Popular Vote Movement Gains Momentum

An attempt at an Electoral College workaround is gaining momentum in the Mountain West.

Democrats in Colorado and New Mexico are pushing ahead with legislation to pledge their 14 collective electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote — no matter who wins each state.

The plan only goes into effect if the law passes in states representing an electoral majority. That threshold is 270 votes, which is the same number needed to win the presidency.

Democrats have been stung by the fact that President Trump's victory marked the second time in five cycles that a Democrat lost the presidency while winning the popular vote. 2016 was the most egregious example, with Hillary Clinton winning 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but losing the election. It was the largest margin ever for someone who won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College.

Proponents of the national popular vote measures have argued that it's not political, but Republicans, who have benefited in recent elections from the Electoral College system, disagree.

And while a majority of the country has expressed support for giving the presidency to the person who wins the most votes — 55 percent in the latest Pew Research Center poll — there are sharp partisan divides. Three-quarters of Democrats are in favor of amending the Constitution to do so, but less than a third of Republicans are.

So far, 11 states — including New York, California and New Jersey — have joined the effort along with the District of Columbia, putting the effort 98 votes short of its goal.

Colorado appears poised to join as the 12th state. The state legislature passed the bill Thursday, and Gov. Jared Polis is expected to sign it. In New Mexico, the legislation is awaiting consideration in the state Senate after the House approved it earlier this month.

by Sam Brasch, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Mark Makela/Getty Images via

Everything But the Girl

Reworked Video - Peter Lindbergh's shoot for Lancome starring Isabella Rossellini.
Lyrics

[ed. Repost. Beautiful.]

via:

As Students Struggle With Stress and Depression, Colleges Act as Counselors

Students and institutions are grappling with issues like the surge in school shootings and trauma from suicides and sexual assault. But it’s not just the crises that have shaken this generation — it’s the grinding, everyday stresses, from social media pressures to relationship problems to increased academic expectations.

More than 60 percent of college students said they had experienced “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year, according to a 2018 report from the American College Health Association. Over 40 percent said they felt so depressed they had difficulty functioning.

Money problems are exacerbating their worries. Mental health professionals say college students have experienced financial burdens on a different scale than many of their predecessors. They grew up during the Great Recession and have seen family members lose jobs and homes. They have great uncertainty about their career prospects and feel pressure to excel academically or risk losing job opportunities.

“There’s a much more radical feeling that you’re either a winner or a loser,” said Victor Schwartz, a psychiatrist and medical director of the Jed Foundation, which helps colleges improve their mental health programming. “That’s put tremendous pressure on college students and is feeding a lot of the anxiety we’re seeing.”

As students have encountered more mental health problems, they have sought help in record numbers. Between the fall of 2009 and spring of 2015, the number of students who visited campus counseling centers increased by more than 30 percent, while college enrollment climbed just 5 percent, according to a 2015 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health.

“You want a college that treats you for the person you are and gives you the help you deserve,” said Katia Seitz, a 19-year-old high school senior from Houston, who has received treatment for an eating disorder. “You don’t want a college that shuts you off or feels like it’s not their responsibility to take care of you.” (...)

Nationwide, students typically have to wait almost seven business days for their first appointment with a college counselor, according to a 2017 report from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. But at some colleges, it can be more than two months.

Three years ago, the counseling center at Queens College had 60 students on its waiting list (it does not require anyone experiencing a crisis to wait). Like many institutions, it began restricting the number of times students could see a counselor, from unlimited visits to 12. At the start of this semester, its waiting list was down to 30 students. But wait times can grow during peak periods.

“As we approach midterms, it feels like we’re running a crisis clinic rather than a counseling center,” said Barbara Moore, director of counseling, health and wellness. She would like to add more counselors, but doesn’t have the space.

Many colleges, however, are increasing their ranks. At least 155 counseling centers added new clinical positions from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017, according to the report by the association for counseling center directors. (...)

Dozens of universities have placed therapists around their campuses, making it easier for students to find help in a convenient location. The University of Michigan has 12 “embedded” counselors, including psychologists and social workers, in its schools of engineering, dentistry and pharmacy. Other schools have placed full-time counselors in the athletic department, where they help players recover from head injuries or overcome mental performance blocks.

The University of South Florida has gathered data on the students who seek mental health counseling at its main campus, in Tampa. It has found that about a quarter of them don’t need a therapist. They often just need better time-management or anxiety-reducing skills, said Rita DeBate, associate vice president for health and wellness.

To help address those issues, the university created “relaxation stations” that include massage chairs, bean bags and nap pods — chairs that cost more than $10,000 each and have quickly become the most sought-after seats on campus.

“We’d love it if we had a lazy river,” Dr. DeBate says, referring to the ultimate student amenity. But once students sink into one of those chairs, letting the white noise settle over them, it’s almost as nice, she says.

by Brad Wolverton, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Zack Wittman

The ‘Oddly Satisfying’ Internet

I was pregnant, anxious and looking for an online diversion to help me sleep (repeatedly searching the internet for “rare chromosomal disorders” wasn’t cutting it). Then, one dawn, I stumbled through a YouTube portal and into the universe of Oddly Satisfying videos.

These videos are compilations of physical objects being manipulated in certain highly specific ways: melted, smoothed, extruded, carved, sliced, dissolved. Frosting piped fluidly over a layer cake. Molten glass slowly ballooning from the tip of a blowpipe. Crayon wax swirling in a factory vat, propelled by the rhythmic swoosh of a giant paddle.

“Ooooooh,” I whispered to myself. “This is it.”

YouTube and Instagram are home to thousands upon thousands of these videos. Their titles are expository and sometimes grammatically spotty: Oddly Satisfying Video That Will Put You in Absolute Calmness, 1,000,000 Dominos Falling Is Oddly Satisfying, Satisfying Floam Crushing Compilation No. 6.

Some of the videos are compilations of reused clips — baking tutorials, pottery demos, factory tours. But many are purpose-built. Knives slice bricks of colored clay into immaculate rectangles against a white infinity backdrop. Disembodied hands knead stress balls or stir paint in hypnotic circles.

The videos seemed to scratch an itch I didn’t know I had. If I watched long enough, I felt lightly hypnotized, as if one of those disembodied hands had reached in and massaged my brain. (...)

But just what makes Oddly Satisfying so oddly satisfying? While the videos have yet to become the subject of major scientific inquiry, there are some theories. It may have to do with symmetry, patterns and repetition, which our brains seem to find inherently pleasing. It may have to do with a sense of “flow” — the state of being completely absorbed in an experience. Or it may be related to the “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or A.S.M.R., the phenomenon of deriving a pleasurably tingly sensation from certain auditory stimuli, like tapping or whispering or crinkling, which is itself a bit of a mystery.

“There may be something in the physical exploration of slime, or soap, or frosting in these videos that scratches a need to learn about how those materials behave,” Emma Barratt, a British psychology researcher who wrote one of the earliest papers about the autonomous sensory meridian response, told me. “Getting that information may be what’s innately satisfying.”

