Bill Gates' Biggest Mistake

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently gave a wide-ranging interview to VC firm Village Global, and at one point, the topic of mobile came up. Gates revealed his biggest regret while at Microsoft was a failure to lead Microsoft into a solid position in the smartphone wars.

In the software world—particularly for platforms—these are winner-take-all markets. So, you know, the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win, and you know it really is winner-take-all. If you're there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you're on your way to complete doom. There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system. And what's that worth? Four hundred billion? That would be transferred from Company G to Company M. And it's amazing to me having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time—and there was this antitrust lawsuit and various things—our other assets—Windows, Office—are still very strong. So we are a leading company. If we'd got that one right, we would be the leading company. But oh well.

In the interview, Gates takes full responsibility for not reacting to the new era of smartphones. But by that time, he already had a foot out the door at Microsoft to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The original iPhone came out in 2007, and the first Android device was released in 2008. Gates had already announced his transition plan in June 2006.

The CEO of Microsoft at the time was Steve Ballmer, who famously laughed at the iPhone and called the $500 device "The most expensive phone in the world" while deriding its lack of a hardware keyboard. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share," Ballmer once told USA Today. "No chance."

Apple went on to sell over 2 billion iPhones.

The launch of the iPhone was a huge inflection point in the tech landscape, and the way companies reacted to it would shape their fortune for years to come. Unlike Microsoft, Google took the iPhone seriously. Google was investing in mobile before the iPhone was announced, having acquired Andy Rubin's Android, Inc. in 2005. The team was working on a Blackberry-style OS, but once the iPhone was announced, Google's mobile division realized it would need to "start over" on an all-touch interface in response. This decision eventually led to the launch of Android 1.0. (...)

Microsoft would eventually take on the iPhone and Android with Windows Phone, but its slow response and failure to recognize the modern smartphone revolution meant Windows Phone would only launch in late 2010. By then, it was too late. Google was throwing an unprecedented amount of resources behind its mobile efforts and, by 2010, had grown too powerful, with something like six major releases of Android and a suite of killer apps like Gmail, Search, YouTube, and Google Maps. Microsoft could build an OS, but it couldn't compete with Google's services. The Windows Phone was killed by the app gap.

Today, Android owns 85 percent of the smartphone OS market and is the most popular operating system in the world—mobile or otherwise—just ahead of Windows.

by Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica |  Read more:
Image: Village Global

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Le Corbusier - 1948
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The Chronic-Pain Quandary

Amid a reckoning over opioids, a doctor crusades for caution in cutting back.

About four years ago, Dr. Stefan Kertesz started hearing that patients who had been taking opioid painkillers for years were being taken off their medications. Sometimes it was an aggressive reduction they weren’t on board with, sometimes it was all at once. Clinicians told patients they no longer felt comfortable treating them.

Kertesz, a primary care physician who also specializes in addiction medicine, had not spent his career investigating long-term opioid use or chronic pain. But he grew concerned by the medical community’s efforts to regain control over prescribing patterns after years of lax distribution. Limiting prescriptions for new patients had clear benefits, he thought, but he wondered about the results of reductions among “legacy patients.” Their outcomes weren’t being tracked.

Now, Kertesz is a leading advocate against policies that call for aggressive reductions in long-term opioid prescriptions or have resulted in forced cutbacks. He argues that well-intentioned initiatives to avoid the mistakes of the past have introduced new problems. He’s warned that clinicians’ decisions are destabilizing patients’ lives and leaving them in pain — and in some cases could drive patients to obtain opioids illicitly or even take their lives.

“I think I’m particularly provoked by situations where harm is done in the name of helping,” Kertesz said. “What really gets me is when responsible parties say we will protect you, and then they call upon us to harm people.”

It’s a case that Kertesz, 52, has tried to make with nuance and precision, bounded by an emphasis on the history of overprescribing and the benefits of tapering for patients for whom it works. But against a backdrop of tens of thousands of opioid overdose deaths each year and an ongoing reckoning about the roots of the opioid addiction crisis, it’s the dialectical equivalent of pinning the tail on a bucking bronco. Kertesz’s critics have questioned his motives. He’s heard he’s been called “the candyman.” (...)

