Toward the Wiki Society

Wikipedia is now so good that we don’t tend to think about how good it is. It’s just there, and it feels as if it’s always been there. “Oh yes, the vast free repository of human knowledge, what about it?” But Wikipedia is remarkable. Astonishing, really. It’s built on a model that exists almost nowhere else online. It’s like nothing else in existence. And it gives us a bit of insight into how we might reform other platforms, even society itself.

First, let’s remember just how “top-down” almost all of the largest web services are. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter. Each a multi-billion dollar company, each run for profit and owned by private investors, each controlled by a powerful CEO. Facebook, Twitter, and Google make money almost entirely through advertising: Companies pay them to put products in front of users’ eyeballs, and the platforms alter the user experience accordingly. Each of these companies operates exactly the way you’d expect of a corporation seeking monopoly power. They crush tiny competitors, they buy politicians (Google and Facebook give more money to Republicans than Democrats), and they are extremely secretive about their internal decision-making process. They do not tell you the algorithms that determine what they will show you, or the experiments they are using to figure out how to manipulate users’ psychology. (Facebook had a brief scandal in 2014 when it was revealed to have tested different ways to mess with people’s emotions, seeing if it could bump users toward happiness or sadness with the display of positive or negative news. Over 700,000 news feeds had been tampered with. It also, even more creepily, kept track of status updates that people had typed and deleted without posting.)

There is nothing even beginning to resemble “democracy” at these companies. Like most corporations, they are dictatorships internally. Amazon workers are infamously mistreated, and Jeff Bezos’ wealth increases by $215 million per day, meaning that he makes the median annual Amazon salary once every nine seconds. Amazon workers have had to fight hard just to reach $15 an hour base pay, which in many places is still far short of a living wage.

Users do not have any voice in company policy. Their only input comes in the form of a binary market choice: Use the service or don’t. If you don’t like the way Facebook’s ads work, go find some other social media network. But because there is no other social media network like Facebook, there is no online shopping portal like Amazon, and there is no bottomless pit of short-form blather like Twitter, it’s not clear where else there is to go. You can get the internet out of your life completely, which might be good for many people’s mental health. But some of us actually rely on these companies for our livelihoods. Current Affairs articles, for instance, are distributed primarily through Facebook and Twitter shares. If these companies were to, say, block our accounts, or even bump our material downward so that fewer users saw it, we’d take a significant hit to our revenue. And if we did incur the ire of one of the tech monoliths, if Amazon stopped selling our books or Google stopped displaying our pages in search results, there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. They don’t have to give us an appeals process. Nobody votes on it. If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up one day and decides he’d like to put Current Affairs out of business, he could probably do it. We are reliant entirely on maintaining the good will of a benevolent overlord.

Wikipedia is something else. It has no advertisements, it seeks no profits, it has no shareholders. It’s incredible to think of the amount of money Wikipedia has given up by steadfastly refusing to publish even the most unobtrusive promotions. In the early days, when there was still a live debate about whether the site should have ads, even just ads for nonprofits, there were those who thought it insane to insist on keeping the site absolutely pure. And yet the purists won.

Being a nonprofit among the profit-seeking monopolies distinguishes Wikipedia. But what makes it like absolutely nothing else in the world is its governance structure. It’s a genuine democratic platform, its rules controlled by its users. There is nothing else quite like that anywhere.

Let’s consider the radicalism of the Wikipedia model. It’s a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” as we know. It has well over 5 million articles in English (40 million total in 301 languages), all of which are put together through the collective effort of volunteers. Readers write a paragraph here, fix a date there, add a citation or two, and over time a vast compendium of human knowledge emerges. It has been stunningly successful, and is one of the most visited sites on the web, with over 18 billion page views.

But Wikipedia is not just edited by users. Its policies themselves are stored in wiki pages, and can be modified and updated by user-editors. The governance of the site itself, the processes that determine what you see, are open to revision by the Wikipedia community, a community that anyone can join. Not only that, but every change to Wikipedia is transparent: Its changes, and the debates over them, are fully available in a public record.

One of Wikipedia’s core rules is: “Wikipedia has no firm rules.” That does not mean “anything goes.” It means “the rules are principles, not laws” and they “exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles.” But the ethic of Wikipedia is that everything is subject to revision, open to discussion, and that anyone can discuss it.

This has meant that Wikipedians have had to, over time, figure out how to govern themselves. Political philosophers have long been infatuated with the concept of the “state of nature,” the condition humankind would find itself in before it had designed governing institutions, and much political theory is concerned with examining how the people in this hypothetical world should construct a state. Or, if humankind suddenly finds itself stranded on a desert island, what procedures ought we to set up to keep everybody from eating each other? The course of Wikipedia’s development has been one of the few real-world examples of such a scenario.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Naomi Ushiyama

Amazon Prime's Promise of Two-Day Delivery Is Dying

Having a baby in 2018, as my wife and I just did, means becoming an Amazon household. We’re not proud of this. We know that Amazon treats its workers terribly. We know that the company has extorted billions of taxpayer dollars out of our home city of New York in exchange for turning our neighbors into terribly treated employees. But babies need a lot of stuff, and they need it quickly. Diapers on demand are a very tempting prospect. So we bought our diapers on Amazon. And then they didn’t come when Amazon said they would come.

One of the foundations of Amazon’s brand is its guaranteed two-day delivery, “free” to Prime subscribers. The company has taught America to rely on this instant gratification. Sometimes this reliance seems soft, or self-indulgent, like when we get mad that a pair of Bluetooth earbuds took three whole days to arrive. You can go an extra day without earbuds. A newborn cannot, generally, go an extra day without diapers.

We asked our friends where they get diapers. “Amazon,” they said. Great. On Day 3, customer service couldn’t even keep its story straight on when our diapers would arrive, or whether they’d even shipped. Of course, this wasn’t a real emergency. We live three blocks from a Walgreens—also a bad company!—so I popped over, bought a pack, problem solved. I’m lucky. But it finally made me realize that two-day shipping is a sham.

It’s a sham because overworked employees and delivery contractors like UPS can’t possibly fulfill all the orders on time. Rather than lose their most powerful client, they lie about whether packages got delivered.

But it’s also a sham because Prime no longer means two-day delivery. As Fast Company describes, Prime delivery times are often listed as three or even five days. The site offers no easy way to filter for two-day Prime shipping. (You can filter by free Prime shipping, but that includes items that take longer to ship. You can filter by two-day shipping, but that includes third-party items with an extra shipping charge.) And because Amazon lets third-party sellers clutter up results pages, you need to comb through results.

None of this is the worst ordeal in the world! It’s just very different than the rapid, no-hassle experience Amazon promised. It’s the promise that helped Amazon muscle out bookstores, threaten Wal-Mart, fleece cities, avoid taxes, bully suppliers, and make its owner the richest man alive. We let Amazon suck the world dry because in return, we could get anything delivered, for free, in a couple of days.

And now that’s gone too. Amazon pulled the old predatory pricing trick on us, got us hooked on an unsustainable shipping speed, then eased up on the delivery once it had pushed its competitors to the margins. So it’s time to suck it up and buy something from a real store—before they buy that too.

by Nick Douglas, Lifehacker |  Read more:

Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images
[ed. No kidding. I ordered a book for a friend in Santa Cruz, CA and it'll take two weeks to get there with Prime (what would it be without it?). See also: Amazon Prime is getting worse, and it’s making me question the nature of reality.]

