Shūji Terayama, Photothèque Imaginaire de Shūji Terayama: Les Gens de la Famille Chien-Dieu, 1975.
via:
Friday, October 19, 2018
Six Games Into His $100m Reign, Jon Gruden Looks a Disaster for the Raiders
Does Jon Gruden feel the tiniest bit of regret about returning to the sidelines? Or do his melodramatic, this-is-everyone’s-fault-but-mine press conference antics prove he is as entrenched as ever, the only guy able to restore the Raiders to their halcyon days?
A normal human may feel both of those emotions: overwhelming self-doubt combined with a belief they can solve it. But this is no ordinary man. This is Jon Effing Gruden.
In semi-retirement, he was pumped up as the knower of all football, paraded the nation over, every coaching cycle, as the man who could ride to the aid of a franchise, college or pro, and fix all of its ills with the flick of a magic, schematic wand, before signing a massive contract extension to stay in ESPN’s commentary booth.
Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis eventually tempted him back. It took all of the 10-years, $100m guaranteed (only a slight pay rise on his ESPN deal) in his eye-popping contract to seal the deal.
Gruden arrived in Oakland espousing all of the Grudenisms that made him in one instance entertaining, in another a caricature. He promised to Make Football Great Again, restoring the 1990s tough, physical style that eludes the self-entitled young pups these days. “I’m trying to throw the game back to 1998,” he told reporters in February, shortly after his appointment to the Raiders job.
Indeed, Gruden went on a media blitz prior to the start of the season. He wasn’t out of touch, he said. A decade away from coaching was nothing. If anything, his time away was an advantage, Gruden’s defenders would have you believe. He had spent all that free-time cycling through the league cherry-picking the best components from everyone else’s program. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, pretty much everything.
A normal human may feel both of those emotions: overwhelming self-doubt combined with a belief they can solve it. But this is no ordinary man. This is Jon Effing Gruden.
In semi-retirement, he was pumped up as the knower of all football, paraded the nation over, every coaching cycle, as the man who could ride to the aid of a franchise, college or pro, and fix all of its ills with the flick of a magic, schematic wand, before signing a massive contract extension to stay in ESPN’s commentary booth.Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis eventually tempted him back. It took all of the 10-years, $100m guaranteed (only a slight pay rise on his ESPN deal) in his eye-popping contract to seal the deal.
Gruden arrived in Oakland espousing all of the Grudenisms that made him in one instance entertaining, in another a caricature. He promised to Make Football Great Again, restoring the 1990s tough, physical style that eludes the self-entitled young pups these days. “I’m trying to throw the game back to 1998,” he told reporters in February, shortly after his appointment to the Raiders job.
Indeed, Gruden went on a media blitz prior to the start of the season. He wasn’t out of touch, he said. A decade away from coaching was nothing. If anything, his time away was an advantage, Gruden’s defenders would have you believe. He had spent all that free-time cycling through the league cherry-picking the best components from everyone else’s program. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, pretty much everything.
by Oliver Connolly, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Kelvin Kuo/AP
Can I Get a "McGangbang?"
On the Weird World of Secret Menus
On an ordinary August afternoon, I turned into the drive-thru lane at the In-N-Out Burger on Sunset and Orange with a special mission. I wanted to see what it was like to order from the “secret menu”—the set of items not on the menu, but available to those in the know. I was also keen to find its limit. Where would the restaurant draw the line on special requests?
In-N-Out’s secret menu was legendary. For decades, it had been so widely publicized, mostly by fans customizing their orders and spreading the word, that the company listed six of the most famous off-menu items on its website. With Not-So-Secret Menu as the title, In-N-Out clearly saw the irony.
In spite of that, further layers of secrecy—and secret telling—remained. Longer lists with dozens of variations on burgers, fries, and shakes circulated in the press, on blogs, and on social media. Conflicting accounts about what In-N-Out would or wouldn’t serve kept things speculative. They also gave my outing a tinge of adventure.
Once I reached a signal point in the lane, a uniformed employee approached my car with a menu hanging from her POS. To establish trust, I dutifully ordered from the laminated list first. Then I asked for the 3×3. This cheeseburger with three beef patties and three slices of cheese was on the not-so-secret menu. If my location were up to the chain standard, the request would go smoothly.
The item was firmly in the system. Submitting the order took no extra typing, and my bill would show a computer-generated “3×3.”
I threw the curve ball last. I planned to ask for something I hadn’t seen on any list. I knew that a grilled cheese was on the not-so-secret menu, and I’d read that some customers who requested a cheeseburger with french fries inside had been turned down. I made up a hybrid just as likely to fail.
“Can you do a grilled cheese with fries inside?”
“We can’t do that.”
Aha!
“Okay, how about with onions?” I countered.
“Sure.”
This exchange confirmed my dawning realization about secret menus. Like my grilled cheese with onions, they have to be negotiated on the spot.
Sometimes we’re the first to chart an off-menu course. More often, we’re standing on the shoulders of countless prior negotiators, whose efforts have solidified into that rumored list. Secret menus foster incessant bargaining because they depend on uncertainty. We can never predict the extent of a secret menu, and there’s always some doubt about what will be available to us.
Why does the custom persist? I would argue that keeping the limits of hospitality veiled, no matter how lightly, serves the interests of restaurateurs and diners alike.
Customers make off-menu requests for a variety of reasons. If not purely for research, my motive at In-N-Out, we do it to have our tastes accommodated, to appear in the know, or to get superior treatment. In those cases, ordering off menu makes us feel special. The belief that there’s some risk of rejection—even if only for other people—gives special orders a further air of triumph.
Restaurateurs who offer unlisted items also have several possible motives. They may want to exceed diners’ expectations, reward valued patrons, or prompt positive word of mouth for the restaurant. If those items were fixed, explicit, and promised to all, they wouldn’t serve these purposes. They’d also belong on the regular menu.
Keeping off-menu lists in the shadows also makes them easier to contain. If special ordering goes unchecked, it could jeopardize the economies of the regular menu. In essence, for secret menus to be socially and economically valuable, they must appear mysterious and negotiable. In dealings, however, not all follow the same rules.
So much depends on the way an establishment structures the relationship between restaurateur and diner. The kind of service a restaurant provides—not by vagaries of server personality or diner traffic, but at the planning level where the bones of a restaurant form—determines nearly everything about its off-menu deliberations. It can dictate how and why a menu deviation starts, who gets it, the composition of the item itself, and whether and how rumors about it spread. It can even decide the tattle’s tone. The chasm lies between standardization and personalization.
As you might guess, chain restaurants with units in the many hundreds or thousands lean toward standardization. The larger the chain, the more it regulates everything from menus to service, which creates the public perception of a homogenous and regimented operation.
This is the strongest at limited-service chains because every segment of the company-designed encounter between patron and server is at its most rote. Regulars are supposed to be addressed the same way as first-timers. Managers don’t encourage servers to recall a repeat customer’s favorite dish or how much ice she likes in her tea. That would only slow operations down—the kiss of death for a high-volume operation. If a server does become familiar with a repeat customer, that relationship could lead to special treatment, such as extra generous provisions of fries or special sauce, but interactions like these stray from the company line. Even when a menu allows customization, the protocols of the assembly line don’t waver, and while loyalty programs tailor offerings to individuals, these propositions are algorithmic, not improvised. (...)
Malcolm Bedell’s “11 McDonald’s Menu Hacks That Will Change Your Life,” which came out in LA Weekly in 2013, did so in the extreme. In addition to listing a variety of McDonald’s off-menu dishes, Bedell boasted a suite of payment-evading ruses. These included what he called “dollar menu hacks,” for which one had to order two of the least expensive items on the menu and combine them to approximate the contents, but not the cost, of a regular-menu item. Below is the author recommending a Budget Big Mac:
by Alison Pearlman, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
On an ordinary August afternoon, I turned into the drive-thru lane at the In-N-Out Burger on Sunset and Orange with a special mission. I wanted to see what it was like to order from the “secret menu”—the set of items not on the menu, but available to those in the know. I was also keen to find its limit. Where would the restaurant draw the line on special requests?
In-N-Out’s secret menu was legendary. For decades, it had been so widely publicized, mostly by fans customizing their orders and spreading the word, that the company listed six of the most famous off-menu items on its website. With Not-So-Secret Menu as the title, In-N-Out clearly saw the irony.
In spite of that, further layers of secrecy—and secret telling—remained. Longer lists with dozens of variations on burgers, fries, and shakes circulated in the press, on blogs, and on social media. Conflicting accounts about what In-N-Out would or wouldn’t serve kept things speculative. They also gave my outing a tinge of adventure.Once I reached a signal point in the lane, a uniformed employee approached my car with a menu hanging from her POS. To establish trust, I dutifully ordered from the laminated list first. Then I asked for the 3×3. This cheeseburger with three beef patties and three slices of cheese was on the not-so-secret menu. If my location were up to the chain standard, the request would go smoothly.
The item was firmly in the system. Submitting the order took no extra typing, and my bill would show a computer-generated “3×3.”
I threw the curve ball last. I planned to ask for something I hadn’t seen on any list. I knew that a grilled cheese was on the not-so-secret menu, and I’d read that some customers who requested a cheeseburger with french fries inside had been turned down. I made up a hybrid just as likely to fail.
“Can you do a grilled cheese with fries inside?”
