Monday, November 19, 2018
Well Played
Video games have been around as a form of mass culture for just over 40 years, but only recently have they become so prevalent and so embedded in our lives — socially, politically, economically — that they could be fully taken for granted. In spring 2018, Fortnite reached a level of total cultural saturation in the U.S. that’s usually reserved for TV shows, movies, or Harry Potter. The game appears in virtually every classroom, bus stop, and teenage bedroom in the country and has achieved a level of ubiquity that sees professional athletes and pop stars appear on livestreams with star gamers, and teens doing the floss while they wait at crosswalks.
In the past, even as video games steadily wove their way deeper into the fabric of American culture, they tended to breach the national consciousness only as crazes (Pac-Man Fever) or controversies (the graphic violence of Doom or Grand Theft Auto). Video games were covered as a specialist hobby, and when a game would spark a moral panic, people in gaming circles would more or less accurately point out that the vast majority of people talking about games had never played any and had no idea what they were about. In other words, the rare moments when games become noteworthy also reinforced their marginality — and the subcultural prestige of gamers.
But lately the grounds have shifted. It’s becoming increasingly indisputable that video games are just a part of mainstream American life, an established cultural medium in their own right, as central as any of the other major entertainment industries. The money doesn’t lie: In 2014, the video game industry was making more money annually than the film and music industries combined. Last year the industry was valued at $116 billion, putting it in the same ballpark as global sports revenue, which is estimated between $130 billion and $150 billion. If growth patterns continue, video games will eclipse that by 2020.
Video games are often seen as a subdevelopment in the broader revolutions in information and communications technology that have marked the “digital age.” And while games have played a crucial role in driving mass adoption and affection for phones and techno-culture more generally, they have also superseded cinema and TV to be the dominant visual medium of our time.
And so games are increasingly breaking through into mainstream discourse. The rise of Fortnite is illustrative: It has become massively popular without controversy or even much moral panic beyond some pro forma “this new thing teens like, surely it’s bad?!?” coverage. The fact of Fortnite’s game-ness is rarely mentioned: that there would be such a hubbub over a video game is not considered a story. With Fortnite, video games have achieved one form of full cultural maturity, namely, ubiquity to the point where mainstream media explanation is beside the point. Fortnite is not marginal nor is it being marginalized. It’s just a megahit cultural product, like a blockbuster movie or hit single.
Given video games’ newly taken for granted prominence, it’s imperative to analyze how they fit into the mainstream of contemporary economic practices and ideology. Why have video games emerged in this moment, growing as the earlier visual media forms have stagnated, losing audiences and drifting toward the margins of culture? What has the medium’s material role been under capitalism? How has it reflected or shaped the specific ways capitalism has developed since 1973, when the series of crises that would lead to the neoliberal era began? (Incidentally, the first mass-market video game, Pong, was released in 1972.)
In the past, even as video games steadily wove their way deeper into the fabric of American culture, they tended to breach the national consciousness only as crazes (Pac-Man Fever) or controversies (the graphic violence of Doom or Grand Theft Auto). Video games were covered as a specialist hobby, and when a game would spark a moral panic, people in gaming circles would more or less accurately point out that the vast majority of people talking about games had never played any and had no idea what they were about. In other words, the rare moments when games become noteworthy also reinforced their marginality — and the subcultural prestige of gamers.But lately the grounds have shifted. It’s becoming increasingly indisputable that video games are just a part of mainstream American life, an established cultural medium in their own right, as central as any of the other major entertainment industries. The money doesn’t lie: In 2014, the video game industry was making more money annually than the film and music industries combined. Last year the industry was valued at $116 billion, putting it in the same ballpark as global sports revenue, which is estimated between $130 billion and $150 billion. If growth patterns continue, video games will eclipse that by 2020.
Video games are often seen as a subdevelopment in the broader revolutions in information and communications technology that have marked the “digital age.” And while games have played a crucial role in driving mass adoption and affection for phones and techno-culture more generally, they have also superseded cinema and TV to be the dominant visual medium of our time.
And so games are increasingly breaking through into mainstream discourse. The rise of Fortnite is illustrative: It has become massively popular without controversy or even much moral panic beyond some pro forma “this new thing teens like, surely it’s bad?!?” coverage. The fact of Fortnite’s game-ness is rarely mentioned: that there would be such a hubbub over a video game is not considered a story. With Fortnite, video games have achieved one form of full cultural maturity, namely, ubiquity to the point where mainstream media explanation is beside the point. Fortnite is not marginal nor is it being marginalized. It’s just a megahit cultural product, like a blockbuster movie or hit single.
Given video games’ newly taken for granted prominence, it’s imperative to analyze how they fit into the mainstream of contemporary economic practices and ideology. Why have video games emerged in this moment, growing as the earlier visual media forms have stagnated, losing audiences and drifting toward the margins of culture? What has the medium’s material role been under capitalism? How has it reflected or shaped the specific ways capitalism has developed since 1973, when the series of crises that would lead to the neoliberal era began? (Incidentally, the first mass-market video game, Pong, was released in 1972.)
by Vicky Osterweil, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Viktor Timofeev
Opioid Nation
The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, up from some 64,000 the previous year and 52,000 the year before that—a staggering increase with no end in sight. Most involved opioids.
A few definitions are in order. The term opioid is now used to include opiates, which are derivatives of the opium poppy, and opioids, which originally referred only to synthesized drugs that act in the same way as opiates do. Opium, the sap from the poppy, has been used throughout the world for thousands of years to treat pain and shortness of breath, suppress cough and diarrhea, and, maybe most often, simply for its tranquilizing effect. The active constituent of opium, morphine, was not identified until 1806. Soon a variety of morphine tinctures became readily available without any social opprobrium, used, in some accounts, to combat the travails and boredom of Victorian women. (Thomas Jefferson was also an enthusiast of laudanum, one of the morphine tinctures.) Heroin, a stronger opiate made from morphine, entered the market later in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that synthetic or partially synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone (Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin), and hydromorphone (Dilaudid), were developed.
In 1996 a new form of oxycodone called OxyContin came on the market, and three recent books—Beth Macy’s Dopesick, Chris McGreal’s American Overdose, and Barry Meier’s Pain Killer—blame the opioid epidemic almost entirely on its maker, Purdue Pharma. OxyContin is formulated to be released more slowly and therefore lasts longer. The company claimed that the drug’s slow release would make it less addictive than ordinary oxycodone, since the initial euphoria—the high—would be muted. Based on this theory and little else, the FDA permitted OxyContin to contain twice the usual dose of oxycodone and carry on the label this statement: “Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” (The FDA official who oversaw OxyContin’s approval later got a plum job at Purdue Pharma.)
The company launched an extraordinarily aggressive and successful marketing campaign to convince physicians that they had the holy grail of a nonaddictive opioid. It sent hundreds of sales representatives to doctors’ offices to tout OxyContin, and offered doctors dinners and trips to meetings at luxury resorts. And it paid more than five thousand doctors, pharmacists, and nurses to train as speakers to tour the country promoting OxyContin. But like all opioids, OxyContin is addictive. And soon enough, users found that they could crush the pills or dissolve the coating, then snort the drug like cocaine or inject it like heroin. Each pill would then become essentially an instantaneous double dose of oxycodone. (...)
The problem with these three books, and it’s a big one, is that they treat the Purdue story as though it were the whole story of the opioid epidemic. But OxyContin did not give rise to opioid addiction, although it jump-started the current epidemic. Heroin has been a common street drug ever since it was banned in 1924. Morphine has also been widely abused.
Nor would taking OxyContin off the market end the epidemic. The overwhelming majority of opioid deaths are caused not by OxyContin but by combinations of fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine, often brought in from China via Mexican cartels, and frequently taken along with benzodiazepines (such as Valium or Xanax) and alcohol. These drugs are cheaper and stronger, particularly fentanyl. Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960, and soon became widely used as an anesthetic and powerful painkiller. It is legally manufactured and highly effective when used appropriately, often for short medical procedures such as colonoscopies. The illicit production and street use is relatively new, but it is now the main cause of most opioid-related deaths (nearly 90 percent in Massachusetts).
The steady increase in opioid deaths after OxyContin came on the market has been supplanted by a much faster increase starting around 2013, when heroin and fentanyl use increased dramatically. We now have two epidemics—the overuse of prescription drugs and the much more deadly and now largely unrelated epidemic of street drugs. By concentrating on the first, we are closing the barn door after the horse is long gone. (...)
The opioid epidemic, while horrifying, is still outweighed by alcohol deaths, which are also increasing, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Hampton writes, “If my first drug of choice came with a prescription, the second one, alcohol, was culturally embedded and used to celebrate at every turn of events.” In 2016, when there were 64,000 deaths in the US from the drug epidemic, there were 90,000 from alcohol (including accidents and homicides caused by inebriated people, as well as direct effects, mainly cirrhosis of the liver). Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause 480,000 deaths a year. I do not intend to minimize the opioid epidemic. Far from it. What I want to underscore is the differences in these three epidemics. Alcohol and cigarettes have no medical or practical uses of any kind. Yet we permit their use if regulated. In contrast, opioids do have medical uses, and they are important.
The opioid epidemic is usually seen as a supply problem. If we can interdict the supply of prescription opioids, the thinking goes, we can stanch the epidemic. But that is unlikely to work for two reasons. First, as I pointed out, this is no longer mainly an epidemic of prescription drugs but of street drugs. And second, it creates an onerous obstacle for doctors and outpatients who require pain treatment. More and more, they have to satisfy regulations expressly designed to restrict access to prescription opioids. Some make sense. For example, it’s reasonable to monitor opioid prescriptions to detect pill mills. It’s also reasonable to flag users who “doctor-shop,” that is, see several doctors at once to try to get multiple doses of opioids.
But other requirements are meant simply to inconvenience both doctors and patients until they give up. For example, in Massachusetts doctors must limit their first-time opioid prescriptions to seven days. That can be more than an inconvenience for ill patients in pain. Macy quotes a letter from a friend with severe back pain from scoliosis. “‘My life is not less important than that of an addict,’ my friend wrote,…explaining that her new practitioner requires her to submit to pill counts, lower-dose prescriptions, and more frequent visits for refills, which increase her out-of-pocket expense.” Even more serious is a new shortage of opioids for injection in cancer centers.
For physicians, who are already weighed down by innumerable bureaucratic requirements, these restrictions present one more hoop to jump through, and many simply won’t do it. Instead, they’ll send the patient away with some Advil and hope it does the trick, even though they know it probably won’t. The regulations are having their intended effect. In Massachusetts, opioid prescribing has decreased by 30 percent. Meanwhile, the epidemic of street drugs continues apace. McGreal raises the possibility that reducing access to prescription opioids might feed the demand for heroin. Macy quotes an addiction specialist who laments that “our wacky culture can’t seem to do anything in a nuanced way.”
