the first and second problems disabled people feel like they constantly have to prove themselves. Sometimes they’ll have good days – lots of conditions are relapsing-remitting – and they’ll want to go play in the park or something. Then they have to worry that some neighbor is going to think “well, that guy looks pretty healthy”, take a photo, and they’ll end up as one of those stories with headlines like SO-CALLED DISABLED PERSON CAUGHT PLAYING SPORTS IN PARK. Other times it’s a bureaucratic issue. I had a patient who, after a few years on disability, recovered enough that he thought he could work about ten hours a week. When he tried to make it happen, he learned he would lose his disability payments – apparently if you can work at all the government doesn’t believe you’re really disabled – and ten hours a week wasn’t enough to support himself. So he cancelled the new job and didn’t work at all.

As long as you have a system whose goal is to separate the “truly” disabled people from the fakers, you’re going to run into problems like these. But refuse to gatekeep, and you have an unjust system where anyone who wants to lie can get out of work while their more honest coworkers are left slaving away all day. Basic income cuts the Gordian knot by proposing that everyone is legally entitled to support, whether they’re disabled or not. Disabled people can get their money without gatekeeping, and there’s no reward for foul play.

Basic jobs abandons this solution and takes us right back to the current system. If you’re abled enough to perform a government job, you’ve got to do it. Who decides if you’re abled enough? The Kafkaesque gatekeepers. And so we get the same bureaucratic despair, the same attempts to cheat the system, and the same perverse incentives.

And the number of disability claims keeps rising. Remember, a lot of economists think that the flight away from work and toward disability comes from people voting with their feet against exactly the kind of low-paying unpleasant jobs that basic jobs advocates want to offer everybody. Expect them to vote against those too, with no clear solutions within the basic jobs paradigm.

2. Basic jobs don’t help caretakers

60% of the jobless are disabled. 15% are traditional unemployed people looking for a new job. And another 10% to 15% are people caring for their sick family members.

This is unavoidable and currently uncompensated. The AgingCare Caregiver forum says their “number one question” is whether people who need to take time off work to care for a sick or elderly parent can get money. The only answer they can provide is “if the person you’re caring for has money or insurance, maybe they can pay you”. If they don’t, you’re out of luck.

Right now our society just drops the ball on this problem. I don’t blame it; giving people money to care for family members would be prohibitively expensive. It would also require a gatekeeping bureaucracy that would put the disability gatekeeping bureaucracy to shame. Not only do they have to assess if someone’s really unable to subsist without care, they also have to decide who gets to take the option for which relatives. I have a second cousin some number of times removed who’s very disabled; can I quit my job and get paid a reasonable salary to take care of them? What if I tell you I’ve never met them or even talked to them on the phone, and just have my grandmother’s word for it that they exist and are sick? What exactly counts as caretaking? If I go visit my second cousin once a day for an hour to make sure he hasn’t gotten any sicker than usual, should the government pay me a full salary? What if actually doing that is 100% vital to my second cousin’s continued survival and I wouldn’t be able to do it consistently while holding down a job? You are never going to be able to make a bureaucracy that can address all these issues fairly.

Basic income cuts the knot again, giving everyone enough money that they can take care of sick or aging friends or relatives if they so choose. You don’t have to justify your choice to provide this level of care (but not that level) to the government. You can just do what needs to be done.

Basic jobs once again drops the ball on this problem. If your mother is dying, you can’t be there to help her, because the government is going to make you dig ditches and fill them in again all day to satisfy people’s worry that somebody somewhere might be getting money without doing enough make-work to “deserve” it.

3. Basic jobs don’t help parents

Everything above, except this time you’re a single parent (or a double parent whose spouse also works) and you want to take care of your child. If you could afford daycare, you probably wouldn’t be the sort of person who needs to apply for a guaranteed basic job. What do you do?

I know what the basic jobs people’s solution to this is going to be: free daycare for all! Okay. So in addition to proposing the most expensive government program ever invented, you want to supplement it by passing the second most expensive government program ever invented, at the same time? Good luck.