“We can’t do that.”
Aha!
“Okay, how about with onions?” I countered.
“Sure.”
This exchange confirmed my dawning realization about secret menus. Like my grilled cheese with onions, they have to be negotiated on the spot.
Sometimes we’re the first to chart an off-menu course. More often, we’re standing on the shoulders of countless prior negotiators, whose efforts have solidified into that rumored list. Secret menus foster incessant bargaining because they depend on uncertainty. We can never predict the extent of a secret menu, and there’s always some doubt about what will be available to us.
Why does the custom persist? I would argue that keeping the limits of hospitality veiled, no matter how lightly, serves the interests of restaurateurs and diners alike.
Customers make off-menu requests for a variety of reasons. If not purely for research, my motive at In-N-Out, we do it to have our tastes accommodated, to appear in the know, or to get superior treatment. In those cases, ordering off menu makes us feel special. The belief that there’s some risk of rejection—even if only for other people—gives special orders a further air of triumph.
Restaurateurs who offer unlisted items also have several possible motives. They may want to exceed diners’ expectations, reward valued patrons, or prompt positive word of mouth for the restaurant. If those items were fixed, explicit, and promised to all, they wouldn’t serve these purposes. They’d also belong on the regular menu.
Keeping off-menu lists in the shadows also makes them easier to contain. If special ordering goes unchecked, it could jeopardize the economies of the regular menu. In essence, for secret menus to be socially and economically valuable, they must appear mysterious and negotiable. In dealings, however, not all follow the same rules.
So much depends on the way an establishment structures the relationship between restaurateur and diner. The kind of service a restaurant provides—not by vagaries of server personality or diner traffic, but at the planning level where the bones of a restaurant form—determines nearly everything about its off-menu deliberations. It can dictate how and why a menu deviation starts, who gets it, the composition of the item itself, and whether and how rumors about it spread. It can even decide the tattle’s tone. The chasm lies between standardization and personalization.
As you might guess, chain restaurants with units in the many hundreds or thousands lean toward standardization. The larger the chain, the more it regulates everything from menus to service, which creates the public perception of a homogenous and regimented operation.
This is the strongest at limited-service chains because every segment of the company-designed encounter between patron and server is at its most rote. Regulars are supposed to be addressed the same way as first-timers. Managers don’t encourage servers to recall a repeat customer’s favorite dish or how much ice she likes in her tea. That would only slow operations down—the kiss of death for a high-volume operation. If a server does become familiar with a repeat customer, that relationship could lead to special treatment, such as extra generous provisions of fries or special sauce, but interactions like these stray from the company line. Even when a menu allows customization, the protocols of the assembly line don’t waver, and while loyalty programs tailor offerings to individuals, these propositions are algorithmic, not improvised. (...)
Malcolm Bedell’s “11 McDonald’s Menu Hacks That Will Change Your Life,” which came out in LA Weekly in 2013, did so in the extreme. In addition to listing a variety of McDonald’s off-menu dishes, Bedell boasted a suite of payment-evading ruses. These included what he called “dollar menu hacks,” for which one had to order two of the least expensive items on the menu and combine them to approximate the contents, but not the cost, of a regular-menu item. Below is the author recommending a Budget Big Mac:
It’s a little known fact that any sandwich on the McDonald’s menu can be ordered “Like a Mac,” as in, “Let me get a McDouble, but make it like a Mac.” There’s even a button on the register devoted to this task in some locations. So you can order the lower-priced McDouble—hold the ketchup and mustard, add lettuce and Big Mac sauce. Total price, with substitutions = $1.49, $2.40 less than a Big Mac and all you’ll be missing is the third slice of bun, some sesame seeds, and most of your dignity.The latter didn’t really bother Bedell. The gamesmanship was too much fun.
by Alison Pearlman, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Winners Take All
In July of 2015, writer and ex-McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas addressed a room full of elites and their good company in Aspen, Colorado. He was a fellow with The Aspen Institute, a centrist think-tank, which was hosting an “ideas festival.” Giridharadas’ talk took aim at what he dubbed the “Aspen Consensus,” an ideological paradigm in which elites “talk a lot about giving more” and not “about taking less.” He earnestly questioned the social change efforts and “win-win” do-goodery promulgated at the business-friendly get-together. In the speech, Giridharadas walked a thin line: both praising the Aspen community which “meant so much” to him and his wife while also laying into its culture and commandments. He dropped the mic: “We know that enlightened capital didn’t get rid of the slave trade,” and suggested that the “rich fought for policies that helped them stack up, protect and bequeath [their] money: resisting taxes on inheritances and financial transactions, fighting for carried interest to be taxed differently from income, insisting on a sacred right to conceal money in trusts, shell companies and weird islands.”
The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it.
Since then the debate has only gotten louder: from Bernie Sanders running as an open socialist on the Democratic ticket to a Gallup poll in August, which found that fewer than half of millennials view capitalism in a favorable light. Meanwhile, the elites whom Giridharadas addressed in Aspen three years ago have seen brutal blows to their centrist, pro-market worldview at the ballot in the form of both Brexit and Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. Giridharadas’ talk was prescient in 2015, noting that “history may not be as kind to us as we hope it will,” adding that “in the final analysis our role in the inequities of our age may not be remembered well.” He was right. And the time couldn’t be more apt for a book-length treatment of his skewering critique of liberal-leaning, market-friendly philanthropy and the grand delusions used to justify and promote it.
In August Giridharadas released Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which is a journalistic look at a culture of privatized change-making, where un-elected elites — unmarred by the messiness of democracy — try to tinker with problems they likely had a hand in causing. “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history,” Giridharadas writes in the book’s introduction. “But it is also, by the cold logic of the numbers, among the more predatory in history,” noting the profound dissonance that drives his project. He suggests that those peddling what he calls a “false dogma” as confining their thinking within a narrow framework where it’s acceptable to promote “actionable tweaks rather than structural change.”
Although Winners Take All aims at today’s upper-crust in a world where wealth has continued to calcify into stock dividends and plush inheritances of the global one-percent since the 2008 global financial crisis, this critique is hardly new. To the contrary, as Giridharadas points out, pointed rebuttals of philanthropy — and the economic conditions that make it possible — have been a staple of left-wing criticism since Andrew Carnegie penned his infamous “Gospel of Wealth,” the founding text of modern philanthropy (or plutocrat P.R., depending on your perspective). Where Carnegie saw vast inequality as a sign of progress, and maintained the paternalistic belief that him and his ilk were the best stewards of their vast wealth, instead of the toiling masses who would waste it “in the indulgence of appetite,” one critic found his “Gospel” — and worldview — to be “repugnant to the whole idea of democracy.” Martin Luther King Jr., likewise, suggested that “Philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” (...)
The book amounts to a collection of vignettes that follow people, like both Giridharadas and Walker, who landed in this elite bubble — either by luck or circumstance — and had doubts about its worldview. A recent-college-grad-turned-McKinsey-consultant-turned-Obama-Foundation-staffer who questioned the market’s ability to create social justice; a billionaire heiress who felt guilty about her inheritance but wouldn’t take a position on whether the wealthy should be taxed more; a social psychologist from Harvard Business School who gave a Ted Talk in conflict with her more systems-driven feminist beliefs — suggesting that women should alter their body language to achieve power instead of challenging it; the guy who booked her on the Ted stage grappled with his organization’s role in the rise of authoritarianism, and on and on. All of these various characters find themselves in what Giridharadas dubs “MarketWorld,” a kind of Disneyfied cultural neoliberalism — an assessment gained by looking through the prism of how elites see themselves, rather than how left-leaning academics and millenial socialists see them — that subsists on cheap bromides about “changing the world” peddled by glib “thought leaders” on the monied conference circuit.
Giridharadas, fittingly a former New York Times op-ed columnist and two-time Ted Talker, is very fascinated by the intellectual climate that midwives the MarketWorld ideology. In the book’s acknowledgements he cites a passage by French economist Thomas Piketty that inspired Winners. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.” This apparatus of justification is undoubtedly, and admittedly, the book’s subject, casting a very large net on everything from Silicon Valley and consulting to “thought leadership” and philanthropy. (...)
The contempt for democracy in order to preserve elite power is the through line for today’s capitalist order. “This stemmed in part,” according to a reviewer of MacLean’s book, “from Calhoun onward, from a conviction that the polity could be cleft between ‘makers and takers,’ and that it was the ‘takers’ who, by employing state power to tax wealth and income, were doing the exploiting.” Such naked disdain for “takers” exists well within the bounds of MarketWorld today. Giridharadas interviews tech journalist Greg Ferenstein, who has given the old-hat pro-market, anti-poor people ideology a software update: calling it “Optimism.” The idea that government should be accountable to business and that people who are “unintelligent, poor, indigent, unmotivated…will be left behind” is hardly breaking any ground, though a striking example of the ideologies being espoused in Silicon Valley. But perhaps the greatest indication of this through line might be in how elites have eschewed the local in favor of “globalism.” Giridharadas chronicles how today’s elites are no longer accountable to the structures of democracy; they fancy themselves “global citizens” — unbound by place, laws, or any other pesky roadblocks, and thus no longer part of the demos. While this might seem a minor cultural shift, these changing allegiances are what allow MarkerWorlders to escape society — and remake it from above in their image.
by Will Meyer, Longreads | Read more:
Image:FPG / Getty, Collage by Katie Kosma
[ed. See also: The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers]
The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it.Since then the debate has only gotten louder: from Bernie Sanders running as an open socialist on the Democratic ticket to a Gallup poll in August, which found that fewer than half of millennials view capitalism in a favorable light. Meanwhile, the elites whom Giridharadas addressed in Aspen three years ago have seen brutal blows to their centrist, pro-market worldview at the ballot in the form of both Brexit and Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. Giridharadas’ talk was prescient in 2015, noting that “history may not be as kind to us as we hope it will,” adding that “in the final analysis our role in the inequities of our age may not be remembered well.” He was right. And the time couldn’t be more apt for a book-length treatment of his skewering critique of liberal-leaning, market-friendly philanthropy and the grand delusions used to justify and promote it.