Opioid prescribing has been declining since 2012, though levels remain higher than they were two decades ago. Today, depending on the estimate, anywhere from 8 million to 18 million Americans take opioids for chronic pain.

The interest in reducing their dosages is predicated in part on efforts to minimize patients’ risk of overdose and addiction. But there are other considerations. Enduring opioid use makes people more sensitive to pain, many experts believe. Opioid use has also been associated with anxiety, depression, and other health issues.

Plus, as people become dependent, the drugs might just be staving off symptoms of withdrawal that would come without another dose, rather than treating the original source of pain.

In short, experts say, long-term opioid use is not good medicine.

Kertesz, who is also a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, agrees with all of that. But he believes that lowering dosages will hurt some patients who are leading functional lives on opioids, and that top-down strategies won’t protect them.

So, in 2015, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed prescribing guidelines for primary care clinicians treating chronic pain, Kertesz grew nervous.

The guidelines, a set of measured recommendations finalized in March 2016, suggested clinicians try other therapies for pain before moving to opioids and prescribe only the lowest effective dose and duration of the drugs. (The guidelines do not apply to end-of-life or cancer care.) For patients on high doses, the guidelines said, “If benefits do not outweigh harms of continued opioid therapy, clinicians should optimize other therapies and work with patients to taper opioids to lower dosages or to taper and discontinue opioids.”

“Our day-to-day practice aligns with nearly all principles laid out in the guideline,” Kertesz wrote in a comment he submitted on the draft. But he cautioned the voluntary recommendations could be implemented too stringently by others.

“This is a guideline like no other … its guidance will affect the immediate well-being of millions of Americans with chronic pain,” he wrote.

After the release of the guidelines, Kertesz started seeing ripple effects. In early 2017, federal officials unveiled a Medicare proposal that would have blocked prescriptions higher than 90 MME without a special review. Around the same time, the National Committee for Quality Assurance considered docking clinicians’ scores if they had patients on high doses for long periods.

Kertesz, other experts, and some medical societies protested such proposals, contending they invoked the CDC guidelines while violating them.

“Most of us wish to see an evolution toward fewer opioid starts and fewer patients at high doses,” Kertesz and colleagues wrote in response to the NCQA plan. “The proposed NCQA measure indulges no such subtleties.”

The discussion overall has been hindered by limited research, including evidence for the benefits of forced tapering. But as of October 2018, 33 states had codified some prescription limits into law. Pharmacies and insurers capped prescriptions at 90 MME. Law enforcement agencies warned high prescribers.

Some initiatives have focused on avoiding “new starts,” not on tapering legacy patients. But Kertesz and other advocates argued the pressure of all the policies and warnings inculcated an anxiety around prescribing.

Chronic pain patients were seen as legally risky and medically complicated, so they had trouble finding providers.

Kertesz and his allies raised their concerns in the popular and academic presses and at conferences, building momentum over the years. They collected anecdotes from patients who said they had been harmed in some way by dose reductions or involuntary tapers.

“It is imperative that healthcare professionals and administrators realize that the Guideline does not endorse mandated involuntary dose reduction or discontinuation,” read a March letter co-authored by Kertesz calling on the CDC to reiterate its recommendations were not binding. The letter continued: “Patients have endured not only unnecessary suffering, but some have turned to suicide or illicit substance use.”

More than 300 patient advocates and experts, including three former White House drug czars, signed it.

by Andrew Joseph, STAT |  Read more:

Image: Tamika Moore

[ed. Read the comments. America has a schizophrenic problem when it comes to mood-altering drugs (see here, here and here). Unfortunately, pain killers fall into this category. If the the ongoing 'War on Drugs' (and Prohibition before it) taught us anything, it's that targeting supply while ignoring demand is a recipe for failure (with sometimes horrific unintended consequences). People are dying not because drugs are easily available but because they aren't, and this uncontrolled environment creates an opportunity for all kinds of other Bad Things to happen (eg. flourishing crime organizations, dangerously adulterated products, property crimes, soaring suicide rates, etc.). The government and medical community's message: we want you to feel better, but not too good (and if unrelieved pain causes you to self-medicate, stick to approved drugs like alcohol, tobacco and anti-depressants; or just get more exercise, think positive thoughts and meditate your way out of the pain). One might reasonably ask why people need to escape reality in the first place (and if that's inherently a bad thing or just normal human behavior). Nearly every culture on earth since humans came onto the scene has had some form of mood-altering drug(s) as a component. See also: The Government's Cure for the Opioid Epidemic May Be Worse Than the Disease (Reason), and Faced with an outcry over limits on opioids, authors of CDC guidelines acknowledge they’ve been misapplied (STAT).]