But even aside from this, I want us to step back and think about what we’re doing. I have met people – mostly mothers, but some fathers too – who are heartbroken at the thought of missing the best years of their children’s lives grinding away at a 9 to 5 job, stuck in traffic commuting to their job, or being too tired to spend time with them after they get home from their job. These people miss their kids’ first steps, outsource watching their first words to underpaid daycare employees, and have to choose between attending their kids’ school plays and putting food on the table.

And if we check the Treasury and decide that we, as a society, don’t have enough money to solve this problem – then whatever, we don’t have enough money to solve this problem.

But I worry we’re going to check and find we have more than enough money. But somebody is going to be so excited about making poor people do busy-work to justify their existence, that we’re going to insist on perpetuating the problem anyway. And if that forces us to pay for universal free daycare, we’re going to be spending extra money just to make sure we can perpetuate the problem as effectively as possible. We’re going to be saying “We could give basic income for $800 billion, or basic jobs plus universal daycare for $900 billion. And that extra $100 billion? That’s the money we spend to make sure you’re digging ditches and filling them in all day, instead of getting to be at home spending time with your kids.”

4. Jobs are actually a big cause of poverty

Poor people’s two largest expenses are housing and transportation.

Guaranteed jobs have to be somewhere. Most of them will be in big cities, because that’s where everybody is. The ones in the country will be few and far between.

That means to get to your government-mandated job, you’ll either need to live in the big city or have a car. Living in the big city means tripling your monthly rent. Having a car means car payments, insurance payments, repair payments, gas payments, and incidentals.

When I first started working with poor patients, I was shocked how many of the problems in their lives were car-related. For well-off people like me, having a car is background noise; you buy or lease it for a reasonable price, then never worry about it again. Poor people can’t afford to buy and don’t always have good enough credit to lease. They tend to get older, sketchier cars that constantly break down. A constant complaint I heard: “My car broke, I can’t afford repairs, and I’m going to get fired if I can’t make it to my job”. Some of them can’t afford insurance and take their chances without it. Others have had various incidents with the police that cost them their license, but they can’t just not show up to work, so they drive anyway and hope they don’t get arrested.

Then there are the little things. Your work doesn’t have a break room, so you’ve got to eat out for lunch, and there goes a big part of your food budget. Your work demands a whole new set of business clothes, so there’s double your clothing budget. You can’t attend things during normal business hours, so you have to pay extra for out-of-hours services.

And then there’s all of the problems above. You can’t take care of your children anymore, so you’ve got to pay for daycare or a nanny or an Uber to take them to their grandparents’ house. You can’t take care of your sick parents anymore, so you’ve got to pay for a home health aide to come in and look after them. You get job-related strain or stress, and there’s the cost of a doctor’s appointment.

And then there are the fuzzier things. If you’ve just spent the entire day at work, and you’re really exhausted, and you never get any time to yourself, maybe you don’t have the energy left to drive to the cheaper supermarket on the other end of town. Maybe you don’t have the time to search for the absolute best deal on the new computer you’re getting. Maybe you don’t have the willpower to resist splurging and giving yourself one nice thing in your life of wage slavery. All of this sounds kind of shameful, but they’re all things that my patients have told me and things that I do myself sometimes despite my perfectly nice well-paying job.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. As Scott notes later in his post, Alaska has had a (very small) universal basic income for some time, which seems to have worked relatively well (the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend). Basic job advocates are undoubtedly thinking of something along the lines of the old WPA, which produced many fine projects and much needed infrastructure improvements, but not without some criticism. Maybe a solution would be some sort of hybrid? Basic incomes and basic jobs? I'm sure a lot of people would like to work for reasons not strictly related to income - a sense of self-worth and well-being, teamwork, pride, accomplishment? Or just to supplement a basic income. See also: We Work]

Colley Whisson, Main Street Dayboro
via:

All My Exes Live in Pixels

Tyler calls the folder on his laptop that contains nudes of his exes “Rogaine.” He changed it from “cocaine” after too many people asked him what he was keeping in there. Anwar called his “random stuff,” but he kept the nudes nested in the fourth of four untitled folders. That was before he deleted the folder sometime last year, when he got paranoid about potential hacking. Ryan’s old nudes are scattered throughout his email — you can find them by typing “.jpg” into the search bar — but he rarely looks at them, except when he’s newly single. Bill says he doesn’t know where his are, probably on camera memory cards and old hard drives. But now that I mention it, he’s gonna gather them into a single place.