A few definitions are in order. The term opioid is now used to include opiates, which are derivatives of the opium poppy, and opioids, which originally referred only to synthesized drugs that act in the same way as opiates do. Opium, the sap from the poppy, has been used throughout the world for thousands of years to treat pain and shortness of breath, suppress cough and diarrhea, and, maybe most often, simply for its tranquilizing effect. The active constituent of opium, morphine, was not identified until 1806. Soon a variety of morphine tinctures became readily available without any social opprobrium, used, in some accounts, to combat the travails and boredom of Victorian women. (Thomas Jefferson was also an enthusiast of laudanum, one of the morphine tinctures.) Heroin, a stronger opiate made from morphine, entered the market later in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that synthetic or partially synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone (Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin), and hydromorphone (Dilaudid), were developed.
In 1996 a new form of oxycodone called OxyContin came on the market, and three recent books—Beth Macy’s Dopesick, Chris McGreal’s American Overdose, and Barry Meier’s Pain Killer—blame the opioid epidemic almost entirely on its maker, Purdue Pharma. OxyContin is formulated to be released more slowly and therefore lasts longer. The company claimed that the drug’s slow release would make it less addictive than ordinary oxycodone, since the initial euphoria—the high—would be muted. Based on this theory and little else, the FDA permitted OxyContin to contain twice the usual dose of oxycodone and carry on the label this statement: “Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” (The FDA official who oversaw OxyContin’s approval later got a plum job at Purdue Pharma.)The company launched an extraordinarily aggressive and successful marketing campaign to convince physicians that they had the holy grail of a nonaddictive opioid. It sent hundreds of sales representatives to doctors’ offices to tout OxyContin, and offered doctors dinners and trips to meetings at luxury resorts. And it paid more than five thousand doctors, pharmacists, and nurses to train as speakers to tour the country promoting OxyContin. But like all opioids, OxyContin is addictive. And soon enough, users found that they could crush the pills or dissolve the coating, then snort the drug like cocaine or inject it like heroin. Each pill would then become essentially an instantaneous double dose of oxycodone. (...)
The problem with these three books, and it’s a big one, is that they treat the Purdue story as though it were the whole story of the opioid epidemic. But OxyContin did not give rise to opioid addiction, although it jump-started the current epidemic. Heroin has been a common street drug ever since it was banned in 1924. Morphine has also been widely abused.
Nor would taking OxyContin off the market end the epidemic. The overwhelming majority of opioid deaths are caused not by OxyContin but by combinations of fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine, often brought in from China via Mexican cartels, and frequently taken along with benzodiazepines (such as Valium or Xanax) and alcohol. These drugs are cheaper and stronger, particularly fentanyl. Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960, and soon became widely used as an anesthetic and powerful painkiller. It is legally manufactured and highly effective when used appropriately, often for short medical procedures such as colonoscopies. The illicit production and street use is relatively new, but it is now the main cause of most opioid-related deaths (nearly 90 percent in Massachusetts).
The steady increase in opioid deaths after OxyContin came on the market has been supplanted by a much faster increase starting around 2013, when heroin and fentanyl use increased dramatically. We now have two epidemics—the overuse of prescription drugs and the much more deadly and now largely unrelated epidemic of street drugs. By concentrating on the first, we are closing the barn door after the horse is long gone. (...)
The opioid epidemic, while horrifying, is still outweighed by alcohol deaths, which are also increasing, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Hampton writes, “If my first drug of choice came with a prescription, the second one, alcohol, was culturally embedded and used to celebrate at every turn of events.” In 2016, when there were 64,000 deaths in the US from the drug epidemic, there were 90,000 from alcohol (including accidents and homicides caused by inebriated people, as well as direct effects, mainly cirrhosis of the liver). Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause 480,000 deaths a year. I do not intend to minimize the opioid epidemic. Far from it. What I want to underscore is the differences in these three epidemics. Alcohol and cigarettes have no medical or practical uses of any kind. Yet we permit their use if regulated. In contrast, opioids do have medical uses, and they are important.
The opioid epidemic is usually seen as a supply problem. If we can interdict the supply of prescription opioids, the thinking goes, we can stanch the epidemic. But that is unlikely to work for two reasons. First, as I pointed out, this is no longer mainly an epidemic of prescription drugs but of street drugs. And second, it creates an onerous obstacle for doctors and outpatients who require pain treatment. More and more, they have to satisfy regulations expressly designed to restrict access to prescription opioids. Some make sense. For example, it’s reasonable to monitor opioid prescriptions to detect pill mills. It’s also reasonable to flag users who “doctor-shop,” that is, see several doctors at once to try to get multiple doses of opioids.
But other requirements are meant simply to inconvenience both doctors and patients until they give up. For example, in Massachusetts doctors must limit their first-time opioid prescriptions to seven days. That can be more than an inconvenience for ill patients in pain. Macy quotes a letter from a friend with severe back pain from scoliosis. “‘My life is not less important than that of an addict,’ my friend wrote,…explaining that her new practitioner requires her to submit to pill counts, lower-dose prescriptions, and more frequent visits for refills, which increase her out-of-pocket expense.” Even more serious is a new shortage of opioids for injection in cancer centers.
For physicians, who are already weighed down by innumerable bureaucratic requirements, these restrictions present one more hoop to jump through, and many simply won’t do it. Instead, they’ll send the patient away with some Advil and hope it does the trick, even though they know it probably won’t. The regulations are having their intended effect. In Massachusetts, opioid prescribing has decreased by 30 percent. Meanwhile, the epidemic of street drugs continues apace. McGreal raises the possibility that reducing access to prescription opioids might feed the demand for heroin. Macy quotes an addiction specialist who laments that “our wacky culture can’t seem to do anything in a nuanced way.”
by Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Porch Pirates
A PEMCO Insurance poll claims that roughly half of all Washington and Oregon residents have had a delivery stolen from their home.
Combined across Oregon and Washington, 48 percent of over 1,100 people polled said they’d had a package of some kind swiped from their residence.
This data seems to fall in line with a rash of package thefts that hit Seattle.
“There is an epidemic right now in our town of petty thievery, where people are emboldened,” said KIRO Radio’s Ron Upshaw back in October. “It’s a brazenness now that I have never seen.”
Additionally, Seattle and Portland are second and fifth respectively in Googles searches for “Amazon package stolen,” weighted by population and searches per capita by a packaging company known as Shorr.
Even with that being so, PEMCO’s poll also noted that 28 percent of respondents don’t do anything to protect against package theft. The most common measure taken by those who do came from the 38 percent of people who make sure someone is always home to receive deliveries.
For the rest, just 18 percent of people installed security technology, 15 percent “allocated a space for packages that is hidden or hard to see,” 14 percent use a neighbor or their workplace for deliveries, and 12 percent signed up for a “safe delivery service” that allows authorized shippers access inside of homes.
Known colloquially as “porch pirates,” many of these thieves have even been known to follow delivery trucks and grab a package shortly after it reaches its destination.
Combined across Oregon and Washington, 48 percent of over 1,100 people polled said they’d had a package of some kind swiped from their residence.
This data seems to fall in line with a rash of package thefts that hit Seattle.“There is an epidemic right now in our town of petty thievery, where people are emboldened,” said KIRO Radio’s Ron Upshaw back in October. “It’s a brazenness now that I have never seen.”
Additionally, Seattle and Portland are second and fifth respectively in Googles searches for “Amazon package stolen,” weighted by population and searches per capita by a packaging company known as Shorr.
Even with that being so, PEMCO’s poll also noted that 28 percent of respondents don’t do anything to protect against package theft. The most common measure taken by those who do came from the 38 percent of people who make sure someone is always home to receive deliveries.
For the rest, just 18 percent of people installed security technology, 15 percent “allocated a space for packages that is hidden or hard to see,” 14 percent use a neighbor or their workplace for deliveries, and 12 percent signed up for a “safe delivery service” that allows authorized shippers access inside of homes.
Known colloquially as “porch pirates,” many of these thieves have even been known to follow delivery trucks and grab a package shortly after it reaches its destination.
by My Northwest | Read more:
Image: My Northwest
Sole and Despotic Dominion
> Thank you for contacting Disher technical support. My name is May and I am pleased to help you with your Disher Experience!
Are you human?
> That's a rather personal question!
Let me talk to a human
> I'd be happy to help you make your Disher Experience the very best one possible
Human
> One moment please! Have a great day!
> Thank you for contacting Disher technical support. My name is May and I am pleased to help you with your Disher Experience!
Are you human?
> Yes sir. I am a live human operator. I am based in Charlestown, Nevis, at Disher's own in-house support center. How may I help you?
My dishwasher won't wash my dishes
> Sir are you using Disher approved products from the Kitchen Store?
Yes
> Sir I show that you have purchased a family starter set of Burberry Gentility dishes with the optional entertaining expansion pack and a cocktail party upgrade from the Disher Dubai store in June 2024. Are these the dishes you are using in your Disher Speckless?
Yes. I left my parents' wedding china in storage because my last dishwasher wouldn't wash them
> Sir yes that is correct. To ensure food safety and the proper delivery of your Disher experience, your Speckless will not switch on if it detects unknown objects; only authorized Disher Kitchen Store products are certified for use with your Disher Speckless
I am using Disher dishes. The ones I bought in Dubai.
> Sir yes thank you. Please stand by while I investigate your account.
> THANK YOU FOR STANDING BY. WE AT DISHER VALUE YOUR TRUST AND STRIVE TO EARN IT EVERY DAY. IF YOU HAVE ANY COMMENTS, CONCERNS OR COMPLIMENTS ABOUT YOUR DISHER EXPERIENCE PLEASE LET US KNOW
> Sir thank you I am back. I see from your IP address and other telemetry that you are in Melstone, Montana. Is that correct?
Yes. I took a new job and got relocated here.
> Sir thank you I see your problem. Your dishes were sold for use within Shia territories in the Middle East and Asian regions. They are not authorized for use in the USA.
What? Are you crazy? They're Disher dishes, this is a Disher dishwasher!
> Sir I am sorry you are unhappy. However, I must correct you. Please allow me to offer this frequently asked question:
> Sir I'm afraid it's not a joke. Please allow me to offer this frequently asked question:
> Sir, I'm very sorry but Disher Dubai and Disher USA are separate firms with their own licensing agreements with Disher Worldwide. You should not have brought these products across an international border. Had they been detected at the customs checkpoint, you could have faced severe penalties.
What was I supposed to do? Sell them before leaving Dubai and buy another set in Montana?
> Sir your license agreement is nontransferable. Sale or other transfer of your Disher Kitchen Store purchases will result in their use in all Disher products being terminated. If you leave a territory, we recommend contacting an appropriate recycling center for safe disposal of your Kitchen Store purchases.
Look, May. I took this job in Montana. I work in shale gas and the company is providing my housing. I'm in the ass-end of nowhere here. Even if I could buy a new dishwasher without this crap in it, they wouldn't let me install it. I've just spent everything relocating halfway around the planet and now you're telling me to throw away my dishes and buy another set?
> Sir may I refer you to a frequently asked question?
by Cory Doctorow, Reason | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Are you human?
> That's a rather personal question!