Whatever the neuropsychological explanation, it’s clear that Oddly Satisfying videos serve as a form of self-care, to use another term that has spiked in recent years. While it’s a journalistic cliché to talk about “our anxious times,” it does seem that the early 21st century is doing something to our heads.

by Emily Matchar, NY Times | Read more:
Image: YouTube

"She Never Looks Back": Inside Elizabeth Holmes's Chilling Final Months at Theranos

Elizabeth Holmes appeared to know exactly what she needed to do. It was September 2017, and the situation was dire. Theranos, the blood-testing company that she had dreamed up more than a decade ago, during her freshman year at Stanford, was imploding before her very eyes. John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, had spent nearly two years detailing the start-up’s various misdeeds—questioning the veracity of its lab results and the legitimacy of its core product, the Edison, a small, consumer blood-testing device that supposedly used a drop of blood to perform hundreds of medical tests. Carreyrou had even revealed that Theranos relied on third-party devices to administer its own tests. Theranos, which had raised nearly $1 billion in funding for a valuation estimated at around $9 billion, now appeared less a medical-sciences company than a house of cards.

Owing largely to Carreyrou’s reporting, the fallout had been colossal, unprecedented. Theranos was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It had been sued by investors. Walgreens, its largest partner, terminated the relationship and shut down 40 testing sites. Forbes, which once estimated Holmes’s wealth at $4.5 billion, wrote it down to zero. The young founder, who was once compared to Steve Jobs, had recently been dubbed a “millennial Madoff” by the New York Post. According to two former executives at the company, Theranos had as many as nine different law firms on retainer, including the formidable Boies Schiller Flexner, to handle the mess—what appeared to be the end of a long, labored, highly visible, and heinous corporate death march.

But Holmes had other ideas. Despite the chaos, she believed that Theranos could still be saved, and she had an unconventional plan for redemption. That September, according to the two former executives, Holmes asked her security detail and one of her drivers to escort her to the airport in her designated black Cadillac Escalade. She flew first class across the country and was subsequently chauffeured to a dog breeder who supplied her with a 9-week-old Siberian husky. The puppy had long white paws, and a grey and black body. Holmes had already picked out a name: Balto.

For Holmes, the dog represented the journey that lay ahead for Theranos. As she explained to colleagues at the company’s headquarters, in Palo Alto, he was named after the world-famous sled dog who, in 1925, led a team of huskies on a dangerous, 600-mile trek from Nenana, Alaska, to remote Nome, Alaska, bearing an antitoxin that was used to fight a diphtheria outbreak. There is even a statue of Balto in New York’s Central Park, Holmes told one former employee. The metaphorical connection was obvious. In Holmes’s telling, Balto’s perseverance mirrored her own. His voyage with the life-changing drug was not so different from her ambition.

In Silicon Valley, founders and C.E.O.s often embrace a signature idiosyncrasy as a personal branding device. Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck every day and tended to only park in handicap spots. Mark Zuckerberg went through a phase during which he would only eat the meat of animals he had personally killed. Shigeru Miyamoto, the Nintendo video-game legend, is so obsessed with estimating the size of things that he carries around a tape measure. It can get even weirder. Peter Thiel has expressed an interest in the restorative properties of blood transfusions from young people. Jack Dorsey drinks a strange lemon-water concoction every morning, and goes on 10-day silent retreats while wearing designer clothing and an Apple Watch. Holmes, too, had seemingly cherry-picked from her elders. She wore a black turtleneck, drank strange green juices, traveled with armed guards, and spoke in a near baritone. In an industry full of oddballs, Holmes—a blonde WASP from the D.C. area—seemed hell-bent on cultivating a reputation as an iconoclastic weirdo. Having Balto seemed to help fortify the image.

Immediately after returning to California, Holmes decided that Balto would hardly leave her side on the quest to save Theranos. Each day, Holmes would wake up with Balto at the nearly empty Los Altos mansion that she was renting about six miles from her company’s headquarters. (Theranos covered the house’s rent.) Soon after, one of her two drivers, sometimes her two security personnel, and even sometimes one of her two assistants, would pick them up, and set off for work. And for the rest of the day, Balto would stroll through the labs with his owner. Holmes brushed it off when the scientists protested that the dog hair could contaminate samples. But there was another problem with Balto, too. He wasn’t potty-trained. Accustomed to the undomesticated life, Balto frequently urinated and defecated at will throughout Theranos headquarters. While Holmes held board meetings, Balto could be found in the corner of the room relieving himself while a frenzied assistant was left to clean up the mess.

Around this same time, Holmes says that she discovered that Balto—like most huskies—had a tiny trace of wolf origin. Henceforth, she decided that Balto wasn’t really a dog, but rather a wolf. In meetings, at cafés, whenever anyone stopped to pet the pup and ask his breed, Holmes soberly replied, “He’s a wolf.” (...)

The fascination with Holmes often fixates on her extraordinary rise—her ability to convince Stanford scientists to believe her idea despite a lack of formal training; her aptitude for getting wisemen (Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, George Schultz) to sit on her board; and her skill for obtaining early funding from eminences such as Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, and others. But the final days of Theranos were equally chilling. After all, Holmes wasn’t just an inexperienced scientist; she was also a wild-spending fiduciary.

Holmes had always enjoyed a certain lifestyle. From the early days of the company, she had insisted on flying in a private jet. As the company’s legal problems mounted, its costs skyrocketed, but Holmes had a hard time weaning herself off certain luxuries. She still had her own personal security detail, drivers, personal assistants, and a personal publicist who was on retainer for $25,000 a month, according to one of the former executives. Theranos had an indemnity agreement with Holmes and Sunny Balwani, the company’s C.O.O., with whom she had been romantically involved. (They are no longer dating.) Theranos paid all their legal bills, which totaled millions of dollars a month, according to both executives.

By late 2017, however, Holmes had begun to slightly rein in the spending. She agreed to give up her private-jet travel (not a good look) and instead downgraded to first class on commercial airlines. But given that she was flying all over the world trying to obtain more funding for Theranos, she was spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on travel. Theranos was also still paying for her mansion in Los Altos, and her team of personal assistants and drivers, who would become regular dog walkers for Balto.

by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Jenny Hueston for The New Yorker

Love Is Claustrophobic: An Interview with Mark Mayer

On the surface, Mark Mayer seems like a normal enough guy. He’s polite, a little awkward, and a little anxious to please. When we were at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop together, it was his job to set up the chairs and the mics for readings, and the chairs were always arranged in nice, straight, punctual rows. His stories, too, have a veneer of normalcy. Model-train enthusiasts dutifully mind their toys, a nephew worries about his anorexic uncle, a parks-and-rec employee tries to get laid. But you can sense, beneath the normal, an abiding weirdness and darkness, a fascination with the sinkholes in the back of the mind, the places where consciousness plunges through the cloud floor of this world and into some other one.

Mark’s weirdness has something to do with tenderness. Weirdness for its own sake is just quirk, but in Mark’s stories, solid-state relationships undergo a phase change right at the moment when love gets hard. (...)

INTERVIEWER

There are so many tender relationships in this collection—children and their uncles and aunts, parents, brothers, friends. What is your interest in these dynamics?