Deb H., Falls Creek, AK

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Lanai, HI
photo: markk

Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds

Two rival civilizations are battling for supremacy. Civilization A is stronger than Civilization B and is perceived by Civilization B as a grave threat; its position, however, is more fragile than it seems. Neither side hesitates to employ espionage, subterfuge, and surveillance, because the rules of conduct—to the extent that they exist—are ill-defined and frequently contested. But the battle lines are clear: whoever controls the technological frontier controls the future.

In Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy, “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”—also known by the title of its first volume, “The Three-Body Problem”—Civilization A is a distant planet named Trisolaris and Civilization B is Earth. Life on Trisolaris has become increasingly difficult to sustain, so its inhabitants prepare to colonize Earth, a project made possible by their vast technological superiority. Using higher-dimensional geometry, they deploy supercomputers the size of a proton to spy on every terrestrial activity and utterance; Earth’s entire fleet of starships proves no match for one small, droplet-shaped Trisolaran probe. Yet Trisolaris’s dominance is far from assured, given the ingenuity of the underdogs. Seeking out the vulnerabilities of its adversary, Earth establishes a deterrence based on mutually assured destruction and forces the Trisolarans to share their technology.

When the first volume of the series was published in the United States, in 2014, the models for Trisolaris and Earth were immediately apparent. For the Chinese, achieving parity with the West is a long-cherished goal, envisaged as a restoration of greatness after the humiliation of Western occupations and the self-inflicted wounds of the Mao era. As Liu told the Times, “China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction.” The future, he went on, would be “full of threats and challenges,” and “very fertile soil” for speculative fiction.

In the past few years, those threats and challenges have escalated, as China’s global ambitions, especially in the field of technology, have begun to impinge upon America’s preëminence. Disputes about tariffs, intellectual property, and tech infrastructure have become urgent matters of national security. The U.S. has blocked China’s access to certain technologies and has cracked down on cyber espionage. In January, the Justice Department filed charges against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for alleged offenses (denied by the company) including fraud, theft of intellectual property, and violations of sanctions against Iran; the company’s C.F.O., who is the daughter of its director and founder, was arrested in Canada, and faces possible extradition to the U.S. In May, Donald Trump signed an executive order that warned of foreign tech companies committing “malicious cyber-enabled actions” at the behest of their governments. The next day, Huawei was added to a list of organizations prohibited from doing business with American companies without explicit government approval, and, not long afterward, Google discontinued Huawei’s access to the Android operating system. In response, the president of Huawei told the Chinese media, “I’ve sacrificed myself and my family for the sake of a goal that we will stand on top of the world. To achieve this goal, a conflict with the U.S. is inevitable.”

As the standoff has intensified, Liu has become wary of touting the geopolitical underpinnings of his work. In November, when I accompanied him on a trip to Washington, D.C.—he was picking up the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation’s Award for Imagination in Service to Society—he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said. Still, the kind of reader he attracts suggests otherwise: Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”

The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration. The trilogy commands a huge following among aerospace engineers and cosmologists; one scientist wrote an explanatory guide, “The Physics of Three Body.” Some years ago, China’s aerospace agency asked Liu, whose first career was as a computer engineer in the hydropower industry, to address technicians and engineers about ways that “sci-fi thinking” could be harnessed to produce more imaginative approaches to scientific problems. More recently, he was invited to inspect a colossal new radio dish, one of whose purposes is to detect extraterrestrial communications. Its engineers had been sending Liu updates on the project and effusive expressions of admiration.

Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu’s short story “The Wandering Earth” earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China’s second-highest-grossing film ever. A headline in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, jubilantly summed up the mood: “Only the Chinese Can Save the Planet!”

by Jiayang Fan, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Robert Beatty

[ed. Definitely in the 'hard sci-fi' category (some of the described physics are mind-bending if not headache inducing). The second installment of the Three Body Problem trilogy - The Dark Forest - is my favorite.]

