Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points

A Nash equilibrium is an outcome in which neither player is willing to unilaterally change her strategy, and they are often applied to games in which both players move simultaneously and where decision trees are less useful.

Suppose my girlfriend and I have both lost our cell phones and cannot contact each other. Both of us would really like to spend more time at home with each other (utility 3). But both of us also have a slight preference in favor of working late and earning some overtime (utility 2). If I go home and my girlfriend's there and I can spend time with her, great. If I stay at work and make some money, that would be pretty okay too. But if I go home and my girlfriend's not there and I have to sit around alone all night, that would be the worst possible outcome (utility 1). Meanwhile, my girlfriend has the same set of preferences: she wants to spend time with me, she'd be okay with working late, but she doesn't want to sit at home alone.

This “game” has two Nash equilibria. If we both go home, neither of us regrets it: we can spend time with each other and we've both got our highest utility. If we both stay at work, again, neither of us regrets it: since my girlfriend is at work, I am glad I stayed at work instead of going home, and since I am at work, my girlfriend is glad she stayed at work instead of going home. Although we both may wish that we had both gone home, neither of us specifically regrets our own choice, given our knowledge of how the other acted.

When all players in a game are reasonable, the (apparently) rational choice will be to go for a Nash equilibrium (why would you want to make a choice you'll regret when you know what the other player chose?) And since John Nash (remember that movie A Beautiful Mind?) proved that every game has at least one, all games between well-informed rationalists (who are not also being superrational in a sense to be discussed later) should end in one of these.

What if the game seems specifically designed to thwart Nash equilibria? Suppose you are a general invading an enemy country's heartland. You can attack one of two targets, East City or West City (you declared war on them because you were offended by their uncreative toponyms). The enemy general only has enough troops to defend one of the two cities. If you attack an undefended city, you can capture it easily, but if you attack the city with the enemy army, they will successfully fight you off.

Here there is no Nash equilibrium without introducing randomness. If both you and your enemy choose to go to East City, you will regret your choice - you should have gone to West and taken it undefended. If you go to East and he goes to West, he will regret his choice - he should have gone East and stopped you in your tracks. Reverse the names, and the same is true of the branches where you go to West City. So every option has someone regretting their choice, and there is no simple Nash equilibrium. What do you do?

Here the answer should be obvious: it doesn't matter. Flip a coin. If you flip a coin, and your opponent flips a coin, neither of you will regret your choice. Here we see a "mixed Nash equilibrium", an equilibrium reached with the help of randomness.

We can formalize this further. Suppose you are attacking a different country with two new potential targets: Metropolis and Podunk. Metropolis is a rich and strategically important city (utility: 10); Podunk is an out of the way hamlet barely worth the trouble of capturing it (utility: 1).

A so-called first-level player thinks: “Well, Metropolis is a better prize, so I might as well attack that one. That way, if I win I get 10 utility instead of 1”

A second-level player thinks: “Obviously Metropolis is a better prize, so my enemy expects me to attack that one. So if I attack Podunk, he'll never see it coming and I can take the city undefended.”

A third-level player thinks: “Obviously Metropolis is a better prize, so anyone clever would never do something as obvious as attack there. They'd attack Podunk instead. But my opponent knows that, so, seeking to stay one step ahead of me, he has defended Podunk. He will never expect me to attack Metropolis, because that would be too obvious. Therefore, the city will actually be undefended, so I should take Metropolis.”

And so on ad infinitum, until you become hopelessly confused and have no choice but to spend years developing a resistance to iocane powder.

But surprisingly, there is a single best solution to this problem, even if you are playing against an opponent who, like Professor Quirrell, plays “one level higher than you.” (...)

In The Art of Strategy, Dixit and Nalebuff cite a real-life application of the same principle in, of all things, penalty kicks in soccer. A right-footed kicker has a better chance of success if he kicks to the right, but a smart goalie can predict that and will defend to the right; a player expecting this can accept a less spectacular kick to the left if he thinks the left will be undefended, but a very smart goalie can predict this too, and so on. Economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta laboriously analyzed the success rates of various kickers and goalies on the field, and found that they actually pursued a mixed strategy generally within 2% of the game theoretic ideal, proving that people are pretty good at doing these kinds of calculations unconsciously. (...)

Here we might be tempted to just leave it to chance; after all, there's a 50% probability we'll both end up choosing the same activity. But other games might have thousands or millions of possible equilibria and so will require a more refined approach.

Art of Strategy describes a game show in which two strangers were separately taken to random places in New York and promised a prize if they could successfully meet up; they had no communication with one another and no clues about how such a meeting was to take place. Here there are a nearly infinite number of possible choices: they could both meet at the corner of First Street and First Avenue at 1 PM, they could both meet at First Street and Second Avenue at 1:05 PM, etc. Since neither party would regret their actions (if I went to First and First at 1 and found you there, I would be thrilled) these are all Nash equilibria.

Despite this mind-boggling array of possibilities, in fact all six episodes of this particular game ended with the two contestants meeting successfully after only a few days. The most popular meeting site was the Empire State Building at noon.

How did they do it? The world-famous Empire State Building is what game theorists call focal: it stands out as a natural and obvious target for coordination. Likewise noon, classically considered the very middle of the day, is a focal point in time. These focal points, also called Schelling points after theorist Thomas Schelling who discovered them, provide an obvious target for coordination attempts.

What makes a Schelling point? [ed.] The most important factor is that it be special. The Empire State Building, depending on when the show took place, may have been the tallest building in New York; noon is the only time that fits the criteria of “exactly in the middle of the day”, except maybe midnight when people would be expected to be too sleepy to meet up properly.

Of course, specialness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. David Friedman writes:

Two people are separately confronted with the list of numbers [2, 5, 9, 25, 69, 73, 82, 96, 100, 126, 150 ] and offered a reward if they independently choose the same number. If the two are mathematicians, it is likely that they will both choose 2—the only even prime. Non-mathematicians are likely to choose 100—a number which seems, to the mathematicians, no more unique than the other two exact squares. Illiterates might agree on 69, because of its peculiar symmetry—as would, for a different reason, those whose interest in numbers is more prurient than mathematical.

A recent open thread comment pointed out that you can justify anything with “for decision-theoretic reasons” or “due to meta-level concerns”. I humbly propose adding “as a Schelling point” to this list, except that the list is tongue-in-cheek and Schelling points really do explain almost everything - stock markets, national borders, marriages, private property, religions, fashion, political parties, peace treaties, social networks, software platforms and languages all involve or are based upon Schelling points. In fact, whenever something has “symbolic value” a Schelling point is likely to be involved in some way.

by Scott Alexander, Less Wrong |  Read more:
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What is Education For?

Education has no clear purpose. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation that there are numerous conflicting visions of what education is “for.” What are we actually trying to do for kids by making them go to school, and why are we trying to do it? If it’s an attempt to help kids understand things they’ll need to know in their daily lives, much of contemporary education makes little sense: very few of us will use chemistry or algebra or French. But it would be very helpful to know how to cook a good breakfast, negotiate a pay raise, or defuse an argument. If education is about making “model citizens,” well, we would probably expect civics to be treated in a little less cursory a fashion. Maybe education is about teaching job skills, providing abilities that will prove useful in making a living. Maybe it nourishes souls and expands horizons. Maybe it’s just a way to keep as many kids as possible in a room together and therefore out of trouble. Or maybe it doesn’t do much of anything at all.

Libertarian economist, George Mason University professor, Cato Institute adjunct, and Freakonomics contributor Bryan Caplan has written The Case Against Education, in which he argues forcefully that it’s the last one. Education, he says, does very little for kids. Or rather, it teaches them very little, which is different. Caplan says that while there is no doubt that the more years of education you receive, the better off you’re likely to be in life, this is mostly unrelated to anything you’ve actually been taught. One standard view of the value of an education is that because employers are willing to pay more for more educated workers, people must be getting something important out of school that pays off. Caplan points out that this is not necessarily the case. The fact that more education leads to a higher salary does not mean that school is actually teaching anybody anything. It could just be “sorting” students who have relevant traits, “signaling” to employers which people have the most potential to succeed at their jobs.