MAYER

Love is a really hard thing to do right in life. I love reading stories where the hero is affronted by something external, a mean neighbor or an alien, but those kinds of conflicts can feel safe to me because all the character has to do, really, is figure out some way to close the relationship, walk away. Intimacy is more vexed. We’re all carrying around our histories—our bad programming, our genders, our wounded egos, our stink—and then we build little brick houses and try to live in them together. It’s a crazy thing to attempt. So I’m interested in stories that go into that space where we can’t escape each other. Family is claustrophobic, love is claustrophobic, which is what makes it meaningful, too. We can’t help but actually encounter each other.

INTERVIEWER

In these stories you swing from gentleness to menace and back again, and I emerge from each either with my heart overflowing or chilled to my core. Do you think about reader experience or expectations when you’re writing? How do you cultivate mood and atmosphere in your work?

MAYER

It’s funny to me that the mood of a story or book can be atmospheric, but our own moods are supposed to be things we can pick from the emoji spread. I think it takes all the meaning and threat out of sadness or anger to imagine them as discrete, specific, capsulized experiences, when really sadness, fear, and jealousy are these atmospheres that flood through life and mix in with the sweet stuff, too. You can name the emotion on a face in a photo, but in real time faces are basically liquids, flowing, reacting, breathing, speaking. I’m drawn to fiction—like yours—where I’m given room to feel many ways at once, since that’s how I feel in life. Like, menace is menacing because of how it abuts and butts into gentleness. I try to remind myself it’s never my job to summarize or conceptualize experiences, neither my characters’ nor my readers’. If I feel like I really understand what an event means for them, then I’m probably not living it deeply, since it’s not like I go around fully understanding what the events of my life mean. (...)

INTERVIEWER

Your sentences are so gorgeous. Who are your favorite prose stylists? What is your sentence-creation process like?

MAYER

I admire the paragraphs of thought that Mavis Gallant can fit into a single line like, “Childhood recollected is often hallucination; who is to blame?” I think my whole book might fit inside that sentence. I wish I could deploy semicolons like that. For commas, I go to Alice Munro, her lists—wardrobes, merchandise, character quirks—where each item somehow contradicts the previous, leaving paradoxes everywhere. And Marilynne Robinson, whose sentences are like spaceships, coming out of nowhere, gliding along on superior technology, which is also older technology. “By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.” That’s her description of conception! “So they seal the door against our returning.” Like anyone, I love the metaphors and similes that make you feel you’re putting on glasses for the first time—like how garbage men call maggots “disco rice”—but for me, the sound of a sentence matters most. Rhythm means more to me than 20/20 vision, and often the best rhythms are the simplest.

by Carmen Maria Machado, Paris Review | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Stephen A. Scheer
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Do Neural Nets Dream of Electric Hobbits?

Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works. For example (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response):

Prompt: For today’s homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War. 

It is easy to identify why the Civil War happened, because so many people and so many books and so much television and films tell us that it was the cause, that it has something to do with race or economics or religion. There is much agreement that it was essentially a war of slavery on behalf of capitalism, about a century of slavery. But that’s not what most people think of when they think of the Civil War. Many people think of the war as about states rights. You’re not wrong about that, but it’s kind of misleading to say that the Civil War was a conflict between states’ rights and federalism. So let’s try again. What’s the idea that has inspired so many people to go onto the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam and Gettysberg and Petersburg and Fredericksburg? The American idea of the republic–a notion of limited government–is a great part of the history. 

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The “founding fathers” were basically religious men who were not very concerned with states’ rights. The Civil War occurred in reaction to the idea that the federal government was taking far too much power away from the states, that they weren’t sovereign. Jefferson himself, as you well know, is an author of the Declaration of Independence who had some really crazy ideas about, well, you know, secession for a variety of reasons. The War Between the States (later the Great Rebellion) was a radical re-imagining of the American idea and not surprisingly, Jefferson’s grandson, who took after both his father and his grandfather and wrote about it, was named Thomas, after the president. “The federal and state governments are both contrived for the benefit of the rich and large property,” This view of the Founding Fathers has been promoted by some of today’s most prominent politicians, including some who hold prominent national offices and have a direct stake in a Republican Party that has been hijacked by the “federalist” wing of the party. So why is it that so many people have an easy-to-spot way of understanding the Civil War that has everything to do with the South and nothing to do with the South? The Confederate flag has been a symbol of racism for a long time, but when the Civil War started and the Civil War ended, many people suddenly began to see it differently. There was a change of heart, which I think is what led people to take the question of why the Civil War happened quite seriously…

Although OpenAI calls this a “language model”, modeling language necessarily involves modeling the world. Even if the AI was only supposed to learn things like “texts that talk about the Civil War use the word ‘Confederate’ a lot”, that has flowered into a rudimentary understanding of how the Civil War worked. Its training corpus (8 million web pages) was large enough that in the course of learning language it learned the specific idiom and structure of all sorts of different genres and subtopics. For example:

Prompt: Legolas and Gimli advanced on the orcs, raising their weapons with a harrowing war cry. 

The orcs’ response was a deafening onslaught of claws, claws, and claws; even Elrond was forced to retreat. “You are in good hands, dwarf,” said Gimli, who had been among the first to charge at the orcs; it took only two words before their opponents were reduced to a blood-soaked quagmire, and the dwarf took his first kill of the night. The battle lasted for hours until two of the largest Orcs attempted to overwhelm Aragorn. When they finally stopped, they lay defeated and lifeless for miles and miles. 

“I take nothing,” said Aragorn. “But I give my word, at my peril and mine, that I will never forget this day of horror. None of us will forget. Ever!” 

“I’ll never forget it!” cried Gimli, who had been in the thick of the battle but hadn’t taken part in it. One of the wounded orcs he had carried off, he was the only one of the survivors who remained uninjured. “We’ll keep the memory of that day of evil, and the war with it, alive as long as we live, my friends!” 

“Then we’ll keep it alive as long as we live,” added Legolas. “And we won’t forget the first great battle of the night, even if we may have forgotten the final defeat.” 

“I agree,” Gandalf said, “but we will all remember it as the last battle in Middle-earth, and the first great battle of the new day.” 

Aragorn drew his sword, and the Battle of Fangorn was won. As they marched out through the thicket the morning mist cleared, and the day turned to dusk. 

The Two Rings were returned to Rivendell. Frodo and Sam woke up alone in their room, and Frodo found a note on his pillow. He opened it and read: May the Power of the Ring be with you always, and may its light never fade. I am not sure if it matters which of the two rings we accept this day but, as you asked me, I have chosen mine. I am sorry to leave you, Frodo, but know that we are very close to the end, and that you are with us forever. May this letter find you safely in Rivendell; and if it does not, then I will accept the ring in your stead. If by any chance you find or give this letter to the enemy, may they learn the strength of the ring and may the Two Rings never be broken!

The big picture is beautiful. The AI understands the reference to Legolas and Gimli as placing this in the setting of Middle-Earth. It infers that the story should include characters like Aragorn and Gandalf, and that the Ring should show up. It maintains basic narrative coherence: the heroes attack, the orcs defend, a battle happens, the characters discuss the battle. It even gets the genre conventions right: the forces of Good overcome Evil, then deliver inspiring speeches about glory and bravery.