Rock Riff Rip-Off

In a little-noticed moment during Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven plagiarism trial, a Guitar God inadvertently revealed that his industry’s most famous (and valuable) tunes were up for grabs. It was June 2016, on the third day of the proceedings in Los Angeles federal court, when Jimmy Page took the stand. He faced examination by attorney Francis Malofiy. At issue in the trial was whether Page had stolen the introduction of 1971’s Stairway from the obscure 1968 instrumental Taurus by the band Spirit.

To the frustration of Malofiy, the judge said it was irrelevant whether the songs’ album recordings sounded alike. What mattered was whether Page had lifted the Spirit song as it had been written on a single page of music submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office in 1967. The Taurus “deposit copy,” as it’s called, is a spare document handwritten by a record company scribe who listened to the record and then distilled it into only 124 notes of piano music. The reverse engineering was required to comply with U.S. law, which before 1978 allowed songs to be registered only via sheet music “deposited” in Washington. When a pianist performed the Taurus deposit copy for jurors earlier in the trial, it didn’t sound much like the Spirit record, let alone Stairway.

In a bind, Malofiy turned the issue on its head:

“I’d like to pull up Exhibit 2708, which is the Stairway to Heaven deposit copy,” he told the court. The sheet music appeared, projected on a screen between Page’s witness stand and the jury box. “Can you point to where on the deposit copy of Stairway to Heaven it indicates the solo?” Malofiy asked, referring to the electric guitar finale that’s considered one of Page’s crowning achievements.

“I’ll have to have a look,” Page said, then scanned the first bit. “Um, I think you need to scroll down one more.” The second folio came up on the screen. “Please scroll one more,” he said as more music appeared. “Please, one more,” he said again as the fourth and final bit came up. “OK. That’s it. I’ve read it.”

“You would agree that there’s no solo on the deposit copy … of Stairway to Heaven, which was deposited with the office?”

“Yeah, we—I agree with that. It’s not in there, no,” Page said.

Malofiy then pointed to the first measure. On the record, Stairway begins with a finger-picked introduction—one of the most recognizable musical passages of the past half-century, mimicked by millions of aspiring guitarists. That iconic intro, Malofiy said, “That’s not represented in the deposit copy?”

“No,” Page said. “You’re correct.”

Sitting in the courtroom that day, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Were some of the most famous passages in rock history really not protected by copyright? And did this also apply to any number of other songs whose deposit copies were certainly equally lacking? I felt as if someone had dropped $100 bills on the ground. Countless unregistered bits of song—guitar solos, bass lines, horn parts, background vocals—could be sitting out there exposed to unscrupulous financial exploitation. Ring tones, TV ads, film soundtracks—or even entire new songs—could be made and sold from these orphaned riffs. (...)

Led Zeppelin won at the 2016 trial, but the matter isn’t resolved, and the stakes seem to have actually grown. Malofiy appealed, and in September, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a Stairway do-over trial for procedural reasons. At the heart of the judges’ decision was a potentially industry-changing declaration: For pre-1978 unpublished songs, the deposited sheet music “defines the scope of the copyright.”

That ruling set off second appeals by both sides. Led Zeppelin asked for the original verdict to be upheld. Malofiy asked the entire appeals court, and not only three judges, to decide on the narrow issue of deposit copies. In early June, the San Francisco appeals court voted to have a rare 11-judge panel rehear the case in September, suspending the earlier appeals decision. The only topic on which the court has asked the parties for briefs so far is the primacy of deposit copies. The litigation has broader implications, undergirding a high-profile New York case in which plaintiffs are demanding more than $100 million for the alleged theft of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for Ed Sheeran’s hit Thinking Out Loud .

The irony is there may be no winning outcome for Led Zeppelin. As Page’s testimony showed, the harder his lawyers push for strict readings of the copyright sheet music, the more they weaken the protection for Stairway. They’re going all-out, too. The legal team for the band and its publisher, Warner Music Group Corp., wrote in a December filing about “the primacy of deposited sheet music” as a bedrock of their industry and how “contracts are entered into in reliance on the certainty that a copyright protects the copyrighted work.”

by Vernon Silver, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Library of Congress
[ed. Here's a side-by-side comparison of Taurus vs. Stairway (YouTube).]