How This All Happened

This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II.

That’s a lot to unpack in 5,000 words, but the short story of what happened over the last 73 years is simple: Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad, then really good, then really bad, and now here we are. And there is, I think, a narrative that links all those events together. Not a detailed account. But a story of how the details fit together.

Since this is an attempt to link the big events together, it leaves out all kinds of detail of what happened during this period. I’m likely to agree with anyone who points out what I’ve missed. My goal isn’t to describe every play; it’s to look at how one game influenced the next.

If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.

Here’s how this all happened.

1. August, 1945. World War II ends.

Japan surrendering was “The Happiest Day in American History,” the New York Times wrote.

But there’s the saying, “History is just one damn thing after another.”

The joy of the war ending was quickly met with the question, “What happens now?”

Sixteen million Americans – 11% of the population – served in the war. About eight million were overseas at the end. Their average age was 23. Within 18 months all but 1.5 million of them would be home and out of uniform.

And then what?

What were they going to do next?

Where were they going to work?

Where were they going to live?

Those were the most important questions of the day, for two reasons. One, no one knew the answers. Two, if it couldn’t be answered quickly, the most likely scenario – in the eyes of many economists – was that the economy would slip back into the depths of the Great Depression.

Three forces had built up during the war:

• Housing construction ground to a halt, as virtually all production capacity was shifted to building war supplies. Fewer than 12,000 homes per month were built in 1943, equivalent to less than one new home per American city. Returning soldiers faced a severe housing shortage.
• The specific jobs created during the war – building ships, tanks, bullets, planes – were very suddenly not necessary after it, stopping with a speed and magnitude rarely seen in private business. It was unclear where soldiers could work.
• The marriage rate spiked during and immediately after the war. Soldiers didn’t want to return to their mother’s basement. They wanted to start a family, in their own home, with a good job, right away.

This worried policymakers, especially since the Great Depression was still a recent memory, having ended just five years prior.

In 1946 the Council of Economic Advisors delivered a report to President Truman warning of “a full-scale depression some time in the next one to four years.”

They wrote in a separate 1947 memo, summarizing a meeting with Truman:

We might be in some sort of recession period where we should have to be very sure of our ground as to whether recessionary forces might be in danger of getting out of hand … There is a substantial prospect which should not be overlooked that a further decline may increase the danger of a downward spiral into depression conditions.

This fear was exacerbated by the fact that exports couldn’t be immediately relied upon for growth, as two of the largest economies – Europe and Japan – sat in ruins dealing with humanitarian crises. And America itself was buried in more debt than ever before, limiting direct government stimulus.

2. So we did something about it: Low interest rates and the intentional birth of the American consumer.

by Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ricardo Montinez, Moby Dick
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Prime and Punishment

Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as if they’d been cut and pasted from elsewhere. “I didn’t know what was going on, whether it was a glitch or whether somebody was trying to mess with us,” Plansky says.

As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. “You have manipulated product reviews on our site,” an email from Amazon read. “This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site.”

A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon’s bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read “appeal decision.”

When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren’t buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company’s third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail itself, according to Marketplace Pulse, making the seller platform alone the largest e-commerce business in the US.

For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal.

Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. “Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”

Amazon is far from the only tech company that, having annexed a vast sphere of human activity, finds itself in the position of having to govern it. But Amazon is the only platform that has a $175 billion prize pool tempting people to game it, and the company must constantly implement new rules and penalties, which in turn, become tools for new abuses, which require yet more rules to police. The evolution of its moderation system has been hyper-charged. While Mark Zuckerberg mused recently that Facebook might need an analog to the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes and hear appeals, Amazon already has something like a judicial system — one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.

Amazon’s judgments are so severe that its own rules have become the ultimate weapon in the constant warfare of Marketplace. Sellers devise all manner of intricate schemes to frame their rivals, as Plansky experienced. They impersonate, copy, deceive, threaten, sabotage, and even bribe Amazon employees for information on their competitors.

And what’s a seller to do when they end up in Amazon court? They can turn to someone like Cynthia Stine, who is part of a growing industry of consultants who help sellers navigate the ruthless world of Marketplace and the byzantine rules by which Amazon governs it. They are like lawyers, only their legal code is the Amazon Terms of Service, their court is a secretive and semiautomated corporate bureaucracy, and their jurisdiction is an algorithmically policed global bazaar rife with devious plots to hijack listings for novelty socks and plastic watches. People like Stine are fixers, guides to the cutthroat land of Amazon, who are willing to give their assistance to the desperate — for a price, of course. (...)

She calls the scheme that got Plansky a “dirty seller trick,” and she’s seen it before. As Amazon has escalated its war on fake reviews, sellers have realized that the most effective tactic is not buying them for yourself, but buying them for your competitors — the more obviously fraudulent the better. A handful of glowing testimonials, preferably in broken English about unrelated products and written by a known review purveyor on Fiverr, can not only take out a competitor and allow you to move up a slot in Amazon’s search results, it can land your rival in the bewildering morass of Amazon’s suspension system.

And Stine’s team had bad news: the only way back from suspension is to “confess and repent,” she says, even if you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. “Amazon doesn’t like to see finger-pointing.”

Amazon calls them “appeals,” which suggests that there’s a possibility of having the verdict overturned. In reality, they’re more like a plea bargain crossed with a business memo, the core of which is a “plan of action” — an explanation of how you’ll make things right. And to make things right, you need to admit to having done something wrong. So Plansky sat down with Stine’s team and looked for something, anything, to confess to. In his appeal, he admitted to providing discounts for reviews before Amazon banned the practice, and to sending customers emails about printing out shooting targets that the algorithm might have mistaken for bribes.

“It was crazy,” he says. “I felt like I was in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, and the only way out was to plead guilty.”

In a way, Plansky had it easy. He at least knew what he had to confess to, even if he hadn’t done it. Many sellers can’t even figure out what Amazon is accusing them of. A suspension message will typically list an item along with a broad and tangentially related category of an infraction, like “used sold as new.” Understandably, sellers respond by sending invoices that show that the items are, in fact, new. Actually, Stine says, the suspension usually has nothing to do with the item being used, but with something like a peeling label on the box. “The thing Amazon wants you to fix is the buyer perception,” Stine says. “Just proving to Amazon that your goods are new is not good enough because Amazon wants you to address why the buyers thought they were used.” One seller described the typical process as Amazon saying, “I’m putting you in jail but not telling you what you did, now give me a justification for why I should let you out and you won’t do it again.”

The appeals process is so confounding that it’s given rise to an entire industry of consultants like Stine. Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee, set up shop in 2014. CJ Rosenbaum, an attorney in Long Beach, New York, now bills himself as the “Amazon sellers lawyer,” with an “Amazon Law Library” featuring Amazon Law, vol. 1 ($95 on Amazon). Stine’s company deals with about 100 suspensions a month and charges $2,500 per appeal ($5,000 if you want an expedited one), which is in line with industry norms. It’s a price many are willing to pay. “It can be life or death for people,” McCabe says. “If they don’t get their Amazon account back, they might be insolvent, laying off 10, 12, 14 people, maybe more. I’ve had people begging me for help. I’ve had people at their wits’ end. I’ve had people crying.”