But the details are a mess. Characters are brought in suddenly, then dropped for no reason. Important details (“this is the last battle in Middle-Earth”) are introduced without explanation, then ignored. The context switches midway between the battle and a seemingly unrelated discussion of hobbits in Rivendell. It cannot seem to decide whether there are one or two Rings.

This isn’t a fanfiction, this is a dream sequence. The only way it could be more obvious is if Aragorn was somehow also my high-school math teacher. And the dreaminess isn’t a coincidence. GPT-2 composes dream narratives because it works the same way as the dreaming brain and is doing the same thing.

A review: the brain is a prediction machine. It takes in sense-data, then predicts what sense-data it’s going to get next. In the process, it forms a detailed model of the world. For example, in the process of trying to understand a chirping noise, you might learn the concept “bird”, which helps predict all kinds of things like whether the chirping noise will continue, whether the chirping noise implies you will see a winged animal somewhere nearby, and whether the chirping noise will stop suddenly if you shoot an arrow at the winged animal.

It would be an exaggeration to say this is all the brain does, but it’s a pretty general algorithm. Take language processing. “I’m going to the restaurant to get a bite to ___”. “Luke, I am your ___”. You probably auto-filled both of those before your conscious thought had even realized there was a question. More complicated examples, like “I have a little ___” will bring up a probability distribution giving high weights to solutions like “sister” or “problem”, and lower weights to other words that don’t fit the pattern. This system usually works very well. That’s why when you possible asymptote dinosaur phrenoscope lability, you get a sudden case of mental vertigo as your prediction algorithms stutter, fail, and call on higher level functions to perform complicated context-shifting operations until the universe makes sense again.

GPT-2 works the same way. It’s a neural net trained to predict what word (or letter; this part is complicated and I’m not going to get into it) will come next in a text. After reading eight million web pages, it’s very good at this. It’s not just some Markov chain which takes the last word (or the last ten words) and uses them to make a guess about the next one. It looks at the entire essay, forms an idea of what it’s talking about, forms an idea of where the discussion is going, and then makes its guess – just like we do. Look up section 3.3 of the paper to see it doing this most directly.

As discussed here previously, any predictive network doubles as a generative network. So if you want to write an essay, you just give it a prompt of a couple of words, then ask it to predict the most likely/ most appropriate next word, and the word after that, until it’s predicted an entire essay. Again, this is how you do it too. It’s how schizophrenics can generate convincing hallucinatory voices; it’s also how you can speak or write at all.

So GPT is doing something like what the human brain does. But why dreams in particular?

Hobson, Hong, and Friston describe dreaming as:

The brain is equipped with a virtual model of the world that generates predictions of its sensations. This model is continually updated and entrained by sensory prediction errors in wakefulness to ensure veridical perception, but not in dreaming.

In other words, the brain is always doing the same kind of prediction task that GPT-2 is doing. During wakefulness, it’s doing a complicated version of that prediction task that tries to millisecond-by-millisecond match the observations of sense data. During sleep, it’s just letting the prediction task run on its own, unchained to any external data source. Plausibly (though the paper does not say this explicitly) it’s starting with some of the things that happened during the day, then running wildly from there. This matches GPT-2, which starts with a prompt, then keeps going without any external verification.

This sort of explains the dream/GPT-2 similarity. But why would an unchained prediction task end up with dream logic? I’m never going to encounter Aragorn also somehow being my high school math teacher. This is a terrible thing to predict.

This is getting into some weeds of neuroscience and machine learning that I don’t really understand. But:

Hobson, Hong and Friston say that dreams are an attempt to refine model complexity separately from model accuracy. That is, a model is good insofar as it predicts true things (obviously) and is simple (this is just Occam’s Razor). All day long, your brain’s generative model is trying to predict true things, and in the process it snowballs in complexity; some studies suggest your synapses get 20% stronger over the course of the day, and this seems to have an effect on energy use as well – your brain runs literally hotter dealing with all the complicated calculations. At night, it switches to trying to make its model simpler, and this involves a lot of running the model without worrying about predictive accuracy. I don’t understand this argument at all. Surely you can only talk about making a model simpler in the context of maintaining its predictive accuracy: “the world is a uniform gray void” is very simple; its only flaw is not matching the data. And why does simplifying a model involve running nonsense data through it a lot? I’m not sure. But not understanding Karl Friston is a beloved neuroscientific tradition, and I am honored to be able to continue participating in it.

Some machine learning people I talked to took a slightly different approach to this, bringing up the wake-sleep algorithm and Boltzmann machines. These are neural net designs that naturally “dream” as part of their computations; ie in order to work, they need a step where they hallucinate some kind of random information, then forget that they did so. I don’t entirely understand these either, but they fit a pattern where there’s something psychiatrists have been puzzling about for centuries, people make up all sorts of theories involving childhood trauma and repressed sexuality, and then I mention it to a machine learning person and he says “Oh yeah, that’s [complicated-sounding math term], all our neural nets do that too.”

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

[ed. See also: GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence (Slate Star Codex). And the original reference: Better Language Models and Their Implications (OpenAI).]

Billy Gibbons, ZZ Ward, Orianthi, Kenny Greenburg

The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Hustles

When I was a kid, I often heard the phrase, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Like many millennials — who are now of course accused of wanting too much in terms of job satisfaction and security — I was encouraged to view any of my interests or talents as a possible career. This framework has carried through to adulthood, but now, instead of conjuring a Richard Scarry-esque image of happily occupying my time doing things I love, it reinforces the idea that my attention belongs more rightfully on profit than on pleasure.

We live in the era of the hustle. Of following our dreams until the end, and then pushing ourselves more. And every time we feel beholden to capitalize on the rare places where our skills and our joy intersect, we underline the idea that financial gain is the ultimate pursuit. If we’re good at it, we should sell it. If we’re good at it and we love it, we should definitely sell it.

This seems to ring especially true in creative fields, where these days selling art is less likely to be considered “selling out” than self-actualization. But even those who are commercially successful in creative fields often lament the disconnect between what it is like to do their jobs and how society views their life and work. Adam J. Kurtz, author of Things Are What You Make of Them has rewritten the maxim for modern creatives: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.” Which, aside from being relatable to anyone who has tried to make money from something they truly care about, speaks to an underrepresented truth: those with passion careers can have just as much career anxiety as those who clock in and out of the mindless daily grind.

I have a friend who is living her dream. She makes and sells leather pocket belts, holsters and ruffle tops for the steampunk/Renaissance Faire/Burning Man crowd. Her designs are worn and enjoyed by thousands of people; she’s created more jobs for Bay Area artists; she’s her own boss — and she hasn’t taken a real day off in roughly eight years. Because that’s what it takes to do what she loves. I admire the hell out of her, but every time I’m tempted to listen to someone who says I should open a restaurant just because I throw a good dinner party, I think of her, and remember that admiration is not the same as envy.

That’s not to say there isn’t joy to be found in turning something you love into your life’s work — it’s just to say that it’s okay to love a hobby the same way you’d love a pet; for its ability to enrich your life without any expectation that it will help you pay the rent. What would it look like if monetizing a hobby was downgraded from the ultimate path to one path? What if we allowed ourselves to devote our time and attention to something just because it makes us happy? Or, better yet, because it enables us to truly recharge instead of carving our time into smaller and smaller pieces for someone else’s benefit?