Think about this like an obstacle course. If we have a group of people clamber up rocks, shimmy down ropes, and, yes, jump through hoops, the ones who make it to the end might have showed that they’re the best candidates for a physically demanding job. But it’s just a test, a selection process designed to expose traits that candidates already possess. It’s a “signal.” It hasn’t actually taught anybody anything, except how good they are at swinging from ropes. For Caplan, this is what education is mostly about. It’s a test of endurance and ability. In contrast to “human capital” theories that emphasize the body of valuable intellectual assets students acquire through schooling, Caplan believes that education is largely a credentialing process. An employer doesn’t want people with high school diplomas because of anything they’ve been taught in high school, but because they want the sort of people who get high school diplomas, i.e. those who have habits like showing up on time, following directions, being able to assimilate new facts quickly, etc. Or, more cynically, they want the sort of people with the financial resources and family support to make it through high school.

This does not mean that school teaches nothing, and Caplan concedes that basic literacy and numeracy are obviously important. But it does mean that a colossal amount of time and resources are being wasted. After all, if you could tell which candidates were going to complete the obstacle course after the first stage, would there be any need for ten additional stages? Plenty of jobs that require college degrees don’t actually require any skills learned in college; there’s no reason they couldn’t be filled by people with high school diplomas, saving the students four years and a pile of money. Caplan asks:

Think about all the classes you ever took. How many failed to teach you any useful skills? The lessons you’ll never need to know after graduation start in kindergarten. Elementary schools teach more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also require history, social studies, music, art, and physical education. Middle and high schools add higher mathematics, classic literature, and foreign languages—vital for a handful of budding scientists, authors, and translators, irrelevant for everyone else. Most college majors don’t even pretend to teach job skills. If you apply your knowledge of Roman history, Shakespeare, real analysis, or philosophy of mind on the job, you have an odd job.

The “uselessness” of education leads Caplan to downright radical conclusions. While typical criticisms of the existing education system focus on how the system is working, Caplan’s objection is to the system itself. He believes that “there’s way too much education” and that “typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives.” He considers himself the ally of every student who has ever sat in class, looking despairingly at the ticking clock, wondering when they’re ever going to use any of the stuff they’re being taught. You’re not, Caplan says, and that’s the problem.

When Caplan begins talking about the implications of his “signaling” theory, things take a turn for the disturbing. Because he believes education is bad and useless, he supports drastic cuts to public support for it:

Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it. The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies. This would not eliminate wasteful signaling, but at least government would pour less gasoline on the fire.

He believes there should be far more emphasis on vocational schooling, to the point of putting kids to work. He even has a section entitled “What’s Wrong With Child Labor?” in which he says that the employment of children is no worse than school and is far more useful:

When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.

At the college level, Caplan believes that students should be discouraged from pursuing “useless” degrees (i.e. the ones that do not increase their employment prospects):

Why should taxpayers fund the option to study fine arts at public expense? Instead, shut down the impractical departments at public colleges, and make impractical majors at private colleges ineligible for government grants and loans. Deprived of impractical options, some students will switch to practical subjects. Won’t plenty of others respond to narrower options by cutting their schooling short? Hopefully. If students refuse to stay in school unless they’re allowed to waste public money, taxpayers should call their bluff. (...)

Anyone who has watched a roomful of young eyes glaze over during an high school English class might be tempted to agree. But it might not be that students are “philistines.” Rather, it might be that subjects are, in general, taught atrociously, that there are few truly inspiring teachers in the classroom who know how to make ideas come alive. The reason “academics rarely broaden students’ horizons” might have a lot more to do with the academics than the students. Caplan gives up very quickly, and without much evidence, on the possibility of engaging the majority of young people in history, literature, the sciences, and the arts. But showing that students aren’t being engaged isn’t proof that they can’t be engaged.

The truth is that Caplan is probably right that the experience of school, for most students in the country, is boring and useless. When the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence asked high school students how they were feeling, 75% of them answered with negative emotions like “tired,” “bored,” and “stressed.” But that doesn’t mean that they’re a bunch of incurious dopes cut out only for manual labor. The insight that “school sucks” is not original to Caplan, and plenty of critics of education have said it over and over. Unlike Caplan, their response has not been to advocate getting rid of school entirely and sending children to work, but thinking very seriously about what education ought to be like. Alternative schooling models like Montessori and Waldorf schools try to eliminate the tedious, obedience-training aspects of school, and remove the structural barriers that stand between students and real knowledge. The progressive education movement has a century-long history, and has produced thousands of experiments around the world in new ways of organizing schooling. There is variation in whether students enjoy school, have good relationships with their teachers, and see schools as supportive environments. Figuring out ways to investigate and improve those things is central to serious projects for education reform. (...)

Caplan tries to show the uselessness of education by pointing to statistics on how few facts people remember from their school days; they can’t remember whether an electron is larger than an atom, etc. But this may misunderstand what exposure to the sciences actually does. True, very few people use algebra after they finish “learning” it. They do, however, carry away a sense of what algebra is. That may not seem like much, but it could be crucial: there’s a big difference between “not knowing much about biology” and “not even knowing what biology is.” I may not understand a physicist’s equations, but it’s a whole new level of ignorance if she introduces herself and I wonder what physics even is.

If we are to offer a meaningful and powerful alternative to instrumental conceptions of learning, we have to be clear about what that might involve. One reason Caplan’s arguments can be tempting is that we haven’t really articulated what schooling ought to be about. This leaves a big prescriptive vacuum where, after making some empirical and commonsense claims, Caplan can slide in unnoticed and present his slashing and burning as the only available solution. And it can result in liberals and progressives trying to defend school on economic, return-on-investment grounds, insisting that sociology degrees are unexpectedly useful in the workplace, or that the average wage worker will someday use their French subjunctives. (Although they probably will use their Spanish subjunctives, which is why Spanish should be mandatory.) (...)

So what’s the alternative? What is school for? For the first 12 years of kids’ conscious lives, we put them in a room and try to fill them with knowledge. What should that be? What about college? To what extent should learning be driven by the preferences of parents or kids themselves? Also, if public schools start trying to make kids learn interesting things, and private schools keep teaching them the things that will make them rich, won’t the wealth gap worsen? Does capitalism give us no other option but to pursue the bleak Caplan vision?

We shouldn’t hesitate to speculate on radical, even highly unusual possibilities. Though we don’t think it should be strictly “vocational,” education should obviously be more practical and active. There’s no excuse for the fact that students aren’t taught basic skills like tying a knot, sewing a button, defusing a bomb, fixing a toilet, baking a loaf of bread, planting a garden, etc. Animal care should be a requirement; establishing relationships with animals is important and every school should have them. Nathan remembers being jealous of a neighboring high school in Florida that used to have cats on campus. What about plant identification? A high school degree should require one to be able to identify at least 80% of the plant life in one’s community. The fact that nobody knows which plants are which is a disgrace.

We can introduce college-level subjects at a much younger age in simplified form. Kids are perfectly capable of learning philosophy. Not the academic kind, perhaps, but as critical thinking (e.g. asking questions like “How do we know to trust our teachers?” “Why are things the way they are?” “Is a bird a process or a thing?”) Try teaching music and art appreciation; don’t just have kids feebly try to learn to play the recorder, introduce them to Miles Davis, or show them how hit songs are made. We should expand the range of material taught in English class. Give kids books they will actually like, don’t make teens read Nathaniel Hawthorne and forget to introduce them to Kurt Vonnegut. Sparky remembers that in his high school, the literature teacher had the class critically examine Dan Brown books, and the students loved it. Something cool should happen every schoolday, whether it’s an explosion in chemistry class or the examination of a historical artifact or the building of a Rube Goldberg contraption or the performing of a play/dialogue. Bring in less dogma, foster more creativity. Make recess longer. Make things more hands-on. Do more field trips. Reward quality of thinking rather than strict obedience (i.e. it matters more if a student has nothing to say about the reading than if they’re late to class). Don’t do anything excruciating to them. (Caplan seems to endorse a lot of this, actually, saying that unstructured play is good, but his whole scheme will ensure that the rich kids get the fun stuff and the poor kids get busboy lessons.)