In August Giridharadas released Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which is a journalistic look at a culture of privatized change-making, where un-elected elites — unmarred by the messiness of democracy — try to tinker with problems they likely had a hand in causing. “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history,” Giridharadas writes in the book’s introduction. “But it is also, by the cold logic of the numbers, among the more predatory in history,” noting the profound dissonance that drives his project. He suggests that those peddling what he calls a “false dogma” as confining their thinking within a narrow framework where it’s acceptable to promote “actionable tweaks rather than structural change.”
Although Winners Take All aims at today’s upper-crust in a world where wealth has continued to calcify into stock dividends and plush inheritances of the global one-percent since the 2008 global financial crisis, this critique is hardly new. To the contrary, as Giridharadas points out, pointed rebuttals of philanthropy — and the economic conditions that make it possible — have been a staple of left-wing criticism since Andrew Carnegie penned his infamous “Gospel of Wealth,” the founding text of modern philanthropy (or plutocrat P.R., depending on your perspective). Where Carnegie saw vast inequality as a sign of progress, and maintained the paternalistic belief that him and his ilk were the best stewards of their vast wealth, instead of the toiling masses who would waste it “in the indulgence of appetite,” one critic found his “Gospel” — and worldview — to be “repugnant to the whole idea of democracy.” Martin Luther King Jr., likewise, suggested that “Philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” (...)
The book amounts to a collection of vignettes that follow people, like both Giridharadas and Walker, who landed in this elite bubble — either by luck or circumstance — and had doubts about its worldview. A recent-college-grad-turned-McKinsey-consultant-turned-Obama-Foundation-staffer who questioned the market’s ability to create social justice; a billionaire heiress who felt guilty about her inheritance but wouldn’t take a position on whether the wealthy should be taxed more; a social psychologist from Harvard Business School who gave a Ted Talk in conflict with her more systems-driven feminist beliefs — suggesting that women should alter their body language to achieve power instead of challenging it; the guy who booked her on the Ted stage grappled with his organization’s role in the rise of authoritarianism, and on and on. All of these various characters find themselves in what Giridharadas dubs “MarketWorld,” a kind of Disneyfied cultural neoliberalism — an assessment gained by looking through the prism of how elites see themselves, rather than how left-leaning academics and millenial socialists see them — that subsists on cheap bromides about “changing the world” peddled by glib “thought leaders” on the monied conference circuit.
Giridharadas, fittingly a former New York Times op-ed columnist and two-time Ted Talker, is very fascinated by the intellectual climate that midwives the MarketWorld ideology. In the book’s acknowledgements he cites a passage by French economist Thomas Piketty that inspired Winners. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.” This apparatus of justification is undoubtedly, and admittedly, the book’s subject, casting a very large net on everything from Silicon Valley and consulting to “thought leadership” and philanthropy. (...)
The contempt for democracy in order to preserve elite power is the through line for today’s capitalist order. “This stemmed in part,” according to a reviewer of MacLean’s book, “from Calhoun onward, from a conviction that the polity could be cleft between ‘makers and takers,’ and that it was the ‘takers’ who, by employing state power to tax wealth and income, were doing the exploiting.” Such naked disdain for “takers” exists well within the bounds of MarketWorld today. Giridharadas interviews tech journalist Greg Ferenstein, who has given the old-hat pro-market, anti-poor people ideology a software update: calling it “Optimism.” The idea that government should be accountable to business and that people who are “unintelligent, poor, indigent, unmotivated…will be left behind” is hardly breaking any ground, though a striking example of the ideologies being espoused in Silicon Valley. But perhaps the greatest indication of this through line might be in how elites have eschewed the local in favor of “globalism.” Giridharadas chronicles how today’s elites are no longer accountable to the structures of democracy; they fancy themselves “global citizens” — unbound by place, laws, or any other pesky roadblocks, and thus no longer part of the demos. While this might seem a minor cultural shift, these changing allegiances are what allow MarkerWorlders to escape society — and remake it from above in their image.
by Will Meyer, Longreads | Read more:
Image:FPG / Getty, Collage by Katie Kosma
[ed. See also: The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers]
Facebook, Corporate Bad Actor
Here is a story about an on-going lawsuit by a group of advertisers against Facebook. It all seems fairly technical and distant from most of our concerns. But it’s actually something that has had a huge impact on the evolution of the news publishing industry over the last few years, and something that seems to have been based in large measure on Facebook’s fraud.
In other things I (or others) have written about the publishing industry, you’ve probably heard about the so-called “pivot to video.” It’s actually become something like a cliche or a meme, a craven shift digital publications made toward replacing text with video before failing in the effort and in many cases going out of business.
There’s a complicated backstory to this phenomenon. It’s mainly about declining digital advertising rates for news publishers and those publishers’ frenzied efforts to find other more lucrative sources of ad dollars. Facebook played a critical role in this story on a few different levels. First, they’re one of the social platforms which has gobbled up an ever-growing percentage of ad dollars – both taking up a bigger percentage of dollars and driving overall rates down. But Facebook played a more specific role too.
Advertisers believe that video advertising – mainly television ads – are simply more valuable than most other kinds of advertising. They may be right. But that’s besides the point for the present discussion. The relevant point is that this belief is deeply embedded in the advertising industry. So if you can show video ads on websites that’s really valuable in advertising dollars terms. The ability to show video ads and have people watch them almost necessarily means having video programming that people are interested in watching. What all of that comes down to is that if you can publish video on the web and do it successfully you can make a lot of money.
The problem has always been that it’s really, really hard to get people to watch video on the web, certainly at anything like the scale that would make the higher ad rates meaningful. There’s Netflix of course. People watch sports telecasts. In a way, there’s lots of video on the web. But those are really different businesses. If you’re in publishing or news publishing it tends to be really, really hard. People aren’t terribly interested in getting their news in a video package. Digital publishers have been trying to crack that lock for more than a decade. It’s very hard.
Fast forward to the last few years when declining ad rates for publishers have squeezed the whole industry. Publishers were desperate for new buckets of ad dollars. That put advertisers in a very strong position to basically say, if you want our ad dollars, come up with video that people will watch or that you can force them to watch. That was a tall order but publishers were desperate. Someone had figured it out, though: Facebook. People were watching lots of video on Facebook. They watched it. They watched till the end. It all seemed to work.
That had two huge consequences.
One consequence was that a flood of ad dollars went to Facebook. But it also served as a powerful proof of concept. If Facebook had figured it out others could too. A third possibility was that your publication could create videos designed to be shown primarily on Facebook. In this span of years hundreds of millions in VC dollars was going to start-ups designed to do just that. Facebook had figured it out even if you couldn’t. Each version of the trend amounted to the same thing. The journalism money was in video.
There was just one problem. It wasn’t true. Facebook was dramatically exaggerating how many people watched their videos and how long they watched them. This is not new information. This came out in 2016. At the time my colleagues and I laughed because they called it a “discrepancy”. Calling this a “discrepancy” is a bit of a stretch. In the advertising world, reporting metrics are the currency, almost literally. If you’re a lawyer and double bill your hours for years, that’s not a discrepancy. It’s fraud, certainly if you’re doing it intentionally. The key was that Facebook was so big that they had largely gotten away with generating their own metrics. They didn’t have to submit their numbers to any kind of third-party verification. What this lawsuit now alleges is that Facebook knew for roughly a year that their numbers were wrong before they told anyone. If that’s true, that’s a big, big problem.
In other things I (or others) have written about the publishing industry, you’ve probably heard about the so-called “pivot to video.” It’s actually become something like a cliche or a meme, a craven shift digital publications made toward replacing text with video before failing in the effort and in many cases going out of business.
There’s a complicated backstory to this phenomenon. It’s mainly about declining digital advertising rates for news publishers and those publishers’ frenzied efforts to find other more lucrative sources of ad dollars. Facebook played a critical role in this story on a few different levels. First, they’re one of the social platforms which has gobbled up an ever-growing percentage of ad dollars – both taking up a bigger percentage of dollars and driving overall rates down. But Facebook played a more specific role too.Advertisers believe that video advertising – mainly television ads – are simply more valuable than most other kinds of advertising. They may be right. But that’s besides the point for the present discussion. The relevant point is that this belief is deeply embedded in the advertising industry. So if you can show video ads on websites that’s really valuable in advertising dollars terms. The ability to show video ads and have people watch them almost necessarily means having video programming that people are interested in watching. What all of that comes down to is that if you can publish video on the web and do it successfully you can make a lot of money.