Much of Stine’s work involves translating Amazon’s cryptic suspension messages and then digging through every review, metric, and message in a seller’s account just to find the infraction she needs to design a remedy for. Sitting at her workstation, she clicks around the seller interface like a mechanic fiddling under the hood, talking mostly to herself. She looks at a warning message. “Amazon mad.” She sees a listing for dog toys that people complained were too chewy for their dogs. “This right here is going to trigger Amazon’s freak-o-meter real soon.”

The actual infraction can be as slight as the indictment is broad. Stine has a client whose listing for a rustic barn wood picture frame was deemed unsafe and taken down; it turned out the offense was a single customer review that mentioned getting a splinter. (The customer had actually given it five stars.) The seller was allowed back when he promised to add “wear gloves when installing” to his listing. Another seller was suspended for selling Nike shoes that were “not as described.” After he’d filed appeal after appeal proving the shoes were genuine Nikes, Stine’s team figured out the problem: some buyers complained the shoes were too small. That seller was let back on after promising to add a line to the listing recommending customers wear thin socks.

“That’s what we call ‘speaking Amazon,’” Stine says. “In my mind, I imagine a checklist, and it doesn’t even have to make sense. It’s just that the previous appeals hadn’t included this all-important proactive step they were going to take to prevent the complaint that the shoe was too tight.”

by Josh Dzieza, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: BloodBros

The Imagined Threat of a Woman Who Governs Like a Man

On Tuesday, Politico posted a provocative, anonymously sourced piece claiming that New York congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be planning, in concert with Justice Democrats, to recruit a Democratic primary challenger to her fellow New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries in 2020, in part in response to his undercutting of California congresswoman and progressive stalwart Barbara Lee in a November House leadership election. Ocasio-Cortez later dismissed the piece, calling it “birdcage lining.”

However inaccurate the facts in Politico’s reporting may have been, the piece was useful and telling — the expression of a building fever dream about Ocasio-Cortez, and the fears of what she might be capable of, should she continue to flash her unprecedented willingness to make bold demands and push her party where she thinks it should go. Ocasio-Cortez’s eagerness to flex her muscles, without demurring or waiting for her turn — without even waiting to be sworn in — is undergirding nightmarish fears about her as an agent of chaos and destruction. The Politico story itself was illustrated with an image of the Bronx native appearing to literally rub her hands together while grinning like Dr. Evil.

Reading the piece, I couldn’t help but think of Naomi Alderman’s brain-bending novel, The Power, published last year. It depicts a world in which women develop the power to inflict physical pain, and to kill, via electricity that emanates from their fingers. In Alderman’s fictional universe, this power is exhibited first by young women who in turn awaken it in their elders; as they are learning the possibilities and limits of their new power, the women giddily experiment with it, sending sparks and currents, determining how much of it they have, whether they can control it, and how they might best deploy it.

The book is extraordinary because it forces readers to think about all the ways — within our social, sexual, professional, and political relationships — in which men’s power over women is so much taken for granted that we don’t question it, don’t even notice it. But when women acquire an equivalent force, chaos and fear reign. The Power read to many, and was regularly reviewed as, a piece of chilling dystopian fiction. But as Alderman herself has said, “It’s only a dystopia for the men … nothing happens to a man in this book that is not happening right now to a woman somewhere in the world.”

What the reaction to Ocasio-Cortez makes undeniable is that if and when women gain enough power to start behaving, in a political sphere, as men have for so long, they will be viewed with fright and discomfort.

Jeffries, a popular incumbent who is generally (though not universally) well-regarded by progressives, supposedly wound up in Ocasio-Cortez’s crosshairs in part because of his own recent tactical moves, which reportedly helped gain him a House leadership position.

In October, he jumped into the race against Lee for Democratic Caucus chair just a few weeks before the midterm elections. Lee was hoping to become the first African-American woman in history to serve in party leadership. According to the Intercept, she had believed that she had the votes, but Jeffries was helped at the last minute by one of his mentors, Joe Crowley, the long-serving New York congressman who’d been beaten in his June primary race by Ocasio-Cortez. Crowley reportedly falsely intimated to caucus members that Lee had donated to Ocasio-Cortez in advance of the primary, depicting her as supportive of the insurgent spirit Ocasio-Cortez has come to symbolize. Some of the votes Lee thought she had locked down changed, and Jeffries won the caucus chair slot by ten votes.

Tuesday’s piece suggesting that Ocasio-Cortez — angry at having been used to defeat a woman she admires by a man she beat — might want to oust Jeffries, prompted an affronted response. “Can we call this out for being dumb?” Bakari Sellers tweeted, calling Jeffries “one of our most talented members.” The actor Jeffrey Wright gravely noted that “quick fame is a funny thing,” apparently in reference to Ocasio-Cortez, and the columnist Michael Cohen predicted that Ocasio-Cortez was going to “wear out her welcome very quickly.”

In some ways, the strong defense of Jeffries wasn’t surprising. He’s extremely popular in his district, belongs to the Progressive Caucus, and is widely understood to have ambitions to succeed Nancy Pelosi as his party’s leader and become the country’s first black Speaker of the House. Jeffries may be a lovely man and a decent progressive, but it is also true that in his efforts to gain leadership of his party, he relied on a network of old-school male power (a network invested in its own form of revenge) to defeat a beloved and ideologically unimpeachable woman. No, this isn’t a capital offense; it’s not a shock; it is, in fact, just politics — what happens every day, not just in Congress but in workplaces around the country.

It happens in part because networks of power are built by and around men, especially white men. To the extent that they permit the entrance of those who are not white men, it is often black men (like Jeffries) and white women who are admitted and supported. But Lee is a black woman who was running for a leadership position in a party that relies on black women’s votes and electoral and activist labor yet rarely acknowledges, let alone endorses, their authority by electing them to positions of leadership.

There has historically been little cost to undercutting women of color on your way to power, because neither white women nor black men have had the power or the inclination to stand up for them in the way, for example, that Crowley and his supporters are alleged to have done for Jeffries in his leadership bid. And also because, hey — once you have the power, you have the power; who’s going to come for you once you ascend?

The tantalizing (or terrifying) possibility laid out in this small — overstated, perhaps even fantasized — story about Ocasio-Cortez coming for Jeffries was that we could, perhaps, imagine these dynamics changing, and that is shocking. Naturally, Ocasio-Cortez would be livid if a falsehood related to her campaign, allegedly propagated by the man she beat, were used to defeat an admired potential mentor. What’s arresting is the notion that she might be in a position — might have enough swagger and sway — to imagine doing something in response. That long-powerful men like Crowley might deploy a vengeful fuck-you isn’t a shocking notion … but what if newly powerful women could conceive of doing the same?

It’s this very possibility that’s exhilarating for some, chilling for others: that women, and in this case, progressive women of color, newly elected in historic numbers, might team up in defense of one another, come to each other’s aid, exact political revenge on those who would vanquish their allies in ways they have never been capable of before. Because it’s not that women in the past haven’t had the will or desire to respond to the affront of having been stepped over by powerful men; it’s that they have not had the numbers, the voice, or the chutzpah that comes with those things, until very, very recently. What’s scary to so many about Ocasio-Cortez is that she’s acting like a politician with power.

by Rebecca Traister, The Cut | Read more:
Image:Mario Tama/Getty Images

Costco’s 100 Million Chickens Will Change the Face of Nebraska

Can a single company reshape a landscape? That’s the question at play in Nebraska, where Costco, one of America’s most powerful companies, has the potential to impact residents, farmers, and the environment in complex and unprecedented ways.