The New Sex Drug Is Called Vyleesi

The New Sex Drug Is Called Vyleesi (The Cut)

The FDA just approved a new drug aimed at revving up women’s libidos and treating “low sexual drive.” Called Vyleesi, the drug calls for being injected, shortly before sex, into the abdomen or the thigh. In trials, 40 percent of women who tried Vyleesi experienced nausea. The chief medical officer for the company behind it, AMAG Pharmaceuticals, told the New York Times that they were “obviously thrilled about being able to bring another option to patients.”

Image: AMAG Pharmaceuticals
[ed. Insert joke here.]

Steely Dan

[ed. Reposts... sorry, I've been on a SD kick lately. I do miss smart music.]

Gene Tierney
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Chianti Classico, Beyond the Straw-Covered Bottle

Chianti Classico wines are better than they have ever been.

The best examples are remarkably distinctive, wonderfully satisfying and, in some ways, the essence of Italian red wines. Still many people seem unaware of what they are missing.

At a dinner party recently, I brought a few bottles of wine including one of my favorite Chianti Classicos, a 2016 from Monteraponi. When the bottle was poured, the other guests loved it, but seemed shocked at learning its identity.

“Chianti?” one said. “Really? I don’t think I’ve had Chianti since it used to come in those straw-covered bottles.”

Now, these people were not wine experts. But I had long convinced myself that differentiating today’s Chianti from those bottles of old was as unnecessary as reminding people that Chablis comes from Burgundy, not California.

Younger consumers nowadays may have no idea that 40 years ago Americans often referred generically to California white wine as “Chablis.” Nor are they likely to know that college students in the 1970s bought Chianti not for the wine but to use the empty fiasco, as the straw-covered bottle is called in Italian, as a candleholder.

The last time I thought about Chianti in fiaschi was a few years ago when Monte Bernardi, a very good producer, began selling Chianti in the straw-covered bottles as a sort of playful retro statement.

As good as Chianti Classico is these days, it rarely seems to be an object of anybody’s desire. With the exception of some excellent Italian restaurants, few wine lists put it in the spotlight. It seldom features on any sommelier’s Instagram feed.

Yet a good Chianti Classico is one of the most soulful wines I know. The best have a pure, deep red-cherry flavor, sometimes deliciously tart or bittersweet, along with pronounced floral aromas and flavors, and an earthy minerality. The acidity is fresh and lively; tannins should be discernible, though not overly chewy — often with what I think of as a dusty quality, focusing the wine and readying the mouth for another sip.

I love Chianti with cooked tomato sauces and pizza. It is also a natural partner with sausages, all sorts of beef dishes and stews. And if you wonder why I’m thinking about a red wine as summer is about to envelop us with heat, I wonder if you ever plan to eat burgers or steaks off the grill. If so, you might consider a Chianti Classico.

How is it that Chianti Classico is generally well known and so often ignored? There are several reasons beyond its checkered-tablecloth past.

First, Chianti is an expression of the sangiovese grape, and sangiovese is very much undervalued, except in the case of Chianti’s Tuscan sibling, Brunello di Montalcino.

Chianti is the historic name of the hilly Tuscan wine region between Florence and Siena. As Chianti became well known in the early 20th century, Italian wine authorities took advantage of its fame by expanding the zone in which wine could legally be called Chianti. Not surprisingly, one result of this expansion was to dilute the quality of the wine.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that the greater Chianti region was officially divided into a series of subzones, of which Chianti Classico represents the historic heartland.

Geography was only one issue. While what constituted Chianti centuries ago is difficult to reconstruct as few records exist, most authorities date modern Chianti back to 1872, when Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a leading Tuscan statesman and agricultural expert, set out what came to be considered the formula for Chianti.

by Eric Asimov, NY Times | Read more:
Image: DEA / G.COZZI/ Getty Images

Slouching Toward War

President Trump has been all over the place on Iran, which is what happens when you take a serious subject, treat it with farcical superficiality, believe braggadocio will sway a proud and ancient civilization, approach foreign policy like a real estate deal, defer to advisers with Iran Derangement Syndrome, refuse to read any briefing papers and confuse the American national interest with the Saudi or Israeli.

This American slouching toward another Middle East war has been a disgrace, shot through with the twisting of truth or outright lies. Now Trump has approved, only to reverse, a retaliatory strike for the Iranian downing of an American drone, an aptly chaotic culmination to the drift the president has allowed.