Let me talk to a human
> I'd be happy to help you make your Disher Experience the very best one possible
Human> One moment please! Have a great day!
> Thank you for contacting Disher technical support. My name is May and I am pleased to help you with your Disher Experience!
Are you human?
> Yes sir. I am a live human operator. I am based in Charlestown, Nevis, at Disher's own in-house support center. How may I help you?
My dishwasher won't wash my dishes
> Sir are you using Disher approved products from the Kitchen Store?
Yes
> Sir I show that you have purchased a family starter set of Burberry Gentility dishes with the optional entertaining expansion pack and a cocktail party upgrade from the Disher Dubai store in June 2024. Are these the dishes you are using in your Disher Speckless?
Yes. I left my parents' wedding china in storage because my last dishwasher wouldn't wash them
> Sir yes that is correct. To ensure food safety and the proper delivery of your Disher experience, your Speckless will not switch on if it detects unknown objects; only authorized Disher Kitchen Store products are certified for use with your Disher Speckless
I am using Disher dishes. The ones I bought in Dubai.
> Sir yes thank you. Please stand by while I investigate your account.
> THANK YOU FOR STANDING BY. WE AT DISHER VALUE YOUR TRUST AND STRIVE TO EARN IT EVERY DAY. IF YOU HAVE ANY COMMENTS, CONCERNS OR COMPLIMENTS ABOUT YOUR DISHER EXPERIENCE PLEASE LET US KNOW
> Sir thank you I am back. I see from your IP address and other telemetry that you are in Melstone, Montana. Is that correct?
Yes. I took a new job and got relocated here.
> Sir thank you I see your problem. Your dishes were sold for use within Shia territories in the Middle East and Asian regions. They are not authorized for use in the USA.
What? Are you crazy? They're Disher dishes, this is a Disher dishwasher!
> Sir I am sorry you are unhappy. However, I must correct you. Please allow me to offer this frequently asked question:
Q. ARE PRODUCTS BOUGHT IN FOREIGN KITCHEN STORES USABLE WITH MY DISHER SPECKLESS?
A. NO.
The trademarks and other intellectual property in the products sold by different Disher affiliated companies through the regional Kitchen Stores are licensed for use on a territory-by-territory basis. In many cases, different territorial licensors own the exclusive right to manufacture and distribute different brands in the Kitchen Store, and part of Disher's commitment to respecting international laws and intellectual property is our use of the sensors in Disher Speckless systems to optimize your Disher experience by ensuring that our devices do not violate these important contractual arrangements.You're joking.
> Sir I'm afraid it's not a joke. Please allow me to offer this frequently asked question:
Q. MAY I BRING MY DISHER PRODUCTS FROM ONE TERRITORY TO ANOTHER?
A. NO.
Because the trademarks in Kitchen Store products are licensed on a territory-by-territory basis, you may not export them beyond their licensed territories. Taking Kitchen Store products across national borders may create criminal and civil liability for you, under global anti-counterfeiting treaties and national laws. Disher takes no responsibility for any legal problems you may incur as a consequence of exporting products from the Kitchen Store. At Disher, we have zero tolerance for counterfeiting.Wait wait wait. WHAT? Counterfeits? I bought these in a Disher store! They're licensed product from your own store.
> Sir, I'm very sorry but Disher Dubai and Disher USA are separate firms with their own licensing agreements with Disher Worldwide. You should not have brought these products across an international border. Had they been detected at the customs checkpoint, you could have faced severe penalties.
What was I supposed to do? Sell them before leaving Dubai and buy another set in Montana?
> Sir your license agreement is nontransferable. Sale or other transfer of your Disher Kitchen Store purchases will result in their use in all Disher products being terminated. If you leave a territory, we recommend contacting an appropriate recycling center for safe disposal of your Kitchen Store purchases.
Look, May. I took this job in Montana. I work in shale gas and the company is providing my housing. I'm in the ass-end of nowhere here. Even if I could buy a new dishwasher without this crap in it, they wouldn't let me install it. I've just spent everything relocating halfway around the planet and now you're telling me to throw away my dishes and buy another set?
> Sir may I refer you to a frequently asked question?
by Cory Doctorow, Reason | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Saturday, November 17, 2018
The Paranoid Fantasy Behind Brexit
Before the narrative of Len Deighton’s bestselling thriller SS-GB begins, there is a “reproduction” of an authentic-looking rubber-stamped document: “Instrument of Surrender – English Text. Of all British armed forces in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland including all islands.” It is dated 18 February 1941. After ordering the cessation of all hostilities by British forces, it sets down further conditions, including “the British Command to carry out at once, without argument or comment, all further orders that will be issued by the German Command on any subject. Disobedience of orders, or failure to comply with them, will be regarded as a breach of these surrender terms and will be dealt with by the German Command in accordance with the laws and usages of war.”
Written amid the anxieties of Britain’s early membership of the European Communities and published in 1978, Deighton’s thriller sets up two ideas that will become important in the rhetoric of Brexit. Since there is no sense that Deighton has a conscious anti-EU agenda, the idea seems to arise from a deeper structure of feeling in England. One is the fear of the Englishman turning into the “new European”, fitting himself into the structures of German domination. His central character is a harbinger of the “rootless cosmopolitan” who cannot be trusted to uphold English independence and English values, and who therefore functions as the enemy within, the quisling class of pro-Europeans. This is the treason of the elite, the puppet politicians and sleek mandarins who quickly accommodate themselves to the new regime.
Deighton was building on real historical memories of the appeasers whose prewar conduct makes the notion that they would have quickly become collaborators in the event of a defeat to the Nazis highly credible. This idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves.
The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)
SS-GB was in part the inspiration for an even more successful English thriller, Robert Harris’s multimillion-selling Fatherland, published in 1992 and filmed for television in 1994. Harris had begun the novel in the mid-1980s but abandoned it. He revived and finished it explicitly in the context of German reunification in 1990 and of fears that the enemy Britain had defeated twice in the 20th century would end the century by dominating it: “If,” Harris wrote in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition in 2012, “there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.”
In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication – the final working-out of the consequences of nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, “the triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.”
Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.
In fact, Britain not only did not move on in 1990 – with the resurrection of a united Germany, it moved back. Harris is no anti-European reactionary and would become one of the most furious critics of Brexit. Yet, like Deighton, he was tapping into profound national anxieties.
The real twist of the knife in Harris’s story is that the novel is set in Germany and the main characters are German. There is nothing of significance to say about England 20 years after its surrender. Except, that is, that is part of a European Union: “In the west, 12 nations – Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.”
A dystopian fantasy this may be, but in the English reactionary imagination, dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality. Rhetorically, it was commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent. In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Prof Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that “the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler”.
The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.”
The cover of that issue of the Spectator’s bore the headline “Speaking for England” – a conscious reference to one of the moments of high drama in September 1939 when Leo Amery in the House of Commons invited Labour’s Arthur Greenwood to “Speak for England!”, implying that the appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain did not do so.
Ridley’s remarks were dismissed by Lutz Stavenhagen, minister of state in the German foreign office, as the sort of thing that might be heard “in the pub after a football match”. And Ridley himself had to resign. But these were not the mere rantings of a marginal crank. As Peter Jenkins wrote in the Independent at the time, “it is widely supposed that Mrs Thatcher’s heart is with him, if not her head … It is no secret that she, like him, fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. She too instinctively mistrusts the Germans and finds it impossible to forget the experiences of the second world war.
The sheer volatility of public opinion in Britain was clear in the 1975 referendum on whether or not to stay in the common market: between January and June 1975, Harold Wilson’s government managed to turn a 57% leave preference in polls to a 67% remain vote on the day. The referendum was “the only really sustained debate the British had ever had on their role in the world” and, as the Daily Express put it, in a jubilant editorial: “Britain’s Yes to Europe” had rung “louder, clearer and more unanimous than any decision in peacetime history”.
Yet a result that seemed both decisive and conclusive proved to be neither – Europe continued to poison British politics. And perhaps one of the reasons it did so is that, as the 1975 referendum campaign showed, there was a very deep underlying division about the meaning of the second world war. The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975, many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters. But instead of this common experience creating a common emotional ideal of Britain’s relationship to Europe, it fed two completely opposite stories, each very deeply felt.
by Fintan O'Toole, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Francesco Ciccolella
[ed. I have exactly zero experience with travel, history or politics on the old continent and am just baffled by the undercurrents swirling around Brexit. Make of this what you will.]
Written amid the anxieties of Britain’s early membership of the European Communities and published in 1978, Deighton’s thriller sets up two ideas that will become important in the rhetoric of Brexit. Since there is no sense that Deighton has a conscious anti-EU agenda, the idea seems to arise from a deeper structure of feeling in England. One is the fear of the Englishman turning into the “new European”, fitting himself into the structures of German domination. His central character is a harbinger of the “rootless cosmopolitan” who cannot be trusted to uphold English independence and English values, and who therefore functions as the enemy within, the quisling class of pro-Europeans. This is the treason of the elite, the puppet politicians and sleek mandarins who quickly accommodate themselves to the new regime.
Deighton was building on real historical memories of the appeasers whose prewar conduct makes the notion that they would have quickly become collaborators in the event of a defeat to the Nazis highly credible. This idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves.The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)
SS-GB was in part the inspiration for an even more successful English thriller, Robert Harris’s multimillion-selling Fatherland, published in 1992 and filmed for television in 1994. Harris had begun the novel in the mid-1980s but abandoned it. He revived and finished it explicitly in the context of German reunification in 1990 and of fears that the enemy Britain had defeated twice in the 20th century would end the century by dominating it: “If,” Harris wrote in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition in 2012, “there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.”
In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication – the final working-out of the consequences of nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, “the triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.”
Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.
In fact, Britain not only did not move on in 1990 – with the resurrection of a united Germany, it moved back. Harris is no anti-European reactionary and would become one of the most furious critics of Brexit. Yet, like Deighton, he was tapping into profound national anxieties.
The real twist of the knife in Harris’s story is that the novel is set in Germany and the main characters are German. There is nothing of significance to say about England 20 years after its surrender. Except, that is, that is part of a European Union: “In the west, 12 nations – Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.”
A dystopian fantasy this may be, but in the English reactionary imagination, dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality. Rhetorically, it was commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent. In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Prof Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that “the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler”.
The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.”
The cover of that issue of the Spectator’s bore the headline “Speaking for England” – a conscious reference to one of the moments of high drama in September 1939 when Leo Amery in the House of Commons invited Labour’s Arthur Greenwood to “Speak for England!”, implying that the appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain did not do so.
Ridley’s remarks were dismissed by Lutz Stavenhagen, minister of state in the German foreign office, as the sort of thing that might be heard “in the pub after a football match”. And Ridley himself had to resign. But these were not the mere rantings of a marginal crank. As Peter Jenkins wrote in the Independent at the time, “it is widely supposed that Mrs Thatcher’s heart is with him, if not her head … It is no secret that she, like him, fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. She too instinctively mistrusts the Germans and finds it impossible to forget the experiences of the second world war.