At the center of the move is the company’s $4.99 rotisserie chicken. In 2014, Costco reported selling 78 million of these processed, four-pound birds a year. In order to guarantee a steady supply and maintain the price, Costco fixed its eye on Nebraska as the best place to start raising and processing its own supply of chickens, and “break free of the monopoly” held by companies such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride, much like it did for sausage and hotdogs with its Kirkland plant in Tracy, California.

In June, the company broke ground on a giant new poultry processing facility in Fremont, about an hour west of Omaha. The plant will process more than 2 million chickens a week, or more than 100 million birds a year, and provide as much as 43 percent of Costco’s rotisserie chickens, as well as around one third of the raw birds it sells.

The effort will also include a feed mill and over 500 giant barns in which to raise the broilers, the hens, and the pullets, or parents used to breed the broilers. Costco needs to recruit around 125 farmers to build and fund chicken barns within a 100-mile radius, and it’s contracting with Lincoln Premium Poultry (LPP), a “company created for Costco in collaboration with Costco” that sprang up in 2016 to take over the business of working with farmers and building the infrastructure.

As the biggest competitor with Whole Foods, selling $4 billion in organic foods, Costco has been wooing shoppers who care about the source of their food for years. (In fact, the company just announced that it would tighten its standards around antibiotic use in all the meat it supplies thanks in part to an ongoing effort by shareholder activists). So, to say there’s a lot at stake with this new venture is an understatement.

While there has been resistance to both the plant and the barns on a county level, Nebraska’s state government has been working with industry forces for several years to welcome just such a project to the state. The operation is being billed as one of the only ways for farmers in the area to hold on to their land for the next generation, but farmers’ advocates and other experts well-versed in the woes farmers face in the chicken industry say the reward may not be worth the price.

And, to a group of farmers, land owners, and activists who have been united by the effort to oppose the plant, and are now actively envisioning a regenerative alternative, one thing is clear: This a watershed moment for the state, and for the shifting relationship between retailers and the larger food chain.

“Here you have a retailer who will now—from cradle to grave—have complete control of the entire production system,” says John Hansen, farmer and president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. “They’ll own the birds, they’ll control all of the particulars of the birds’ genetics, the production. They’ll own the feed mill and they’ll have control of the processing plant. If this model works, what will it mean for the rest of the poultry industry? Will other retailers, like Walmart, be close behind?”

by Twilight Greenaway, Civil Eats |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Harry Allen Carpenter, George C. Wood, Our Environment: How We Adapt Ourselves to It - Book II

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Henri Rousseau, The Rabbit’s Meal (Le Repas du lapin).
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A Vice President With Few Virtues

No matter what your politics, Christian Bale is easily one of our greatest living actors, along with Daniel Day-Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Robert De Niro. And while his stunning performance as Dick Cheney in Vice isn’t his best performance, it’s certainly his greatest impersonation since his Sissy-Spacek-as-Carrie/Anthony-Perkins-as-Norman-Bates-level defining of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. (Like Meryl Streep playing The Iron Lady, Bale will be the mainstream star to watch in this year’s Best Actor race. Vice is already running away with Golden Globe nominations.)

On that note, I had planned to write a straightforward film review, maybe making a crack that it would be up to you to decide whether a film about Dick Cheney qualified as a sort of sequel to American Psycho, and leave it at that. And I would have been happy to have stayed in my lane, except for all the Beltway political pundits who, in Vice’s wake, have taken up the art of film criticism. (Full disclosure: I interviewed Ben Shapiro years ago for a book review, and though our outlooks differed, I respected him and liked him personally. That said, I’m afraid I disagree with him in the extreme here, although Kyle Smith in National Review makes a far more worthwhile case against the movie on its own merits, or lack thereof.)

So instead, I am summoned to a more urgent, if distasteful, task: to try and explain why anyone in the conservative movement (or anywhere else) would want to normalize Dick Cheney—let alone flat-out cheer for him. After all, this was a man who left office with an approval rating as low as 13 percent.

That’s lower than Richard Nixon when he resigned, lower than Jimmy Carter when he was replaced by Ronald Reagan. It’s as low as Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression and as low as Barack Obama among Republicans and conservatives.

Even today, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both have triple the approval ratings that Cheney left office with.

Thirteen percent.

To plagiarize what Andrew Sullivan famously said about Hillary, anyone with Cheney’s destructive track record towards his own movement should have been drummed out “under a welter of derision.”

We don’t have to be “ordered” to remember and revere historical figures like Reagan, MLK, and JFK, or be shamed into doing so. But who the heck did Dick Cheney ever benefit outside of the corporate-crony one percent? What small, non-monopoly business did he ever give a chance to grow? What did he do to improve our schools and police? What did he do for balanced-budget conservatism, as he overruled Alan Greenspan and his own treasury secretary, gloating that “deficits don’t matter”?

How did Cheney make us more secure, with Iraq and Afghanistan all but ruined, Iran and Syria feeling stronger every day, and ISIS having wrought its destruction—and with Osama bin Laden still livin’ large for two-and-a-half years after Cheney retired? How do you defend someone who literally went to the Supreme Court to keep the minutes of his infamous 2001 energy task force meetings secret (they were co-chaired by Kenny-Boy Lay during the height of Enron’s rape of California’s power grid), while at the same time suggesting the outing of a truly top secret CIA agent (Valerie Plame) just to get revenge on her journalist husband? How did Cheney uphold Ronald Reagan’s mantra of curbing big government excesses when he justified warrantless surveillance and straight-up torture?

And what lasting benefit did Dick Cheney bestow on the conservative or Republican brand, with Barack Obama winning the biggest landslides since Reagan and Bush Senior?

It was my respected colleague Kelley Vlahos who solved the mystery of why some members of the Beltway press just can’t quit Cheney: “because they still won’t admit that the war was wrong.” Bingo. Expecting the U.S. to export insta-democracy to decidedly non-Western cultures? Putting overwhelmingly Christian and Jewish “viceroys” in charge of historically Muslim nations? Gee, what could possibly go wrong… (...)

Watching Bale as a terse, leering, manipulative young reactionary as he grindstones and plays people against each other from the late ‘60s to his Bush-Cheney heyday, one is struck by his shameless entitlement. Cheney uses movement conservatism and old boy connections as his own Uber. If Christian Bale is a slim and athletic man trapped in a fat and ugly body, Cheney sees himself as the Richelieu or Machiavelli of his own real-life movie, trapped just one step behind the real decision-makers—until he finally gets that chance to ride his horse from Aqueduct to Santa Anita.

The other key role among these garbage men is Amy Adams’ take-no-prisoners performance as Lynne Cheney. Mrs. Cheney had the straight-A brains and Ph.D.-level drive to be a powerful judge or executive in her own right, and was, according to Adams, a better “natural politician” than her husband. But as a card-carrying member of the Phyllis Schlafly/Anita Bryant/Beverly LaHaye-era Right from rural Wyoming, Lynne had less than zero plans to transform herself into another bra-burning icon. Instead, “she lived her [considerable] ambitions through her husband,” as Adams said. Adams even added that compared to the iron-fisted Lynne, her husband Dick might have been the “velvet glove”! (...)