It’s no surprise we feel pressure to monetize our spare time. The cult of busyness is one of the most toxic aspects of our culture, but it’s also a defense mechanism. When so many of us are suffering economic hardship as we struggle to put our education and potential to use amid the five-alarm fires of climate change and political turmoil, it’s easier to keep going and glorify the struggle than it is to sit and risk feeling helpless. (Or risk feeling, if we’re being honest.) It’s easier to stomach needing three jobs to make ends meet if we rebrand ourselves as hustlers. So we pour ourselves another cup of coffee, post an inspirational meme and abide by the national motto of Rise and Grind, ever on the search for a new “hack” that will help us get more done in less time. But if we choose to capitalize on all of our resources, when do we get to choose ourselves?

Whenever I have some time to myself, I panic. Unstructured time — especially spent alone — is phenomenally rare in my life and I feel an overwhelming obligation to make good use of it. I should get some laundry done. Meal prep. Ask each item in my dresser if it brings me joy. Figure out how to fold a fitted sheet. Paint my nails. Work on the play I’m writing. Do a face mask. But instead, I deal with my option paralysis in the least helpful way possible: by scrolling through my phone alone in the dark until I run out of battery (literally or figuratively) and put myself to bed feeling like I’ve lost something valuable and hating myself for it. I can’t be productive, and I can’t fully relax, and I can’t possibly be alone in this.

by Molly Conway, Man Repeller | Read more:
Image: Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Numb to Corruption: How the GOP Trained Its Base Not to Care

With great fanfare, the New York Times published a major feature on Tuesday headlined "Intimidation, Pressure and Humiliation: Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him." This investigative report chronicled a truly breathtaking pattern of Donald Trump acting about as guilty and corrupt as a human being can: Firing anyone he fears might expose him, hiring loyalists and pressuring them to cover up for him, encouraging associates to commit perjury on his behalf, intimidating witnesses, lobbing false accusations, bullying congressmen into covering for him -- the list goes on.

Anyone who dropped into American politics after having been out of it for the past five years would be floored, wondering how on earth Trump and his associates aren't in jail already. But for most people who read the article, the takeaway is quite different: It's useful to have a thorough accounting of the horrors at the halfway point of this current hellish journey, but this journalistic behemoth will change nothing.

Anyone who wasn't already convinced that Trump is a corrupt criminal will be unmoved. We still have to wait to find out whether Trump has lost even the tiny fraction of voters necessary to kick him out of office in 2020. We've got two more years of this: Stories about Trump's corruption and criminality that should shock everyone but won't, Trump voters blithely dismissing the overwhelming evidence against him as "fake news" and people who see the truth standing by, helpless to change things.

The Times reporters grasp this reality, noting in the article that "many Americans have lost track of how unusual" Trump's behavior has been. Since much of his obstruction of justice occurs right out in the open, it may not seem as criminal and conspiratorial as it actually is.

No doubt, as the Times reporters argue, "the president’s brazen public behavior" has numbed the public to the seriousness of the situation, which is no doubt exactly what Trump is hoping for. But Trump's own behavior, and even the behavior of those Republicans who actively cover up for him, is only part of the story. In truth, Republicans have been priming their voters for decades to accept, defend and even adore a shameless criminal in the White House.

The key to Trump's defense with his base, I would argue, is not that he tries to convince them he's innocent, at least not in the traditional sense of "someone who didn't do the crimes he's suspected of." Instead, the strategy is to suggest that all politicians are corrupt, everyone is complicit and therefore all investigations are just bad-faith power grabs conducted for purely partisan reasons.

That strategy is working with Trump's base because that's exactly the message Republicans have been instilling in their voters for decades.

First, Republicans normalized the idea that all politicians are corrupt by electing a series of deeply corrupt politicians themselves. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have all been warm-up acts to Trump. Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, falsified intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion: Every one of those presidents helped train their voters to defend political corruption if it was conducted for supposedly meritorious ends.

With Watergate -- a bush-league burglary gone wrong -- the training wheels hadn't come off. But by the time Bush administration lies had led us into the disastrous quagmire in Iraq, your average conservative had not only become adept at making excuses for political corruption, but had fully accepted that doing so is a normal and expected aspect of supporting the Republican Party. It's honestly not that big a leap from defending the corrupt Bush administration to defending the corrupt Trump administration.

Second, Republican politicians trained their base to think of investigations as bad-faith political power grabs by themselves using investigations primarily, if not solely, for this purpose. Ever since the Bill Clinton presidency, Republicans have invented a steady stream of Democratic "scandals" to gin up fake umbrage, from Whitewater and Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky to whatever the hell was supposed to be scandalous about "Benghazi."

(A note for the #MeToo era: Whatever you might think about Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, which was clearly inappropriate behavior, it's safe to say that Republican outrage over it was in bad faith.)

All these endless, pointless investigations and scandal-mongering over Democratic behavior that wasn't corrupt, much less criminal, has primarily served to indoctrinate the conservative masses into believing that "investigations" are never truly serious, but just a tool for partisans trying to score political points. They are now throughly primed to interpret the investigations into Trump's very real corruption as nothing more than Democrats seeking revenge for decades of mistreatment by Republican hacks.

That's why polls that measure whether Republican voters "believe" Trump is telling the truth are somewhat beside the point. The real problem is that they don't believe it matters whether Trump is a criminal, and even the proverbial "smoking gun" wouldn't shake them from that belief.

The polling data that's more useful is data showing the surge in Republican support for Russia and belief that Russia is an "ally" since Trump's election. Which is to say that the increasing evidence that Russian intelligence interfered with the American election, and attempted to bribe a candidate into ending sanctions levied on Russia for human rights violations, has only made Republicans love the Russians even more. That isn't the result of ignorance. It's evidence of a widespread belief that criminality is no problem if it helps their team win.

by Amanda Marcotte, Salon |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: The Red Menace is Real (Jacobin):

One of the luckiest breaks for the United States, and indeed the world, was that Trump never actually governed as the populist he pretended to be. (...)

Had Trump passed some version of universal health care, he would have probably secured a second term, increased the GOP’s domination of Congress, and left the Democrats wandering the political desert for a generation in the political realignment that followed.]

The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits

Will the Colorado run dry?

The beginnings of the mighty Colorado River on the west slope of Rocky Mountain National Park are humble. A large marsh creates a small trickle of a stream at La Poudre Pass, and thus begins the long, labyrinthine 1,450-mile journey of one of America’s great waterways.

Several miles later, in Rocky Mountain National Park’s Kawuneeche Valley, the Colorado River Trail allows hikers to walk along its course and, during low water, even jump across it. This valley is where the nascent river falls prey to its first diversion — 30 percent of its water is taken before it reaches the stream to irrigate distant fields.

The Never Summer Mountains tower over the the valley to the west. Cut across the face of these glacier-etched peaks is the Grand Ditch, an incision visible just above the timber line. The ditch collects water as the snow melts and, because it is higher in elevation than La Poudre Pass, funnels it 14 miles back across the Continental Divide, where it empties it into the headwaters of the Cache La Poudre River, which flows on to alfalfa and row crop farmers in eastern Colorado. Hand dug in the late 19th century with shovels and picks by Japanese crews, it was the first trans-basin diversion of the Colorado.

