Getting a Flood of G.D.P.R.-Related Privacy Policy Updates? Read Them.

You have probably noticed a flood of emails and alerts from companies in the past few weeks informing you about changes to their privacy policies.

Don’t ignore them.

Yes, there is a lot of legalese to wade through. But resist the temptation to immediately delete those emails or close the alerts right away. They may contain important information about managing your digital privacy at a time when it’s become clear that our online data is far from safe.

All those privacy messages are appearing now because a law called the General Data Protection Regulation will go into effect across the European Union on Friday. The law has been heralded as the world’s strongest protector of digital privacy rights. And while it was designed for Europeans, the borderless nature of the online world has virtually every commercial entity that touches the web making changes to its sites and apps to comply.

The data regulation law centers on two main principles. The first is that companies need your consent to collect your data. The second is that you should be required to share only data that is necessary to make their services work.

Danny O’Brien, a director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered this analogy: “A birthday cake company needs your name to put on the birthday cake. If it isn’t essential information, you can deny them consent to use that data and you still have to get the service.”

If companies don’t comply with the new rules, they can be fined up to 4 percent of their global revenue. But you should expect businesses that rely on advertising revenue to work hard to persuade as many of us as possible to give our consent for them to collect as much data as possible. Companies can do that by making it easy for people to give permission, and immensely complicated to opt out.

So to ensure you benefit from the new law, it helps to examine the revamped privacy policies we are all getting. Here is what to look for.

by Brian X. Chen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Minh Uong/The New York Times

Louisa Howard, Pollen
via:

Lawmakers Officially Forget the Financial Crisis

The U.S. Congress might have just set a record for shortness of memory: Just 10 years after a crisis that nearly brought down the global financial system, it’s loosening the safeguards designed to prevent a repeat. Now it’s up to regulators — and specifically the Federal Reserve — to ensure that the backsliding doesn’t go too far.

Prodded by President Donald Trump to “do a big number” on the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform, the House and Senate have agreed on a bill, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. It’s not a major rollback, and it provides some welcome relief for community banks, but it does take aim at a crucial guarantor of financial resilience: the equity capital that allows banks to absorb losses in difficult times.

The bill eases capital requirements for “custodial” institutions such as State Street and Bank of New York Mellon. These are among the most systemically important because they facilitate other banks’ transactions. What’s more, it does this by complicating a key measure of capital, known as the leverage ratio, which is meant to be a simple supplement to more easily manipulated regulatory metrics.

The bill also frees regional banks with less than $250 billion in assets from company-run stress tests and from special Fed supervision. That threshold is too high: Many of those banks are large, and institutions in this category required billions of dollars in taxpayer support to get through the last crisis.

The changes could be viewed in a more positive light if the banks had plenty of capital. They don’t. Some barely squeaked by in the last round of stress tests, and the largest have as little as $6 in equity for each $100 in assets — not nearly enough to avoid distress in a severe crisis. The loosening is also poorly timed: risks in the financial system are mounting, and banks have been reducing their reserves against bad loans.

by The Editors, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Invisible Asymptotes

"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." - Sun Tzu

My first job at Amazon was as the first analyst in strategic planning, the forward-looking counterpart to accounting, which records what already happened. We maintained several time horizons for our forward forecasts, from granular monthly forecasts to quarterly and annual forecasts to even five and ten year forecasts for the purposes of fund-raising and, well, strategic planning.

One of the most difficult things to forecast was our adoption rate. We were a public company, though, and while Jeff would say, publicly, that "in the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run, it's a scale," that doesn't provide any air cover for strategic planning. It's your job to know what's going to happen in the future as best as possible, and every CFO of a public company will tell you that they take the forward guidance portion of their job seriously. Because of information asymmetry, analysts who cover your company depend quite a bit on guidance on quarterly earnings calls to shape their forecasts and coverage for their clients. It's not just that giving the wrong guidance might lead to a correction in your stock price but that it might indicate that you really have no idea where your business is headed, a far more damaging long-run reveal.

It didn't take long for me to see that our visibility out a few months, quarters, and even a year was really accurate (and precise!). What was more of a puzzle, though, was the long-term outlook. Every successful business goes through the famous S-curve, and most companies, and their investors, spend a lot of time looking for that inflection point towards hockey-stick growth. But just as important, and perhaps less well studied, is that unhappy point later in the S-curve, when you hit a shoulder and experience a flattening of growth.