The problem has always been that it’s really, really hard to get people to watch video on the web, certainly at anything like the scale that would make the higher ad rates meaningful. There’s Netflix of course. People watch sports telecasts. In a way, there’s lots of video on the web. But those are really different businesses. If you’re in publishing or news publishing it tends to be really, really hard. People aren’t terribly interested in getting their news in a video package. Digital publishers have been trying to crack that lock for more than a decade. It’s very hard.
Fast forward to the last few years when declining ad rates for publishers have squeezed the whole industry. Publishers were desperate for new buckets of ad dollars. That put advertisers in a very strong position to basically say, if you want our ad dollars, come up with video that people will watch or that you can force them to watch. That was a tall order but publishers were desperate. Someone had figured it out, though: Facebook. People were watching lots of video on Facebook. They watched it. They watched till the end. It all seemed to work.
That had two huge consequences.
One consequence was that a flood of ad dollars went to Facebook. But it also served as a powerful proof of concept. If Facebook had figured it out others could too. A third possibility was that your publication could create videos designed to be shown primarily on Facebook. In this span of years hundreds of millions in VC dollars was going to start-ups designed to do just that. Facebook had figured it out even if you couldn’t. Each version of the trend amounted to the same thing. The journalism money was in video.
There was just one problem. It wasn’t true. Facebook was dramatically exaggerating how many people watched their videos and how long they watched them. This is not new information. This came out in 2016. At the time my colleagues and I laughed because they called it a “discrepancy”. Calling this a “discrepancy” is a bit of a stretch. In the advertising world, reporting metrics are the currency, almost literally. If you’re a lawyer and double bill your hours for years, that’s not a discrepancy. It’s fraud, certainly if you’re doing it intentionally. The key was that Facebook was so big that they had largely gotten away with generating their own metrics. They didn’t have to submit their numbers to any kind of third-party verification. What this lawsuit now alleges is that Facebook knew for roughly a year that their numbers were wrong before they told anyone. If that’s true, that’s a big, big problem.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
Image: Richard Drew/AP
First Sex Doll Brothel Raided by Police, Closed Down
Italy's first sex doll brothel has been raided and shut down by police only nine days after it was first opened.
Offering clients silicone models inside one of its eight private rooms, LumiDolls Torino was found to be breaking Italian laws on renting out accommodation.
The city's health authority is also investigating if the dolls in the secret establishment situated in the north-western city of Turin are thoroughly cleaned after each use, the Daily Mail reports.
The Lumidolls franchise, which offers the first such service in a country where human prostitutes are illegal, first opened its doors on September 3, with managers confirming they had been 'booked for weeks'.
Charging €80 (NZ$140) for a half-hour session with a "very realistic" silicon doll, patrons can choose from seven different female dolls and one male doll called Alessandro which has an adjustable penis varying from five to seven inches.
The dolls, which cost up to €2,000 ($3550) each, are said to be thoroughly washed for two hours after use.
Customers choose their doll's outfit - with options including fitness and secretary - and specify which position they want to find them in.
"The positions they can take are many, almost all the ones in the Kamasutra,' the brothel says.
The dolls are used in one of eight special rooms equipped with a bed, an en-suite bathroom and a TV screen that shows porn.
Upon opening, the brothel, run by a Spanish company with branches in Moscow and Barcelona, had said: "We are full for weeks with a few small exceptions."
Offering clients silicone models inside one of its eight private rooms, LumiDolls Torino was found to be breaking Italian laws on renting out accommodation.
The city's health authority is also investigating if the dolls in the secret establishment situated in the north-western city of Turin are thoroughly cleaned after each use, the Daily Mail reports.
The Lumidolls franchise, which offers the first such service in a country where human prostitutes are illegal, first opened its doors on September 3, with managers confirming they had been 'booked for weeks'.Charging €80 (NZ$140) for a half-hour session with a "very realistic" silicon doll, patrons can choose from seven different female dolls and one male doll called Alessandro which has an adjustable penis varying from five to seven inches.
The dolls, which cost up to €2,000 ($3550) each, are said to be thoroughly washed for two hours after use.
Customers choose their doll's outfit - with options including fitness and secretary - and specify which position they want to find them in.
"The positions they can take are many, almost all the ones in the Kamasutra,' the brothel says.
The dolls are used in one of eight special rooms equipped with a bed, an en-suite bathroom and a TV screen that shows porn.
Upon opening, the brothel, run by a Spanish company with branches in Moscow and Barcelona, had said: "We are full for weeks with a few small exceptions."
by Charlie Moore, NZHerald | Read more:
Image: 123rf
[ed. Love the picture. The legal/ethical dilemma everyone's been anticipating.]
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Ani DiFranco
The sky is gray
The sand is gray
And the ocean is gray
And I feel right at home
In this stunning monochrome
Alone in my way
Alone in my way
I smoke and I drink
And every time I blink
I have a tiny dream
But as bad as I am
I'm proud of the fact
That I'm worse than I seem
What kind of paradise am I looking for?
I've got everything I want and still I want more
Maybe some tiny shiny key
Will wash up on the shore...
Caring for All
"Hit them where they’re strong.” That’s the political approach Karl Rove, veteran Republican campaign strategist, employed to convince the majority of the American people to vote for George W. Bush for President not once, but twice. It’s a brilliant political strategy because it forces the opposition to defend strengths they had all but taken for granted, and in the process, expose their own weaknesses.
So, when the Trump team published an op-ed last week attacking Medicare-for-All, they were admitting the strength of this policy as a clarion call for Democrats this Midterm election. Hit them where they’re strong.
The Trump administration knows that Medicare-for-All is popular policy. A recent poll showed that seventy percent of all Americans support the policy, including a full eighty-five percent of Democrats (a slim majority of Republicans even polled in favor). And in a year where Democratic turnout, driven by, well, everything that’s happened since 11/9/2016, is likely to be high, Trump will do anything to turn out his base or risk losing his majorities in both houses of Congress. How do you turn them out? Do exactly what Trump has done for his entire, albeit short, political career: Scare them. Psychology tells us that loss aversion—the fear of losing a thing you already have—is a more powerful motivator than the potential for gain. For an op/ed bashing Medicare-for-All, this leads to a classic Trumpian play: take a policy that guarantees universal access to healthcare for all Americans, and spin it as a scary policy that will actually take away your healthcare.
Let’s get the obligatory fact-checking out of the way, shall we?
The Trump op-ed says “the Democrats’ plan means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice, seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised.” In fact, current versions of the plan would actually add benefits to Medicare, like dental and vision, and would make care more affordable for seniors by eliminating most co-pays and deductibles.
Here, Trump plays to the refrain we’ve heard about Medicare for a long time now from both sides of the aisle: Medicare is becoming unsustainable. That’s true. But it’s exactly why we need Medicare-for-All.
How can including more people in Medicare both strengthen it and add benefits? While that may sound counterintuitive, there’s a perfectly good explanation. To be sustainable, any insurance system requires there to be more money paid into the insurance pool than is drawn out. Older people are usually sicker than their younger counterparts. That means their healthcare costs are higher, and they cost the system more. Younger people are usually healthier, and spend far less on healthcare every year. Right now, aside from a few other special groups, Medicare only covers those over 65—those who, by dint of age, are sicker and most costly. Young people are left to the private market or Medicaid. Moving younger, healthier people (and their insurance dollars) onto Medicare increases the pool of money in the system, making sure there’s enough for seniors, too. So, yes, by putting more money into the system from people who use less healthcare, Medicare-for-All will actually make Medicare more sustainable, and improve benefits for older folks.
Because Medicare-for-All will cover comprehensive benefits and eliminate most out-of-pocket costs, it will also do away with the need that too many seniors have for the “Medicare Advantage” plans Trump refers to. (“The first thing the Democratic plan will do to end choice for seniors is eliminate Medicare Advantage plans for about 20 million seniors.”) These are essentially private managed care plans that fill the gaps in traditional Medicare: they charge lower out-of-pocket costs, or they offer additional benefits like dental coverage. In exchange for filling these gaps, these plans reduce the choice seniors really want: the choice in what doctors you see. This is where traditional Medicare shines today, and where Medicare-for-All would shine tomorrow: nearly all doctors would accept Medicare-for-All (similar to Medicare today), greatly increasing the choices Americans have when it comes to their healthcare.
Medicare-for-All won’t outlaw private health insurance. (“Democrats outlaw private plans…”) Current versions of the proposal only prohibit sale of private plans that offer duplicate coverage of services already covered under Medicare-for-All. And because the benefits under these proposals are generous, this makes private insurance simply unnecessary for most people. This makes the system more efficient: free-market dogma assumes that private companies will always be more efficient than the government, but that’s just not true when it comes to health insurance. In fact, private health insurance is way less efficient than Medicare today. First, every insurance corporation has its own overhead costs. So instead of one overhead in a single-payer system like Medicare-for-All, you have redundant overhead costs for every single insurer in the system. That creates more overhead overall, inflating the costs of healthcare. Second, insurance corporations have one primary goal: make money. So while traditional Medicare has administrative overhead around 2%, private insurers can skim up to 15% off the top of every healthcare dollar, which either goes straight to profits or covers the other costs of running healthcare like a big business. That’s how their CEOs make tens of millions of dollars, after all. That’s money we all pay—a source of deep inefficiency.