As we contemplate the dumpster fire that is today’s politics, Vice is a useful reminder that the arrogant and destructive reign of Dick “Full Speed Ahead” Cheney was so awful for American society in general and American conservatism in particular that it helped provoke the biggest counter-reaction on the Left since Watergate. And if you’re a Never Trumper, just recall that a key reason Trump and Ted Cruz were the last Republicans standing in 2016 was because Cheneyism had so discredited the old “conservative” establishment.

Sorry, I’m just not there for conservative writers infantilizing Cheney and going all triggered snowflake at what big meanies the Hollywood libr’als are being to him. Christian Bale said it himself: “[Cheney’s] a big boy…he says himself he has no remorse, no regrets, he’d do everything again in a minute.” Exactly.

by Telly Davidson, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: Vice/Annapurna Pictures/YouTube Screenshot

[ed. See also: Are We Ready to Lose Afghanistan? (American Conservative)]

A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, So She Lost Her Job

A children's school pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas, alleging a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech.

The child language specialist, Bahia Amawi, is a U.S. citizen who received a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1999 and, since then, has specialized in evaluations for young children with language difficulties (see video below). Amawi was born in Austria and has lived in the U.S. for the last 30 years, fluently speaks three languages (English, German, and Arabic), and has four U.S.-born American children of her own.

Amawi began working in 2009 on a contract basis with the Pflugerville Independent School District, which includes Austin, to provide assessments and support for school children from the county’s growing Arabic-speaking immigrant community. The children with whom she has worked span the ages of 3 to 11. Ever since her work for the school district began in 2009, her contract was renewed each year with no controversy or problem.

But this year, all of that changed. On August 13, the school district once again offered to extend her contract for another year by sending her essentially the same contract and set of certifications she has received and signed at the end of each year since 2009.

She was prepared to sign her contract renewal until she noticed one new, and extremely significant, addition: a certification she was required to sign pledging that she “does not currently boycott Israel,” that she “will not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” and that she shall refrain from any action “that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israeli or in an Israel-controlled territory.”

That language would bar Amawi not only from refraining from buying goods from companies located within Israel, but also from any Israeli companies operating in the occupied West Bank (“an Israeli-controlled territory”). The oath given to Amawi would also likely prohibit her even from advocating such a boycott given that such speech could be seen as “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel.” (...)

This required certification about Israel was the only one in the contract sent to Amawi that pertained to political opinions and activism. There were no similar clauses relating to children (such as a vow not to advocate for pedophiles or child abusers), nor were there any required political oaths that pertained to the country of which she is a citizen and where she lives and works: the United States.

In order to obtain contracts in Texas, then, a citizen is free to denounce and work against the United States, to advocate for causes that directly harm American children, and even to support a boycott of particular U.S. states, such as was done in 2017 to North Carolina in protest of its anti-LGBT law. In order to continue to work, Amawi would be perfectly free to engage in any political activism against her own country, participate in an economic boycott of any state or city within the U.S., or work against the policies of any other government in the world — except Israel.

That’s one extraordinary aspect of this story: The sole political affirmation Texans like Amawi are required to sign in order to work with the school district’s children is one designed to protect not the United States or the children of Texas, but the economic interests of Israel. As Amawi put it to The Intercept: “It’s baffling that they can throw this down our throats and decide to protect another country’s economy versus protecting our constitutional rights.” (...)

When asked if she considered signing the pledge to preserve her ability to work, Amawi told The Intercept: “Absolutely not. I couldn’t in good conscience do that. If I did, I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus, become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully.” (...)

The anti-BDS Israel oath was included in Amawi’s contract papers due to an Israel-specific state law enacted on May 2, 2017, by the Texas State Legislature and signed into law two days later by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott. The bill unanimously passed the lower House by a vote of 131-0, and then the Senate by a vote of 25-4.

When Abbott signed the bill in a ceremony held at the Austin Jewish Community Center, he proclaimed: “Any anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texas policy.”

The bill’s language is so sweeping that some victims of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Southwest Texas in late 2017, were told that they could only receive state disaster relief if they first signed a pledge never to boycott Israel. That demand was deeply confusing to those hurricane victims in desperate need of help but who could not understand what their views of Israel and Palestine had to do with their ability to receive assistance from their state government.

The evangelical author of the Israel bill, Republican Texas state Rep. Phil King, said at the time that its application to hurricane relief was a “misunderstanding,” but nonetheless emphasized that the bill’s purpose was indeed to ensure that no public funds ever go to anyone who supports a boycott of Israel.

At the time that Texas enacted the law barring contractors from supporting a boycott of Israel, it was the 17th state in the country to do so. As of now, 26 states have enacted such laws — including blue states run by Democrats such as New York, California, and New Jersey — while similar bills are pending in another 13 states. (...)

The vast majority of American citizens are therefore now officially barred from supporting a boycott of Israel without incurring some form of sanction or limitation imposed by their state. And the relatively few Americans who are still free to form views on this hotly contested political debate without being officially punished are in danger of losing that freedom, as more and more states are poised to enact similar censorship schemes.

by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Matthew Lanyon, Clarice Cliff
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Bubbles and Hot Potatoes

Of all the delusions that have infected the minds of economists, central bankers, and the investing public in recent years, perhaps none is as short-sighted and pernicious as the idea that aggressively low interest rates are “good” for the economy and the financial markets.

There is, of course, a certain truth to that idea, roughly equivalent to proposing that snorting amphetamine-laced cocaine is “good” for one’s energy, or that walking into a bar and randomly choosing partners while wearing a blindfold is “good” for one’s love life. In each case, however, the validity of the claim comes from subverting the word “good” to mean nothing more than a short-lived burst of very bad choices.

Back in 2003, Alan Greenspan mixed the soap of what would become the housing bubble by holding interest rates to just 1%. Investors responded to the uncomfortably low yields on Treasury bills by looking for alternatives that offered a seemingly safe “pickup” in yield. They found that alternative in mortgage securities. Wall Street was more than happy to satisfy the demand for more “product,” as they called it, by creating more mortgage bonds. But see, creating a mortgage bond requires you to actually make a mortgage loan to someone, which is how we got zero-down, no-doc, interest-only loans. “No credit? No problem!” Well, no problem in the short-term. Over the next few years, that bubble of Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation would reach its peak, and then collapse, producing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

In my 2003 piece outlining that developing bubble, I began, “T.S. Eliot once wrote ‘Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.’ It seems that the U.S. financial system is bound and determined to find out… the real question is this: why is anybody willing to hold this low interest rate paper if the borrowers issuing it are so vulnerable to default risk? That’s the secret. The borrowers don’t actually issue it directly. Instead, much of the worst credit risk in the U.S. financial system is actually swapped into instruments that end up being partially backed by the U.S. government. These are held by investors precisely because they piggyback on the good faith and credit of Uncle Sam.”

In the Federal Reserve’s attempt to bring the U.S. out of the crisis of its own making, the Fed has produced conditions that make another collapse inevitable. Unfortunately, the scale of the present bubble is far grander, and the consequences are likely to be more severe. By the completion of this cycle, I continue to expect the S&P 500 to lose roughly two-thirds of the market capitalization it reached at its September 20 peak. Mountains of covenant-lite debt and leveraged loans, this cycle’s version of “sub-prime” mortgages, will go into default. Worse, “covenant-lite” means that lenders have much less protection in the event of defaults, so recovery rates will plunge to levels that investors have never experienced.