One of the huge advantages for us at Amazon was that we always had a fairly good proxy for our total addressable market (TAM). It was easy to pull the statistics for the size of the global book market. Just as a rule of thumb, one could say that if we took 10% of the global book market it would mean our annual revenues would be X. One could be really optimistic and say that we might even expand the TAM, but finance tends to be the conservative group in the company by nature (only the paranoid survive and all that).

When I joined Amazon I was thrown almost immediately into working with a bunch of MBA's on business plans for music, video, packaged software, magazines, and international. I came to think of our long-term TAM as a straightforward layer cake of different retail markets.

Still, the gradient of adoption was somewhat of a mystery. I could, in my model, understand that one side of it was just exposure. That is, we could not obtain customers until they'd heard of us, and I could segment all of those paths of exposure into fairly reliable buckets: referrals from affiliate sites (we called them Associates), referrals from portals (AOL, Excite, Yahoo, etc.), and word-of-mouth (this was pre-social networking but post-email so the velocity of word-of-mouth was slower than it is today). Awareness is also readily trackable through any number of well-tested market research methodologies.

Still, for every customer who heard of Amazon, how could I forecast whether they'd make a purchase or not? Why would some people use the service while others decided to pass?

For so many startups and even larger tech incumbents, the point at which they hit the shoulder in the S-curve is a mystery, and I suspect the failure to see it occurs much earlier. The good thing is that identifying the enemy sooner allows you to address it. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit.

For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It's an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or, as I was back then, a planner in finance.

Amazon's invisible asymptote

Fortunately for Amazon, and perhaps critical to much of its growth over the years, perhaps the single most important asymptote was one we identified very early on. Where our growth would flatten if we did not change our path was, in large part, due to this single factor.

We had two ways we were able to flush out this enemy. For people who did shop with us, we had, for some time, a pop-up survey that would appear right after you'd placed your order, at the end of the shopping cart process. It was a single question, asking why you didn't purchase more often from Amazon. For people who'd never shopped with Amazon, we had a third party firm conduct a market research survey where we'd ask those people why they did not shop from Amazon.

Both converged, without any ambiguity, on one factor. You don't even need to rewind to that time to remember what that factor is because I suspect it's the same asymptote governing e-commerce and many other related businesses today.

Shipping fees.

People hate paying for shipping. They despise it. It may sound banal, even self-evident, but understanding that was, I'm convinced, so critical to much of how we unlocked growth at Amazon over the years.

People don't just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree. We know this because our first attempt to address this was to show, in the shopping cart and checkout process, that even after paying shipping, customers were saving money over driving to their local bookstore to buy a book because, at the time, most Amazon customers did not have to pay sales tax. That wasn't even factoring in the cost of getting to the store, the depreciation costs on the car, and the value of their time.

People didn't care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time. Most time we spend isn't like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback.

Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment.

You can't imagine what a relief it is to have a single overarching obstacle to focus on as a product person. It's the same for anyone trying to solve a problem. Half the comfort of diets that promise huge weight loss in exchange for cutting out sugar or carbs or whatever is feeling like there's a really simple solution or answer to a hitherto intractable, multi-dimensional problem.

Solving people's distaste for paying shipping fees became a multi-year effort at Amazon. Our next crack at this was Super Saver Shipping: if you placed an order of $25 or more of qualified items, which included mostly products in stock at Amazon, you'd receive free standard shipping.

The problem with this program, of course, was that it caused customers to reduce their order frequency, waiting until their orders qualified for the free shipping. In select cases, forcing customers to minimize consumption of your product-service is the right long-term strategy, but this wasn't one of those.

That brings us to Amazon Prime. This is a good time to point out that shipping physical goods isn't free. Again, self-evident, but it meant that modeling Amazon Prime could lead to widely diverging financial outcomes depending on what you thought it would do to the demand curve and average order composition.