The 11th-hour calling-off of military action was the one wise decision Trump has taken on Iran since he took office. Dazzled by Saudi blandishments, Israeli veneration, the opportunity to trash Barack Obama’s diplomacy and the lure of evangelicals’ votes, Trump determined from Day 1 that the Islamic Republic was the enemy from Central Casting. His view was unburdened by any serious assessment of how to balance toughness and engagement in the long-traumatized American-Iranian relationship.

The United States does not need the war with Iran that John Bolton, the national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem determined to deliver. It would be a war of choice, illusion and irresponsibility. It would place Americans at risk across the Middle East, with no benefit to the United States or its allies.

The Trump administration has been lucky. Now, in a real crisis, and one of the administration’s own making, the cavalier ineptitude and absence of anything resembling process is on full public view. Threats and bombast get you just so far. Iran has called Trump’s bluff.

Just over a year ago, when Trump tore up the nuclear deal that the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China had hammered out over years of diplomacy to keep Iran from a bomb, I wrote:

“President Trump is withdrawing the United States from an Iran nuclear deal that has worked, in the name of unrelated demands that are unworkable, at very high cost to America’s alliances and the value of its word, with no viable alternative policy in place and at the risk of igniting the Middle East.”

Here we are, on the brink of ignition. Over the past year, Bolton has threatened military action multiple times, telling Iran there will be “hell to pay,” ratcheting up tensions wherever possible and extending potential pretexts for war.

Pompeo has been a willing dance partner in this exercise. He has declared a determination to drive Iran’s oil exports to “zero” and energetically pursued the grotesque objective of conflating Iran, a Shia nation, with Al Qaeda, an expression of murderous Wahhabi Sunni extremism. In fact, as former Secretary of State John Kerry told me, “Iran has helped in the war against the ISIS,” another Sunni terrorist group.

The aim of the Bolton-Pompeo Iran-equals-Al-Qaeda maneuver has been obvious: to bring a war with Iran within the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed by Congress in response to Sept. 11, whose perpetrators were overwhelmingly Saudi. (...)

“The Trump administration policy has been unnecessary, counter-strategic and dangerous,” Kerry told me. “It has completely upended the legitimacy of approaching certain issues — Yemen, Hezbollah, missile technology — while having the nuclear issue in a box in the most accountable, transparent nuclear deal on the planet.

“All they have done is given life to the deeply held Iranian belief that you cannot trust or negotiate with the United States, while trying to squeeze Iran into economic oblivion in pursuit of regime change that would only hand power to the hard-line Republican Guards, not some democrat.”

by Roger Cohen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: US bases around Iran via

‘Most of Government Is Unconstitutional’

On Thursday, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court called into question the whole project of modern American governance.

In Gundy v. United States, which concerned the constitutionality of a law requiring the registration of sex offenders, four of the more conservative justices endorsed a controversial legal theory according to which Congress lacks the power to delegate broad powers to agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Heath and Human Services.

For now, the four more-liberal justices have brushed back the challenge, ruling 5 to 3, with Justice Samuel Alito, that Congress can give to the executive branch the authority to implement that specific law. But a close reading of the decisions in the case — and the fact that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was recused — suggests that the liberals may not have the votes to turn back the conservative assault on Congress’s powers.

Federal agencies have been vested with expansive authority since the dawn of the republic, but the administrative state as we know it really took off in the 20th century. The rise of agencies like the Office of Price Administration, the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency was essential to the prosecution of two world wars, the creation of the post-New Deal welfare state and the regulation of novel risks such as industrial pollution.

But powerful agencies have long generated anxiety among conservatives. The Constitution, they note, assigns to Congress “all legislative powers herein granted.” Very broad delegations of power from Congress to administrative agencies, conservatives argue, amount to an unconstitutional dereliction of Congress’s responsibilities.

Back in 1935, the Supreme Court signaled that it was open to this argument. In two cases, the court struck down New Deal laws for vesting too much authority with too little guidance. According to the court, Congress had to offer some “intelligible principle” about how agencies were to exercise the power they were given.