After 8 years of Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation, financial valuations have been driven to the most offensive extremes in history, with the most reliable equity valuation measures recently matching or exceeding their 1929 and 2000 peaks. Accordingly, prospective long-term investment returns for stocks and bonds have been driven to strikingly low levels.

At the September peak, we estimated that a conventional portfolio mix invested 60% in the S&P 500, 30% in Treasury bonds, and 10% in Treasury bills was likely to produce total returns averaging just 0.48% annually over the coming 12-year horizon. The only time passive investors faced lower expected 12-year returns was during the 3 weeks immediately surrounding the 1929 market peak. After a recent increase in bond yields and a mild -10% decline in the S&P 500, that estimate increased to just 1.29%. With most pension funds assuming expected future returns on the order of 7% annually, the coming years are likely to include a rather severe pension funding crisis. (...)

With the most reliable measures of market valuation still over 2.5 times their historical norms, there are essentially two ways to normalize valuations. One is for the market to lose about -60% of its value. The other is for fundamentals to grow while leaving stock prices unchanged. So the question is: how many years of growth would be required in order to normalize valuations? The answer is ln(2.5)/ln(1.04) = over 23 years. Though prices would be unchanged, you’d also get a dividend yield of about 2% while you wait.

In my view, there will likely be very large changes in economic conditions and market psychology long before then, so my sense is that a major price collapse like 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 is the most likely way this bubble will be resolved. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that it would not even take a decline to historically run-of-the-mill valuations to wipe out every bit of S&P 500 total return that the index has enjoyed since 2000.

While successfully engineering inflation seems like a tempting way to avoid major market losses, it’s important to remember again that the best equity valuation measures remain over 2.5 times their historical norms. Though higher inflation isn’t required for valuations to normalize, it would almost certainly accelerate that normalization. That’s another way of saying that the CPI would have to far more than double before the positive effects of inflation on nominal growth would begin to overcome the negative effects of inflation on market valuations.

In the Federal Reserve’s attempt to bring the U.S. out of the crisis of its own making, the Fed has produced conditions that make another collapse inevitable. Unfortunately, the scale of the present bubble is far grander, and the consequences are likely to be more severe.

Put simply, the extraordinary and experimental policies of quantitative easing and zero interest rates have not been “good” except in the myopic sense of encouraging a short-term burst of very bad choices and misallocations of capital. While it’s unfortunately necessary to tolerate cartoonish rants on CNBC about a potential Fed “policy error” as it normalizes interest rates, the fact is that the policy error is way, way behind us, and the Fed already made it.

The financial markets have already experienced years of aggressive yield-seeking speculation, record valuation extremes, and eager issuance of new “product” – in the form of covenant lite debt and leveraged loans – to satisfy the need of investors to “earn something greater than zero.” Now all we have is an unfortunate situation. With the total capitalization of U.S. corporate equities recently pushing $40 trillion, I continue to expect that $20 trillion or more of what investors count as “wealth” will vanish over the completion of this cycle.

Bubbles and hot potatoes

Over the completion of this cycle, you’re going to hear a lot of misinformation about monetary policy, along with a great deal of misplaced blame. The initial blame will be directed at whatever immediately accompanies the downturn. If a market collapse happens to fall on the same day that an organ grinder’s monkey throws a coconut at the bronze bull on Wall Street, they’re going to blame the crash on the monkey.

Additional rounds of blame will be directed at whatever advances the agenda of the person talking. Republicans will blame Democrats. Democrats will blame Republicans. Dogs will blame cats. Cats will blame mice. Everyone on financial TV will blame Jay Powell at the Fed for the “policy mistake” of even trying to normalize interest rates. But the true object deserving of blame will be the thing that made a financial collapse inevitable in the first place: the yield-seeking carnival of speculation engineered by the Bernanke-Yellen Fed.

Let’s walk through some of the mechanics of how monetary policy actually works, and how recent policies encouraged a bubble and collapse that is now baked-in-the-cake. The discussion will help to clear up some misconceptions (like the insufferable phrase “cash on the sidelines”), as well as some widely-believed cause-and-effect relationships that have no basis in fact.

by John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Hussman Investment Trust |  Read more:

[ed. Do read the whole thing. In 2008, when the economic meltdown started to gain steam the S&P 500 was roughly around 1,400 and change. The Dow, 11,000. Now it's S&P: 2550 and Dow: 23,600 (not to mention the $1.5 trillion added to the national debt since then, courtesy of the GOP tax bill of 2017).] 

via: misplaced

The Orange Trapper

Fishing from a canoe in the Delaware River, I like to ship the paddle and let the boat go where it will. I watch the stony bottom, which flies by under fast-moving water. This is not Philadelphia. This is two hundred river miles above Philadelphia, where the stream-rounded rocks are so clear they look printed. Shoving the rocks, anadromous lampreys have built fortress nests, which are spread around the river like craters of the moon. Mesmerized, I watch the rocks go by. Fly-casting for bass, I see golf balls.

From shallows in the Merrimack in Manchester, New Hampshire, I once picked up a ball that bore the logo of a country club two and a half miles upstream. If the river brought it there, the ball had come through deep water and then over the Amoskeag Dam. In the Connecticut River above Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ve seen golf balls by the constellation—too deep to reach and too far from any upstream golf course for their presence to make sense unless people hit them off their lawns. Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain. Mine include watching for golf balls, which I do with acute attention, the fact notwithstanding that I quit golf cold when I was twenty-four. These days, my principal form of exercise is on a bicycle, which I ride a good bit upward of two thousand miles a year. I go past golf courses. How could I not? I live in New Jersey, which has a golf-course density of five per hundred square miles, or twice the G.C.D. of Florida, which has more golf courses than any other state. Moreover, the vast undeveloped forests of the southern part of New Jersey tend to shove the densities toward and beyond Princeton, in whose environs I ride my bike. The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball.

The Delaware is less accommodating. When you are flying along on fast current, you don’t just get off your canoe and prop it up on a kickstand in order to pick up a golf ball. Over time, seeing so many golf balls in the river was such a threatening frustration that I had to do something about it. Research led to the telephone number of a company then in Michigan. A real person answered and was even more than real. She understood me. She knew what I was asking and did not call 911. Instead, she had questions of her own: What was the speed of the current? What was the depth of the river? Was the bottom freestone? Sand? Clay? Silt? After completing the interview, she said, “You want the Orange Trapper.”

“The Orange Trapper?”

“The Orange Trapper.”

It came in various lengths. I said I thought the nine-footer would do. The nine might be stiffer in the current than the twelve, the fifteen, the eighteen, the twenty-one, or the twenty-four. Besides, nine (actually, 9.6) just felt right. It was the length of my fly rods.