To his credit, Jeff decided to forego testing and just go for it. It's not so uncommon in technology to focus on growth to the exclusion of all other things and then solve for monetization in the long run, but it's easier to do so for a social network than a retail business with real unit economics. The more you sell, the more you lose is not and has never been a sustainable business model (people confuse this for Amazon's business model all the time, and still do, which ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

The rest, of course, is history. Or at least near-term history. It turns out that you can have people pre-pay for shipping through a program like Prime and they're incredibly happy to make the trade. And yes, on some orders, and for some customers, the financial trade may be a lossy one for the business, but on net, the dramatic shift in the demand curve is stunning and game-changing. (...)

Prime is a type of scale moat for Amazon because it isn't easy for other retailers to match from a sheer economic and logistical standpoint. As noted before, shipping isn't actually free when you have to deliver physical goods. The really challenging unit economics of delivery businesses like Postmates, when paired with people's aversion for paying for shipping, makes for tough sledding, at least until the cost of delivering such goods can be lowered drastically, perhaps by self-driving cars or drones or some such technology shift.

Furthermore, very few customers shop enough with retailers other than Amazon to make a pre-pay program like Prime worthwhile to them. Even if they did, it's very likely Amazon's economies of scale in shipping and deep knowledge of how to distribute their inventory optimally means their unit economics on delivery are likely superior.

The net of it is that long before Amazon hit what would've been an invisible asymptote on its e-commerce growth it had already erased it.

Know thine enemy.

by Eugene Wei, Remains of the Day |  Read more:

Image: Stratechery, uncredited

The Compleat Angler Calendar: January

‘and ‘tis no matter how fine you fish, for nothing will rise in this Month but a Grayling, and of them I never at this season saw any taken with a Flie, of above a foot long in my life: but of the little ones about the bigness of a smelt in a warm day, and a glowing Sun, you may take enough… the whole Month through’.

A Back’s grayling and a cross-section of its gill. Coloured etching by J. Curtis.
via:

Creative Commons via Wellcome Library, London.

Sonic Youth

[ed. Time flies.]

The Five Best Alternatives to Google URL Shortener

If you've ever relied on goo.gl to tighten up links for you, it's time to start thinking about alternative URL shorteners. Google ended support for its Google URL Shortener at the end of March 2018 and is taking a year to fully phase out the tool.

URL shorteners make sharing written-out links more manageable. Say you want to provide a link on a business card, in an advertisement, or in an email format where hyperlinking isn't ideal. A shortened URL takes up less space and keeps your text tidy. For example, using goo.gl, you can convert https://www.blog.google/products/maps/wheres-waldo-find-him-google-maps/... to https://goo.gl/rVBBtP. It's easier to read and easier for someone to copy and paste or type.

Some URL shorteners do little more than turn long links into short ones, while others let you customize the text of the new URLs, track click-through rates, and analyze other information about who's clicking your links. Most URL shorteners have a free tier of service, but you often have to pay for added features, such as data and analysis. The five that made the cut for this list are easy to use and access, and each one stands out for one special reason, noted as "Best for" below.

Here are the best URL shortening services to replace goo.gl, followed by details of how and why Google is shutting down the service.

The Five Best Goo.gl Alternatives:
Bit.ly
Polr
Rebrandly
TinyURL
URL Shortener by Zapier

by Jill Duffy, Zapier |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Hodaka Yoshida
via:

Bach at the Burger King

Weaponized classical music

At the corner of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsichord at deafening volumes. The music never stops. Night and day, Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi rain down from Burger King rooftops onto empty streets.

Empty streets, however, are the target audience for this concert. The playlist has been selected to repel sidewalk listeners — specifically, the mid-Market homeless who once congregated outside the restaurant doors that served as a neighborhood hub for the indigent. Outside the BART escalator, an encampment of grocery carts, sleeping bags, and plastic tarmacs had evolved into a sidewalk shantytown attracting throngs of squatters and street denizens. “There used to be a mob that would hang out there,” remarked local resident David Allen, “and now there may be just one or two people.” When I passed the corner, the only sign of life I found was a trembling woman crouched on the pavement, head in hand, as classical harpsichord besieged her ears.

This tactic was suggested by a cryptic organization called the Central Market Community Benefit District, a nonprofit collective of neighborhood property owners whose mission statement strikes an Orwellian note: “The CMCBD makes the Central Market area a safer, more attractive, more desirable place to work, live, shop, locate a business and own property by delivering services beyond those the City of San Francisco can provide.” These supra-civic services seem to consist primarily of finding tasteful ways to displace the destitute.