It may well be true, as Bryan Caplan argues, that as things stand education is a bad deal, societally speaking. We can buy that a lot of the economic benefit comes from signaling, and that spending money on things like Common Core and standardized testing could be making things worse because the gains are illusory. This doesn’t mean, however, that the solution is drastically decreasing resources. That would just be putting all the burdens education is trying to bear (lifelong return-on-investment and publicly-subsidized training for corporate life) onto the backs of students and parents. Plus, why should only rich kids get to spend four years pursuing an arts degree? It shouldn’t just be the students who are willing to toil to pay off crushing debts who get to spend their college years exploring irrelevant subjects that interest them.

In fact, we need to put more resources into education, but we also need to change our thinking. It’s not because kids are “natural philistines” if they’re bored, but because we don’t prioritize (or spend the money on) the kind of extraordinary learning experiences that would engage even the most intransigent or apathetic child. If foreign language classes aren’t good enough for people to retain languages, then let’s introduce foreign exchange programs. Send them around the world on the public dime.

We’re not cynical about students—we think everyone can be enriched—but to do that we need to turn away from the economic benefits of education and actually focus on that enrichment. Let’s do the things Caplan says he wants (more play, a broader canon), but let’s do it for every child, not make it dependent on family ability to pay. If rich parents think it’s worthwhile to pay for private schools with 15-person classes and seminar environments, let’s guarantee that to the children of Baltimore and Detroit. If teachers are downtrodden and fatigued and not inspiring, then let’s fucking pay them. Teaching should be a prestige job and there’s no reason it can’t be.

There are many possible visions for what education could and should be. But the one thing it shouldn’t be is preparation for wage work. Attempts to destroy education in the name of efficiency are going in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of more efficiency, we need less of it. Students should be finding out about all of the fascinating things in our big, wonderful world, not being fitted and measured for future drudgery. What is education for? It’s for becoming a person, not a worker.

by Sparky Abraham and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nick Sirotich

See No Evil

Trawling a hotel minibar one night while on a work trip to Amsterdam, I found a piece of chocolate with an unusual name: Tony’s Chocolonely. I giggled at how apt the name was—who eats minibar chocolate unless they are, indeed, a little lonely?—and, on a whim, plugged it into Google.

The results were more sobering than I’d expected. The founder of Chocolonely, Teun (Tony) van de Keuken, founded the company with the goal of making the first (the “lonely only”) chocolate bar produced without labor exploitation. According to the company, this goal actually landed them in legal trouble: Bellissimo, a Swiss chocolatier, sued Chocolonely in 2007, allegedly claiming that “slave-free chocolate is impossible to produce.”

I had heard similar claims about other industries. There was the Fairphone, which aimed at its launch in 2013 to be the first ethically produced smartphone, but admitted that no one could guarantee a supply chain completely free from unfair labor practices. And of course one often hears about exploitative labor practices cropping up in the supply chains of companies like Apple and Samsung: companies that say they make every effort to monitor labor conditions in their factories.

Putting aside my cynicism for the moment, I wondered: What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain?

The thing that still confused me is how reliable supply chains are, or seem to be. The world is unpredictable—you’ve got earthquakes, labor strikes, mudslides, every conceivable tragedy—and yet as a consumer I can pretty much count on getting what I want whenever I want it. How can it be possible to predict a package’s arrival down to the hour, yet know almost nothing about the conditions of its manufacture?

In the past twenty years, popular and academic audiences have taken a growing interest in the physical infrastructure of global supply chains. The journalist Alexis Madrigal’s Containers podcast took on the question of how goods travel so far, so quickly. The writer Rose George traveled the world on a container ship for her book Ninety Percent of Everything. And Marc Levinson’s The Box startled Princeton University Press by becoming a national bestseller. Most recently, Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics offered a surprisingly engrossing history of that all-important industry.

These books help us visualize the physical infrastructure that makes global capitalism possible. But the data infrastructure has yet to be explored. How does information travel through the supply chain in such a peculiar way, so that I know to wait impatiently at my door at the exact moment my new iPhone will arrive—but no one really seems to know how it has gotten to me?

I set out to find the answer, and what I found surprised me. We consumers are not the only ones afflicted with this selective blindness. The corporations that make use of supply chains experience it too. And this partial sight, erected on a massive scale, is what makes global capitalism possible.

A Network of Waterways

The industry of supply-chain management (or SCM, to its initiates) is both vast and secretive. It’s one of the most rapidly growing corporate fields, and the subject of reams of books, journal articles, and blog posts. You can even get a degree in it.

But most companies are leery about revealing too much about their own logistics operations. It’s not only because they are afraid of exposing what dark secrets might lurk there. It’s also because a reliable, efficient supply chain can give a company an invaluable edge over its competitors.

Take Amazon: it’s not so much a retailer as a supply chain incarnate. Its advantage lies in the high speed and the low price with which it can get a set of bath towels to your door. No wonder the retailer is famously tight-lipped about its supply-chain infrastructure. Few people outside of Amazon know much about the software that Amazon uses to manage its logistics operations.

In the supply-chain universe, there are large, tech-forward companies like Amazon and Apple, which write and maintain their own supply-chain software, and there’s everyone else. And most everyone else uses SAP. SAP—the name stands for Systems, Applications, and Products—is a behemoth, less a single piece of software than a large, interlocking suite of applications, joined together through a shared database. Companies purchase SAP in “modules,” and the supply-chain module interlocks with the rest of the suite. Among people who’ve used SAP, the reaction to hearing its name is often a pronounced sigh—like all large-scale enterprise software, SAP has a reputation for being frustrating.

Nevertheless, SAP is ubiquitous, with modules for finance, procurement, HR, and supply-chain management. “A very high percentage of companies run SAP for things like finance,” says Ethan Jewett, an SAP consultant and software developer who helps companies implement SAP modules. “And so, if you’re running it for one part of your business, you’ll default to running it for another part of your business.”

Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of a company called Sourcemap, which aims to help companies map their own supply chains. Bonanni suspects that companies’ inability to visualize their own supply chain is partly a function of SAP’s architecture itself. “It’s funny, because the DNA of software really speaks through,” said Bonanni. “If you look at SAP, the database is still actually written in German. The relations in it are all one-link. They never intended for supply chains to involve so many people, and to be interesting to so many parts of the company.”

This software, however imperfect, is crucial because supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?

“It’s a staggering kind of undertaking,” said Bonnani. “If you’re a small apparel company, then you still might have 50,000 suppliers in your supply chain. You’ll have a personal relationship with about 200 to 500 agents or intermediaries. If you had to be in touch with everybody who made everything, you would either have a very small selection of products you could sell or an incredible margin that would give you the extra staff to do that.”

We call them “supply chains,” but that image is misleading. They really look more like a network of waterways, with thousands of tiny tributaries made up of sub-suppliers trickling into larger rivers of assembly, production, and distribution.

Bonanni explained that while workplace abuses get a lot of attention when they take place in the supply chains of large, prestigious companies like Apple and Samsung, working conditions are actually most opaque and labor abuse is most rampant in other industries, like apparel and agriculture. “Apparel, every quarter they have 100 percent turnover in the clothing that they make, so it’s a whole new supply chain every season. And with food, there’s millions of farmers involved. So in these places, where there’s way too many nodes for anyone to see without a computer, and where the chain changes by the time you’ve monitored it—those are the places where we see a lot of problems and instability.”

The picture that many of us have of supply chains involve state-of-the-art factories like those owned by Foxconn. In reality, the nodes of most modern supply chains look much less impressive: small, workshop-like outfits run out of garages and outbuildings. The proliferation and decentralization of these improvisational workshops help explain both why it’s hard for companies to understand their own supply chains, and why the supply chains themselves are so resilient. If a fire or a labor strike disables one node in a supply network, another outfit can just as easily slot in, without the company that commissioned the goods ever becoming aware of it.

It’s not like there’s a control tower overseeing supply networks. Instead, each node has to talk only to its neighboring node, passing goods through a system that, considered in its entirety, is staggeringly complex. Supply chains are robust precisely because they’re decentralized and self-healing. In this way, these physical infrastructures distributed all over the world are very much like the invisible network that makes them possible: the internet.

by Miriam Posner, Logic |  Read more:

Image: Media Club

Beaver Fever

Why two countries want to kill 100,000 beavers

If you're a boreal toad — or a wood duck, or a brook trout, or a moose — you might owe your life to a beaver. (Kudos, also, on learning to read.)

Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, is the ultimate keystone species, that rare creature that supports an entire ecosystem. By building dams and forming ponds, beavers serve as bucktoothed housing developers, creating watery habitat for a menagerie of tenants. Songbirds nest in pondside willows, frogs breed in shallow canals, and trout shelter in cold pools. There's even a beaver beetle that eats the skin of you-know-what.

Modern beavers have been wandering North America for 7.5 million years, giving flora and fauna plenty of time to adapt. Willow, a favorite snack, resprouts multiple stems when it's gnawed down, like a hydra regrowing heads. Cottonwoods produce distasteful tannins to deter chewing. America's rarest butterfly, the St. Francis Satyr, eats little but sedges that grow in beaver wetlands. The evolutionary connection runs so deep it's often boiled down to a pithy bumper-sticker: "Beavers taught salmon to jump."

Before European traders set about turning their furs into fancy hats, beavers roamed most of the continent, stopping up streams from the Arctic tundra-line to the Mojave Desert. But the mammals never ventured beyond northern Mexico, leaving Central and South America historically beaverless.

Until, that is, an ill-conceived scheme unleashed nature's architects on a landscape that had never known their teeth — and forever rearranged ecosystems at the bottom of the world.

The bizarre experiment was launched in 1946, when Argentina relocated 20 Canadian beavers to Tierra del Fuego, the windswept archipelago at South America's tip, to "enrich" local wildlife and foster a fur trade. The pelt industry never took off, but the beavers, unchecked by North American predators like wolves and bears, flourished. They swam glacier-scoured fjords between islands, dispersing throughout both the Argentine and Chilean sides of Tierra del Fuego. Some decades after their arrival, a beaver clambered from an icy strait and established a beachhead on the Patagonian mainland. These days, their population numbers about 200,000.

And as beavers spread, they did what beavers are wont to do: They transformed their surroundings.

Just as New Zealand's flightless birds had no recourse against invasive rats, Tierra del Fuego's trees were ill-equipped to withstand "los castores." The region's forests are dominated by beeches that never evolved beaver coexistence strategies: They don't resprout after cutting, produce unsavory chemicals or tolerate flooded soils. As beavers chewed down beeches and expanded free-flowing streams into broad ponds, forests opened into stump-dotted meadows. In 2009, Chris Anderson, an ecologist at Chile's Universidad de Magallanes, found that beavers had reshaped up to 15 percent of Tierra del Fuego's total land area and half its streams — "the largest alteration to the forested portion of this landscape since the recession of the last ice age."

"Basically, everything that's cuttable has been clear-cut," Anderson said. Drowned trees and gnawed logs, freeze-dried by icy winds, litter the landscape like the ghosts of forests past. "You just see acres and acres of white trees."

Conservationists, aghast at the loss of old-growth forest, put their faith in natural barriers. Patagonia has two primary habitats, the forest and the steppe — the latter a wind-blasted, arid grassland whose paucity of trees seemed likely to limit beavers' growth. In 2017, however, an Argentine biologist named Alejandro Pietrik found that, contrary to predictions, beavers were actually producing more offspring on the steppe. Unbothered by the lack of trees, the colonists were happily weaving dams from a shrub called mata negra.

"As long as they have water, they can expand," Pietrik said. "They can colonize all of Patagonia if they want."

Over the years, Chile and Argentina have made halfhearted attempts at curtailing the invasion. A bounty program failed to motivate trappers, while proposed markets for beaver meat never materialized. Recently, though, the two nations have gotten more serious: In 2016, they announced a plan to cull 100,000 — one of the largest invasive-species-control projects ever attempted.

Although the massive trapping program, in a pilot phase, should help contain the spread, most scientists say the toothy loggers are in South America to stay. "I think eradication is not possible," said Chilean biologist Giorgia Graells. On many islands, Graells said, dense forests and scarce roads will thwart trappers. If beavers persist on even a single island, she pointed out, the survivors could repopulate the rest of the archipelago — Sisyphus's boulder in furry form.

In some respects, the South American beaver narrative is a familiar one: Humans introduce nonnative species; nonnative species wreak havoc; humans futilely attempt to erase their error. Yet the beaver story is more interesting — for, befitting a keystone species, the rodent takeover has produced winners as well as losers. Research suggests that beavers have benefited native Magellanic woodpeckers, perhaps by making trees more susceptible to the wood-boring insects upon which the birds feast. The slackwaters behind dams also support native fish called puye, which are four times more abundant around beaver impoundments than elsewhere in southern Chile.

"Before you determine whether a change is good or bad, you always have to ask, 'For whom?' " Anderson said. "If you're a duck and you want ponds with lots of little crustaceans to eat, well, beaver ponds are full of them."

The biggest beneficiaries, however, have been the beaver's fellow North Americans: the muskrat and the mink, two other lusciously furred mammals the Chilean government naively plopped down in Tierra del Fuego in the 1940s. On their own, the imports might have perished; beavers, however, ensured their survival. When researchers scoured one invaded island, they found a whopping 97 percent of muskrat tracks, scats and burrows around beaver ponds and wetlands, suggesting that one rodent was supporting the other. Mink, a weasel-like carnivore, have in turn feasted on the muskrats — as well as native birds and mammals.

The scientists who studied that ecological chain reaction called it an "invasional meltdown." A less ominous phrasing might be "novel ecosystem," a natural community that's been altered by human activity but has since escaped our control. Like it or not, novel ecosystems are all around us — scrubby pine forests in Puerto Rico, urban wetlands in New Jersey, replanted grasslands in an old Colorado mining pit. Assuming utter eradication fails, some corners of Patagonia may be forced to surrender to the awesome power of an indomitable rodent.

by : Ben Goldfarb, WaPo via: ADN | Read more:
Image: Ben Goldfarb

My Lifelong Quest for Pants That Actually Fit

I had no pants. We were going out and I had to look nice, so I went to my closet and realized that I had nothing that would help me accomplish that task. I had two pairs of jeans that fit, two more pairs of jeans that were too tight (but were still there because I told myself I'd slim back down one day to fit in them), decade-old suit pants, pleated corduroys (GAHHHH), and a pair of khakis I fucking despised and were also too tight. Standard dad closet.

So I put on the same Old Navy jeans I wore every day and hoped tossing on a jacket would make me look like some tech oligarch who drives a BMW convertible and can make jeans work at a semi-formal occasion. They did not. I came downstairs and my wife looked dynamite, which only underscored how dumpy I looked—the sort of appalling fashion mismatch you see on the red carpet of any Adam Sandler movie premiere. And the worst part was that my wife wasn't even annoyed. No, at this point, she was used to being married to a sloppy, hopeless pants case.

It's a weird thing, to be 40 years old and realize that you have no clue how to dress the lower half of your body. It's especially galling given I work at, you know, this magazine. But I've sucked at pants my whole life, and I can't tell you whether I was born hating them or if there is some childhood pant trauma that I've suppressed and have yet to unearth. My body doesn't help matters. I have no ass and my thighs are wider than a Texas highway. They do not make pants for my body prototype. I have silently fumed when a Gap or Banana Republic only has a 28-inch-size waist in stock, as if America were populated exclusively by tiny Italian men. I have cursed jeans that were too stiff and hot. I have openly despaired while trying to fasten that little hook on a pair of trousers, packing myself into them like I'm trying to close a suitcase. I have expressed sticker shock at the price of tailored pants.

And khakis? Man, FUCK khakis. I own khakis strictly because my inner eighth grader has been trained to believe that you need khakis if you're going out to a fancy brunch or singing in a choir recital. I'd rather die than wear them. They're ugly and act as a magnet for piss stains. Also, the only thing I hate more than pants is shopping, so you see my problem. I have bitched and moaned and cried out, WHY CAN'T THEY MAKE PANTS FOR ME? to anyone who will listen.

And, at long last, someone did. I found myself a guru. A sensei. A MASTER. Enter Mark Anthony Green, GQ's style editor and a man whose sartorial choices are so effortless as to be pure sorcery. I walked into his office and could instantly see that it pained Mark Anthony to look at me dressed the way I was. I was like a toddler coming home from school covered in mud and paste. I tried to explain my plight to him, listing out my grievances against BIG PANT just as I have listed them out for you. He was shaking his head well before I was finished talking.