What came in the mail was only twenty-one inches long, with an orange head, a black grip, and a shaft that consisted of ten concentric stainless tubes with a maximum diameter of five-eighths of an inch. You could conduct an orchestra with it. It was beautiful. The orange head was a band of industrial-strength plastic, as obovate as a pear and slightly wider than a golf ball. A depression in its inside top was there to secure one side of a ball, but the genius of the device was in a working part, a bevelled “flipper” that came up through the throat and would waggle into place on the other side of the ball. The Orange Trapper worked two ways. It had no upside or downside. You could surround a golf ball with either side, then lift it up as if you were playing lacrosse with no strings. You could turn the head over—a hundred and eighty degrees—and the ball would generally stay put. But flip the thing over once more and the ball would always roll free. Made by JTD Enterprises, it could have been designed by Apple.

Even so, finesse was required to trap a ball in shallow current. After seeing one, and swinging around, and going hard upstream, and shipping the paddle, you had about five seconds to place the head of the Trapper over the ball. I missed as often as not. It wasn’t the Trapper’s fault. My average would have been higher chasing hummingbirds with a butterfly net. The river is an almost endless sequence of shallows, riffles, rapids, and slow pools. For the real action, I went below some white water into a long deep pool with Don Schlaefer in his johnboat. Don is a fishing pal. He plays golf. He had no interest in the balls in the river, but he could put his boat right over them and hold it there while I fished with the Orange Trapper. I picked up a dozen golf balls in half an hour.

Marvelling at the craziness, Don said, “Why are you doing this? They’re only golf balls. Golf balls are cheap.”

I said, “Money has nothing to do with it.”

A Titleist Pro V1, currently the Prada golf ball, costs four or five dollars on the Internet and more in a pro shop. If a person of Scottish blood says money has nothing to do with that, he is really around the corner. True, I don’t find balls of such quality often in the river. But they’re a high percentage of what I pick up in the roadside woods of New Jersey. Titleist makes about a million balls a day. In the United States, for all qualities and brands, a present estimate is that golfers lose three hundred million golf balls a year.

Why? Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton, now lives in central New Hampshire, and is a member of Bald Peak, Yeamans Hall, Pine Valley, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

Hackl: “It is an indication of the vast disparity of wealth in this country that golfers in some places can hit seven-dollar balls into woods and thickets and not even bother to look for them.”

There is less to it than that. Golfers have egos in the surgeon range. They hit a drive, miss the fairway, and go looking for the ball thirty yards past where it landed. When their next drive goes into timber and sounds like a woodpecker in the trees, there is no way to know the vector of the carom, so they drop another ball and play on. It must be said, in their defense, that various pressures concatenate and force them to keep moving, no matter the cost in golf balls. The foursome behind is impatient. A major issue is how long it takes to play. It is infra dig to cause “undue delay.” In the Rules of Golf, there’s a five-minute time limit on looking for lost balls. The rule may be unknown to some golfers and by others ignored, but five minutes or less is what most golfers give to finding lost balls. The rest are mine.

You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup. At your kitchen sink, you can tell how long a ball sat on the ground by the length of time required to take the ground off the ball.

With felt-tip pens and indelible ink, golfers decorate balls to individualize them beyond the markings of the manufacturer. If more than one player is using a Callaway 3 HX hot bite or a Pinnacle 4 gold FX long—or, far more commonly, there’s a coincidence of Titleists—you need your own pine tree. Some golfers’ graffiti are so elaborate that they resemble spiderwebs festooned with Christmas ornaments. Golfers also draw straight, longitudinal lines that serve as gunsights in putting. It is possible to mark a ball with a ballpoint pen, but some golfers actually believe that the weight of ballpoint ink, altering the pattern of flight, will affect the precision of their shots. It is tempting to say that the prevalence of this belief is in direct proportion to handicap.

In the frenzy of marketing, golf balls are sold in such complex variety that golf’s pro shops are not far behind fishing’s fly shops, where line weights and rod weights and tip flex and reel seats are sold in so many forms for so many different capabilities and so many different situations that people’s basements are forested with tackle. And, as with fishing equipment, the spectrum of subtlety in golf balls includes price. The difference is not among manufacturers but within the product lines of manufacturers. You can buy a dozen Titleist DT SoLos for less than twenty dollars. I know a golfer who has spoken as follows about looking for a wayward ball: “If you don’t find yours but find another of the same quality, you’re even. If you find a ball that’s not up to your standards, you leave it there for a lower class of golfer.” How he happened to get into the woods in the first place was not a topic he addressed. He reminded me of a pirate in the Guayas River near Guayaquil. With six other pirates, he came off a needle boat and over the stern of a Lykes Brothers merchant ship. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at a sailor’s throat while others tied him to a king post. A pirate pointed at the sailor’s watch, and said, “Give me.” The sailor handed over the watch. The pirate looked at it and gave it back.

by John McPhee, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Phillip Toledano

Are You Ready for the Financial Crisis of 2019?

For moneyed Americans, most of the past year has felt like 1929 all over again — the fun, bathtub-gin-quaffing, rich-white-people-doing-the-Charleston early part of 1929, not the grim couple of months after the stock market crashed.

After a decade-long stock market party, which saw the stocks of the S. & P. 500 index create some $17 trillion in new wealth, the rich indulged in $1,210 cocktails at the Four Seasons hotel’s Ty Bar in New York, in $325,000 Rolls-Royce Cullinan sport-utility vehicles in S.U.V.-loving Houston and in nine-figure crash pads like Aaron Spelling’s 56,000-square-foot mansion in Los Angeles (currently on the market for $175 million, more than double what it fetched just five years ago).

Will it last? Who knows? But in recent months, the anxiety that we could be in for a replay of 1929 — or 1987, or 2000, or 2008 — has become palpable not just for the Aspen set, but for any American with a 401(k).

Overall, stocks are down 1.5 percent this year, after hitting dizzying heights in early October. Hedge funds are having their worst yearsince the 2008 crisis. And household debt recently hit another record high of $13.5 trillion — up $837 billion from the previous peak, which preceded the Great Recession.

After a decade of low interest rates that fueled a massive run-up in stocks, real estate and other assets, financial Cassandras are not hard to find. Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire investor, recently posited that we are likely in a “global debt bubble,” and Jim Rogers, the influential fund manager and commentator, has forewarned of a crash that will be “the biggest in my lifetime” (he is 76).

What might prove the pinprick to the “everything bubble,” as doomers like to call it? Could be anything. Could be nothing. Only time will tell if the everything bubble is a bubble at all. But, just a decade after the last financial crisis, here are five popular doom-and-gloom scenarios.

Happy holidays!

5. Student Debt

Remember how the 2008 crisis was triggered by a bunch of people, who probably should not have been lent giant amounts of money in the first place, not making their mortgage payments? That was just the precipitating factor, but go back and stream “The Big Short” if none of this rings a bell.

Then fast-forward to 2018, where bad mortgages may not be the problem. Consider, instead, the mountain of student debt out there, which is basically a $1.5 trillion bet that a generation of underemployed young people will ever be able pay off a hundred grand in tuition loans in an economy where even hedge funders are getting creamed. Already, a lot of them aren’t paying and can’t pay. In a climate where “there are massive amounts of unaffordable loans being made to people who can’t pay them,” as Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, described the student debt problem in Barron’s earlier this year, nearly 20 percent of those loans are already delinquent or in default. That number could balloon to 40 percent by 2023, according to a report earlier this year by the Brookings Institution.