The sheer volatility of public opinion in Britain was clear in the 1975 referendum on whether or not to stay in the common market: between January and June 1975, Harold Wilson’s government managed to turn a 57% leave preference in polls to a 67% remain vote on the day. The referendum was “the only really sustained debate the British had ever had on their role in the world” and, as the Daily Express put it, in a jubilant editorial: “Britain’s Yes to Europe” had rung “louder, clearer and more unanimous than any decision in peacetime history”.
Yet a result that seemed both decisive and conclusive proved to be neither – Europe continued to poison British politics. And perhaps one of the reasons it did so is that, as the 1975 referendum campaign showed, there was a very deep underlying division about the meaning of the second world war. The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975, many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters. But instead of this common experience creating a common emotional ideal of Britain’s relationship to Europe, it fed two completely opposite stories, each very deeply felt.
by Fintan O'Toole, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Francesco Ciccolella
[ed. I have exactly zero experience with travel, history or politics on the old continent and am just baffled by the undercurrents swirling around Brexit. Make of this what you will.]
Dark Store Theory
Kraig Sadownikow doesn’t look like an anti-corporate crusader. The mayor of West Bend, Wisconsin, stickers his pickup with a “Don’t Tread on Me” snake on the back window, a GOP elephant on the hitch, and the stars-and-stripes logo of his construction company across the bumper.
His fiscal conservatism is equally well billboarded: In the two hours we spent at City Hall and cruising West Bend in his plush truck, Sadownikow twice mentioned the 6 percent he has shaved off the Wisconsin city’s operating budget since becoming mayor in 2011, and stressed its efforts to bring more business to town.
So you might be surprised to learn that Sadownikow (he instructed me to pronounce his name like sat-on-a-cow) is personally boycotting two of the biggest big-box retailers in his town, Walmart and Menards, the Midwestern home improvement chain. He’s avoiding shopping at these companies’ stores until they cease what he sees as a flagrant exploitation of West Bend’s property tax system: repeat tax appeals that, added up, could undermine the town’s hard-won fiscal health.
[ed. See also: Amazon’s Long Game Is Clearer Than Ever: Amazon last year effectively paid nothing in federal tax. Worse, thanks to the tax cut approved by Donald Trump, who ironically has ripped Amazon for not paying taxes, the company will reportedly receive a one-time $789 million windfall for last year — in addition to the goodies it just received this week. (Rolling Stone)]
His fiscal conservatism is equally well billboarded: In the two hours we spent at City Hall and cruising West Bend in his plush truck, Sadownikow twice mentioned the 6 percent he has shaved off the Wisconsin city’s operating budget since becoming mayor in 2011, and stressed its efforts to bring more business to town.
So you might be surprised to learn that Sadownikow (he instructed me to pronounce his name like sat-on-a-cow) is personally boycotting two of the biggest big-box retailers in his town, Walmart and Menards, the Midwestern home improvement chain. He’s avoiding shopping at these companies’ stores until they cease what he sees as a flagrant exploitation of West Bend’s property tax system: repeat tax appeals that, added up, could undermine the town’s hard-won fiscal health.
Sadownikow is one of many unlikely combatants who have lined up against “dark store theory.” That’s the ominous-sounding term that administrators have given to a head-spinning legal argument taking cities across the U.S. by storm. Big-box retailers such as Walmart, Target, Meijer, Menards, and others are trimming their expenses in a forum where few residents are looking: the property tax assessment process. With one property tax appeal after another, they are compelling small-town assessors and high-court judges to accept the novel argument that their bustling big boxes should be valued like vacant “dark” stores—i.e., the near-worthless properties now peppering America’s shopping plazas.
To hear it from opponents, this emerging legal phenomenon essentially weaponizes an already grim retail landscape. But it’s not always clear who’s right and wrong—dark store theory is a battlefield muddied in the cryptic laws and upside-down logic of commercial property valuation. The potential slam to vulnerable tax bases is tangible, however. If the stores prevail in West Bend, for example, it would reduce property values by millions of dollars, force the city to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, and set back payments on the public infrastructure that the town built to lure these retailers in the first place. That could result in higher taxes for residents, fewer police officers, firefighters, and teachers, and potentially, a mess of public debt. (...)
Born of the post-recession retail apocalypse and spread by a cottage industry of “no-win, no-fee” tax consultants, dark store theory could foreshadow an even larger threat to local finances—a weakening of the basic social contract underpinning the property-tax apparatus that keeps cities and towns afloat. And here’s the rub: The ruthless logic helping these brick-and-mortar giants dodge their taxes might make a lot of sense. (...)
It might seem absurd that a corporation can insist that a bustling big box is worth little more than a worn-out husk many miles away. Yet this theory is winning over courts. Though most appeals are settled informally by assessors, a small and growing portion are getting kicked up to local tax boards, circuit courts, and in a few states, state supreme courts. In about half of these cases, justices are siding with big box proponents. Dark store theory has “largely withstood judicial scrutiny, leading to hundreds of store devaluations and to hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated lost tax revenue to local governments,” according to a January 2018 report by S&P Global Ratings, which warned investors of the risk the issue poses to municipal budgets.
There’s a good reason why dark store theory emerged in the wake of the Great Recession, as empty “ghost boxes” pockmarked the suburbs and exurbs of the upper Midwest. After the economic shock of 2008, consumer spending tanked, sending business on Main Streets and shopping plazas alike into the red. Today, combined with the rise of Amazon and web-based shopping, once-mighty retail giants keep tumbling. In October, 125-year-old Sears filed for bankruptcy, with plans to close 46 stores by Christmas; Toys ‘R’ Us shuttered more than 700 locations around the country earlier this year. According to Bloomberg, from the beginning of 2018 through April, U.S. store closures had hit 77 million square feet. (...)
When you zoom out from these byzantine quarrels, the woes of the taxman look even grimmer. Property assessments are but a small and emerging frontier for creative tax workarounds among large U.S. corporations. Thanks to offshore tax havens and other breaks and loopholes, many names in the Dow 30 have for years enjoyed a shrinking tax burden as a share of their profits. A 2013 Washington Post analysis found that the share of income Walmart paid in taxes dropped by 24.3 percentage points between 1971 and 2012. Home Depot’s fell by 12.5 points between 1971 and 2012. Today, President Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax code overhaul has boosted GDP and economic growth, at least temporarily. But one year in, corporate tax revenues have also dropped by one-third. And the new cap on state and local tax deductions threatens to further pressure city and school budgets.
Historically speaking, brick-and-mortar retailers haven’t had as much luck in lobbying for federal tax breaks compared to peers in tech and manufacturing, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Boeing. But at the state and local level, they’ve scored generous incentives. Hungry for development, many communities go to great lengths to lure mega-retailers in with public subsidies and tax benefits. For example, West Bend spent nearly $16 million to build infrastructure on once-vacant farmland solely to attract Menards and Walmart, Sadownikow told me, with the plan to finance that with the future growth in property taxes. Now, if the stores successfully slash their payments, the city would be forced to drag out its timeline for paying off that investment. This also raises the specter of debt.
It’s like a betrayal, Krause told me. “They come in promising jobs and to add to the tax base—more development, more tourism, more people coming in,” she said. “Now look at what they’re doing.”
To hear it from opponents, this emerging legal phenomenon essentially weaponizes an already grim retail landscape. But it’s not always clear who’s right and wrong—dark store theory is a battlefield muddied in the cryptic laws and upside-down logic of commercial property valuation. The potential slam to vulnerable tax bases is tangible, however. If the stores prevail in West Bend, for example, it would reduce property values by millions of dollars, force the city to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, and set back payments on the public infrastructure that the town built to lure these retailers in the first place. That could result in higher taxes for residents, fewer police officers, firefighters, and teachers, and potentially, a mess of public debt. (...)
Born of the post-recession retail apocalypse and spread by a cottage industry of “no-win, no-fee” tax consultants, dark store theory could foreshadow an even larger threat to local finances—a weakening of the basic social contract underpinning the property-tax apparatus that keeps cities and towns afloat. And here’s the rub: The ruthless logic helping these brick-and-mortar giants dodge their taxes might make a lot of sense. (...)
It might seem absurd that a corporation can insist that a bustling big box is worth little more than a worn-out husk many miles away. Yet this theory is winning over courts. Though most appeals are settled informally by assessors, a small and growing portion are getting kicked up to local tax boards, circuit courts, and in a few states, state supreme courts. In about half of these cases, justices are siding with big box proponents. Dark store theory has “largely withstood judicial scrutiny, leading to hundreds of store devaluations and to hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated lost tax revenue to local governments,” according to a January 2018 report by S&P Global Ratings, which warned investors of the risk the issue poses to municipal budgets.
There’s a good reason why dark store theory emerged in the wake of the Great Recession, as empty “ghost boxes” pockmarked the suburbs and exurbs of the upper Midwest. After the economic shock of 2008, consumer spending tanked, sending business on Main Streets and shopping plazas alike into the red. Today, combined with the rise of Amazon and web-based shopping, once-mighty retail giants keep tumbling. In October, 125-year-old Sears filed for bankruptcy, with plans to close 46 stores by Christmas; Toys ‘R’ Us shuttered more than 700 locations around the country earlier this year. According to Bloomberg, from the beginning of 2018 through April, U.S. store closures had hit 77 million square feet. (...)
When you zoom out from these byzantine quarrels, the woes of the taxman look even grimmer. Property assessments are but a small and emerging frontier for creative tax workarounds among large U.S. corporations. Thanks to offshore tax havens and other breaks and loopholes, many names in the Dow 30 have for years enjoyed a shrinking tax burden as a share of their profits. A 2013 Washington Post analysis found that the share of income Walmart paid in taxes dropped by 24.3 percentage points between 1971 and 2012. Home Depot’s fell by 12.5 points between 1971 and 2012. Today, President Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax code overhaul has boosted GDP and economic growth, at least temporarily. But one year in, corporate tax revenues have also dropped by one-third. And the new cap on state and local tax deductions threatens to further pressure city and school budgets.
Historically speaking, brick-and-mortar retailers haven’t had as much luck in lobbying for federal tax breaks compared to peers in tech and manufacturing, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Boeing. But at the state and local level, they’ve scored generous incentives. Hungry for development, many communities go to great lengths to lure mega-retailers in with public subsidies and tax benefits. For example, West Bend spent nearly $16 million to build infrastructure on once-vacant farmland solely to attract Menards and Walmart, Sadownikow told me, with the plan to finance that with the future growth in property taxes. Now, if the stores successfully slash their payments, the city would be forced to drag out its timeline for paying off that investment. This also raises the specter of debt.
It’s like a betrayal, Krause told me. “They come in promising jobs and to add to the tax base—more development, more tourism, more people coming in,” she said. “Now look at what they’re doing.”