"You're wrong about like five things, just to start this off."

Nevertheless, he took it upon himself to be my personal pant coach and teach me to find that uncanny valley where being comfortable and looking good can miraculously coexist. Here now is what I learned from him during the long and painstaking process of pant rehab:

by Drew Magary, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Getty

The Last Frontier: Inside Alaska's Meth Epidemic

The first time James Savage used meth it was to avoid shooting heroin. Back when he was 19, working as a baker in the remote town of Beluga, Alaska, Savage fell off a ladder, shattering the bones in his right foot. A camp medic gave him painkillers to cope with the discomfort as they waited for the weather to clear to get him to proper medical care. It was his introduction to opioids, and kicked off years spent rotating through pain clinics, growing more and more dependent on legal pills.

“Realistically, they’re all trying to help,” he says of the clinicians who dispensed greater and greater quantities of meds. By the time he was 24, Savage was walking out of pharmacies with a shopping bag’s worth of pills, trading them in parking lots with other users.

When it became apparent to the clinics that he was doctor shopping, they cut him off, leaving Savage with a choice: turn to heroin to stave off crippling withdrawal symptoms, or grit his teeth through DIY detox.

Instead, he found a middle-ground: methamphetamine. A drug buddy told him that if he stayed awake in a meth-induced mania for a few days, he could crash into two or three days of torpid sleep, bypassing the worst parts of withdrawal. (...)

Alongside epidemic abuse of the grim opioid-heroin-Fentanyl triad, meth use is surging. One crude measure of its prevalence is the number of overdose deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control: between 2005 and 2015 fatal overdoses involving stimulants shot up almost 300 percent, the vast majority of which were attributable to meth. Its price has never been lower, its purity never higher. More people are injecting it with needles, opening up new frontiers in disease transmission and overdose. And in an effort to eke out a profit amid a glut in supply, transnational criminal organizations are cultivating customers in areas that were spared the last meth scourge — many of them places where there is already an infrastructure for heroin.

In the last 12 years, meth has changed, but not disappeared. Since the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act took effect in 2006, over-the-counter sales of the essential cold-medicine ingredients small-time meth cooks relied on dried up, and with them the small-time cooks. But the market abhors a vacuum, and according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, soon afterwards criminal networks in Mexico stepped in.

The cheap, potent meth arriving in the U.S. is manufactured at an industrial scale by cartels, according the Justice Department and DEA’s most recent Drug Threat Assessment. In fact, domestic meth lab seizures are the lowest they’ve been in 16 years. “Most of the methamphetamine available in the United States is produced clandestinely in Mexico and smuggled across the Southwest Border,” the report states. Professional chemists working in “super labs” have abandoned pseudoephedrine as a key ingredient and gone back to the precursor chemicals. Though a 2015 federal action controlling access to those precursor ingredients in Mexico caused their prices to triple, cartel operators have imported them from China or tried to “self-synthesize.”

The effect of all this for users is that the purity of meth in the United States is now consistently above 90 percent. And according to DEA figures, “domestic methamphetamine purchases analyzed from January 2011 through September 2016 indicate the price per pure gram of methamphetamine decreased 41 percent from $98 to $58.”

Nowadays, potent methamphetamine makes it all the way from Sinaloa and Guadalajara to Alaska, arriving almost totally pure.

Meth is not nearly as front-and-center as it was in American culture even a decade ago. Around the time Breaking Bad premiered, ghoulish mug shots were circulated as drug deterrents, and residential lab explosions were a staple of local TV news. Since then, the opioid epidemic has eclipsed meth as the nation’s most prominent drug threat. But according to health and law enforcement officials in places like Alaska, that does not mean meth has gone away. It not only stuck around, they say, but is getting worse. (...)

Meth’s casualties in Alaska are rising, in part because of how it is being used in combination with other drugs. The rate of meth-related overdoses quadrupled in less than a decade. Between 2008 and 2016, the fatality rate went from 1.4 to 5.8 per every 100,000 residents, according to a report by the state’s Division of Public Health. Of the 193 lethal overdoses caused by meth in that period, 54 percent also involved an opioid like heroin.

Police in Alaska find meth and heroin in many of the same places. They’re both shipped in through the mail system. Tucked into hidden compartments of cars barged up from the Lower 48. Carried in body cavities on commercial flights. Mid-level dealers frequently have both when they are busted. At the street level the two drugs are sold side by side.

“The problem with cocaine is its got a very short high. Meth’s got a much, much longer high that pairs up with heroin a lot more equally,” explains Lieutenant Jack Carson, who oversees much of the drug crime for the Anchorage Police Department.

Alaska is a small but lucrative market for drugs. Though prices for heroin and meth have come down in recent years, the real change in value has occurred primarily at the bulk level.

On the streets of Anchorage, meth sells for around $100 a gram, according to Carson. Though the clear crystalline shards sold today are consistently stronger than the grainy, red-tinged powder that was churned out by local mom-and-pop meth labs a decade ago, the street prices paid are relatively similar.

But ten years ago, a pound of meth that would have cost $26,000 in Alaska now sells for between $11,000 and $8,000. Those savings have not trickled down to low-level sales, in part because there’s relatively little competition on the supply side in this remote market. It is hard getting illegal drugs into Alaska, and this keeps out newcomers who might undersell established distributors.

But for those who can get drugs into Alaska, particularly rural areas, the profits can be enormous.

Though the state’s population of 740,000 is tiny, Alaska has a large appetite for booze and drugs. By the state health department’s own calculations, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths in 2015 was 140 percent above than the national average. Binge drinking is more frequent, too. Illegal drug use is 35 percent higher. The suicide rate is double the national average.

Explanations abound for why all this is.

by Zacharia Hughes, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Ash Adams

Joe Walsh

Should the U.S. Air Force Bomb Forest Fires?

Earlier this summer, the Swedish Air Force dropped a laser-guided bomb on a forest fire to help suppress the flames. Now there’s a proposal for the United States to do the same, using the might of the U.S. Air Force to fight America’s raging forest fires via bombs and sonic booms. Bombers that have attacked targets in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq could instead strike targets in the continental United States—this time saving lives and property.

As the Earth's climate changes, wildfire season in the western United States has grown from a summertime concern into a year-round struggle. Higher temperatures have meant, according to one government scientist, “severe droughts, meaning more dry fuel, as well as more intense heat waves”. The conditions set the stage for more, larger fires throughout the year. The trend will threaten people, property, and natural spaces, not to mention push the need for government firefighting services to unprecedented levels.

Clearly it's time for new and crazy-sounding ideas. Last month, the Swedish government, battling wildfires of its own, dropped a GBU-49 laser guided bomb on a remote forest fire. F-15 Strike Eagle Weapon System Officer Mike Benitez, writing in War on the Rocks, proposes using B-1 bombers stuffed to the gills with bombs to battle wildfires on the American homefront.

The idea here is to snuff out fires the way you'd blow out birthday candles at the base. In Sweden, the shockwave from a single bomb snuffed out flames within a 100-yard radius of the impact point. So, Benitez reasons, why not load up a heavy strategic bomber with up to 84 bombs and do some serious firefighting?

Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it.

The B-1 wouldn’t carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.

The B-1 method is theoretically doable but could be too expensive and dangerous. If that’s the case, then perhaps a big bomber like the B-1, or many smaller jets, could instead fly low and fast over wildfires, using the pressure waves from sonic booms to snuff out fires. As Benitez points out, an aircraft will generate a sonic boom along the length of its flight path at a rate of one mile per thousand feet. This could beat out wildfires over a wide area, and could be repeated as many times as necessary.

by Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. Inside an acoustic guitar.]
via: Reddit 

Menopause, Depression, & Me

'It feels like a derangement'

I stare stupidly at it. It’s nothing much to look at. It’s only a small pile of clothing: the shorts and tank top that I wear in bed, which I have thrown onto the floor before getting into the shower. I stare stupidly at the clump because I can’t pick it up. It’s astonishing I managed to shower, because I know already that this is a bad day, one when I feel assaulted by my hormones, which I picture as small pilots in those huge Star Wars armored beasts that turn me this way and that, implacable. On this morning, I wake up with fear in my stomach—fear of nothing—and I know it will be a bad day. (...)