The inspiration for the Burger King plan, a CMCBD official commented, came from the London Underground. In 2005, the metro system started playing orchestral soundtracks in 65 tube stations as part of a scheme to deter “anti-social” behavior, after the surprising success of a 2003 pilot program. The pilot’s remarkable results — seeing train robberies fall 33 percent, verbal assaults on staff drop 25 percent, and vandalism decrease 37 percent after just 18 months of classical music — caught the eye of the global law-enforcement community. Thus, an international phenomenon was born. Since then, weaponized classical music has spread throughout England and the world: police units across the planet now deploy the string quartet as the latest addition to their crime-fighting arsenal, recruiting Officer Johann Sebastian as the newest member of the force.

Experts trace the practice’s origins back to a drowsy 7-Eleven in British Columbia in 1985, where some clever Canadian manager played Mozart outside the store to repel parking-lot loiterers. Mozart-in-the-Parking-Lot was so successful at discouraging teenage reprobates that 7-Eleven implemented the program at over 150 stores, becoming the first company to battle vandalism with the viola. Then the idea spread to West Palm Beach, Florida, where in 2001 the police confronted a drug-ridden street corner by installing a loudspeaker booming Beethoven and Mozart. “The officers were amazed when at 10 o’clock at night there was not a soul on the corner,” remarked Detective Dena Kimberlin. Soon other police departments “started calling.” From that point, the tactic — now codified as an official maneuver in the Polite Policeman’s Handbook — exploded in popularity for both private companies and public institutions. Over the last decade, symphonic security has swept across the globe as a standard procedure from Australia to Alaska. (...)

Baroque music seems to make the most potent repellant. “[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,” notes critic Scott Timberg, “the music used to scatter hoodlums is pre-Romantic, by Baroque or Classical-era composers such as Vivaldi or Mozart.” Public administrators seldom speculate on the underlying reasons why the music is so effective but often tout the results with a certain pugnacious pride. As a Cleveland official explained, “There’s something about Baroque music that macho wannabe-gangster types hate.” The police chief of Tacoma, Washington, echoed the same logic (and the same phrasing): “By playing classical music, we hope to create an unpleasant environment for criminals and gangster-wannabes.” One London subway observer voiced the punitive mindset behind the strategy in bluntest terms: “These juvenile delinquents are saying ‘Well, we can either stand here and listen to what we regard as this absolute rubbish, or our alternative — we can, you know, take our delinquency elsewhere.’”

Take your delinquency elsewhere could be the subtext under every tune in the classical crime-fighting movement. It is crucial to remember that the tactic does not aim to stop or even necessarily reduce crime — but to relocate it. Moreover, such mercenary measures most often target minor infractions like vandalism and loitering — crimes that damage property, not people, and usually the property of the powerful. “[B]usiness and government leaders,” Lily Hirsch observes in Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, “are seizing on classical music not as a positive moralizing force, but as a marker of space.” In a strange mutation, classical music devolves from a “universal language of mankind” reminding all people of their common humanity into a sonic border fence protecting privileged areas from common crowds, telling the plebes in auditory code that “you’re not welcome here.”

So our metaphor for music’s power must change from panacea to punishment, from unifying to separating force, as its purpose slips from aesthetic or spiritual ennoblement into economic relocation. Mozart has traded in a career as doctor for the soul to become an eviction agent for the poor.

Thus music returns to its oldest evolutionary function: claiming territory. Zoological research suggests that the original function of birdsong was not only attracting mates (as Darwin argued) but also asserting territorial rights. Experiments have demonstrated that birds usually refrain from entering regions where they hear recorded birdsong playing. These aggressive aspects of avian song extended to early humans. Primatologist Thomas Geissman speculates: “[E]arly hominid music may also have served functions resembling those of ape loud calls […] including territorial advertisement; intergroup intimidation and spacing.” The songs have changed, but the melody is the same — Warning: Private Property. Music carves public space into private territory, signaling certain areas are off limits to certain groups through orchestral “intimidation.” And no genre carries more intimidating upper-class associations than classical music.

by Theodore Gioia, LARB | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Comments]

How to Buy a Home in the Seattle Area: A Survival Guide

What does it really take to buy a home in the Seattle area? There are the skyrocketing prices, of course.