In so many ways, it seems the tax code no longer fits the players, and that may include property assessment. And dark store theory may be bigger than big boxes: As challenges spread geographically, city administrators fear the tactic will catch on among other property classes, with fast food outlets, banks, grocery stores, and office buildings deploying similar arguments in an effort to slash their tax obligations. Indeed, legal records show that this is happening: Two Hy-Vee supermarkets in Iowa have asked for write-downs using vacant properties. A Steak ‘n Shake in Warren County, Ohio, has made a similar argument about the value of its lease.
by Laura Bliss, CityLab | Read more:
Image: Madison McVeigh/CityLab[ed. See also: Amazon’s Long Game Is Clearer Than Ever: Amazon last year effectively paid nothing in federal tax. Worse, thanks to the tax cut approved by Donald Trump, who ironically has ripped Amazon for not paying taxes, the company will reportedly receive a one-time $789 million windfall for last year — in addition to the goodies it just received this week. (Rolling Stone)]
Friday, November 16, 2018
Remote Workers Can Get a Cushy Apartment, Free Office Space, and $10,000—If they Move to Tulsa
If you’re a full-time remote worker in the U.S. and are looking for a change, Tulsa, Oklahoma has a deal for you.
It’ll give you a free shared-office space, a subsidized furnished apartment in the city’s Arts District, and $10,000 cash. All you have to do is pack up and move—for at least one year—to Tulsa, a city of just over 400,000 people in the near dead-center of the continental U.S.
The last few years have seen the rise of start-ups catering to so-called “digital nomads,” people whose mobile, flexible jobs give them the freedom to live and work wherever they choose.
Now cities, states, and even countries are exploring ways to attract these workers—who would, presumably, start paying taxes, launch businesses, and otherwise contribute to the economy of wherever they’re drawn to.
Tulsa Remote is one of several revitalization projects in the region funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The Tulsa-based philanthropic organization was started by George B. Kaiser, an oil and banking billionaire who has signed on to Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates’ “Giving Pledge,” whose wealthy signees promise to give away at least half their fortunes to charity.
The organization has budgeted for 20 new remote workers in the program’s first year, says Ken Levit, GKFF’s executive director. Applicants must be at least 18, eligible to work in the U.S., already working full-time for an employer based outside the boundaries of Tulsa County, and prepared to move to Tulsa within six months. Applications opened Tuesday at the website TulsaRemote.com; the city hopes to settle the first new residents within the next three months, Levit said.
Tulsa’s economy had been heavily dependent on energy, and the slump in oil prices at the end of late 2015 hit Tulsa hard. By January 2016, Oklahoma lost 13,000 energy jobs statewide. In September the city’s unemployment rate was 3 percent, below the U.S. national rate of 3.7 percent, but the area still struggles with pockets of poverty and an underfunded public-education system. Tulsa Remote is an attempt to attract talent to a small city that might otherwise go overlooked by educated new graduates or entrepreneurs looking for an affordable home base, Levit says.
“You roll the dice a little bit and you get the right person whose going to start a company, create beautiful works of art, or run for office in a few years,” Levit says. “We’re looking for combination of wanderlust and roots.”
by Corinne Purtill, Nextgov | Read more:
Image: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock
It’ll give you a free shared-office space, a subsidized furnished apartment in the city’s Arts District, and $10,000 cash. All you have to do is pack up and move—for at least one year—to Tulsa, a city of just over 400,000 people in the near dead-center of the continental U.S.
The last few years have seen the rise of start-ups catering to so-called “digital nomads,” people whose mobile, flexible jobs give them the freedom to live and work wherever they choose.Now cities, states, and even countries are exploring ways to attract these workers—who would, presumably, start paying taxes, launch businesses, and otherwise contribute to the economy of wherever they’re drawn to.
Tulsa Remote is one of several revitalization projects in the region funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The Tulsa-based philanthropic organization was started by George B. Kaiser, an oil and banking billionaire who has signed on to Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates’ “Giving Pledge,” whose wealthy signees promise to give away at least half their fortunes to charity.
The organization has budgeted for 20 new remote workers in the program’s first year, says Ken Levit, GKFF’s executive director. Applicants must be at least 18, eligible to work in the U.S., already working full-time for an employer based outside the boundaries of Tulsa County, and prepared to move to Tulsa within six months. Applications opened Tuesday at the website TulsaRemote.com; the city hopes to settle the first new residents within the next three months, Levit said.
Tulsa’s economy had been heavily dependent on energy, and the slump in oil prices at the end of late 2015 hit Tulsa hard. By January 2016, Oklahoma lost 13,000 energy jobs statewide. In September the city’s unemployment rate was 3 percent, below the U.S. national rate of 3.7 percent, but the area still struggles with pockets of poverty and an underfunded public-education system. Tulsa Remote is an attempt to attract talent to a small city that might otherwise go overlooked by educated new graduates or entrepreneurs looking for an affordable home base, Levit says.
“You roll the dice a little bit and you get the right person whose going to start a company, create beautiful works of art, or run for office in a few years,” Levit says. “We’re looking for combination of wanderlust and roots.”
by Corinne Purtill, Nextgov | Read more:
Image: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock
Spinning Wind Turbine Wins James Dyson Award
A spinning turbine that can capture wind travelling in any direction and could transform how consumers generate electricity in cities has won its inventors a prestigious international award and £30,000 prize.
Nicolas Orellana, 36, and Yaseen Noorani, 24, MSc students at Lancaster University, scooped the James Dyson award for their O-Wind Turbine, which – in a technological first – takes advantage of both horizontal and vertical winds without requiring steering.
Conventional wind turbines capture wind travelling only in one direction, and are notoriously inefficient in cities where wind trapped between buildings becomes unpredictable. (...)
The annual award scheme is run by the James Dyson Foundation, designer Sir James Dyson’s charitable trust. It challenges young people to “design something that solves a problem” and is open to university students and recent graduates in product design, industrial design and engineering.
O-Wind Turbine is a 25cm sphere with geometric vents that sits on a fixed axis and spins when wind hits it from any direction. When wind energy turns the device, gears drive a generator that converts the power of the wind into electricity. The students believe the device, which could take at least five years to be put into commercial production, could be installed on large structures such as the side of a building or balcony, where wind speeds are highest.
Dyson, who chose the winners, hailed it as “an ingenious concept”. He continued: “Designing something that solves a problem is an intentionally broad brief. It invites talented, young inventors to do more than just identify real problems. It empowers them to use their ingenuity to develop inventive solutions. O-Wind Turbine does exactly that. It takes the enormous challenge of producing renewable energy and using geometry it can harness energy in places where we’ve scarcely been looking – cities.”
Nicolas Orellana, 36, and Yaseen Noorani, 24, MSc students at Lancaster University, scooped the James Dyson award for their O-Wind Turbine, which – in a technological first – takes advantage of both horizontal and vertical winds without requiring steering.
Conventional wind turbines capture wind travelling only in one direction, and are notoriously inefficient in cities where wind trapped between buildings becomes unpredictable. (...)The annual award scheme is run by the James Dyson Foundation, designer Sir James Dyson’s charitable trust. It challenges young people to “design something that solves a problem” and is open to university students and recent graduates in product design, industrial design and engineering.
O-Wind Turbine is a 25cm sphere with geometric vents that sits on a fixed axis and spins when wind hits it from any direction. When wind energy turns the device, gears drive a generator that converts the power of the wind into electricity. The students believe the device, which could take at least five years to be put into commercial production, could be installed on large structures such as the side of a building or balcony, where wind speeds are highest.
Dyson, who chose the winners, hailed it as “an ingenious concept”. He continued: “Designing something that solves a problem is an intentionally broad brief. It invites talented, young inventors to do more than just identify real problems. It empowers them to use their ingenuity to develop inventive solutions. O-Wind Turbine does exactly that. It takes the enormous challenge of producing renewable energy and using geometry it can harness energy in places where we’ve scarcely been looking – cities.”
by Rebecca Smithers, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: James Dyson Awards
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Bojack
-Bojack Horseman “Free Churro”
via:
[ed. Watched the last episode of Season 5 last night, and it was... devastating (spoiler alert). How many noticed the last song (as Bojack finally commits to rehab) was Under The Pressure by the group The War On Drugs? Or the coldly mercenary interview with Gina (written pre-Weinstein) and how it anticipates the #MeToo movement. This show operates on a lot of different levels.]
[ed. Watched the last episode of Season 5 last night, and it was... devastating (spoiler alert). How many noticed the last song (as Bojack finally commits to rehab) was Under The Pressure by the group The War On Drugs? Or the coldly mercenary interview with Gina (written pre-Weinstein) and how it anticipates the #MeToo movement. This show operates on a lot of different levels.]
Let Every Day Be Sadie Hawkins Day
If You Like a Guy, Tell Him. Only Then Will Women Be Free.
I still remember my first Sadie Hawkins Day. We spilled out of the cafeteria and divided ourselves, amoeba-like, into two lines on either side of the basketball court.
Everyone seemed to know what to do. Someone must have yelled “Go!” The boys scattered, and the girls, after a quick five-count, tore after them. I aimed straight. I caught Matthew Kirschenbaum up by the swings; I don’t think he was running at top speed.
“Do you want me to release you?” I asked. He shook his head.
This, I remember thinking, is how it should be.
Sadie Hawkins Day — traditionally celebrated on Nov. 15 — was the one day a year when it was the girls who pursued the boys, instead of the other way around. It was big back then, if less so now.
In the early 1970s, Seventeen magazine urged prepubescent me to guard my self-respect, which meant, I knew, to not be obvious about liking a boy. The same message came through in the stories we were raised on, the TV shows we watched. Yvette Mimieux nearly died from wanting it in the classic teenage melodrama “Where the Boys Are,” and much, much earlier, Eve got all of humanity kicked out of Eden by wanting that apple. Her punishment: Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. The first woman and the first lesson.
So I grew up believing that girls were supposed to be wanted, but we were not supposed to want. If we did want, we were never, ever to show it. Any move on behalf of our own desires should be in service of getting men to act on theirs.
I always envied the girls who seemed so peaceful waiting for boys to talk to them; I wasn’t of that tribe. My mother used to shake her head and say, “Just let them come to you,” but I was no good at biding my time. In sixth grade, I asked a boy I liked if he liked me; in freshman year of college, I asked a man I was attracted to if he felt the same. In each case, I felt that something was wrong with me for having brought up the topic. I was too much like a guy, I thought. But even then, I was asking them about their desires, not speaking my own.
As I got older, I developed other methods for getting a man to make the first move: bumping into him as we walked together, shivering with unfelt cold, standing fetchingly on steps that would bring me to his eye level — all so he’d be overtaken with desire and, for God’s sake, kiss me. So much work, this active passivity — but I never considered kissing any of them first. After all, what worse insult can a man give a woman than “She wanted it,” a phrase that carries its own sneer.
So the reason that afternoon is still so bright in my memory, why I can still feel the metal chain of the swing in my hand, see Matthew’s smile: Sadie Hawkins was a day of respite from pretending not to want, or from distorting my want into a hint. (...)
I’d like to think that women are becoming more comfortable voicing their own desires, that there’s no need for permission anymore. But change seems slow in coming. Stories of heterosexual marriage proposals usually still feature the man asking and the woman thrilled to be asked.