Nudes from my exes are collected in a folder called “just drunk enough to send this.” I made it when I was studying abroad at a South African university with slow internet and a long-distance girlfriend. One day, she sent a video with the subject head “just drunk enough to send this.” I took my laptop to the library immediately and made small talk with a fellow American while the progress bar slowly filled up. The video featured my girlfriend wearing a tank top and camouflage booty shorts. “True Affection” by The Blow played in the background. The first line of that song is “I was out of your league,” which she almost definitely was. (I’ve only heard that song once in the years since she sent me the video. I would describe my reaction to it as Pavlovian.)

This was in 2010, just before the World Cup, and laptop cameras were still in the relative dark ages. Though the video was pixelated nearly beyond recognition, I watched it dozens of times before I got back to the United States. After that, because we lived in different cities and were off-and-on, the folder grew and grew. We broke up, finally, when I moved from Los Angeles to New York City and she didn’t. But there were other women that made their way into the folder. One girlfriend, a writer I dated for about six months, sent me a series of headless pictures of her lying on leopard-print bed sheets, boobs out, flipping me the bird. Another fling was fond of taking pictures in the bath, which put her face in high definition and gave the rest of her a kind of watery mystery.

And, though the specific practice is a modern phenomenon, we would be lying to ourselves if we said it wasn’t deeply rooted in history. Photographers like Albert Arthur Allen were producing boudoir photography as early as the 1920s, but nudes must have predated that. After all, the Tourist Multiple and the Simplex were consumer-focused cameras that debuted in 1913 and 1914, respectively. Another thing that debuted around that time was World War I. If you think that British, French and German women were sending their soldier husbands off to war empty-handed, then I have some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.

Like all things invented in war, the practice has now moved to us soft-belly civilians. Basically as long as there’s been an ability to take photos, you can bet someone thought to train the camera on their own naked body. I don’t know whether people kept the photos around, but I’m sure if they did they did so in a pasteboard box, hidden at the back of some closet somewhere where nobody would look. You know, kind of like nesting it five deep in untitled folders.

Sending nudes is, whether we acknowledge it or not, an expression of trust. You trust that your significant other isn’t a fucking psychopath who’s going to use your belief in them against you, even if you have a terrible breakup. You trust your own feelings and desires and confidence in that moment. And if you’re feeling insecure about it, you can ask for a naked picture in return. (In my research for this article — combing through old emails — I found a lot of photos of my hard 20something dick poking out of jeans.)

I asked one of my exes what she thought of this whole thing—the fact that I still had her old nudes

“I don’t care,” she said. “The only thing I hate is when people message me like, the day of [having masturbated to them].”

Who does that? She listed three exes, though one had stopped when he got married. I hadn’t even known that was an option, to be frank. That seemed, and seems, several steps over the line. If you want to look, go right ahead, but there’s no need to let her know exactly how you’re using them.

There’s something comforting about looking at these nudes even now. It’s lower-impact than actually fucking, but still trips many of the same pleasure centers. I still want to see her naked, sure. But it’s also about being reminded of that time in my life, when romantic relationships were less encumbered by “real problems” and more defined by who lived on the same street, or had the best jokes about the uselessness of their major.

For a while, I thought I might be the only one with a nudes folder. It sat on my computer, visited mainly when I was hung over or the internet was out. That made me feel tremendously creepy, like I was somehow spying on content specifically produced for me. I realized only a few weeks ago just how commonplace it was. My current girlfriend left her phone on top of the car. As we drove onto the freeway, it slipped off and shattered on the pavement. She was upset, at least partially because she had lost all her old naked pictures of herself. Her estimate was that her ex had around 400 on his hard drive. So she Facebook messaged him and he sent them to her. And then she sent them to me.

It’s a strange experience, to see someone’s recycled nudes. I’m not naive enough to think that all naked pictures sent to me were taken with me as the intended recipient. I know for a fact that that’s not true. But to think that they had been produced for someone else, then repurposed for me, was enough to spin my head clean around. I told my girlfriend I thought she looked very pretty and then never looked at the pictures again. Why would I? I can’t be nostalgic for a past I never experienced. (...)