Many more trans-basin diversions of water from the west side of the divide to the east would follow. That’s because 80 percent of the water that falls as snow in the Rockies here drains to the west, while 80 percent of the population resides on the east side of the divide.

The Colorado River gathers momentum in western Colorado, sea-green and picking up a good deal of steam in its confluence with the Fraser, Eagle, and Gunnison rivers. As it leaves Colorado and flows through Utah, it joins forces with the Green River, a major tributary, which has its origins in the dwindling glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, the second largest glacier field in the lower 48 states.

The now sediment-laden Colorado (“too thick to drink, too thin to plow” was the adage about such rivers) gets reddish here, and earns its name – Colorado means “reddish.” It heads in a southwestern direction through the slick rock of Utah and northern Arizona, including its spectacular run through the nearly 280-mile-long Grand Canyon, and then on to Las Vegas where it makes a sharp turn south, first forming the border of Nevada and Arizona and then the border of California and Arizona until it reaches the Mexican border. There the Morelos Dam — half of it in Mexico and half in the United States — captures the last drops of the Colorado’s flow, and sends it off to Mexican farmers to irrigate alfalfa, cotton, and asparagus, and to supply Mexicali, Tecate, and other cities and towns with water.

While there are verdant farm fields south of the border here, it comes at a cost. The expansive Colorado River Delta — once a bird- and wildlife-rich oasis nourished by the river that Aldo Leopold described as a land of “a hundred green lagoons” — goes begging for water. And there is not a drop left to flow to the historic finish line at the Gulf of California, into which, long ago, the Colorado used to empty.

Nature, in fact, has been given short shrift all along the 1,450-mile-long Colorado. In order to support human life in the desert and near-desert through which it runs, the river is one of the most heavily engineered waterways in the world. Along its route, water is stored and siphoned, routed and piped, with a multi-billion dollar plumbing system — a “Cadillac Desert,” as Marc Reisner put it in the title of his landmark 1986 book. There are 15 large dams on the main stem of the river, and hundreds more on the tributaries.

The era of tapping the Colorado River, though, is coming to a close. This muddy river is one of the most contentious in the country — and growing more so by the day. It serves some 40 million people, and far more of its water is promised to users than flows between its banks — even in the best water years. And millions more people are projected to be added to the population served by the Colorado by 2050.

The hard lesson being learned is that even with the Colorado’s elaborate plumbing system, nature cannot be defied. If the over-allocation of the river weren’t problem enough, its best flow years appear to be behind it. The Colorado River Basin has been locked in the grip of a nearly unrelenting drought since 2000, and the two great water savings accounts on the river — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — are at all-time lows. An officially announced crisis could be at hand in the coming months.

Meanwhile the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California, and Nevada — have, despite much debate, been unable to come up with a Drought Contingency Plan to keep water in Lake Mead below levels that would trigger a crisis and lead to mandatory cuts in water. And if the states do not agree on a plan by the end of this month, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman says she will step in and force hard decisions.

There are large, existential questions facing the 40 million people who depend on the river — there simply is not enough water for all who depend on it, and there will likely soon be even less.

by Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360 |  Read more:

Image: Ted Wood

[ed. First in a series.]

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world. The first approach used Newton’s law of gravity, according to which the objects exert a pull on each other. The second imagined a gravitational field extending through space, which the objects distort. The third applied the principle of least action, which holds that each object moves by following the path that takes the least energy in the least time. All three approaches produced the same, correct prediction. They were three equally useful descriptions of how gravity works.

“One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretational schemes,” Feynman said. What’s more, this multifariousness applies only to the true laws of nature—it doesn’t work if the laws are misstated. “If you modify the laws much, you find you can only write them in fewer ways,” Feynman said. “I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”

Even as physicists work to understand the material content of the universe—the properties of particles, the nature of the big bang, the origins of dark matter and dark energy—their work is shadowed by this Rashomon effect, which raises metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is one of today’s leading theoreticians. “The miraculous shape-shifting property of the laws is the single most amazing thing I know about them,” he told me, this past fall. It “must be a huge clue to the nature of the ultimate truth.”

Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons; each of these is, more microscopically, a trio of quarks; and quarks, in turn, are presumed to consist of something yet more fundamental. Reductionists think that they are playing a game of telephone: as the message of reality travels upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, it becomes garbled, and they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales. And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.

If anything, Feynman’s example understated the mystery of the Rashomon effect, which is actually twofold. It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action. In everyday reality, it’s strange to imagine that objects move by “choosing” the easiest path. (How does a falling rock know which trajectory to take before it gets going?) But, a century ago, when physicists began to make experimental observations about the strange behavior of elementary particles, only the least-action interpretation of motion proved conceptually compatible. A whole new mathematical language—quantum mechanics—had to be developed to describe particles’ probabilistic ability to play out all possibilities and take the easiest path most frequently. Of the various classical laws of motion—all workable, all useful—only the principle of least action also extends to the quantum world. (...)

Whether these researchers are on the right track or not, the web of explanations of reality exists. Perhaps the most striking thing about those explanations is that, even as each draws only a partial picture of reality, they are mathematically perfect. Take general relativity. Physicists know that Einstein’s theory is incomplete. Yet it is a spectacular artifice, with a spare, taut mathematical structure. Fiddle with the equations even a little and you lose all of its beauty and simplicity. It turns out that, if you want to discover a deeper way of explaining the universe, you can’t take the equations of the existing description and subtly deform them. Instead, you must make a jump to a totally different, equally perfect mathematical structure. What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level, if it’s bound to be superseded?

It seems inconceivable that this intricate web of perfect mathematical descriptions is random or happenstance. This mystery must have an explanation. But what might such an explanation look like? One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The “theory of everything” is like the ultimate prediction machine—a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions.

by Natalie Wolchover, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Lennard Kok

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dos Cabezas, 1982
via:

Benihana and the Question of Cultural Appropriation

I love Benihana.

It isn’t the food that does it for me; not the USDA Choice steak and certainly not the chicken (though I’ll admit I’m a sucker for shrimp of any kind, for Benihana’s bad dipping sauces, for the mushrooms that are invariably over- and undercooked at the same time). It isn’t even the exuberant faux friendliness of the service, even if I get a little thrill of excitement whenever the entire floor staff gathers ‘round to sing happy birthday to a table twice, once in English and another in perfunctory if adequate Japanese.

Even though I’ll happily eat a plate of food cut into scat-sized bits or clap along with the staff and their birthday song, and will even, if the spirit calls to me—and it has, frequently—pipe up in Japanese when the time comes, what I love about Benihana is more intangible than the food served or the ambience or the reasonable-for-Manhattan drink prices and specials.

It isn’t even the outright wackiness—the flying shrimp tails or the onion volcano or the egg juggling or any of the other cooking acrobatics.