Now, lots of that debt is owed the federal government, so it’s unlikely to poison the banking system, as mortgages did a decade ago. But this burden of debt is already beginning to wipe out the next generation of home buyers and auto purchasers. As a result, a generation of well-educated and underemployed millennials, told to value a college education above all, could drag down an economy that never seemed to want them in the first place.

4. China

You know who has racked up even more debt than hopeful 20-something ceramics-studies grads in the United States? Here’s a hint: It’s a not-exactly-Communist country in Asia that has been on such a wild debt-fueled building spree that it somehow used more cement in just three years earlier this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Think about that. Now think about it some more. Over the past decade, China devoted mountains of cash to build airports, factories and entire would-be cities — now known as “ghost” cities, since the cities are populated by largely empty skyscrapers and apartment towers — all in the name of economic growth. And grow it did.

The result is a country with a supersized population (1.4 billion people) and supersized debt. Where things go from here is anyone’s guess. Optimists might argue that those trillions bought a 21st-century Asian equivalent of the American dream. Pessimists describe that massive debt as a “mountain,” a “horror movie,” a “bomb” and a “treadmill to hell,” all in the same Bloomberg article. One thing seems certain, though: If the so-called “debt bomb” in China explodes, it’s likely to sprinkle the global economy with ash. And with President Trump teasing a trade war that already seems to be threatening China’s massive, export-based economy, we may have our answer soon.

3. The End of Easy Money

Say you lived in the suburbs, and one day your neighbor suddenly pulled up her driveway in a new $75,000 Cadillac Escalade. A week later, she was tugging a new speedboat. A few weeks after that, it was Jet Skis. You might either think, “Wow, she’s rolling in it,” or “Golly, she hates glaciers.” (Hatred of glaciers may prove, actually, to be the real spark of the financial end times.) But what if it turned out that she bought all of those carbon-dioxide-spewing toys on credit, at crazy-low interest rates? And what if those rates suddenly started to spike? The result would likely be good news for the polar ice caps and bad news for her, when the repo man (not to cave to gender stereotypes about repo-persons) came calling.

O.K., overstretched metaphor alert: The “neighbor” is us. Ever since the Federal Reserve started printing money in the name of “quantitative easing” to pull us out of the last financial crisis, money has been cheap, and seemingly any American with a pulse and a credit line has been able to fake “rich” by bingeing on all sorts of indulgences — real estate (despite tighter lending standards), fancy watches and awesome gaming systems, to say nothing of the debt that corporations were racking up, which some market analysts think might be the biggest threat of all.

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The New York Times; Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Dalai Lama
via:

The Annals of Flannel

Three years ago, Bayard Winthrop, the chief executive and founder of the clothing brand American Giant, started thinking about a flannel shirt he wore as a kid in the 1970s. It was blue plaid and bought for him by his grandmother, probably at Caldor, a discount department store popular in the northeast back then. The flannel was one of the first pieces of clothing Mr. Winthrop owned that suggested a personality.

“I thought it looked great,” he said, “and I thought it said something about me. That I was cool and physical and capable and outdoorsy.”

Since 2011 American Giant, or AG, has mass-produced everyday sportswear for men and women, like the Lee jeans or Russell sweatshirts once sold in stores like Caldor — from the ginned cotton to the cutting and sewing — entirely in the U.S. Mr. Winthrop, a former financier who had run a snowshoe firm, made it the company’s mission to, in his words, “bring back ingenuity and optimism to the towns that make things.” He’s been very successful, especially with a full-zip sweatshirt Slate called “the greatest hoodie ever made.” AG has introduced denim, leggings and socks, among other products.

But Mr. Winthrop’s madeleine of a garment proved elusive. “We kept asking around and hearing, ‘Not flannel. You can do all these other things here, maybe. Flannel is gone.’” he said.

L.L. Bean, Woolrich, Ralph Lauren and Pendleton all made their reputations on rugged, cozy flannel shirts, but not one of those brands make them domestically today. In fact, “flannel hasn’t been made in America for decades,” said Nate Herman, an executive for the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a Washington D.C.-based trade group. (...)

Bringing its manufacture back to America, Mr. Winthrop thought, could be deeply symbolic. Both of the capability of U.S. manufacturing and of the need for big fashion brands to invest here again. It was a quixotic artisanal project, perhaps, but one with potentially high business stakes.

Flannel 101

“Forty years ago, we were able to make great shirts here, great jeans here, sold at a price that made sense to mainstream consumers,” Mr. Winthrop said at the outset of his project. “We’ve lost that capability in 40 years? We can’t make a flannel shirt in America? I’m not going to accept that answer.”

“Made in America” has become a marketing catchphrase espoused by both Brooklyn $400 selvage denim enthusiasts and Trump isolationists. And brands like American Apparel have led a renaissance of sorts in domestic manufacturing. But producing clothes in the U.S. today is exceedingly complicated. Over the last 30 years, the textile industry has been decimated by outsourcing and unfavorable trade deals, shedding 1.4 million jobs in the process, said Augustine Tantillo, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations.

Communities that produced clothes for generations, like Fort Payne, Ala., the former sock capital of the world, were mortally wounded when mills closed. Sometimes the expertise or work force have dissipated. Sometimes it’s the machinery, the looms, that have gone overseas.

Each time AG develops a new product, Mr. Winthrop must patch together its supply chain from what remains. To help him navigate the process, he relies on “old dogs in the industry,” he said, though AG is based in San Francisco and runs like a tech start-up, with sales almost entirely online.

For flannel, he called James McKinnon.

At 50, Mr. McKinnon is not that old (Mr. Winthrop is 49). But he is the third McKinnon to run Cotswold Industries, the textile manufacturer his grandfather started in 1954. Cotswold made the woven fabric for headliners inside Ford cars. Later, the firm manufactured pocket linings for Lee, Wrangler and Levi jeans. Cotswold still handles pocketing business for many U.S. brands, part of a diverse portfolio that includes making fabrics for culinary apparel. The fabrics are woven at its mill in Central, S.C.

Mr. Winthrop called Mr. McKinnon at his office in midtown Manhattan and ran through the list of questions. Why is flannel gone? What would it take to bring it back? How would you do it?

Mr. Winthrop specified that he wanted to make yarn-dyed flannel, not flannel in which the pattern is simply printed onto the fabric. (...)

Shirting in general is more complicated than a T-shirt or fleece because it’s woven rather than knit. Wovens typically require more needlework, which means higher labor costs, which means that they have been outsourced more aggressively than knits or denim. And a flannel is a very complicated woven shirt.

For a T-shirt, raw material is fed into a circular knitting machine and a roll of fabric is cranked out and dyed red or blue or purple. But flannel requires the dyeing of each individual yarn, which is what gives it the patterned look of, say, Buffalo plaid.

Those dyed yarns are put on a weaving machine, or loom. There are lengthwise, or warp, yarns and crosswise, or weft, yarns. To get the famous red and black squares even and blended, the warping must be done precisely right. And the more intricate the pattern or numerous the colors, the more complex the warping and the harder the weave.

As anyone who loves one knows, flannel shirts are soft, which is achieved through a finishing process called napping.

“Flannel, of all the things in your wardrobe, is the one thing that you know intuitively if you like or not,” Mr. Winthrop said. “It has to feel right in your hand.”

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Travis Dove

Giant Steps

via: Vox and YouTube

[ed. I don't fully get it either. But it does give you a sense of where genius finds expression.]