I can’t pick up the clothes. I can’t explain the granite of that “can’t” to anyone else, the way it feels impossible to beat. Look at me looking at the pile and you will think, Just pick it up. For fuck’s sake. But I don’t. I look at it, and the thought of accomplishing anything makes my fear and despair grow. Every thought brings on another and that prospect is frightening. All those thoughts. I write that down and I feel stupid and maudlin and dramatic. A privileged freelance writer who does not have a full-time job that requires her presence in an office and can be indulgent of what the medical profession calls “low moods.” In fact, plenty of menopausal women leave their jobs, endure wrecked relationships, suffer, and cope. Or don’t. But I don’t feel maudlin and dramatic in the bathroom, or on any other of a hundred occasions over the past two years. I feel terrified. I have no reason to feel fear. But my body acts as though I do: the blood rushing from my gut to my limbs in case I need to flee, leaving the fluttering emptiness that is called “butterflies,” though that is too pretty a description.

Still, I set off on my bicycle to my writing studio. I hope I can overcome the day. I always hope, and I am always wrong. A few hours later, I find myself cowering in my workspace, a studio I rent in a complex of artists’ studios, scared to go downstairs to the kitchen because I can’t bear to talk to anyone I might find there. I have done nothing of use all day. Every now and then, I stop doing nothing and put my head in my hands because it feels safe and comfortable, like a refuge. I look underneath my desk and think I might sit there. There is no logic to this except that it is out of sight of the door and no one will find me.

Even so, when the phone rings I answer it. I shouldn’t, but I am hopeful that I can manage it and mask it, and I haven’t spoken to my mother for a few days and would like to. It goes well for a few minutes, because I’m not doing the talking. Then she asks me whether I want to accompany her to a posh dinner, several weeks hence. She doesn’t understand when I ask to be given some time to think about it. “Why can’t you decide now?” I say it’s one of the bad days, but I know this is a mixed message: If it’s that bad, how am I talking on the phone and sounding all right? Because I am a duck: talking serenely above, churning below, the weight on my chest, the catch in my throat, the inexplicable distress. I try to explain but I’m also trying hard not to weep, and so I explain it badly.

She doesn’t understand. This is not her fault. She is a compassionate woman, but she had an easy menopause, so easy that she can say, “Oh, I barely remember it.” One of those women: the lucky ones. She doesn’t understand depression, though both her children experience it, because she has never had it. “But you sounded well,” she says, “I thought you were all right.” Now she says, “I don’t understand how your not being well is stopping you deciding whether you want to go to dinner.” Because it is a decision, and a decision is too hard, requiring many things to happen in my brain and my brain is too busy being filled with fear and panic and tears and black numbness. There is no room to spare.

I hang up because I can’t explain this. I stay there for a while, sitting on my couch, wondering how to face cycling home or leaving my studio or opening the door. All these actions seem equally impossible.

It takes a while but finally I set off. I know where I’m going. I have learned. On days like this, there are only two places to be. One is in my darkened bedroom with my cat lying next to me. On days like this, she takes care to lie closer to me than usual because she knows and because she loves me. Maybe my darkness has a smell.

The other place to be is in unconsciousness.

These are the safe places because everything is quiet. On days like this, I wonder if this is what autism feels like, when sensation is overwhelming. Not just noise, but thoughts, sights, all input. It is on the bad days that I realize what a cacophony of impressions we walk through every day, and how good we are at receiving and deflecting, as required. Every day, we filter and sieve; on the bad days, my filters fail.

I sometimes call these bridge days, after a footbridge near my studio that goes at a great height over the busy A64 road. On days like this, that bridge is a danger for me. I am not suicidal, but I have always had the urge to jump. This is a thing with a name. HPP: high places phenomenon. The French call it “l’appel du vide.” So very Sartre of them: the call of emptiness. The A64 is the opposite of emptiness, but still, it is a danger. Today I don’t have the filter that we must all have to function: the one that stops us stepping into traffic or fearing the cars or buses that can kill us at any time. The one that mutes the call of the HPP.

I avoid the bridge. I cycle home, trying not to rage at drivers who cut me off and ignore me. I have no room for rage along with everything else. Thoughts that would normally flow now snag. Every observation immediately triggers a negative thread, a spiral, and a worsening. On a good day, I can pass a child and a mother and think, How nice. Nothing more. Fleeting. Unimportant. On a bad day, I see the same and think of my own infertility, how I have surely disappointed my mother by not giving her grandchildren; how it is all too late, and what have I done with my life, and my book will be a failure and today is lost and I can’t afford to lose the time. It goes on and on. Snagging thoughts that drag me down, that are relentless.

When I get inside my house, I cry. I try to watch something or read, but nothing interests me. This is called anhedonia and is a symptom of depression: the forgetting how to take pleasure. The best thing to do is sleep away the day, as much as I can.

Toward evening, I begin to feel a faint foolishness. This is my sign. Embarrassment. Shame at the day and at my management of it. When I am able to feel that and see that, I am getting better. Now I manage to watch TV, though only foreign-language dramas. Without the filmmaking industries of northern Europe, my menopause would be even bleaker. Foreign words go somewhere shallower in the brain; they are less heavy. But soon I switch it off. I don’t care about the plot. I don’t care about anything. I take a sleeping pill to get the day over with, so the better next day can begin. (...)

Depression, wrote William Styron, is a noun “with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.” It was pioneered by a Swiss psychiatrist who, Styron thought, perhaps had a “tin ear” and “therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering ‘depression’ as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease.”

Black dog. Walking through treacle. Low moods. Nothing I have read of depression has conveyed the crippling weight of it, that is a weight made out of nothing.

I do not have depression according to most authoritative clinical definitions of the condition. Depression is a long-term chronic illness. Mine is unpredictable, and before I got my HRT dose right, it lasted weeks at a time; but usually, these days, it lasts no more than twenty-four hours. My now-and-thens do not qualify as a disease. I do not count as depressed. Instead, I am one of the women of menopause, who struggle to understand why we feel such despair, why now we cry when before we didn’t, why understanding what is left and what is right takes a fraction longer than it used to: all this is “low mood” or “brain fog.” These diminishing phrases, which convey nothing of the force of the anguish or grief that assaults us, are reserved for women and usually relate to menstrual cycles or hormones.

I have never been sunny. People who can rise from their beds and see joy without working at it, they have always been a mystery. I still feel guilty for once asking a cheery person, cheery very early in the morning, why he was so happy—I made it sound like an accusation not praise—and I watched as his face fell and his warmth iced over. I’m still sorry. Cheeriness always seems like an enviable gift. I have always been susceptible to premenstrual upheaval: two days a month when things feel awful as though they have never been anything else. I endured them. Now and then, there have been therapists sometimes and antidepressants now and then, and, for the last few years, running, in whatever wilds I can find. The best therapy. I have managed. (...)

For many months, I told people I was “unwell.” Not crippled, not weeping, not disabled. “Unwell.” The implication: that there is something physically wrong. A proper illness, not depression. A definition of depression is heartache, but it is my head that aches. What if I told everyone I had a severe headache? A broken ankle not brain? They would understand better. Then, one day, as I sit at my computer and think of the writing deadline that is today and feel despair, and I try to read serious medical literature and instead put my head in my hands again, I decide to write to the commissioning editor, even though she is new and this may form her opinion of me, and say: I can’t function today. I can’t write. And it is because of depression. Please give me leeway. It shames me to write it, but I do. And I do it again, when needed. So far, every response has been profoundly kind. I should have done it sooner.

Mental illness. Such an odd concept. How strange to put a division between mental and physical illness, as if the brain is not in the body. As if emotions are not regulated by the brain. As if feelings are not linked to hormones. As if all maladies are not of the body. And still mental illness is put in its place, which is in a different category. Not “real” illness. Not physical. Easier to fix, to underfund, to sweep into the dark corner of the unspoken. Imagine the contrary. Have you broken your ankle? Cheer up. Do you have third-degree burns? Chin up. Think yourself better, you with your chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Smile.

by Rose George, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Vilhelm Hammershøi: Rest, 1905

Norman Rockwell, Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 1950
via:

Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade

Sometimes you don’t know how deep the hole is until you try to fill it. In 2009, staring down what looked to anyone with a calculator like the biggest financial crisis since 1929, the federal government poured $830 billion into the economy — a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures, than the entire New Deal — and the country barely noticed.