No, it’s the bare, brutal honesty of the whole experience. I don’t just mean the upselling is as clear as the bland onion soup served with your meal. It’s that every restaurant does what Benihana does but more sneakily and less efficiently; it’s that Benihana murdered the preciousness of the “chef’s table” and cooked it up along with shrimp long before the “chef’s table” ever existed; it’s that Benihana understands most people don’t go out just to eat, just to drink, just for the show; it’s that Benihana knows most people just want a good time, and it only exists to give it to them quickly—no matter how large your group, no matter how many yelling kids, no matter how many drinks you’ve had or ordered, you’re in and out in less time than it takes to see a movie. That is why I admire the man who came up with the concept that Benihana perfected and thereby spawned a legion of copycat “hibachi” Japanese steakhouses across the world.

Now, I don’t usually sit around and think about Benihana and why it’s good, although I often sit around and think about why other restaurants I go to are bad. Which is another way of saying I’ve never found Benihana offensive in the slightest, even though I can’t really say I enjoy the food. But this past summer, social media conspired against my studied complacency about examining the Benihana experience too closely. A reporter tweeted out a photo posted by Donald Trump Jr. on his Instagram: a snap of some fried rice shaped into “I <3 U” on a griddle, over which Trump had typed, incomprehensibly, “My culture is not your fried rice ‘I love you’ with a beating heart sign!!! [crying laughing emoji] #culturalappropriation.”

Oh, no! Politics! In food! In restaurants! And even worse I realized it was possible that all along, over the years—even as I laughed and clapped along as countless Benihana cooks scootched a stack of onions spouting steam across what might as well have been the same flattop, a flattop so long it could very well span my 35 years, and said, or yelled, or merely observed as they are obviously required to: “A choo-choo train”—I had been the unwitting accomplice in some form of awful appropriation of my culture, my culture as a half-Japanese person, yes, but more importantly, my culture as a Japanese-American. (...)

The transformation of the popular conception of Japanese culture in this country from the World War II era to the present is entirely unique. Japan was once an enemy so menacing that it warranted putting its emigrants in concentration camps; now it exists as a kind of benign oddity in the American mind. Today, the Japanese are widely known for their food, their cleanliness, their attention to detail, their customer service, and their comics and cartoons, which serve to reinforce the image of Japan as a pleasant, albeit weird, place populated with correspondingly weird and pleasant people—a caricature that is about two parts Marie Kondo, one part Jiro Ono, and one part Haruki Murakami.

This caricature is relentlessly reinforced by the country's admirers in the Western press. We are told the Japanese are just so positive or that we Americans would do well to emulate them, despite regular news reports about the society's deeply ingrained misogyny, exploitative work culture, and the rampant xenophobia that finds its expression in its suicidally exclusionary immigration policies, which is why it’s held up as an exemplar by ethno-nationalists the world over. And let’s not forget the jingoism evident in the pilgrimages and tributes sent by Japanese heads of state to a shrine dedicated to the few token war criminals prosecuted in the aftermath of World War II, which justifiably enrages Japan's neighbors.

All of which is to say, Japan is a complicated country with a troubled culture, but for most Americans, it is merely the source of products that they are willing to pay a premium to possess, not because they are technologically more advanced or qualitatively better, but because they have a certain aesthetic, whether it’s animated cartoons, middle-brow fiction, or scented oil dispensers guaranteed to spark joy for years to come.

Nowhere is this tendency to overvalue Japanese-ness more evident than in restaurant culture, which is why it would be silly for Benihana to ditch any references to its legitimately Japanese origin, even if it doesn’t need them. Japanese stuff sells, and it would be malpractice for any restaurateur not to take advantage of the fact that many Americans are more willing to spend money on “small plates” at an “izakaya” than on bar food at a restaurant and bar.

by Sho Spaeth, Serious Eats |  Read more:

Image: Vicky Wasik

Harry Nilsson

[ed. See also: A Whale's Afterlife (New Yorker).]

What Happened When I Bought a House With Solar Panels

On a rare rainy day early last year, my husband, Alex, and I toured what, with any luck, would become the most exciting and daunting purchase of our lives: a cream-colored bungalow-style fixer-upper, built in 1924, a few blocks from our rental in Santa Barbara, Calif. What the house lacked in curb appeal, it more than made up for in charm and utility: the original built-in cupboards in the dining room, the way the light streamed in from copious windows, the fenced backyard for our wirehaired mutt. Moldy linoleum in the bathroom would be easy to rip up. A shower head inexplicably hanging above the kitchen sink would be easy to rip out. The location was a big draw, as was, at least initially, the fact that the red pitched roof of the two-car garage was outfitted with 17 solar panels. We’d get to do our bit for the planet.

The solar array was a modern addition to a property that otherwise hadn’t changed much since 1950, when the late owner, Michael “Jug” Jogoleff, moved into the home’s 948 square feet as a preschooler with his mother and aunt, transplants from Iowa. He never moved again. He grew tall and barrel-chested and remained a lifelong bachelor, becoming a neighborhood fixture who organized block parties. His décor reflected his obsession with all things electronic, in particular ham radio. “Radios and computers were packed into every available square inch of space he could find,” and “his roof bristled with every form of antenna,” Santa Barbara’s amateur radio club wrote after he died of cancer at the age of 70 in January 2017. “He was the consummate ‘ham’ and could build anything—and did! Amateur radio has lost one of the last of the ‘real hams.’”

Two days after walking through Jug’s ham shack, we made an offer. A week later, just before we entered escrow, we learned the solar array hadn’t belonged to Jug. It was, in the language of the industry, a third-party-owner, or TPO, system, belonging to Sunrun Inc., the largest provider of residential solar in the U.S. I started looking into the TPO model. It’s used less often than it once was, but it’s been important in making residential solar, once out of reach for most people, much more widespread. The reason is simple: Homeowners usually pay nothing upfront. A company like Sunrun puts solar panels on your roof, connects them to your home, and claims a tax benefit for owning the system. Going forward, you pay Sunrun to provide the bulk of your electricity needs instead of your utility.

I’d soon learn that the system was tied to the title of the house. It appeared that if we bought Jug’s place, we’d have to assume his lease arrangement with Sunrun. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this as a buyer, but it definitely piqued my curiosity as a journalist. I set out to examine the value proposition carefully.

A Sunrun customer service representative told me that in the year before he went solar, Jug’s monthly bill to Southern California Edison averaged $115. Under the terms of his deal, he paid $75 a month to Sunrun. The panels on his garage were expected to cover 85 percent of his energy needs. That left him reliant on SoCal Edison for the remaining 15 percent, at a cost of about $17 a month. All in, his energy bills came to about $92, a savings of about $23 a month.

I got ahold of a copy of Jug’s contract, and quickly saw how Sunrun could afford to extend such an offer. It lasted 20 years. The payments escalated annually by 2.9 percent—they’d be 72 percent higher by 2036. The tax credit was worth at least $5,000. (...)

I asked Sunrun if it would take back the system to put it on someone else’s house. It wouldn’t. The only way to get out from under the obligation, as far as we could tell, was to prepay the balance on the remaining 18-plus years’ worth of payments and buy the hardware outright. The price: $27,300.

By mid-February, we’d reached a standstill. We wouldn’t complete the deal if it meant taking on the obligation to Sunrun. The trust managing Jug’s assets for his heirs was refusing to buy out the system. Sunrun was blocking the sale via a document called a UCC filing, which showed the company had a financial claim on the property. (Sunrun disputes how consumer advocates characterize UCC filings: “effective liens.”) Our lender was refusing to fund our loan without a resolution.