How about the youngest generation, who have the benefit of the new fluidity of gender — have they transcended this dynamic? Maybe not as much as we would hope. Consider the hoopla around “promposals”: Girls may send out emissaries to test the waters, but the request still usually comes from the boy — sometimes with as many bells and whistles as a marriage proposal. And with the same enactment of amazed gratitude on the girl’s part. They cling to their own disempowerment and call it romance. Is romance worth such passivity?
Until it is no big deal for a woman to say, “I want,” as well as “I don’t want” — until heterosexual women no longer feel the need to wait for the man to propose or to invite us to the prom or to kiss us on a beautiful summer evening when we want to kiss — we leave ourselves at the mercy of men’s desires.
by Kate Neuman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jason Merritt/Getty Images
[ed. Right on. I imagine most men would be flattered and relieved not to have to bear the burden of potential rejection all the time.]
Everyone seemed to know what to do. Someone must have yelled “Go!” The boys scattered, and the girls, after a quick five-count, tore after them. I aimed straight. I caught Matthew Kirschenbaum up by the swings; I don’t think he was running at top speed.
“Do you want me to release you?” I asked. He shook his head.This, I remember thinking, is how it should be.
Sadie Hawkins Day — traditionally celebrated on Nov. 15 — was the one day a year when it was the girls who pursued the boys, instead of the other way around. It was big back then, if less so now.
In the early 1970s, Seventeen magazine urged prepubescent me to guard my self-respect, which meant, I knew, to not be obvious about liking a boy. The same message came through in the stories we were raised on, the TV shows we watched. Yvette Mimieux nearly died from wanting it in the classic teenage melodrama “Where the Boys Are,” and much, much earlier, Eve got all of humanity kicked out of Eden by wanting that apple. Her punishment: Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. The first woman and the first lesson.
So I grew up believing that girls were supposed to be wanted, but we were not supposed to want. If we did want, we were never, ever to show it. Any move on behalf of our own desires should be in service of getting men to act on theirs.
I always envied the girls who seemed so peaceful waiting for boys to talk to them; I wasn’t of that tribe. My mother used to shake her head and say, “Just let them come to you,” but I was no good at biding my time. In sixth grade, I asked a boy I liked if he liked me; in freshman year of college, I asked a man I was attracted to if he felt the same. In each case, I felt that something was wrong with me for having brought up the topic. I was too much like a guy, I thought. But even then, I was asking them about their desires, not speaking my own.
As I got older, I developed other methods for getting a man to make the first move: bumping into him as we walked together, shivering with unfelt cold, standing fetchingly on steps that would bring me to his eye level — all so he’d be overtaken with desire and, for God’s sake, kiss me. So much work, this active passivity — but I never considered kissing any of them first. After all, what worse insult can a man give a woman than “She wanted it,” a phrase that carries its own sneer.
So the reason that afternoon is still so bright in my memory, why I can still feel the metal chain of the swing in my hand, see Matthew’s smile: Sadie Hawkins was a day of respite from pretending not to want, or from distorting my want into a hint. (...)
I’d like to think that women are becoming more comfortable voicing their own desires, that there’s no need for permission anymore. But change seems slow in coming. Stories of heterosexual marriage proposals usually still feature the man asking and the woman thrilled to be asked.
How about the youngest generation, who have the benefit of the new fluidity of gender — have they transcended this dynamic? Maybe not as much as we would hope. Consider the hoopla around “promposals”: Girls may send out emissaries to test the waters, but the request still usually comes from the boy — sometimes with as many bells and whistles as a marriage proposal. And with the same enactment of amazed gratitude on the girl’s part. They cling to their own disempowerment and call it romance. Is romance worth such passivity?
Until it is no big deal for a woman to say, “I want,” as well as “I don’t want” — until heterosexual women no longer feel the need to wait for the man to propose or to invite us to the prom or to kiss us on a beautiful summer evening when we want to kiss — we leave ourselves at the mercy of men’s desires.
by Kate Neuman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jason Merritt/Getty Images
[ed. Right on. I imagine most men would be flattered and relieved not to have to bear the burden of potential rejection all the time.]
When No One Retires
Before our eyes, the world is undergoing a massive demographic transformation. In many countries, the population is getting old. Very old. Globally, the number of people age 60 and over is projected to double to more than 2 billion by 2050 and those 60 and over will outnumber children under the age of 5. In the United States, about 10,000 people turn 65 each day, and one in five Americans will be 65 or older by 2030. By 2035, Americans of retirement age will eclipse the number of people aged 18 and under for the first time in U.S. history.
The reasons for this age shift are many — medical advances that keep people healthier longer, dropping fertility rates, and so on — but the net result is the same: Populations around the world will look very different in the decades ahead.
Some in the public and private sector are already taking note — and sounding the alarm. In his first term as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, with the Great Recession looming, Ben Bernanke remarked, “in the coming decades, many forces will shape our economy and our society, but in all likelihood no single factor will have as pervasive an effect as the aging of our population.” Back in 2010, Standard & Poor’s predicted that the biggest influence on “the future of national economic health, public finances, and policymaking” will be “the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”
This societal shift will undoubtedly change work, too: More and more Americans want to work longer — or have to, given that many aren’t saving adequately for retirement. Soon, the workforce will include people from as many as five generations ranging in age from teenagers to 80-somethings.
Are companies prepared? The short answer is “no.” Aging will affect every aspect of business operations — whether it’s talent recruitment, the structure of compensation and benefits, the development of products and services, how innovation is unlocked, how offices and factories are designed, and even how work is structured — but for some reason, the message just hasn’t gotten through. In general, corporate leaders have yet to invest the time and resources necessary to fully grasp the unprecedented ways that aging will change the rules of the game.
Paul Irving says he became seriously interested in the issues of aging and longevity almost serendipitously. “When I began my work at the Milken Institute, I fell into a project focused on urban adaptations for an aging population. I realized that this unprecedented demographic shift would change everything — societies, communities, businesses, families, and institutions of all types in incredible ways,” he says. “But understanding, planning, action, and urgency were lacking.”
What’s more, those who do think about the impacts of an aging population typically see a looming crisis — not an opportunity. They fail to appreciate the potential that older adults present as workers and consumers. The reality, however, is that increasing longevity contributes to global economic growth. Today’s older adults are generally healthier and more active than those of generations past, and they are changing the nature of retirement as they continue to learn, work, and contribute. In the workplace, they provide emotional stability, complex problem-solving skills, nuanced thinking, and institutional know-how. Their talents complement those of younger workers, and their guidance and support enhance performance and intergenerational collaboration. In encore careers, volunteering, and civic and social settings, their experience and problem-solving abilities contribute to society’s well-being.
In the public sector, policy makers are beginning to take action. Efforts are under way in the United States to reimagine communities to enhance “age friendliness,” develop strategies to improve infrastructure, enhance wellness and disease prevention, and design new ways to invest for retirement as traditional income sources like pensions and defined benefit plans dry up. But such efforts are still early stage, and given the slow pace of governmental change they will likely take years to evolve.
Companies, by contrast, are uniquely positioned to change practices and attitudes now. Transformation won’t be easy, but companies that move past today’s preconceptions about older employees and respond and adapt to changing demographics will realize significant dividends, generating new possibilities for financial return and enhancing the lives of their employees and customers. I spent many years in executive management, corporate law, and board service. Based on this experience, along with research conducted with Arielle Burstein, Kevin Proff, and other members of our staff at the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, I have developed a framework for building a “longevity strategy” that companies can use to create a vibrant multigenerational workforce. Broadly, a longevity strategy should include two key elements: internal-facing activities (hiring, retention, and mining the talents of workers of all ages) and external-facing ones (how your company positions itself and its products and services to customers and stakeholders). In this article, I’ll address the internal activities companies should be engaging in. I’ll discuss the external-facing activities in an article coming tomorrow.
But first, let’s examine why leaders seem to be overlooking the opportunities of an aging population.
THE AGEISM EFFECT
There’s broad consensus that the global population is changing and growing significantly older. There’s also a prevailing opinion that the impacts on society will largely be negative. A Government Accountability Office report warns that older populations will bring slower growth, lower productivity, and increasing dependency on society. A report from the Congressional Budget Office projects that higher entitlement costs associated with an aging population will drive up expenses relative to revenues, increasing the federal deficit. The World Bank foresees fading potential in economies across the globe, warning in 2018 of “headwinds from ageing populations in both advanced and developing economies, expecting decreased labour supply and productivity growth.” Such predictions serve to further entrench the belief that older workers are an expensive drag on society.
What’s at the heart of this gloomy outlook? Economists often refer to what’s known as the dependency ratio: the number of people not typically in the workforce — those younger than 15 and older than 65 — in a population divided by the number of working-age people. This measure assumes that older adults are generally unproductive and can be expected to do little other than consume benefits in their later years. Serious concerns about the so-called “silver tsunami” are justified if this assumption is correct: The prospect of a massive population of sick, disengaged, lonely, needy, and cognitively impaired people is a dark one indeed.
This picture, however, is simply not accurate. While some older adults do suffer from disabling physical and cognitive conditions or are otherwise unable to maintain an active lifestyle, far more are able and inclined to stay in the game longer, disproving assumptions about their prospects for work and productivity. The work of Laura Carstensen and her colleagues at the Stanford Center on Longevity shows that typical 60-something workers today are healthy, experienced, and more likely than younger colleagues to be satisfied with their jobs. They have a strong work ethic and loyalty to their employers. They are motivated, knowledgeable, adept at resolving social dilemmas, and care more about meaningful contributions and less about self-advancement. They are more likely than their younger counterparts to build social cohesion and to share information and organizational values.
Yet the flawed perceptions persist, a byproduct of stubborn and pervasive ageism. Positive attributes of older workers are crowded out by negative stereotypes that infect work settings and devalue older adults in a youth-oriented culture. Older adults regularly find themselves on the losing end of hiring decisions, promotions, and even volunteer opportunities.
The reasons for this age shift are many — medical advances that keep people healthier longer, dropping fertility rates, and so on — but the net result is the same: Populations around the world will look very different in the decades ahead.
Some in the public and private sector are already taking note — and sounding the alarm. In his first term as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, with the Great Recession looming, Ben Bernanke remarked, “in the coming decades, many forces will shape our economy and our society, but in all likelihood no single factor will have as pervasive an effect as the aging of our population.” Back in 2010, Standard & Poor’s predicted that the biggest influence on “the future of national economic health, public finances, and policymaking” will be “the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”This societal shift will undoubtedly change work, too: More and more Americans want to work longer — or have to, given that many aren’t saving adequately for retirement. Soon, the workforce will include people from as many as five generations ranging in age from teenagers to 80-somethings.
Are companies prepared? The short answer is “no.” Aging will affect every aspect of business operations — whether it’s talent recruitment, the structure of compensation and benefits, the development of products and services, how innovation is unlocked, how offices and factories are designed, and even how work is structured — but for some reason, the message just hasn’t gotten through. In general, corporate leaders have yet to invest the time and resources necessary to fully grasp the unprecedented ways that aging will change the rules of the game.