It registered the crisis, though. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression was indelibly shaped by that experience of deprivation, even though what followed was what Henry Luce famously called, in 1941, “the American Century.” He meant the 20th, and, to judge from our present politics, at least — “Make America Great Again” on one side of the aisle; on the other, the suspicion that the president is a political suicide bomber, destroying the pillars of government — he probably wouldn’t have made the same declaration about the 21st. A decade now after the beginning of what has come to be called the Great Recession, and almost as long since economic growth began to tick upward and unemployment downward, the cultural and psychological imprint left by the financial crisis looks as profound as the ones left by the calamity that struck our grandparents. All the more when you look beyond the narrow economic data: at a new radical politics on both left and right; at a strident, ideological pop culture obsessed with various apocalypses; at an internet powered by envy, strife, and endless entrepreneurial hustle; at opiates and suicides and low birthrates; and at the resentment, racial and gendered and otherwise, by those who felt especially left behind. Here, we cast a look back, and tried to take a seismic reading of the financial earthquake and its aftershocks, including those that still jolt us today.

AMERICA STOPPED BELIEVING IN THE AMERICAN DREAM

by Frank Rich, NY Magazine Columnist

If you were standing in the smoldering ashes of 9/11 trying to peer into the future, you might have been overjoyed to discover this happy snapshot of 2018: There has been no subsequent major terrorist attack on America from Al Qaeda or its heirs. American troops are not committed en masse to any ground war. American workers are enjoying a blissful 4 percent unemployment rate. The investment class and humble 401(k) holders alike are beneficiaries of a rising GDP and booming stock market that, as measured by the Dow, is up some 250 percent since its September 10, 2001, close. The most admired person in America, according to Gallup, is the nation’s first African-American president, a man no one had heard of and a phenomenon no one could have imagined at the century’s dawn. Comedy, the one art whose currency is laughter, is the culture’s greatest growth industry. What’s not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous. In the aftermath of 9/11, the initial shock and horror soon gave way to a semblance of national unity in support of a president whose electoral legitimacy had been bitterly contested only a year earlier. Today’s America is instead marked by fear and despair more akin to what followed the crash of 1929, when unprecedented millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes after the implosion of businesses ranging in scale from big banks to family farms.

It’s not hard to pinpoint the dawn of this deep gloom: It arrived in September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier. The shadow it would cast is so dark that a decade later, even our current run of ostensible prosperity and peace does not mitigate the one conviction that still unites all Americans: Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap, it seems, except Peak TV (for those who can afford it).

That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. When that tide pulled back in 2008 to reveal the ruins underneath, the country got an indelible picture of just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken, and how many central American institutions, whether governmental, financial, or corporate, had betrayed the trust the public had placed in them. And when we went down, we took much of the West with us. The American Kool-Aid we’d exported since the Marshall Plan, that limitless faith in progress and profits, had been exposed as a cruel illusion. (...)

Read more:

WTF HAPPENED?

by Sheila Bair, Former head of FDIC

Once the system was stabilized in early 2009, we had an opportunity to restructure and break up Citigroup in particular, but we didn’t do that. I think that was a missed opportunity. We just reinforced too-big-to-fail with all these bailouts, let’s face it. Other than Lehman Brothers, nobody took their medicine. Restructuring Citigroup would have sent a powerful signal that the government had the gumption and courage to stand up to these very large institutions, and to impose losses on bond holders.

I think we’ve improved the system on the margin. There are higher capital requirements, there’s better bank liquidity, less reliance on short-term financing, less reliance on debt among the regulated banks. Those are all positive things. But the financial system we have is still basically the financial system we had in 2008, with more capital and less reliance on short-term funding, so whether it’s enough? I hope it is.

I wish we had more Republicans who would stand up to these cronies who want the government bailouts. I think a lot of people still want that on Wall Street — it’s secretly what they want. They think it’s the government’s obligation to keep them afloat. I’m a capitalist, and I’d rather have the state own them than have that system.

It’s very frustrating. It’s just stupid economics. Set the morality aside; it’s just dumb economics to have a system like this where you’re propping up inefficient, bloated institutions. So there are good economic reasons to not have the system we had in 2008, and whether we’ve gotten rid of it or not I don’t know. I think we won’t know until a big bank gets in trouble again. Then we’ll see what happens. I don’t even want to think about what the political fallout would be. (...)

by Yves Smith, Founder, Naked Capitalism

Trump is crowing about this 4.1 percent GDP growth, right? Yet if you look at the statistics, real worker wages have continued to be flat for this period. The crisis itself was the greatest looting of the public purse in history. The crisis itself was a huge wealth transfer. The Obama administration should have forced a lot more recognition of the losses. These losses were real. They should have forced more loan write-downs. And recognition of the loss to the financial system. And they should have had a huge stimulus to offset the downdraft of recognizing those losses. And in fact the Japanese, early in their crisis, they said the biggest mistake we made was not writing down the bad loans in the banking system. Don’t repeat our mistake.

And we did this in a more indirect manner by having the Fed engineer these super-low interest rates that were a transfer from savers to the financial system. Economist Ed Kane said that basically savers lost $300 billion in income a year. So that reduction of income right there, you see today. There’s a Wall Street Journalstory about how pension funds are in crisis. There’s not a single mention of the fact that the zero-interest-rate policies are the reason why the pensions are in distress. All retirees and long-term savers, life insurance, they’re all in the same boat. It used to be that if you were a saver or an asset holder, you could get a decent positive return doing something not crazy. And the Fed took that away. The big reason the pensions are in crisis is because the way we dealt with the crisis.

We have this fallacy that normal people should be able to save for retirement. If public pension funds, which can invest at the very lowest possible fees, can’t make this work, how is Joe Mom-and-Pop America gonna be able to do this? Again, it’s back to the stagnant worker wages. So, great, we’re not paying people enough, housing prices are very inflated. We’ve got this horrible medical system that costs way too much, and how are people supposed to put any money aside when their real estate and their rents and their health costs are going up?

Why do you think we have Trump? I mean, even though he did a big bait-and-switch, as we all know, there were a lot of people that lost their homes, their community wasn’t what it used to be, particularly if they lived in the Rust Belt. And then you have these people on the coast saying, “Oh, they should go get training. It’s disgusting.” I mean, let them eat cake is let them get training. What you hear from these coastal elites: People over 40, even over 35, are basically non-hirable. Are you gonna train them? They’re gonna waste their time thinking they can get a new job? I mean, that’s just lunacy.

I think the Republicans, because they’re sort of loud and proud, that’s the way they behave, it’s easier to point fingers at them. And in some sense they are more vocal proponents of bad ideology, but there’s this great tendency in politics and in business to present whatever was done as being terrific and successful when it wasn’t. This is one of my criticisms of the Obama administration, but now appears to be true of the Democratic Party generally, that they think the solution for every problem is better PR.

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by Frank Rich, Sheila Bair, Corey Robin, Robert Shiller, Matt Bruenig, Yves Smith, Boots Riley, Steve Rattner, Astra Taylor, Paul Romer, Stephanie Kelton (and Others), NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Flyer

On a recent, brutally hot morning on the edge of a lake just outside Las Vegas, tech entrepreneur Carter Reum was strapped into his vehicle and ready to lift off into the future. Except he didn’t.

Reum was sitting inside the narrow cockpit of the Flyer, a ten-propeller flying vehicle designed and built by Kitty Hawk, a company started by Google’s Larry Page. It was to be Reum’s inaugural flight in the vehicle after becoming the first person to buy one. (Kitty Hawk would not disclose the price).

But it was not to be. Kitty Hawk’s flight crew, sitting in a white, yurt-like enclosure, scrapped the flight after wind speeds climbed above ten knots. Reum would have to wait another day.

Just a few minutes before, however, flight training manager Brittney Miculka had been at the helm of the Flyer, lifting off from the edge of a pier, rising ten feet above the lake and performing impressive turns and pivots in front of a small group of onlookers. The flight lasted about eight minutes, but in that short time, observers caught a glimpse of what the future might look like; one where the average person will no longer be stuck in soul-crushing traffic, but soaring above it.