When you break up, in one instant, the feeling that you’ve had for someone is replaced by memories of that feeling, now qualified by their status as an ex. I remember, mainly, the fights, the upsets, the slow descent into mutual disillusionment. If we constantly remembered the good times, there would be no need to end the relationship. There would be no way to get over it. The human memory is a fallible and subjective thing for reasons of evolution.

Looking at old nudes is a little bit of a salve against that. The picture of my ex pulling down her bikini top to reveal her breasts reminds me of a day at the beach that was blessedly free of argument. The video of her sent during winter break from her childhood bedroom reminds me of the nights we spent trying to fuck quietly so her mother wouldn’t hear. They’re little postcards from a past, reminding you of what it’s like to be loved by someone who used to love you.

by Michael Hafford, MEL | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Elliott Erwitt
via:

via: Yamaha

As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, ‘Someone Is Going to Get Hurt’

As a teenager, Keoni Gandall already was operating a cutting-edge research laboratory in his bedroom in Huntington Beach, Calif. While his friends were buying video games, he acquired more than a dozen pieces of equipment — a transilluminator, a centrifuge, two thermocyclers — in pursuit of a hobby that once was the province of white-coated Ph.D.’s in institutional labs.

“I just wanted to clone DNA using my automated lab robot and feasibly make full genomes at home,” he said.

Mr. Gandall was far from alone. In the past few years, so-called biohackers across the country have taken gene editing into their own hands. As the equipment becomes cheaper and the expertise in gene-editing techniques, mostly Crispr-Cas9, more widely shared, citizen-scientists are attempting to re-engineer DNA in surprising ways.

Until now, the work has amounted to little more than D.I.Y. misfires. A year ago, a biohacker famously injected himself at a conference with modified DNA that he hoped would make him more muscular. (It did not.)

Earlier this year, at Body Hacking Con in Austin, Tex., a biotech executive injected himself with what he hoped would be a herpes treatment. (Verdict: No.) His company already had live-streamed a man injecting himself with a home-brewed treatment for H.I.V. (His viral load increased.)

In a recent interview, Mr. Gandall, now 18 and a research fellow at Stanford, said he only wants to ensure open access to gene-editing technology, believing future biotech discoveries may come from the least expected minds.

But he is quick to acknowledge that the do-it-yourself genetics revolution one day may go catastrophically wrong.

“Even I would tell you, the level of DNA synthesis regulation, it simply isn’t good enough,” Mr. Gandall said. “These regulations aren’t going to work when everything is decentralized — when everybody has a DNA synthesizer on their smartphone.”

The most pressing worry is that someone somewhere will use the spreading technology to create a bioweapon.

Already a research team at the University of Alberta has recreated from scratch an extinct relative of smallpox, horsepox, by stitching together fragments of mail-order DNA in just six months for about $100,000 — without a glance from law enforcement officials.

The team purchased overlapping DNA fragments from a commercial company. Once the researchers glued the full genome together and introduced it into cells infected by another type of poxvirus, the cells began to produce infectious particles.

To some experts, the experiment nullified a decades-long debate over whether to destroy the world’s two remaining smallpox remnants — at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and at a research center in Russia — since it proved that scientists who want to experiment with the virus can now create it themselves.

The study’s publication in the journal PLOS One included an in-depth description of the methods used and — most alarming to Gregory D. Koblentz, the director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University — a series of new tips and tricks for bypassing roadblocks.

“Sure, we’ve known this could be possible,” Dr. Koblentz said. “We also knew North Korea could someday build a thermonuclear weapon, but we’re still horrified when they actually do it.”

Experts urged the journal to cancel publication of the article, one calling it “unwise, unjustified, and dangerous.” Even before publication, a report from a World Health Organization meeting noted that the endeavor “did not require exceptional biochemical knowledge or skills, significant funds or significant time.”

But the study’s lead researcher, David Evans, a virologist at the University of Alberta, said he had alerted several Canadian government authorities to his poxvirus venture, and none had raised an objection.

Many experts agree that it would be very difficult for amateur biologists of any stripe to design a killer virus on their own. But as more hackers trade computer code for the genetic kind, and as their skills become increasingly sophisticated, health security experts fear that the potential for abuse may be growing.