And let’s face it, nobody really likes their insurance company, anyway. Most of the time, even if you have Cadillac private health insurance, you usually have to pay a copay every time you see your healthcare provider, rack up bills until you hit your deductible, and fight with your insurer to cover major costs like hospital stays or surgery. Private insurance is a headache.
Medicare today isn’t perfect either, but the fact remains that Medicare-for-All would provide better coverage than pretty much any private plan today.
And Medicare-for-All costs less than our current system. If this sounds too good to be true, take a moment to remind yourself just how broken and expensive our current non-system already is. Reminder: our healthcare costs per person are almost double what other high-income countries pay. One in six dollars spent in the American economy is spent on healthcare.
But none of that will stop you from hearing, over and over, scary-sounding numbers about how expensive Medicare-for-All will be. Republican attack ads fixate on what the plan will add to the federal government’s budget—but not how much it will save the average American family. Everyone knows that you can’t figure out whether something is ‘worth it’ just by looking at its price. For example, if you’re in the market for a new car because your old one costs you $1500 a month in repairs, you can’t just fixate on the price tag for the new one. You have to consider the trade-in value of your old car—plus what you’ll save on repairs.
And so it is with Medicare-for-All: healthcare costs would go up for the federal government, but costs would go down even more for employers, state governments, and most importantly, families (remember: you wouldn’t need to pay premiums to private insurance companies anymore). Even estimates from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center have shown that Medicare-for-All would save the American people literally trillions of dollars. So yes, Medicare-for-All is expensive. But it’s a lot cheaper than the current system.
A major way that Medicare-for-All saves money is by repairing the broken incentives in our current system. Today’s system rewards big hospitals and big insurers with massive profits when they collude to keep prices high. They use their size to negotiate pay rates for services and procedures in bulk that drive small providers and insurers out of the market. That’s caused massive consolidation among both hospital systems and insurance providers. Who suffers? People—the ones who get healthcare and the ones who provide it. Independent physicians can’t compete with the big health systems, and doctors are increasingly being driven to work for huge conglomerates that take away their autonomy. This loss of competition also jeopardizes the ability of healthcare workers to secure fair working conditions and a living wage. Meanwhile, patients suffer because profit-seeking oligopolies on both sides of a healthcare payment leave us with less choice and higher costs.
Medicare-for-All solves the consolidation problem by taking the profit motive out of the insurance system and setting fair reimbursement rates for everyone, which neutralizes the monopoly power of hospitals and brings down costs. And by allowing the single payer—Medicare—to enforce fair labor standards, Medicare-for-All supports the workers who actually provide our healthcare. Negotiating bulk discounts on prescription drugs to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and save Americans money is just icing on the cake.
by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed & Micah Johnson, Current Affairs | Read more:
So, when the Trump team published an op-ed last week attacking Medicare-for-All, they were admitting the strength of this policy as a clarion call for Democrats this Midterm election. Hit them where they’re strong.
The Trump administration knows that Medicare-for-All is popular policy. A recent poll showed that seventy percent of all Americans support the policy, including a full eighty-five percent of Democrats (a slim majority of Republicans even polled in favor). And in a year where Democratic turnout, driven by, well, everything that’s happened since 11/9/2016, is likely to be high, Trump will do anything to turn out his base or risk losing his majorities in both houses of Congress. How do you turn them out? Do exactly what Trump has done for his entire, albeit short, political career: Scare them. Psychology tells us that loss aversion—the fear of losing a thing you already have—is a more powerful motivator than the potential for gain. For an op/ed bashing Medicare-for-All, this leads to a classic Trumpian play: take a policy that guarantees universal access to healthcare for all Americans, and spin it as a scary policy that will actually take away your healthcare.Let’s get the obligatory fact-checking out of the way, shall we?
The Trump op-ed says “the Democrats’ plan means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice, seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised.” In fact, current versions of the plan would actually add benefits to Medicare, like dental and vision, and would make care more affordable for seniors by eliminating most co-pays and deductibles.
Here, Trump plays to the refrain we’ve heard about Medicare for a long time now from both sides of the aisle: Medicare is becoming unsustainable. That’s true. But it’s exactly why we need Medicare-for-All.
How can including more people in Medicare both strengthen it and add benefits? While that may sound counterintuitive, there’s a perfectly good explanation. To be sustainable, any insurance system requires there to be more money paid into the insurance pool than is drawn out. Older people are usually sicker than their younger counterparts. That means their healthcare costs are higher, and they cost the system more. Younger people are usually healthier, and spend far less on healthcare every year. Right now, aside from a few other special groups, Medicare only covers those over 65—those who, by dint of age, are sicker and most costly. Young people are left to the private market or Medicaid. Moving younger, healthier people (and their insurance dollars) onto Medicare increases the pool of money in the system, making sure there’s enough for seniors, too. So, yes, by putting more money into the system from people who use less healthcare, Medicare-for-All will actually make Medicare more sustainable, and improve benefits for older folks.
Because Medicare-for-All will cover comprehensive benefits and eliminate most out-of-pocket costs, it will also do away with the need that too many seniors have for the “Medicare Advantage” plans Trump refers to. (“The first thing the Democratic plan will do to end choice for seniors is eliminate Medicare Advantage plans for about 20 million seniors.”) These are essentially private managed care plans that fill the gaps in traditional Medicare: they charge lower out-of-pocket costs, or they offer additional benefits like dental coverage. In exchange for filling these gaps, these plans reduce the choice seniors really want: the choice in what doctors you see. This is where traditional Medicare shines today, and where Medicare-for-All would shine tomorrow: nearly all doctors would accept Medicare-for-All (similar to Medicare today), greatly increasing the choices Americans have when it comes to their healthcare.
Medicare-for-All won’t outlaw private health insurance. (“Democrats outlaw private plans…”) Current versions of the proposal only prohibit sale of private plans that offer duplicate coverage of services already covered under Medicare-for-All. And because the benefits under these proposals are generous, this makes private insurance simply unnecessary for most people. This makes the system more efficient: free-market dogma assumes that private companies will always be more efficient than the government, but that’s just not true when it comes to health insurance. In fact, private health insurance is way less efficient than Medicare today. First, every insurance corporation has its own overhead costs. So instead of one overhead in a single-payer system like Medicare-for-All, you have redundant overhead costs for every single insurer in the system. That creates more overhead overall, inflating the costs of healthcare. Second, insurance corporations have one primary goal: make money. So while traditional Medicare has administrative overhead around 2%, private insurers can skim up to 15% off the top of every healthcare dollar, which either goes straight to profits or covers the other costs of running healthcare like a big business. That’s how their CEOs make tens of millions of dollars, after all. That’s money we all pay—a source of deep inefficiency.
And let’s face it, nobody really likes their insurance company, anyway. Most of the time, even if you have Cadillac private health insurance, you usually have to pay a copay every time you see your healthcare provider, rack up bills until you hit your deductible, and fight with your insurer to cover major costs like hospital stays or surgery. Private insurance is a headache.
Medicare today isn’t perfect either, but the fact remains that Medicare-for-All would provide better coverage than pretty much any private plan today.
And Medicare-for-All costs less than our current system. If this sounds too good to be true, take a moment to remind yourself just how broken and expensive our current non-system already is. Reminder: our healthcare costs per person are almost double what other high-income countries pay. One in six dollars spent in the American economy is spent on healthcare.
But none of that will stop you from hearing, over and over, scary-sounding numbers about how expensive Medicare-for-All will be. Republican attack ads fixate on what the plan will add to the federal government’s budget—but not how much it will save the average American family. Everyone knows that you can’t figure out whether something is ‘worth it’ just by looking at its price. For example, if you’re in the market for a new car because your old one costs you $1500 a month in repairs, you can’t just fixate on the price tag for the new one. You have to consider the trade-in value of your old car—plus what you’ll save on repairs.
And so it is with Medicare-for-All: healthcare costs would go up for the federal government, but costs would go down even more for employers, state governments, and most importantly, families (remember: you wouldn’t need to pay premiums to private insurance companies anymore). Even estimates from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center have shown that Medicare-for-All would save the American people literally trillions of dollars. So yes, Medicare-for-All is expensive. But it’s a lot cheaper than the current system.
A major way that Medicare-for-All saves money is by repairing the broken incentives in our current system. Today’s system rewards big hospitals and big insurers with massive profits when they collude to keep prices high. They use their size to negotiate pay rates for services and procedures in bulk that drive small providers and insurers out of the market. That’s caused massive consolidation among both hospital systems and insurance providers. Who suffers? People—the ones who get healthcare and the ones who provide it. Independent physicians can’t compete with the big health systems, and doctors are increasingly being driven to work for huge conglomerates that take away their autonomy. This loss of competition also jeopardizes the ability of healthcare workers to secure fair working conditions and a living wage. Meanwhile, patients suffer because profit-seeking oligopolies on both sides of a healthcare payment leave us with less choice and higher costs.