“The vision of Kitty Hawk is truly to free the world from traffic,” Todd Reichert, Kitty Hawk’s lead engineer, told Quartz. “It’s incredibly ambitious, and it will take time, and this is the first step.”

The Flyer looks a lot like a hobbyist’s drone. It runs on batteries and can stay aloft for around 20 minutes. Its rotors are large, making it more energy efficient and less noisy, says Reichert. Indeed, from 50 feet away or so, the Flyer sounds no louder than a semi-truck on the highway. Whether that’s going to be too loud when it’s flying over your house is an open question.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype around flying cars. But the technology does seem close, even if none of these vehicles have yet gone through the kind of rigorous testing that’s going to be required to ensure passenger safety. More important, perhaps, or at least, more difficult to surmount, will be the vast changes to the regulation of federal airspace that will be required before flying cars become common.

Kitty Hawk is not the only company trying to make flying cars. Companies in China, Germany, Slovakia and elsewhere have been developing flying cars for several years now. But few of them have reached the stage where someone without a pilot’s license could sit inside the vehicle and fly.

Mostly that has to do with the Flyer’s design. It weighs just 250 pounds, thus classifying it under FAA rules as un ultralight, which means no aircraft registration or pilot certification are required. It also means that it won’t be able to fly over congested areas, like cities.

The Flyer is flown with just two controls: one switch to set the altitude, and a small joystick to change direction.

by Erik Olsen, Quartz |  Read more:
Image: Quartz

Nice fish
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‘The Onion’ Proudly Stands With The Media As The Enemy Of The People

In recent days, President Donald Trump has increased his criticism of the media, and at a briefing Thursday, his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, controversially refused to walk back his statements. Recognizing that unity in the journalistic profession is absolutely essential to allowing reporters to bravely and securely practice their craft, The Onion announces that we proudly stand with our brothers and sisters in the media as the enemy of the people.

When the Trump administration refers to news organizations as antagonists to the American public, we know exactly what they’re doing: correctly identifying the awesome power that we hold over the slobbering masses and trying to drive a wedge between the public and the fourth estate. Rest assured, however, that this wedge was already there. We in the news media despised you imbeciles long before Trump, and we’ll despise you long after he’s gone.

Honestly, you empty-headed dipshits who can barely process a simple headline or understand its meaning should be happy we interact with you at all.

An utter contempt for the idiotic multitudes has been a cornerstone of American journalism virtually since its inception, and we at The Onion are grateful for our colleagues at hallowed institutions such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN who have served as pioneers in relentlessly tormenting the public by obscuring the truth, promoting wanton hysteria, and lying to their faces. We stand alongside them as staunch enemies of everyday Americans.

When one of our colleagues at some lesser publication criticizes any politician’s assault on journalists, what you must understand is that this is merely another—in our opinion, fairly transparent—effort to elicit easy sympathy from feeble-minded media consumers for some sort of manufactured conflict between the government and the press. Nevertheless, all that exists is the media’s collective effort to lead you morons further and further from useful information, critical thought, and truth itself. And, honestly, why on God’s green earth should we try to help anyone who is as willfully ignorant and so unconcerned with maintaining a country with even a veneer of representative democracy as Americans?

Mr. Trump believes the press is too critical of him. No fucking shit. We are critical of everyone who is not us. The press hates you. All of you. We are what you deserve.

God bless America.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: An inhabitant of the 8th or 9th Circle of Hell (or both, not sure). Uncredited.

Qin Qi, Zhou Tianbai’s Friend, 2018
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Sex and Hotels

Hotels are synonymous with sex. Sex in a hotel is romantic, daring, unbridled, wild. Sex in a hotel is sexy. If you’ve been having a sexy time at home you’ll have a sexier time in a hotel. And it’s even more fun if there are two of you.

Yes, so far we’ve only been talking about masturbation, an activity that, at home, often has a hurried, lavatorial quality to it. In a hotel—and I should add that “hotel” throughout this piece is short for “expensive hotel”—it’s something to luxuriate in. At home you want to watch news, sports, or documentaries about human rights abuses. If you are watching television in a hotel, on the other hand, you want to see things going in and out of other things in extreme close-up. Ideally, to square the circle, the porno you watch in your hotel room will be set in a hotel room.

And what will you be wearing as you watch hotel porn in your hotel room? Why, a fluffy white bathrobe, of course. Even though they are frequently stolen, these fluffy white bathrobes are theft-proof in the sense that almost as soon as you get them home they lose that fluffy quality. How do hotels maintain robes in that state of perpetual fluffiness? Keeping them white is easy; keeping them fluffy is one of life’s enduring mysteries. Is it a question of using gallons of fabric conditioner? Apparently not (I’ve tried it). The answer can only be: because they are not just fluffy white bathrobes—they are fluffy white hotel bathrobes.

Not only are they fluffy and soft and white—they are also clean. And the chances are that you too are clean beneath your fluffy white robe because everything about a hotel is clean. Cleanliness might not be next to godliness but it is certainly adjacent to horniness. A hotel room is horny because it is clean: The sheets are clean, the toilets are clean, everything is clean, and this cleanliness is a flagrant inducement to—what else?—filthiness. Ideally, the room is so clean as to suggest that it has never been used. It cries out to be defiled. If the room is, in a sense, virginal, then the act of breaking the seal on bars of soap and other stealable accessories has something of the quality of breaking its hymen. Slightly archaic it may be, but to speak of “taking a room” is, in this context, pleasingly suggestive.
Luxury hotels offer the chance to live—for a while—like an 18th-century libertine.

In an effort to keep the rooms unsullied by that dirty stuff, air, urban hotel rooms are almost always sealed off from the outside world, cocooning you totally in the ambient hum of overnight luxury. It doesn’t matter where you are on the planet; you could be anywhere. More exactly, you could be nowhere. The luxury hotel is a quintessential example of what the French theorist Marc Augé calls the “non-place” of supermodernity. In The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe pointed out that the defining architectural feature of the motel—namely, that you don’t “have to go through a public lobby to get to your room”—played a major part in the “rather primly named ‘sexual revolution.’ ” In international hotels, however, the passage through the lobby—a process of which checking in is the ritualistic expression—is also a passage from place to non-place. By checking in and handing over your credit card or passport, you effectively surrender your identity. By becoming a temporary resident of this non-place you become a non-person and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity. You become morally weightless. In the confines of the hotel you are no longer Mr. or Ms. Whoever, you are simply the occupant of a room. You have no history. The act of the porter carrying your stuff up to your room means that you are, as they say, not carrying any baggage. (...)

The reality, too, is a kind of historical fantasy. Luxury hotels offer the chance to live—for a while—like an 18th-century libertine for whom life consists entirely of pleasure because there is a retinue of servants to clear up the mess. Every whim is catered for. A hotel is a chore-free zone, leaving you free—DO NOT DISTURB—to engage in limitless carnality. Every hint of the mundane—even turning down the covers of your bed—is taken care of by other people, by the staff. As a consequence, your actions have no consequences. What the British writer Adam Mars-Jones calls “treating the facilities to mild abuse” is certainly the privilege of every hotel guest, but major abuse is also tolerated (as long as it’s paid for). The rock star’s famed tendency—obligation almost—to trash hotel rooms simply takes this to its extreme. Every day is a new beginning. Everything broken can be replaced. Every day the room and its contents are wiped clean of staining evidence and incriminating fingerprints (a fact that, in turn, feeds into the sense of rampant amorality that is at the heart of the hotel experience). This has its dangers, of course; it takes an effort of will not to succumb to the delusion that the mere fact of being in a hotel room is both prophylactic and contraceptive.

At this point a slight qualification is needed, namely, that in some ways a room is more erotic than a suite. A suite subtly revives the division of labor and leisure on which the architecture of the house is predicated. In a suite the bed is kept separate as an adjunct or option. In a room the bed is all-dominating and unavoidable. However big the room, the bed expands proportionately to fill it up. Since the outside world scarcely exists, the bed becomes the world (“This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere,” as the great hotelier John Donne put it.). You do everything in or from this bed: You read, write, watch porno, have sex, sleep, make calls … basically, the only time you’re not stretched out on the bed is when you’re stretched out in the king-size bath, which is, effectively, a liquid bed.

by Geoff Dyer, Slate | Read more:
Image: Doris Liou