“To unleash something deadly, that could really happen any day now — today,” said Dr. George Church, a researcher at Harvard and a leading synthetic biologist. “The pragmatic people would just engineer drug-resistant anthrax or highly transmissible influenza. Some recipes are online.” (...)

A Biological Arms Race

If nefarious biohackers were to create a biological weapon from scratch — a killer that would bounce from host to host to host, capable of reaching millions of people, unrestrained by time or distance — they would probably begin with some online shopping.

A site called Science Exchange, for example, serves as a Craigslist for DNA, a commercial ecosystem connecting almost anyone with online access and a valid credit card to companies that sell cloned DNA fragments.

Mr. Gandall, the Stanford fellow, often buys such fragments — benign ones. But the workarounds for someone with ill intent, he said, might not be hard to figure out.

Biohackers will soon be able to forgo these companies altogether with an all-in-one desktop genome printer: a device much like an inkjet printer that employs the letters AGTC — genetic base pairs — instead of the color model CMYK.

A similar device already exists for institutional labs, called BioXp 3200, which sells for about $65,000. But at-home biohackers can start with DNA Playground from Amino Labs, an Easy Bake genetic oven that costs less than an iPad, or The Odin’s Crispr gene-editing kit for $159.

by Emily Baumgaertner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

[ed. There must be some kind of law: If a technology exists, it'll be used (no matter what).]

The Coup Has Already Happened

A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it.

We already had the coup.

It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention. Any time is the right time to pour into the streets and demand that it all grinds to a halt and the country change direction. The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.

Take the recent revelations about the president’s personal errand boy, Michael Cohen. He ran a shell company from which money was used to pay Stormy Daniels to remain silent in what was quite likely an illegal campaign contribution. Money came in, along with major corporations, from a Russian oligarch close to Putin, Viktor Vekselberg, or rather from a corporation called Columbus Nova, run by a cousin of his apparently appointed to mask Vekselberg’s own role. The New Yorker reports, “It is a company technically owned by others but which looks after money owned and controlled in large part—if not entirely—by Vekselberg and his family.” Or as Frank Rich put it at New York Magazine, it’s “an example of collusion so flagrant that it made Trump and Rudy Giuliani suddenly go mute: a Putin crony’s cash turns out to be an essential component of the racketeering scheme used to silence Stormy Daniels and thus clear Trump’s path to the White House in the final stretch of the 2016 election.”

The Washington Post reports that Columbus Nova “is listed as the organization behind a string of websites targeted toward white nationalists and other members of the alt-right.” That is, this Russian oligarch’s company was illegally attempting to influence the election, and they were giving money to the bagboy of the election’s winner. Pro Publica reports that another personal lawyer of the president’s, Marc Kasowitz, also worked on behalf of Columbus Nova. There are a thousand other details like that of financial dealings—real estate sales, investments, odd transfers of wealth, social connections, meetings—that tie the Trump mob to the Russian mob—because most of the oligarchs are, in that autocratic regime, in one way or another mobsters, because Putin himself runs that vast country as though he was a mob boss intent on exerting control through fear, and profit through extortion.

The Trump family aspires to mafia status, a thuggocracy, but they are manipulable and bumbling where Putin and company are disciplined and Machiavellian. They hire fools and egomaniacs and compromised figures—Scaramucci, Giuliani, Bannon, Flynn, Nunberg, the wifebeating Rob Porter—and then fire them, with a soap opera’s worth of drama; the competent ones quit, as have many lawyers hired to help Trump navigate his scandals. The Trumps don’t hide things well or keep their mouths shut or manage the plunder they grab successfully, and they keep committing crimes in public. Remember when Trump revealed highly classified data to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister when they visited him in the Oval Office, not long after he fired FBI director James Comey (but before he admitted it was to obstruct Comey’s investigation of his ties to Russia?). There’s a picture of that visit in which the Russians are laughing at him and he looks befuddled. Remember when Donald Jr. met with the Russian agent in Trump Tower in June of 2016 to get purloined data on Clinton and tried to cover it up by saying it was about adoptions? Remember when the Trump team was forced out of the Panama hotel that Trump still profited from, and how his lawyers appealed directly to the president of Panama? How he profits from that business and others despite the emoluments clause of the Constitution? Or the various lawsuits for violating that clause, including one pending from the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia? Or the women suing Trump for defamation? Perhaps not, as so many scandals have piled up on those ones.