Medicare-for-All solves the consolidation problem by taking the profit motive out of the insurance system and setting fair reimbursement rates for everyone, which neutralizes the monopoly power of hospitals and brings down costs. And by allowing the single payer—Medicare—to enforce fair labor standards, Medicare-for-All supports the workers who actually provide our healthcare. Negotiating bulk discounts on prescription drugs to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and save Americans money is just icing on the cake.
by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed & Micah Johnson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used by Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything
When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that enabling it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches, or keep Facebook from collecting the addresses of all the places she visits on the internet, or prevent third-party trackers she’s never heard of from following her from site to site. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a quarter of American adults use “Do Not Track” to protect their privacy. (Our own stats at Gizmodo Media Group show that 9% of visitors have it turned on.) We’ve got bad news for those millions of privacy-minded people, though: “Do Not Track” is like spray-on sunscreen, a product that makes you feel safe while doing little to actually protect you.
“Do Not Track,” as it was first imagined a decade ago by consumer advocates, was going to be a “Do Not Call” list for the internet, helping to free people from annoying targeted ads and creepy data collection. But only a handful of sites respect the request, the most prominent of which are Pinterest and Medium. (Pinterest won’t use offsite data to target ads to a visitor who’s elected not to be tracked, while Medium won’t send their data to third parties.) The vast majority of sites, including this one, ignore it. (...)
“It is, in many respects, a failed experiment,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton University. “There’s a question of whether it’s time to declare failure, move on, and withdraw the feature from web browsers.”
That’s a big deal coming from Mayer: He spent four years of his life helping to bring Do Not Track into existence in the first place.
Why do we have this meaningless option in browsers? The main reason why Do Not Track, or DNT, as insiders call it, became a useless tool is that the government refused to step in and give it any kind of legal authority. If a telemarketer violates the Do Not Call list, they can be fined up to $16,000 per violation. There is no penalty for ignoring Do Not Track.
In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission endorsed the idea of Do Not Track, but rather than mandating its creation, the Obama administration encouraged industry to figure out how it should work via a “multistakeholder process” that was overseen by W3C, an international non-governmental organization that develops technical standards for the web. It wound up being an absolutely terrible idea.
Technologists quickly came up with the code necessary to say “Don’t track me,” by having the browser send out a “DNT:1" signal along with other metadata, such as what machine the browser is using and what font is being displayed. It was a tool similar to “robots.txt,” which can be inserted into the HTML of a web page to tell search engines not to index that page so it won’t show up in search results. The “stakeholders” involved in the DNT standard-setting process—mainly privacy advocates, technologists, and online advertisers—couldn’t, though, come to an agreement about what a website should actually do in response to the request. (The W3C did come up with a recommendation about what websites and third parties should do when a browser sends the signal—namely, don’t collect their personal data, or de-identify it if you have to—but the people that do the data collection never accepted it as a standard.)
“Do Not Track could have succeeded only if there had been some incentive for the ad tech industry to reach a consensus with privacy advocates and other stakeholders—some reason why a failure to reach a negotiated agreement would be a worse outcome for the industry,” said Arvind Narayanan, a professor at Princeton University who was one of the technologists at the table. “Around 2011, the threat of federal legislation brought them to the negotiating table. But gradually, that threat disappeared. The prolonged negotiations, in fact, proved useful to the industry to create the illusion of a voluntary self-regulatory process, seemingly preempting the need for regulation.”
“Do Not Track,” as it was first imagined a decade ago by consumer advocates, was going to be a “Do Not Call” list for the internet, helping to free people from annoying targeted ads and creepy data collection. But only a handful of sites respect the request, the most prominent of which are Pinterest and Medium. (Pinterest won’t use offsite data to target ads to a visitor who’s elected not to be tracked, while Medium won’t send their data to third parties.) The vast majority of sites, including this one, ignore it. (...)“It is, in many respects, a failed experiment,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton University. “There’s a question of whether it’s time to declare failure, move on, and withdraw the feature from web browsers.”
That’s a big deal coming from Mayer: He spent four years of his life helping to bring Do Not Track into existence in the first place.
Why do we have this meaningless option in browsers? The main reason why Do Not Track, or DNT, as insiders call it, became a useless tool is that the government refused to step in and give it any kind of legal authority. If a telemarketer violates the Do Not Call list, they can be fined up to $16,000 per violation. There is no penalty for ignoring Do Not Track.
In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission endorsed the idea of Do Not Track, but rather than mandating its creation, the Obama administration encouraged industry to figure out how it should work via a “multistakeholder process” that was overseen by W3C, an international non-governmental organization that develops technical standards for the web. It wound up being an absolutely terrible idea.
Technologists quickly came up with the code necessary to say “Don’t track me,” by having the browser send out a “DNT:1" signal along with other metadata, such as what machine the browser is using and what font is being displayed. It was a tool similar to “robots.txt,” which can be inserted into the HTML of a web page to tell search engines not to index that page so it won’t show up in search results. The “stakeholders” involved in the DNT standard-setting process—mainly privacy advocates, technologists, and online advertisers—couldn’t, though, come to an agreement about what a website should actually do in response to the request. (The W3C did come up with a recommendation about what websites and third parties should do when a browser sends the signal—namely, don’t collect their personal data, or de-identify it if you have to—but the people that do the data collection never accepted it as a standard.)
“Do Not Track could have succeeded only if there had been some incentive for the ad tech industry to reach a consensus with privacy advocates and other stakeholders—some reason why a failure to reach a negotiated agreement would be a worse outcome for the industry,” said Arvind Narayanan, a professor at Princeton University who was one of the technologists at the table. “Around 2011, the threat of federal legislation brought them to the negotiating table. But gradually, that threat disappeared. The prolonged negotiations, in fact, proved useful to the industry to create the illusion of a voluntary self-regulatory process, seemingly preempting the need for regulation.”
by Kashmir Hill, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: Angelica Alzona (Gizmodo Media Group)
The Bookish Life
The village idiot of the shtetl of Frampol was offered the job of waiting at the village gates to greet the arrival of the Messiah. “The pay isn’t great,” he was told, “but the work is steady.” The same might be said about the conditions of the bookish life: low pay but steady work. By the bookish life, I mean a life in which the reading of books has a central, even a dominating, place. I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging. Reading happens to be my hobby, too, along with peristalsis and respiration.
Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” So many books are there in the world that no one can get round to even all the best among them, and hence no one can claim to be truly well-read. Some people are merely better-read than others. Nobody has read, or can read, everything, and by everything I include only the good, the beautiful, the important books.
The first question is “How can one tell which books qualify as good, beautiful, important?” In an essay of 1978 called “On Reading Books: A Barbarian’s Cogitations,” Alexander Gerschenkron, a Harvard economist of wide learning, set out three criteria: A good book must be interesting, memorable, and rereadable. This is as sensible as it is unhelpful. How can one know if a book is interesting until one has read it; memorable until time has or has not lodged it in one’s memory; rereadable until the decades pass and one feels the need to read it again and enjoys it all the more on doing so?
Not much help, either, is likely to be found in various lists of the world’s best books. In 1771 a man named Robert Skipwith, later to be Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s brother-in-law, asked Jefferson to compile for him a list of indispensable books. Jefferson obliged with a list of 148 titles, mostly Greek and Roman classics, and some intensely practical treatises, among them a book on horse-hoeing husbandry. The Guardian not long ago published a list of the world’s one hundred best nonfiction books in English, and while nearly every one seemed eminently worthy, one could just as easily add another hundred books that should have been on such a list, and this does not include all the world’s splendid works of fiction, drama, and poetry, and not merely in English alone. In 1960, Clifton Fadiman, then a notable literary critic, produced a work called The Lifetime Reading Plan, a work of 378 pages, which I have chosen never to read, lest it take up the time I might devote to a better book.
Such lists reveal a yearning for a direct route to wisdom. Brace yourself for the bad news: None is available. If one wanted to establish expertise in a restricted field—economics, say, or art history, or botany—such a list might be useful. But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor, as I hope to make plain, could it. (...)
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. . . . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.” As I put it elsewhere some years ago, I read for the pleasures of style and in the hope of “laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness,” and, like Montaigne, on lucky days perhaps to pick up a touch of wisdom along the way.
The act of reading—office memos, newspaper articles on trade and monetary policy, and bureaucratic bumpf apart—should if possible never be separable from pleasure. Twenty or so years ago there was a vogue for speed-reading. (“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes,” Woody Allen quipped. “It involves Russia.”) But why, one wonders, would you wish to speed up an activity that gives pleasure? Speed-reading? I’d as soon take a course in speed-eating or speed-lovemaking. Yet the notion of speed generally hovers over the act of reading. “A real page-turner,” people say of certain novels or biographies. I prefer to read books that are page-stoppers, that cause me to stop and contemplate a striking idea, an elegant phrase, an admirably constructed sentence. A serious reader reads with a pencil in hand, to sideline, underline, make a note.
Nor, I suspect, is the bookish soul likely to read chiefly on a Kindle or a tablet. I won’t go into the matter of the aesthetics of book design, the smell of books, the fine feel of a well-made book in one’s hands, lest I be taken for a hedonist, a reactionary, and a snob. More important, apart from the convenience of Kindles and tablets—in allowing for enlarged print, in portability if one wants to take more than one or two books along when traveling—I have come to believe that there is a mysterious but quite real difference between words on pixel and words in print. For reasons that perhaps one day brain science will reveal to us, print has more weight, a more substantial feel, makes a greater demand on one’s attention, than the pixel. One tends not to note a writer’s style as clearly in pixels as one does in print. Presented with a thirty- or forty-paragraph piece of writing in pixels, one wants to skim after fifteen or twenty paragraphs in a way that one doesn’t ordinarily wish to do in print. Pixels for information and convenience, then, print for knowledge and pleasure is my sense of the difference between the two. (...)