I began to grieve, and then felt like a materialistic jerk for getting so attached to a wooden box. It wasn’t that simple, of course. By then, the house represented the place where Alex and I would—maybe with a child or two one day—build our future.

A few months later, regulators would vote to make California the first U.S. state to require solar panels on almost all new homes starting in 2020—meaning TPO solar will soon become a lot more common in California. (The shares of Sunrun and its competitors soared on the news.) That’s bound to further complicate the homebuying economy as at least some buyers—or the buyers after them—make the same calculations Alex and I did. (...)

Offering rooftop solar setups worth tens of thousands of dollars for no money down requires weaving an intricate financial web. The monthly payments in 20-year contracts provide Sunrun with future streams of cash flow, but acquiring customers, procuring hardware, and paying installers (and executives) require money today. Government incentives are key, especially the federal Investment Tax Credit, which allows owners to deduct 30 percent of the cost of a rooftop system from their federal taxes.

The structure of tax incentives in the U.S. also helps explain why it’s the only country where the TPO model has thrived. Homeowners elsewhere buy rooftop solar systems outright, and for much cheaper; Americans pay twice as much as their global peers. Australia and other countries offer substantial upfront subsidies or rebates—at one point, the Australian subsidies covered some 80 percent of the cost of a typical system. (They now cover about a third of the cost, which is falling.) In the U.S., by contrast, homeowners who buy systems outright can’t claim the credits until the next time they file their taxes, and then only if they owe the government at least as much as the value of the credit. (Currently the credit can be spread over multiple years.) That and other factors play to the strengths of Sunrun.

Sunrun finances its initial costs by taking on debt and raising capital from what are called tax equity investors. Only a few dozen companies have the appetite for tax credits and financial sophistication to be in this pool, including Google, JPMorgan Chase, and General Electric, says Joe Osha, an analyst who covers energy technology at JMP Securities LLC. They invest in Sunrun not to generate significant cash returns but to reap tax benefits: By assuming ownership of thousands of solar systems they can claim the credits and thus lower their tax bills from other economic activities. Hugh Bromley, a solar analyst at BloombergNEF, says Sunrun and its competitors offer solar, sure, but can be better understood as having created “one of the most sophisticated financial engineering industries of any sector of the U.S. economy.”

by Esmé E. Deprez, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Finding Home in a Parking Lot

Jamie used to wake up most nights with a flashlight in his face. From the backseat bed he’d winnowed into his SUV, he’d look up to see a police officer rapping on his window. Keep driving, they’d tell him. But Jamie didn’t have anywhere to drive. “I asked them repeatedly, ‘Isn’t there somewhere I can go where it’s not going to be a problem with you?’”

For Jamie, who turned 55 last month, the car was his only destination: It’s where he’s slept for most of the past two years, he says, save a 6-month stint he spent “in the bushes.” After the retail music store he’d worked at for eight years went out of business, he got evicted from his apartment in San Diego, and crashed with friends and family until their goodwill ran out. Then he got a new temporary job as a flooring installer, and the job came with a car. When the gig was over, his employer let him keep the vehicle. And then it became his sanctuary.

Jamie is one of thousands of America’s homeless who, instead of turning to shelters or the streets, live in their cars, vans, and RVs. In many cities where housing prices are high, their ranks, too, are growing. Los Angeles, which reported falling homelessness rates this year, still hosts one of the largest populations in the country: Of the 50,000 total homeless residents, the majority are unsheltered, and about a quarter (or 15,700) are based in their cars. In San Diego County, where Jamie still lives, a January 2018 homeless count found that 1,262 residents lived in vehicles there, although the number is likely higher, because it didn’t include people living in RVs. And in the King County area, where Seattle is located, the entire unsheltered population increased by 15 percent between 2017 and 2018. In that same year, the number of those in their cars leapt 46 percent, to reach 3,372.

Lifting people out of unsheltered homelessness is a challenge that each city is tackling differently—building more, and more affordable, housing; increasing the number of shelter beds; strengthening mental health treatment; softening eviction laws.

But a new cadre of “safe parking” programs are cropping up across the West Coast, too, aimed at carving out space and security for the people homeless services haven’t yet reached.

The first official Safe Parking program was launched in Santa Barbara in 2004, when a counseling center partnered with city officials and local faith leaders to open up parking lots each night for homeless families living out of their RVs, and to connect them to social services. Now, the Santa Barbara program runs 23 lots with 134 total spaces, and has expanded to accept other vehicles. Other California counties like Los Angeles and San Diego run their own versions of the program, and churches outside Seattle, like the Lake Washington Methodist Church in Kirkland, have implemented smaller, more local models. (...)

Cars provide crucial mobility for those who commute to work, but the quarters are cramped: To be able to sleep inside the vehicles, people must bend their backs and knees uncomfortably. A carbon monoxide leak could prove deadly. And while vehicles may be relatively closed off from the elements, their roofs can drip in the rain, and mold can sprout on the windows. Karina O’Malley, Lake Washington Methodist Church’s Safe Parking Coordinator, says that in Washington’s rainy season, many people keep pets in the car to increase body heat, and line windshields with towels or fit tarps over the roofs to keep out wetness and chills. Bathroom access on the road is spread out and sparse; showers, almost non-existent. (“Beach showers [were] fine in the summertime, but when it gets to be wintertime…” Jamie trails off. “It’s not exactly North Dakota here, but it’s been getting down into the low 30s.”)

The hardest part, though, Jamie and homeless advocates say, is finding a space to park undisturbed for the night. “Obviously there’s fear of being broken into, especially while you’re asleep; of having things stolen out of your vehicle, your last safe space,” said Emily Uyeda Kantrim, L.A.’s Safe Parking program coordinator. “But the harassment and people continually having to move their vehicle usually comes from residential neighborhoods.” (...)

Although America has an estimated 2 billion parking spots for the country’s 250 million cars, the space is contested, and highly policed. “We can acknowledge that there are thousands of parking spaces in Los Angeles that go unused at night,” said Kantrim. Indeed, UCLA transportation scholar Donald Shoup estimates that “14 percent of incorporated land in Los Angeles County is devoted to parking” in his book, Parking and the City.

Some see Safe Parking programs as a better way to activate that unused space. Most lots open up at night to let people drive in, and then clear out during the days. Reserving land for a short period of time “in order to stabilize our most vulnerable population who are actually prevented from being in other safe spaces at night—that's reasonable,” Kantrim said.

It’s simple, says Teresa Smith, the CEO of Dreams for Change, which runs San Diego’s safe parking program: “We’re using parking lots to park cars.”

Of course, it’s not actually that simple. Each program operates, and is funded, differently. But they all start with the same premise, says Safe Parking L.A.’s Kantrim: “You have a parking lot. You identify people who need to use it. You have a security guard to check people in at night. You have some reasonable place for them to use the restroom—be it a porta-potty or an externally accessible bathroom. And that’s about it. There aren’t a lot of moving pieces.”

by Sarah Holder, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: (Applied Survey Research/All Home)

Courtney Barnett