From the aforementioned slush fund we just learned about, Cohen made a second payoff to a woman who had sex with and was supposedly impregnated by another wealthy Republican, though there’s suspicion that the $1.6 million payment wasn’t really on behalf of Elliott Broidy, but of Trump himself. Shutting up women is a big part of what these people do, though maybe the existence of those affairs shuts Trump up too. Jonathan Chait writes of last week’s Cohen revelations: “For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer—who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian ‘peace plan’ with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017—by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.”

It’s understandable if you find connecting the dots hard when there are so many dots they blur into a blob. (...)

Right now, Devin Nunes is trying to drill a hole out of the Justice Department and push classified information through it, into the open. The Washington Post reported last week, “A subpoena that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued to the Justice Department last week made a broad request for all documents about an individual who people close to the matter say is a sensitive, longtime intelligence source for the CIA and FBI. The Justice Department has refused to provide the documents. Intelligence officials say the material could jeopardize the source.” There seems to be widespread expectation that Nunes is fully capable of setting someone up to be assassinated, since his clear agenda since Trump arrived has been to block, disrupt, discredit, or sabotage the investigation of ties between Russia and the president and his pack of thugs. It’s been more than a year since, in a midnight drama, Nunes rushed information to the White House that he got as a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Sabotage of national institutions, laws, standards, and the greater good has been accepted as part of the new normal, which is staggeringly far from normal. An elected official is trying to prevent his country’s agencies and its citizens from finding out if and how the president and his goons are tangled up with a foreign regime and how that prevented us from having free and fair elections and may again. As fired FBI director Comey noted in his first briefing of the president, there is no concern with protecting the nation and its information systems. The president himself has done many extraordinary things to try to interfere with the investigation, and last year White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly only prevented him from firing Mueller by threatening to resign if he did. (...)

Some of the press is already on board, of course, though we are at a point where we should probably stop calling propaganda outlets news sources. The rightwing Daily Caller, a widely read online publication co-founded by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, has cut out the middle men and the apologists and gone straight to Oleg Deripaska, aka Putin’s favorite oligarch, the one who kept Paul Manafort on a short leash, letting him publish an editorial headlined “The Ever-Changing ‘Russia Narrative’ Is False Public Manipulation.” Traditionally you don’t let the accused party dictate the narrative, especially when the accused is suspected of being part of a foreign conspiracy to subvert the government of the United States. But it’s is no more unusual than Fox’s and the National Enquirer’s deep allegiance to Trump over truth. For Fox that means constantly running disinformation or just avoiding major news that casts the president in a negative light (and for Fox’s Sean Hannity, that means, according to a stunning new piece in New York magazine, a bedtime call with the president every night—“Generally, the feeling is that Sean is the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet,” says one source in the piece, which also reminds us Fox is almost Trump’s sole source of news). For the Enquirer, it means catch-and-kill payoffs to women who might damage his reputation (a catch-and-kill is when you pay for exclusive rights to a story and then don’t publish it).

The Enquirer performed a catch-and-kill operation to silence former playmate Karen McDougal, who had a relationship with Trump around the same time Daniels had her lone sexual encounter with him.

There are so many threads in this tangle involving women and how to shut them up. Deripaska—whose money apparently went to Cohen’s slush fund—took Sergei Prikhodko, Russia’s deputy prime minister, on an August 2016 cruise on his yacht with a very young paid female companion on board who goes by the name Nastya Rybka. Rybka shared a video she recorded of the two of them discussing the US election and says she has 16 hours more of recordings containing valuable information for the Mueller investigation. The Putin regime found the video—and an opposition candidate’s interpretation of it—so significant that the government attempted to shut down YouTube in Russia. Rybka is currently imprisoned in Thailand on prostitution charges. The New York Times reports that earlier this year she said, “If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know. I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.” The US seems disinclined to take her or take a look at her evidence.