In the risky generalization department, slow readers tend to be better readers—more careful, more critical, more thoughtful. I myself rarely read more than twenty-five or thirty pages of a serious book in a single sitting. Reading a novel by Thomas Mann, a short story by Chekhov, a historical work by Theodor Mommsen, essays by Max Beerbohm, why would I wish to rush through them? Savoring them seems more sensible. After all, you never know when you will pass this way again.
A great help in leading the bookish life is to recognize that as a reader, you might be omnivorous, but you can never be anywhere near omniscient. The realization removes a great deal of pressure. Some of this pressure derives from the claim of recent years that there is a much wider world than the Western one most of us grew up and were educated in. If one is not to be thought parochial in one’s interests, the argument holds, one is responsible for knowing not Western culture alone but also the cultures of the Far and Near East. Yet when I think of all I haven’t read in or about Western culture, I am perfectly prepared to take a pass on Islam,Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, and the rich store of Chinese Confucian and contemplative literature. These and more will have to wait until I have read Pindar, Terence, Hume’s History of England, Taine, Zola, and a few hundred other such items, not to speak of the books I should like to reread. They’ll have to wait, it begins to look, until the next life, which, I like to think, will surely provide a well-stocked library. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure I want any part of it. Hell of course will have a library, but one stocked exclusively with science fiction, six-hundred-odd page novels by men whose first name is Jonathan, and books extolling the 1960s. (...)
Which brings me to the clutter that books can bring into a home. Books Do Furnish a Room is a truism as well as the title of the tenth novel in Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time novel cycle, but it needs to be added that books can also take over a room—and not one room alone. Harry Wolfson, the Harvard scholar and philosopher, is said to have used both his refrigerator and oven to store books. I tell you this so your feelings shouldn’t be hurt if, had you happened to have known him, Professor Wolfson failed to invite you to dinner.
I have myself twice sold off large numbers of my books. I had hoped to keep my own collection of books within respectable bounds—down, say, to the two or three hundred of the books I most love—but have found that impossible. I also instituted a failed policy of telling myself that for every book I brought home, I would get rid of one already in my possession. Meanwhile, over the years, I seem to have acquired two thousand or so books. Publishers and people send me books. Like an incorrigible juvenile delinquent who can’t stay out of pool halls, I wander into used bookshops and do not often emerge empty-handed. Books in my apartment continue to multiply. Some of them, I suspect, do it overnight, in the dark, while I am asleep.
Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” So many books are there in the world that no one can get round to even all the best among them, and hence no one can claim to be truly well-read. Some people are merely better-read than others. Nobody has read, or can read, everything, and by everything I include only the good, the beautiful, the important books.The first question is “How can one tell which books qualify as good, beautiful, important?” In an essay of 1978 called “On Reading Books: A Barbarian’s Cogitations,” Alexander Gerschenkron, a Harvard economist of wide learning, set out three criteria: A good book must be interesting, memorable, and rereadable. This is as sensible as it is unhelpful. How can one know if a book is interesting until one has read it; memorable until time has or has not lodged it in one’s memory; rereadable until the decades pass and one feels the need to read it again and enjoys it all the more on doing so?
Not much help, either, is likely to be found in various lists of the world’s best books. In 1771 a man named Robert Skipwith, later to be Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s brother-in-law, asked Jefferson to compile for him a list of indispensable books. Jefferson obliged with a list of 148 titles, mostly Greek and Roman classics, and some intensely practical treatises, among them a book on horse-hoeing husbandry. The Guardian not long ago published a list of the world’s one hundred best nonfiction books in English, and while nearly every one seemed eminently worthy, one could just as easily add another hundred books that should have been on such a list, and this does not include all the world’s splendid works of fiction, drama, and poetry, and not merely in English alone. In 1960, Clifton Fadiman, then a notable literary critic, produced a work called The Lifetime Reading Plan, a work of 378 pages, which I have chosen never to read, lest it take up the time I might devote to a better book.
Such lists reveal a yearning for a direct route to wisdom. Brace yourself for the bad news: None is available. If one wanted to establish expertise in a restricted field—economics, say, or art history, or botany—such a list might be useful. But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor, as I hope to make plain, could it. (...)
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. . . . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.” As I put it elsewhere some years ago, I read for the pleasures of style and in the hope of “laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness,” and, like Montaigne, on lucky days perhaps to pick up a touch of wisdom along the way.
The act of reading—office memos, newspaper articles on trade and monetary policy, and bureaucratic bumpf apart—should if possible never be separable from pleasure. Twenty or so years ago there was a vogue for speed-reading. (“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes,” Woody Allen quipped. “It involves Russia.”) But why, one wonders, would you wish to speed up an activity that gives pleasure? Speed-reading? I’d as soon take a course in speed-eating or speed-lovemaking. Yet the notion of speed generally hovers over the act of reading. “A real page-turner,” people say of certain novels or biographies. I prefer to read books that are page-stoppers, that cause me to stop and contemplate a striking idea, an elegant phrase, an admirably constructed sentence. A serious reader reads with a pencil in hand, to sideline, underline, make a note.
Nor, I suspect, is the bookish soul likely to read chiefly on a Kindle or a tablet. I won’t go into the matter of the aesthetics of book design, the smell of books, the fine feel of a well-made book in one’s hands, lest I be taken for a hedonist, a reactionary, and a snob. More important, apart from the convenience of Kindles and tablets—in allowing for enlarged print, in portability if one wants to take more than one or two books along when traveling—I have come to believe that there is a mysterious but quite real difference between words on pixel and words in print. For reasons that perhaps one day brain science will reveal to us, print has more weight, a more substantial feel, makes a greater demand on one’s attention, than the pixel. One tends not to note a writer’s style as clearly in pixels as one does in print. Presented with a thirty- or forty-paragraph piece of writing in pixels, one wants to skim after fifteen or twenty paragraphs in a way that one doesn’t ordinarily wish to do in print. Pixels for information and convenience, then, print for knowledge and pleasure is my sense of the difference between the two. (...)
In the risky generalization department, slow readers tend to be better readers—more careful, more critical, more thoughtful. I myself rarely read more than twenty-five or thirty pages of a serious book in a single sitting. Reading a novel by Thomas Mann, a short story by Chekhov, a historical work by Theodor Mommsen, essays by Max Beerbohm, why would I wish to rush through them? Savoring them seems more sensible. After all, you never know when you will pass this way again.
A great help in leading the bookish life is to recognize that as a reader, you might be omnivorous, but you can never be anywhere near omniscient. The realization removes a great deal of pressure. Some of this pressure derives from the claim of recent years that there is a much wider world than the Western one most of us grew up and were educated in. If one is not to be thought parochial in one’s interests, the argument holds, one is responsible for knowing not Western culture alone but also the cultures of the Far and Near East. Yet when I think of all I haven’t read in or about Western culture, I am perfectly prepared to take a pass on Islam,Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, and the rich store of Chinese Confucian and contemplative literature. These and more will have to wait until I have read Pindar, Terence, Hume’s History of England, Taine, Zola, and a few hundred other such items, not to speak of the books I should like to reread. They’ll have to wait, it begins to look, until the next life, which, I like to think, will surely provide a well-stocked library. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure I want any part of it. Hell of course will have a library, but one stocked exclusively with science fiction, six-hundred-odd page novels by men whose first name is Jonathan, and books extolling the 1960s. (...)
Which brings me to the clutter that books can bring into a home. Books Do Furnish a Room is a truism as well as the title of the tenth novel in Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time novel cycle, but it needs to be added that books can also take over a room—and not one room alone. Harry Wolfson, the Harvard scholar and philosopher, is said to have used both his refrigerator and oven to store books. I tell you this so your feelings shouldn’t be hurt if, had you happened to have known him, Professor Wolfson failed to invite you to dinner.
I have myself twice sold off large numbers of my books. I had hoped to keep my own collection of books within respectable bounds—down, say, to the two or three hundred of the books I most love—but have found that impossible. I also instituted a failed policy of telling myself that for every book I brought home, I would get rid of one already in my possession. Meanwhile, over the years, I seem to have acquired two thousand or so books. Publishers and people send me books. Like an incorrigible juvenile delinquent who can’t stay out of pool halls, I wander into used bookshops and do not often emerge empty-handed. Books in my apartment continue to multiply. Some of them, I suspect, do it overnight, in the dark, while I am asleep.
by Joseph Epstein, First Things | Read more:
Image: Plum leaves via Creative Commons
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Junk Merchants
With America's political order settling into a seemingly permanent state of crisis-on-autopilot, it is just a matter of time before the paper economy follows suit. Last week’s dramatic Wall Street selloffs saw the Dow Jones roster shed around 4 percent of its collective value. Tech stocks, always at the frothiest tip of investment bubbles, took an especially pronounced beating. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon impresario, lost (as of last Wednesday) a cool $9.1 billion in net worth, more than triple Mark Zuckerberg’s bracing $2.5 billion market bath.