But nowadays, to compete in this feverish market, buyers have to deal with so much more: Pay for damage the seller doesn’t disclose. Decide whether to buy a house just a couple days after it hits the market. Have a six-figure cash nest egg saved up for a down payment and nonrefundable earnest money.

Will you let the old owners continue living in your new house for months after you buy it? Can you compete with a pool of buyers where 1 in 4 people are paying with all cash? Are you ready for heartbreak if you get outbid on your dream home even when stretching to make your highest possible offer?

Our reporting found the average buyer will tour dozens of houses, lose to higher bids about three to five times, and pursue a house for six months to a year before finally getting a home. Many buyers likened the process to a full-time job.

“It was just all-consuming,” said Michael McDermott, who bought a house with his wife in North Seattle last year. “You have to always be on guard and always be ready. It’s such a rabid market that it can get out of control really fast.”

We talked to dozens of people who know the market best — buyers, sellers, brokers and lenders from around the Puget Sound region — to put together a complete homebuying survival guide. (...)

Saving Up
Getting a Loan
Picking a Lender
Picking Your Broker
Start Searching
Act Quickly
Edges are No Longer a Bargain
Look for 'Stinkers'
Off-Market Sales
Homes That Need Work
Duplicate Houses (...)

Begin Bidding

Here, we get to the most frenzied part of the homebuying process today.

Historically, there was one big decision you had to make when putting in an offer on a home: how much you’re willing to pay. In today’s competitive market — where nine in 10 homes in Seattle provoke bidding wars — buyers must also add sweeteners that add tremendous risk and sometimes higher costs to their bid. Each one is relatively standard now in competitive markets, and becoming more common in outlying areas.

Appraisal contingency: Your mortgage doesn’t automatically cover your purchase price — it only covers what a neutral third party, known as an appraiser, decides it’s worth. In the past, it was rare for appraisals to come in with a value far below the purchase price, but recently, buyers have started to feverishly bid up homes past what the market fundamentals dictate.

This is a concern for sellers — if buyers wind up with a mortgage loan that’s lower than what they planned, they might back out of the deal or ask to lower the price. So, to win over uneasy sellers, most successful buyers now must “waive” the appraisal contingency as part of their initial bid — guaranteeing they will pay their bid price, no matter what the appraisal will be. So if a buyer agrees to buy a house for $750,000 but the appraiser says it’s only worth $700,000, the buyer is on the hook for paying the remaining $50,000 in cash.

Practically speaking, this means buyers can’t max out their down payment with all the cash they have saved up, because they might need some more if the appraisal comes in low.

Inspection contingency: Most buyers will get a pre-inspection before bidding on a house; this is a $200 to $300 walk-through with a licensed professional who will assess the home’s basic condition — and that is all you’ll have time to do since homes sell quickly. In the 30 or so days between when a seller agrees to accept your offer and the deal closes, you can have a much more thorough inspection that would reveal the full extent of problems in a house. This is particularly important for older homes.

In the past, a detailed inspection that showed the roof needed $10,000 in undisclosed work might have yielded a renegotiation to lower the sale price; now, however, to be competitive most buyers must “waive” the inspection contingency, meaning they’ll pay the full price no matter what the inspection turns up. This is can be a huge source of anxiety for buyers who may not fully know what they’re getting themselves into.

Matt van Winkle, a RE/MAX broker in Seattle, has heard stories of buyers having to pay as much as $100,000 in repairs that they didn’t find out about until after they were on the hook for the sale. Local courts have generally sided with the sellers in these cases.

“You see it all the time, where you know it’s just something waiting to happen,” van Winkle said. “There are buyers that are just being foolish, and they do win sometimes because they either don’t know what they’re doing or they’re willing to be as aggressive as necessary to get a property.”

Two items that come up a lot: The side sewer (which often needs replacement in older local homes) — crews can send a camera through the line, called a scope, to check it for about $250; and the oil tank, another common item in older homes that must have a “decommission certificate” showing it’s been buried or removed.