More recently the National Enquirer ran a hit piece on Michael Cohen, which makes it seem possible that Cohen is going to rat on Trump and the forces lined up with Trump are going to try to discredit him. CNN reports that it “could be a strong sign President Donald Trump is upset with his personal lawyer and turning against the man,” as though it’s normal for the president to use the tabloids to discredit longtime allies. Acts that would have been shocking if committed by previous administrations are overshadowed and crowded by equally transgressive acts that pile up into something that would like us to forget that this is not normal. Even when Trump is gone, the corruption of a significant percent of the American population, those with whom we don’t merely disagree on principles and goals, but on reality itself, will be a lingering problem. They are weaponized minds, and their hate, as hate always is, is easily directed. The Republican Party itself now stands for little other than its own grasp on power, and for the domination of this country’s white male Christian-identified minority over the majority of us. (...)

The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate.

by Rebecca Solnit, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Tillerson Says Lies Are a Threat to Democracy]

'Americans are Being Held Hostage and Terrorized by the Fringes’

Arthur Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, the center-right Washington think tank that has, amid a decade of turmoil inside the Republican Party, remained a sober, respected voice on matters of policy—while gradually shedding its George W. Bush-era reputation as a leading voice for pugnacious, interventionist foreign policy.

Brooks, who is stepping down in June 2019 after 10 years at the helm of AEI, has consistently struck me as the smartest figure on the American right—someone not given to bouts of provocation or hyperbole, but rather someone who speaks with equal authority on macroeconomics and family budgeting, global starvation and American giving, corporate structure and worker behavior, cultural evolution and societal happiness.

Brooks also conjures comparisons to “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the character in the Dos Equis beer commercials. He performed as a professional French hornist before entering the world of academia. He converted to Roman Catholicism when he was 16 after a quasi-supernatural experience at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. He met his future wife, who spoke no English, while touring in France—and immediately moved to Barcelona to learn Spanish and begin his courtship. He befriended the Dalai Lama during a trip to India some years ago, leading to repeated visits with one another and a joint New York Times op-ed.

Less flashy but equally fascinating—at least in the annals of Washington— Brooks enhanced AEI’s reputation as an engine of introspection and debate, even as anti-intellectualism and lowest-common-denominator conservatism became the currency of the modern GOP. Brooks employs scholars from across the ideological spectrum, including Never-Trumpers, and unlike the rival Heritage Foundation, AEI has kept its distance from the administration.

In March, Brooks announced his impending retirement. We sat down recently to discuss the polarization of the electorate, the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the reason he remains optimistic about America’s future. Excerpts of that conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.

***

POLITICO Magazine: For conservatism, for Republicanism, for the institutions of government and for the country as a whole, from your perch over the past 10 years, what went wrong?

Arthur Brooks: For me, unity is a really big deal. By that I don’t mean agreement. The founding model in this place was super old school—a competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society, which was so subversive in the ’30s and ’40s because there was no competition of ideas. Disagreement is the essence of how we can unify as a people. We have a moral consensus about pushing opportunity out to people who need it most. Then we actually have to become a constellation of disagreement around that so that we can find the best way to do it. In the same way that you need a competition within the economy so that you can serve consumers best. Competition is hugely important in all areas. It’s a moral good. When you basically see a culture that's not trying to win competition vigorously and civilly and respectfully, but rather trying to shut down competition by any means necessary, that’s like an economy that's going from free enterprise to mercantilism. That’s basically what’s happened. We’ve gone from free enterprise of ideas to mercantilism of ideas. That’s what’s happening on both right and left today. That’s really disappointing.

Now, I’m sanguine still. Why? Because that happens periodically and competition also always wins out. There are basically two kinds of people in life: people who want to win competition and people who want to shut it down. People who don’t understand competition actually are the ones who want to shut it down because they don’t understand that competition requires rules. It requires moral precepts. Pepsi doesn’t want to go blow up the Coca-Cola bottling factory. It wants to take their customers fair and square for the better product and better pricing. The same thing should be true in American politics and policy.

PM: So you see intellectual sabotage?