Paul Irving says he became seriously interested in the issues of aging and longevity almost serendipitously. “When I began my work at the Milken Institute, I fell into a project focused on urban adaptations for an aging population. I realized that this unprecedented demographic shift would change everything — societies, communities, businesses, families, and institutions of all types in incredible ways,” he says. “But understanding, planning, action, and urgency were lacking.”
What’s more, those who do think about the impacts of an aging population typically see a looming crisis — not an opportunity. They fail to appreciate the potential that older adults present as workers and consumers. The reality, however, is that increasing longevity contributes to global economic growth. Today’s older adults are generally healthier and more active than those of generations past, and they are changing the nature of retirement as they continue to learn, work, and contribute. In the workplace, they provide emotional stability, complex problem-solving skills, nuanced thinking, and institutional know-how. Their talents complement those of younger workers, and their guidance and support enhance performance and intergenerational collaboration. In encore careers, volunteering, and civic and social settings, their experience and problem-solving abilities contribute to society’s well-being.
In the public sector, policy makers are beginning to take action. Efforts are under way in the United States to reimagine communities to enhance “age friendliness,” develop strategies to improve infrastructure, enhance wellness and disease prevention, and design new ways to invest for retirement as traditional income sources like pensions and defined benefit plans dry up. But such efforts are still early stage, and given the slow pace of governmental change they will likely take years to evolve.
Companies, by contrast, are uniquely positioned to change practices and attitudes now. Transformation won’t be easy, but companies that move past today’s preconceptions about older employees and respond and adapt to changing demographics will realize significant dividends, generating new possibilities for financial return and enhancing the lives of their employees and customers. I spent many years in executive management, corporate law, and board service. Based on this experience, along with research conducted with Arielle Burstein, Kevin Proff, and other members of our staff at the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, I have developed a framework for building a “longevity strategy” that companies can use to create a vibrant multigenerational workforce. Broadly, a longevity strategy should include two key elements: internal-facing activities (hiring, retention, and mining the talents of workers of all ages) and external-facing ones (how your company positions itself and its products and services to customers and stakeholders). In this article, I’ll address the internal activities companies should be engaging in. I’ll discuss the external-facing activities in an article coming tomorrow.
But first, let’s examine why leaders seem to be overlooking the opportunities of an aging population.
THE AGEISM EFFECT
There’s broad consensus that the global population is changing and growing significantly older. There’s also a prevailing opinion that the impacts on society will largely be negative. A Government Accountability Office report warns that older populations will bring slower growth, lower productivity, and increasing dependency on society. A report from the Congressional Budget Office projects that higher entitlement costs associated with an aging population will drive up expenses relative to revenues, increasing the federal deficit. The World Bank foresees fading potential in economies across the globe, warning in 2018 of “headwinds from ageing populations in both advanced and developing economies, expecting decreased labour supply and productivity growth.” Such predictions serve to further entrench the belief that older workers are an expensive drag on society.
What’s at the heart of this gloomy outlook? Economists often refer to what’s known as the dependency ratio: the number of people not typically in the workforce — those younger than 15 and older than 65 — in a population divided by the number of working-age people. This measure assumes that older adults are generally unproductive and can be expected to do little other than consume benefits in their later years. Serious concerns about the so-called “silver tsunami” are justified if this assumption is correct: The prospect of a massive population of sick, disengaged, lonely, needy, and cognitively impaired people is a dark one indeed.
This picture, however, is simply not accurate. While some older adults do suffer from disabling physical and cognitive conditions or are otherwise unable to maintain an active lifestyle, far more are able and inclined to stay in the game longer, disproving assumptions about their prospects for work and productivity. The work of Laura Carstensen and her colleagues at the Stanford Center on Longevity shows that typical 60-something workers today are healthy, experienced, and more likely than younger colleagues to be satisfied with their jobs. They have a strong work ethic and loyalty to their employers. They are motivated, knowledgeable, adept at resolving social dilemmas, and care more about meaningful contributions and less about self-advancement. They are more likely than their younger counterparts to build social cohesion and to share information and organizational values.
Yet the flawed perceptions persist, a byproduct of stubborn and pervasive ageism. Positive attributes of older workers are crowded out by negative stereotypes that infect work settings and devalue older adults in a youth-oriented culture. Older adults regularly find themselves on the losing end of hiring decisions, promotions, and even volunteer opportunities.
by Paul Irving, Harvard Business Review | Read more:
Image: Mark Smith
Google, Facebook, and Amazon Benefit From an Outdated Definition of “Monopoly”
A few weeks ago, Italy fined Apple and Samsung €15 million for the “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones. The antitrust regulators allege that both companies pushed users to download software that slowed phone performance, forcing customers to buy replacement phones sooner.
The fines were another blow to big tech companies as the groundswell of skepticism against them rises. These companies have amassed so much power that even Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for stricter regulations to be placed on them. Google owns 92% market share of internet searches, Facebook an almost 70% share of social networks. Both have a duopoly in advertising with no credible competition or regulation. Amazon, meanwhile, is crushing retailers and faces conflicts of interest as both the dominant e-commerce seller and the leading online platform for third-party sellers. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android completely control the mobile app market, and they determine whether businesses can reach their customers and on what terms.
So why hasn’t the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) taken action to break up these companies?
I believe that an outdated interpretation of antitrust law is partly to blame. For decades the standard for evaluating whether to break up monopolies, or block the mergers that create them, has been “consumer welfare.” And this consumer welfare standard has predominantly been interpreted as low prices. If companies can show that a merger or acquisition would not impact prices, for the most part, they win approval.
But in the context of technology companies—which often offer “free” platforms and instead sell user attention as their product—this low-prices-focused paradigm makes no sense. (...)
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have great technology, but much of their current status and financial success comes from what I believe are regulatory and antitrust mistakes. Amazon was allowed to buy dozens of ecommerce rivals and online booksellers to give it a monopsony position in the book industry. Google was able to buy its main competitor, DoubleClick, and vertically integrate online ad markets by buying advertising exchanges. Facebook was able to buy Instagram and WhatsApp with no regulatory challenges.
Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have together acquired more than 500 companies in the past decade. Many new tech startups never get the chance to compete with the established companies, because as soon as they prove their technologies, they are acquired.
But startups aren’t the only ones suffering. A growing mountain of evidence is showing that increasing industrial concentration via all the merger activity is leading to lower productivity, lower wages, and destroyed economic dynamism. And despite the fetish for lower prices, highly concentrated industries have been raising prices on their consumers. This is why you keep paying more for worse service on airlines, as an example.
The fines were another blow to big tech companies as the groundswell of skepticism against them rises. These companies have amassed so much power that even Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for stricter regulations to be placed on them. Google owns 92% market share of internet searches, Facebook an almost 70% share of social networks. Both have a duopoly in advertising with no credible competition or regulation. Amazon, meanwhile, is crushing retailers and faces conflicts of interest as both the dominant e-commerce seller and the leading online platform for third-party sellers. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android completely control the mobile app market, and they determine whether businesses can reach their customers and on what terms.So why hasn’t the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) taken action to break up these companies?
I believe that an outdated interpretation of antitrust law is partly to blame. For decades the standard for evaluating whether to break up monopolies, or block the mergers that create them, has been “consumer welfare.” And this consumer welfare standard has predominantly been interpreted as low prices. If companies can show that a merger or acquisition would not impact prices, for the most part, they win approval.
But in the context of technology companies—which often offer “free” platforms and instead sell user attention as their product—this low-prices-focused paradigm makes no sense. (...)
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have great technology, but much of their current status and financial success comes from what I believe are regulatory and antitrust mistakes. Amazon was allowed to buy dozens of ecommerce rivals and online booksellers to give it a monopsony position in the book industry. Google was able to buy its main competitor, DoubleClick, and vertically integrate online ad markets by buying advertising exchanges. Facebook was able to buy Instagram and WhatsApp with no regulatory challenges.
Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have together acquired more than 500 companies in the past decade. Many new tech startups never get the chance to compete with the established companies, because as soon as they prove their technologies, they are acquired.
But startups aren’t the only ones suffering. A growing mountain of evidence is showing that increasing industrial concentration via all the merger activity is leading to lower productivity, lower wages, and destroyed economic dynamism. And despite the fetish for lower prices, highly concentrated industries have been raising prices on their consumers. This is why you keep paying more for worse service on airlines, as an example.
by Denise Hearn, Quartz | Read more:
Image: David Goldman/AP
[ed. See also: today's NY Times blockbuster: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis (or here for the short version). Also: Apple’s “Capital Return Program”: Rewarding the Wrong People (Naked Capitalism).]
[ed. See also: today's NY Times blockbuster: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis (or here for the short version). Also: Apple’s “Capital Return Program”: Rewarding the Wrong People (Naked Capitalism).]
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
The Pros and Cons of Cheerleading
I’m eating a giant bowl of mashed potatoes covered in melted cheese and that’s normal. It’s normal to take five pounds of leftover mashed potatoes from your fridge, grate a pound of cheese on top, microwave it, and then sit on the couch and eat it while staring blankly at the wall. This is how adult human beings eat lunch.
My daughter is trying out for cheerleading this week. They call it “cheer” now, but it’s just as bone-chilling as it was when I did it back in junior high school, which they now call “middle school.” Back then, I was high-strung and geeky, which they now call “anxious and socially awkward.” I wanted to make cheerleading so I could Be Somebody. While I eat six pounds of food for lunch (which they used to call “binge eating” but they now call “self-care”) I’m wondering if this is what my daughter wants, too.
My daughter never sweated a thing back in elementary school. She effortlessly made lots of ordinary, lovable elementary school friends. But seventh grade is different. You show up to middle school and your entire group of friends might just be judged as uncool by some other giant group of friends from an ever-so-slightly more sophisticated segment of your deeply idiotic suburb. You go to places like Starbucks or the fucking drug store next to the Starbucks (this is where they hang out now, instead of the Orange Julius) and even your closest friends are trying to ditch you, and you are also trying to ditch some of your other closest friends. Everyone is trying to win—or “out-beat the rest” as the grammatically challenged local cheerleaders put it in one of their cheers.
“Junior high is all about ditching and getting ditched,” I tell my daughter and her friend, trying to make the brutal realities of seventh grade sound faintly sporting instead of torturous. Even though I called middle school the wrong name again, they nod vigorously, so I throw in some wisdom about being who you are, where you are. Their eyes go dead. I wander off in search of something stiff to drink instead. Which is normal.
It’s normal to drink when you’re 48 years old and you’re looking a little grizzled, but you still want to look beautiful—magically, implausibly beautiful—possibly because you’ve always been attracted to the impossible. Some mornings I look in the mirror and I see Keith Richards. Other mornings I am Jeffrey Tambor. I put moisturizer on Tambor’s face anyway, as if, with enough moisture, I will transform him into a dewy nymph. I almost savor the despair of this moment, of wanting something so shallow and out of reach.