“Just about anything you find during inspection isn’t going to alter the sale price, which is remarkable for me,” said Singh, the Wedgwood homebuyer. The seller of his new home made a $200,000 profit over what they had paid nine months prior. “But in this market, that’s how it is. Including rats being in the property. OK, you pay a million bucks for a rat-filled house.”

Financing contingency: Typically you can back out of a home purchase if your mortgage loan falls through. But it’s standard for buyers to “waive” the financing contingency, guaranteeing they will buy the home regardless.

Title contingency: Washington law mandates that sellers must provide a title to the home, listing some vital stats on the property. If there’s a surprise in the title — like unpaid property taxes or a driveway that’s actually shared with a neighbor — a buyer can back out or renegotiate the price. Sellers do not want to deal with this uncertainty, though. Most buyers now must “waive” the title contingency, meaning they can get a title full of surprises and have no recourse. A dive into public records databases can reveal some of the things that the title would unearth, however.

“I can never advise” waiving all those contingencies, Jaime Stenwick, a RE/MAX broker in Seattle, said. “But I have to tell them their offer is probably not going to be accepted if they don’t.”

Rentbacks: You may be under the mistaken impression that once you buy a home, you can now live in it. But these days sellers are often under the gun to turn around and buy a home in the same crazy market, so they may want a few months to continue living in their home while they search for their next house. It’s common for buyers to agree to delay their move into their new home by granting 60-day or 90-day rentbacks to the sellers.

Nonrefundable earnest money: Buyers have long typically forked over a small amount, like 1 percent of the purchase price, in cash once the deal is initially agreed upon. Now buyers are offering upwards of 5 percent in earnest money. That amounts to about $40,000 on the typical Seattle house. And more buyers are giving this money away as a nonrefundable payment — another new twist — so if the deal falls through, your money is gone.

Other tips on bidding

The letter: Just about everyone now sends sellers a letter about how much they love the house — complete with cute pictures of their kids — so when you write one you’re only separating yourself from developers and investors to prove you’re a real person. The hard truth, though, is that a lot of these letters wind up in the trash. Some listing agents refuse to show them to their clients for fear that emotion will get in the way of the highest offer. Of course, some sellers do care, and want their house to go to a good family, especially for the neighbors they’re leaving behind.

Ask to be No. 2: Savvy buyers can ask to be placed second in line in case the winner’s offer falls through, or they back out of the purchase.

That way, said Laurie Way, a Coldwell Banker Bain broker in Seattle who has used that strategy, “They don’t start taking offers all over again — you just slide right in.”

by Mike Rosenberg, Seattle Times | Read more:

Image: Emily M. Eng

Alec DeCaprio

[ed. Kids! Damn ... I hate 'em. Backing track here:]

U.S. Military Defends Controversial Decision To Test Kilauea Volcano On Hawaiian Civilians

Explaining the strategy behind the recent domestic deployment of their new geological weapon, U.S. military officials released a statement Friday defending their much-criticized decision to test the Kilauea volcano on Hawaiian civilians. “The defense of our nation is paramount, and as recently as last month, we lacked a comprehensive practical understanding of the costs, side effects, and ultimate strategic advantages of deploying the Kilauea volcano in a real-world environment,” said U.S. Air Force General and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Paul Selva, who declared the launch of the top-secret, $65 billion military project as an unequivocal success. “We anticipated that the residents of Hawaii would be frustrated with the number of homes destroyed by lava and the amount of volcanic ash particles in the air, but those who would denounce this vital military initiative need to remember that Hawaii is actually sparsely populated and far more isolated relative to other potential test areas. From a military perspective, Project Kilauea Eruption is now ready for frontline use in future conflicts, so in the long run, volcanic tests on American citizens are part of our very real commitment to protecting American lives.” Pentagon sources disclosed that the Kilauea project was fast-tracked after recent seismic activity in North Korea suggested that they were developing several volcanoes of their own.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: USGS via

[ed. See also: How Trump changed everything for The Onion]

Lexington Lab Band

[ed. Lynyrd Skynyrd classic (... and here's a Huey Lewis one too). If you play guitar, check out the lessons (and covers) on tondr's (Dale Adams') excellent YouTube channel. See also: Lexington Lab Band - The Making of a Band. Update: Heart (Straight On).]

Abigail Heyman, Untitled, 1971
via:

Library Signs

Library signs
via:

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).]

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