Brooks: Yeah, and it’s not just unfair, it’s stupid because it leads to mediocrity. It leads to a flaccid set of political parties and not very creative ideas. When you’re shutting down the competition like this you don’t solve problems. You perpetuate problems, and you simply build up power structures. So all politics becomes a rent-seeking mechanism: my tribe, your tribe. I’m going to get power, I’m going to deny you power as opposed to colluding within the kind of the noble cause of solving ideas by competing at the head. What’s always disappointing to me is when we’re moving in the wrong direction and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction on that by moving to intellectual mercantilism. I want to move to intellectual free enterprise. That’s what I want.

PM: And the folks who want to suppress competition of ideas now have tools at their disposal the likes of which they’ve never had before, to do just that.

Brooks: I have a book coming out next year called The Culture of Contempt. We’ve created a culture of not anger, not disagreement, it’s contempt. And we need to strike back. We’re the majority. We don’t want this. Americans are being held hostage and terrorized by the fringes. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not like 50 percent of Americans thinks one thing and 50 percent thinks another thing. No, 15 percent on each side are effectively controlling the conversation and 70 percent of us don’t hate each other. I can ask any audience, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” Every hand goes up. And yet, you’re willing to have somebody, some fringe person on your side of the debate, say that your brother-in-law or your mother or your aunt is evil and stupid.

PM: But isn’t the problem more that the fringe used to be called “the fringe” for a reason—and today the fringe represents a broader chunk of both politicians and voters?

Brooks: They always do in this cycle. It’s always the case that when you get into a time of really big political polarization, that people are manipulated by people who are at the fringe. It’s only in retrospect that people go, “Whoa, man, I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that we were putting up with that.” We need a kind of an ethical populism. What basically happened is that political establishment was a little bit too reticent. It was not paying attention, and the result was that the fringe picked up the football and ran off with it. But there’s going to be a backlash. If I have anything to say about it, there’s going to be a backlash of people who say that your radical, hateful views, and I’m no liberal, but I don’t hate liberals. I refuse to hate liberals. Refuse. I think there’s a lot of Americans that want to join me in that.

PM: How do you think we got to this point?

Brooks: The two things to read are Reinhart and Rogoff’s book, This Time Is Different. It came out in 2010—the single best book ever on financial cycles and financial crisis. The second is an article that was written in the European Economic Review in early 2017 by three German economists that looks at the knock-on political effect of financial crises—not a regular recession, but a big overhang of assets that becomes a bubble and then pops, which typically happens a couple times a century. So it’s silver and the railroads in 1894 and 1896, or it’s the stock market in 1929, or it's the real estate market in ’08. The most interesting thing for me is that in the decade after a financial crisis, the knock-on effect over 10 years is not low growth, it’s uneven growth. The big thing that happens for 10 years is that you have asymmetric economic growth where 80 percent of the income distribution gets none of the rewards of the growth after the recession. Of course you get populism after that. It’s natural. It’s just the way it works.

PM: But populism is not inherently a bad thing.

Brooks: Bernie Sanders is a populist. Bernie Sanders’ populism is all about scapegoating. It’s rich people, it’s bankers, it’s Republicans—it’s all these people who got your stuff. That’s the kind of populism that we frequently see as opposed to a kind of ethical populism, which basically says we have good values, let’s go share. Let’s make sure that our values are ascendant to save our country. Right? Wouldn't that be great? But it turns out it’s easier in the political process when people are suffering a lot to say somebody came and got your stuff. Whether it’s immigrants or whether it’s trading partners or whether it’s bankers or whatever.

PM: What about conservatism? In your nine years at AEI, what’s been the single most important, most fundamental change you have seen in conservatism itself?

Brooks: Well for sure it’s the rise to Trump.

by Tim Alberta, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
[ed. Great interview, although my perspective on the question of 'how we got here' wouldn't be limited to just the Great Recession. There's also: a dishonest and ill-conceived war with Iraq (and everything that followed - legitimizing torture; a new Homeland Security bureaucracy and rise of the surveillance state; the demise of habeas corpus and the normalization of indefinite political imprisonment; neoliberalism in general (including the demise of Glass-Steagall) and the focus on maximizing short-term corporate shareholder profit as a national economic policy, etc.); plus, John McCain's decision to cast Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. It's just been a cascading series of moral and ethical failures since 9/11 - but beginning with the Reagan administration.]