Being in seventh grade isn’t so different. You hate it but you also love it a tiny bit for the same reasons you hate it: the drama, the suffering, the competition. But you want to love it more. You want to be the one who is standing in the front, shouting something and looking cute doing it. You want to out-beat the rest.
When I was in seventh grade, I had no dance or gymnastics experience, but I wanted the impossible, and so did my best friend. Every day after tryouts, we practiced our cheers and our jumps and yelled at each other, “NO BROKEN WRISTS!” and “THAT LOOKS SLOPPY, START OVER!” When we checked the list after school and saw that we made the team, just 8 slots available to 60 girls, we screamed and jumped around for five minutes straight because we knew that becoming cheerleaders would change everything. We would still be geeks, sure, but we would be visible geeks. People would hate us for no reason. That’s what we wanted. That is a normal thing to want at that age.
Now that I’m older and I’ve been hated for all kinds of reasons, I find cheerleading sexist and futile. I also know from personal experience that at least 91 percent of cheerleading coaches are sadists and sociopaths. That’s just a wild guess, but it feels statistically bulletproof inside of my head, where I spend most of my time these days. I’m middle-aged so I have all kinds of baseless and unfair opinions, which people used to call “being fucking delusional” but now refer to as “honoring your truth.”When you wake up in the morning looking like Burgess Meredith, what else do you have, really? You treasure your petty grievances and sweeping generalizations.
But I don’t tell my daughter these things. I don’t tell her harrowing stories about my high school cheerleading coach, who was a terrifying cross between an enthusiastic real estate agent and Bernadette Peters on a five-day bender. I don’t describe how we were forced to practice dangerous stunts in the gym without mats. Girls would be writhing in pain, saying their backs or heads hurt after a fall to the hard gym floor, and our coach would yelp in her scary baby voice, “You’re OK, you’re fine, get up!”
I also don’t tell her how much I loved wearing my uniform to school, or how satisfying it was to get attention from cute boys for the first time ever, after feeling doomed by my giant ugly glasses and unrelenting acne and bad fashion choices for so long. Out-beating the rest feels pretty goddamn great, I never say to her. I strongly recommend it.
I am being discreet, which is unusual for me. I want to help my daughter make the team. But I also feel like I should’ve prevented her from landing here, in this idiotic predicament in our idiotic suburb. Her dance is set to a hip-hop mix that begins with the words “My left stroke just went viral,” from “Humble” by Kendrick Lamar, but then it segues into a bad pastiche of watered-down beats that aren’t nearly as good as that song. My younger daughter asks me what “left stroke” means, but I ignore her because my older daughter is dancing and, in spite of my misgivings, I am already yelling, “NO BROKEN WRISTS!” and “THAT LOOKS SLOPPY, START OVER!” After a few rounds of this, she’s crying. I’m making cheerleading seem impossible. I am the worst kind of mother, a cartoonishly bossy, shallow nightmare. I don’t care. I can’t stop barking instructions, which seem to be about dancing but really boil down to how to be visible and cute and win by cheering someone else to victory. I never in a million years thought I would land here.
My daughter says she’ll freak out if she doesn’t make the team. This is normal, I think, but my pulse rate goes up anyway. I tell her that she should try on the despair of not making cheerleading right now, and maybe even cry about it, so she’s prepared when she sees the list at school and she’s not on it. This is terrible advice, advice so shitty that only a professional advice columnist could give it. “I feel like you don’t think I’m going to make it!” she yells at me. She hates me right now. I hate myself, too. All very normal and developmentally appropriate, for all involved.
It’s true that I feel like she might not make cheerleading, for the same reason I feel like I might get crushed by a mile-wide meteor at any second. I’ve always expected the worst. It’s a way of life. I want her to mimic my mindset, the way I mimicked my mother’s. That way no one wants something impossible that they can’t have. That way no one is ever disappointed. That way everyone aims low, and no one cares too much about something that’s out of their control. That way no one cries their eyes out when they read the list after school on Friday. My friend is a counselor at the school and says that it’s like the end of the world that day, hallways filled with sobbing girls. They have a nickname for that day. “Dies Dolorem,” or something like that. I might’ve made that up, too.
When you’re middle-aged, it’s normal to make shit up. It’s normal to be cynical about things you used to care about way too much, and it’s normal to find yourself seduced by those same things, out of the blue, in spite of your best intentions. It’s also normal to aim for the impossible while also expecting the worst. I want my daughter to make cheerleading, and I also don’t want her to make it. I want her to pick an activity that’s much less sexist and futile, but I also want her to out-beat the rest—not in spite of the fact that it’s absurd and shallow and twisted, but because of it.
My daughter is trying out for cheerleading this week. They call it “cheer” now, but it’s just as bone-chilling as it was when I did it back in junior high school, which they now call “middle school.” Back then, I was high-strung and geeky, which they now call “anxious and socially awkward.” I wanted to make cheerleading so I could Be Somebody. While I eat six pounds of food for lunch (which they used to call “binge eating” but they now call “self-care”) I’m wondering if this is what my daughter wants, too.
My daughter never sweated a thing back in elementary school. She effortlessly made lots of ordinary, lovable elementary school friends. But seventh grade is different. You show up to middle school and your entire group of friends might just be judged as uncool by some other giant group of friends from an ever-so-slightly more sophisticated segment of your deeply idiotic suburb. You go to places like Starbucks or the fucking drug store next to the Starbucks (this is where they hang out now, instead of the Orange Julius) and even your closest friends are trying to ditch you, and you are also trying to ditch some of your other closest friends. Everyone is trying to win—or “out-beat the rest” as the grammatically challenged local cheerleaders put it in one of their cheers.“Junior high is all about ditching and getting ditched,” I tell my daughter and her friend, trying to make the brutal realities of seventh grade sound faintly sporting instead of torturous. Even though I called middle school the wrong name again, they nod vigorously, so I throw in some wisdom about being who you are, where you are. Their eyes go dead. I wander off in search of something stiff to drink instead. Which is normal.
It’s normal to drink when you’re 48 years old and you’re looking a little grizzled, but you still want to look beautiful—magically, implausibly beautiful—possibly because you’ve always been attracted to the impossible. Some mornings I look in the mirror and I see Keith Richards. Other mornings I am Jeffrey Tambor. I put moisturizer on Tambor’s face anyway, as if, with enough moisture, I will transform him into a dewy nymph. I almost savor the despair of this moment, of wanting something so shallow and out of reach.
Being in seventh grade isn’t so different. You hate it but you also love it a tiny bit for the same reasons you hate it: the drama, the suffering, the competition. But you want to love it more. You want to be the one who is standing in the front, shouting something and looking cute doing it. You want to out-beat the rest.
When I was in seventh grade, I had no dance or gymnastics experience, but I wanted the impossible, and so did my best friend. Every day after tryouts, we practiced our cheers and our jumps and yelled at each other, “NO BROKEN WRISTS!” and “THAT LOOKS SLOPPY, START OVER!” When we checked the list after school and saw that we made the team, just 8 slots available to 60 girls, we screamed and jumped around for five minutes straight because we knew that becoming cheerleaders would change everything. We would still be geeks, sure, but we would be visible geeks. People would hate us for no reason. That’s what we wanted. That is a normal thing to want at that age.
Now that I’m older and I’ve been hated for all kinds of reasons, I find cheerleading sexist and futile. I also know from personal experience that at least 91 percent of cheerleading coaches are sadists and sociopaths. That’s just a wild guess, but it feels statistically bulletproof inside of my head, where I spend most of my time these days. I’m middle-aged so I have all kinds of baseless and unfair opinions, which people used to call “being fucking delusional” but now refer to as “honoring your truth.”When you wake up in the morning looking like Burgess Meredith, what else do you have, really? You treasure your petty grievances and sweeping generalizations.
But I don’t tell my daughter these things. I don’t tell her harrowing stories about my high school cheerleading coach, who was a terrifying cross between an enthusiastic real estate agent and Bernadette Peters on a five-day bender. I don’t describe how we were forced to practice dangerous stunts in the gym without mats. Girls would be writhing in pain, saying their backs or heads hurt after a fall to the hard gym floor, and our coach would yelp in her scary baby voice, “You’re OK, you’re fine, get up!”
I also don’t tell her how much I loved wearing my uniform to school, or how satisfying it was to get attention from cute boys for the first time ever, after feeling doomed by my giant ugly glasses and unrelenting acne and bad fashion choices for so long. Out-beating the rest feels pretty goddamn great, I never say to her. I strongly recommend it.
I am being discreet, which is unusual for me. I want to help my daughter make the team. But I also feel like I should’ve prevented her from landing here, in this idiotic predicament in our idiotic suburb. Her dance is set to a hip-hop mix that begins with the words “My left stroke just went viral,” from “Humble” by Kendrick Lamar, but then it segues into a bad pastiche of watered-down beats that aren’t nearly as good as that song. My younger daughter asks me what “left stroke” means, but I ignore her because my older daughter is dancing and, in spite of my misgivings, I am already yelling, “NO BROKEN WRISTS!” and “THAT LOOKS SLOPPY, START OVER!” After a few rounds of this, she’s crying. I’m making cheerleading seem impossible. I am the worst kind of mother, a cartoonishly bossy, shallow nightmare. I don’t care. I can’t stop barking instructions, which seem to be about dancing but really boil down to how to be visible and cute and win by cheering someone else to victory. I never in a million years thought I would land here.
My daughter says she’ll freak out if she doesn’t make the team. This is normal, I think, but my pulse rate goes up anyway. I tell her that she should try on the despair of not making cheerleading right now, and maybe even cry about it, so she’s prepared when she sees the list at school and she’s not on it. This is terrible advice, advice so shitty that only a professional advice columnist could give it. “I feel like you don’t think I’m going to make it!” she yells at me. She hates me right now. I hate myself, too. All very normal and developmentally appropriate, for all involved.
It’s true that I feel like she might not make cheerleading, for the same reason I feel like I might get crushed by a mile-wide meteor at any second. I’ve always expected the worst. It’s a way of life. I want her to mimic my mindset, the way I mimicked my mother’s. That way no one wants something impossible that they can’t have. That way no one is ever disappointed. That way everyone aims low, and no one cares too much about something that’s out of their control. That way no one cries their eyes out when they read the list after school on Friday. My friend is a counselor at the school and says that it’s like the end of the world that day, hallways filled with sobbing girls. They have a nickname for that day. “Dies Dolorem,” or something like that. I might’ve made that up, too.
When you’re middle-aged, it’s normal to make shit up. It’s normal to be cynical about things you used to care about way too much, and it’s normal to find yourself seduced by those same things, out of the blue, in spite of your best intentions. It’s also normal to aim for the impossible while also expecting the worst. I want my daughter to make cheerleading, and I also don’t want her to make it. I want her to pick an activity that’s much less sexist and futile, but I also want her to out-beat the rest—not in spite of the fact that it’s absurd and shallow and twisted, but because of it.
by Heather Havrilesky, Popula | Read more:
Image: Olan Fucking Mills? Who knows?
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