But just as reliably as investors clamor to a stampede of wealth destruction, market savants and the shills of the business press adjourn to their Bloomberg terminals and CNBC podiums to issue reassuring directives about the soundness of the market’s overall direction, bumpy selloffs and localized panics notwithstanding. When a similar downturn wracked Wall Street in February, Bloomberg editor Robert Burgess insisted that all was well, so far as underlying fundamentals and such were concerned: corporate profits were outperforming expectations, the WTO had revised its global growth forecasts upward, and traditional shelters against panic such as Treasury bonds were not seeing appreciable gains.
All of which proved true enough—until it didn’t. The October market swoon has, in fact, already seen boosts in Treasuries and gold prices, suggesting that this bout of jitters might have some basis in broader economic conditions. More worrying still is the massive overleveraging of the corporate economy, which according to a recent report by Burgess’s employer, has seen more than $1 trillion in investment money careening toward junk-bond status. Indeed, the main reason all this merger-driven debt hasn’t received a forthright junk rating is due to the reliably corrupt practices of the industry-captive debt-rating racket. In their survey of the fifty largest mergers-and-acquisition deals of the past year, Bloomberg’s Molly Smith and Christopher Cannon noted that “by one key measure, more than half of the acquiring companies pushed their leverage to levels typical of junk-rated peers. But those companies . . . have been allowed to maintain investment-grade ratings by Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings.”
by Chris Lehmann, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Russ Allison Loar
But just as reliably as investors clamor to a stampede of wealth destruction, market savants and the shills of the business press adjourn to their Bloomberg terminals and CNBC podiums to issue reassuring directives about the soundness of the market’s overall direction, bumpy selloffs and localized panics notwithstanding. When a similar downturn wracked Wall Street in February, Bloomberg editor Robert Burgess insisted that all was well, so far as underlying fundamentals and such were concerned: corporate profits were outperforming expectations, the WTO had revised its global growth forecasts upward, and traditional shelters against panic such as Treasury bonds were not seeing appreciable gains.All of which proved true enough—until it didn’t. The October market swoon has, in fact, already seen boosts in Treasuries and gold prices, suggesting that this bout of jitters might have some basis in broader economic conditions. More worrying still is the massive overleveraging of the corporate economy, which according to a recent report by Burgess’s employer, has seen more than $1 trillion in investment money careening toward junk-bond status. Indeed, the main reason all this merger-driven debt hasn’t received a forthright junk rating is due to the reliably corrupt practices of the industry-captive debt-rating racket. In their survey of the fifty largest mergers-and-acquisition deals of the past year, Bloomberg’s Molly Smith and Christopher Cannon noted that “by one key measure, more than half of the acquiring companies pushed their leverage to levels typical of junk-rated peers. But those companies . . . have been allowed to maintain investment-grade ratings by Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings.”
But of course, few economic commentators are talking about the sink hole of shitty debt opening up beneath the Dow Jones trading floor—any more than they were inclined, circa 2007, to wonder whether housing prices would succumb to the laws of gravity. No, the flight of investment capital merely marks the onset of a fresh round of inflation jitters among our titans of finance, as the Fed prepares to further nudge up interest rates. After operating with a virtually unlimited supply of free money over the past decade, the masters of our financial universe are adapting to a reconfigured investment environment the best way they know how—by hoovering up all available cash and going home to count their T-bills. (...)
Such wishful trend-spotting may play well on cable news outlets, where it gets teed up alongside Trump’s pronouncement that the Fed has gone “crazy” in its bid to rein in the flow of free money to Wall Street. But the pundit sideline of market phrenology, like Trump’s camera-ready tantrums, pointedly overlooks the stubborn structural forces that are now causing our heroic capital flows to seize up in concert. It’s not simply the M and A sector, but the paper economy at large, that’s been on a stupendous debt binge since the serial corporate tax cuts the Trump administration has visited on the financial sector for no good earthly reason. (Apart, that is, from the seeming across-the-board allergy to tax liability shared by both the president and his hidden-genius son-in-law.) Wall Street has indeed been so flush with unearned pelf that its single largest expenditure has been in corporate stock buybacks—a boondoggle for the investment class, to be sure, but a key accelerant of inequality in the actually existing productive economy. (...)
In other words, whether last week’s stampede proves to be the overture to worse market reckonings to come, or what our thought leadership class is now fond of calling a blip, it already stands out in the annals of investment chicanery for its sheer gratuitous awfulness. The stock market has never had anything more than a notionally symbolic relationship to the underlying conditions of the American economy, but here at the summit of neoliberal policy delusion, it’s been re-engineered into a full-blown monument to social cruelty for its own sake—something too crass and gruesome even to qualify as a conceptual art installation. The scandal won’t so much be in the magnitude of the next great recession, when and if it comes, but rather in the predatory status quo we’ve come to accept as the picture of economic health.
by Chris Lehmann, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Russ Allison Loar
Printer Makers Are Crippling Cheap Ink Cartridges Via Bogus 'Security Updates'
Printer maker Epson is under fire this month from activist groups after a software update prevented customers from using cheaper, third party ink cartridges. It’s just the latest salvo in a decades-long effort by printer manufacturers to block consumer choice, often by disguising printer downgrades as essential product improvements.
For several decades now printer manufacturers have lured consumers into an arguably-terrible deal: shell out a modest sum for a mediocre printer, then pay an arm and a leg for replacement printer cartridges that cost relatively-little to actually produce.
Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a booming market for discount cartridges and refillable alternatives. Just as unsurprisingly, major printer vendors quickly set about trying to kill this burgeoning market via all manner of lawsuits and dubious behavior.
Initially, companies like Lexmark filed all manner of unsuccessful copyright and patent lawsuits against third-party cartridge makers. When that didn’t work, hardware makers began cooking draconian restrictions into printers, ranging from unnecessary cartridge expiration dates to obnoxious DRM and firmware updates blocking the use of “unofficial” cartridges.
As consumer disgust at this behavior has grown, printer makers have been forced to get more creative in their efforts to block consumer choice.
HP, for example, was widely lambasted back in 2016 when it deployed a “security update” that did little more than block the use of cheaper third-party ink cartridges. HP owners that dutifully installed the update suddenly found their printers wouldn’t work if they’d installed third-party cartridges, forcing them back into the arms of pricier, official HP cartridges.
Massive public backlash forced HP to issue a flimsy mea culpa and reverse course, but the industry doesn’t appear to have learned its lesson quite yet.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation now says that Epson has been engaged in the same behavior. The group says it recently learned that in late 2016 or early 2017, Epson issued a “poison pill” software update that effectively downgraded user printers to block third party cartridges, but disguised the software update as a meaningful improvement.
The EFF has subsequently sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that Epson’s lack of transparency can easily be seen as “misleading and deceptive” under Texas consumer protection laws.
“When restricted to Epson’s own cartridges, customers must pay Epson’s higher prices, while losing the added convenience of third party alternatives, such as refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems,” the complaint notes. “This artificial restriction of third party ink options also suppresses a competitive ink market and has reportedly caused some manufacturers of refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems to exit the market.”
Epson did not immediately return a request for comment.
Activist, author, and EFF member Cory Doctorow tells Motherboard that Epson customers in other states that were burned by the update should contact the organization. That feedback will then be used as the backbone for additional complaints to other state AGs.
For several decades now printer manufacturers have lured consumers into an arguably-terrible deal: shell out a modest sum for a mediocre printer, then pay an arm and a leg for replacement printer cartridges that cost relatively-little to actually produce.
Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a booming market for discount cartridges and refillable alternatives. Just as unsurprisingly, major printer vendors quickly set about trying to kill this burgeoning market via all manner of lawsuits and dubious behavior.Initially, companies like Lexmark filed all manner of unsuccessful copyright and patent lawsuits against third-party cartridge makers. When that didn’t work, hardware makers began cooking draconian restrictions into printers, ranging from unnecessary cartridge expiration dates to obnoxious DRM and firmware updates blocking the use of “unofficial” cartridges.
As consumer disgust at this behavior has grown, printer makers have been forced to get more creative in their efforts to block consumer choice.
HP, for example, was widely lambasted back in 2016 when it deployed a “security update” that did little more than block the use of cheaper third-party ink cartridges. HP owners that dutifully installed the update suddenly found their printers wouldn’t work if they’d installed third-party cartridges, forcing them back into the arms of pricier, official HP cartridges.
Massive public backlash forced HP to issue a flimsy mea culpa and reverse course, but the industry doesn’t appear to have learned its lesson quite yet.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation now says that Epson has been engaged in the same behavior. The group says it recently learned that in late 2016 or early 2017, Epson issued a “poison pill” software update that effectively downgraded user printers to block third party cartridges, but disguised the software update as a meaningful improvement.
The EFF has subsequently sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that Epson’s lack of transparency can easily be seen as “misleading and deceptive” under Texas consumer protection laws.
“When restricted to Epson’s own cartridges, customers must pay Epson’s higher prices, while losing the added convenience of third party alternatives, such as refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems,” the complaint notes. “This artificial restriction of third party ink options also suppresses a competitive ink market and has reportedly caused some manufacturers of refillable cartridges and continuous ink supply systems to exit the market.”
Epson did not immediately return a request for comment.
Activist, author, and EFF member Cory Doctorow tells Motherboard that Epson customers in other states that were burned by the update should contact the organization. That feedback will then be used as the backbone for additional complaints to other state AGs.
by Karl Bode, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
[ed. Of course they are (but who installs printer updates, anyway?)]
[ed. Of course they are (but who installs printer updates, anyway?)]
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