It turned out, however, that the intelligible principle could be pretty minimal. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has approved laws telling agencies to regulate “in the public interest” and to set pollution standards “requisite to protect the public health.” Not once in the 84 years since has the Supreme Court invalidated a law because it offends the so-called nondelegation doctrine.

And for good reason. To run a functional, modern government, Congress has no choice but to delegate authority and discretion to federal agencies. Doing so allows Congress to make use of agencies’ resources and scientific expertise, to enable a nimble response to emerging problems and to insulate technocratic decisions from raw politics.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the Supreme Court’s post-1935 consensus — that Congress gets to decide how much power to delegate to an agency, not the courts — serves as the foundation of the American state. That’s what makes Thursday’s decision so troubling.

by Nicholas Bagley, NY Times | Read more:
Image: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
[ed. It's like the Twilight Zone.]

The Problem With HR

In the old days, there was personnel: payroll, hiring, and—should things go terribly awry—pink slips. It was an office where the clatter of a typewriter signaled that volumes of paperwork were being shifted from inbox to outbox, and where employees could be just as bloodlessly reshuffled from “in” to “out.” It was women’s work, and in the popular imagination it was the terrain of the spinster: humorless, a stickler.

Human resources performs all of these old functions, along with a host of new ones. Employees often imagine that the “resources” on offer are the benefits that flow to them from that department, but in the term’s 19th-century origins, it is the workers themselves who are the resources, one more asset—along with equipment, factories, and capital—at the company’s disposal. Most HR reps today would never dream of speaking about employees as a type of commodity (at least not to their face), although it can be hard to understand what, exactly, these reps are talking about, because the field is rich with jargon: onboarding, balanced scorecards, cultural integration, the 80/20 rule.

On The Office, Michael Scott once said of Toby, the Dunder Mifflin HR rep: “If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, bin Laden, and Toby, I would shoot Toby twice.” Over the past year, every time a friend asked what I was working on and I mentioned the letters HR, there was a remarkably consistent response: a quiet groan and a brief, skyward look—not a two-bullet look, but not a one-bullet look, either.

Fairly or not, HR is seen as the division of the company that slows things down, generates endless memos, meddles in employees’ personal business, holds compulsory “trainings,” and ruins any fun and spirit-lifting thing employees come up with. A notorious Fast Company cover story, published in 2005, is called “Why We Hate HR.” Its author, Keith H. Hammonds, laid out a string of damning questions that have resonated with businesspeople ever since:

Why are annual performance appraisals so time-consuming—and so routinely useless? Why is HR so often a henchman for the chief financial officer, finding ever-more ingenious ways to cut benefits and hack at payroll? Why do its communications—when we can understand them at all—so often flout reality? Why are so many people processes duplicative and wasteful, creating a forest of paperwork for every minor transaction? And why does HR insist on sameness as a proxy for equity?

But the real reason many workers don’t love human resources is that while the department often presents itself as functioning like a union—the open door for worker complaints, the updates on valuable new benefits—it is not a union. In a strong job market, HR is the soul of generosity, making employees feel valued and significant. But should the economy change, or should management decide to go in another direction, HR can just as quickly become assassin as friend. The last face you’ll see is Jane’s—your pal from HR, who hands out the discounted tickets to Knott’s Berry Farm and sends the blast emails about Chipotle Friday—and she’ll be dry-eyed while collecting your employee badge and invoking the executioner’s code: COBRA.

Jane’s not a bad person—she’s just carrying out orders from far up the ladder. And when it comes to sexual harassment, women understand that Jane reports to upper management, not some neutral body that stands in allegiance with right moral action. If employers judged HR departments by their ability to prevent sexual harassment, most would have gotten a failing grade long ago. What HR is actually responsible for—one of the central ways the department “adds value” to a company—is serving as the first line of defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit. These two goals are clearly aligned, but if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that you can achieve the latter without doing much of anything at all about the former.

In october 2014, Ellen DeGeneres did something on her talk show that we can hardly imagine in today’s environment: She made an extended joke about sexual harassment. “Last week we had our mandatory sexual-harassment training seminar,” she told the audience. “We have it every year for all of the employees, and it combines frank discussions about the workplace behavior and … mind-numbing boredom.” The people in the audience laughed appreciatively—they knew exactly what she meant. Then she introduced a game: “Sexual-Harassment Training or Late-Night Movie?” And, with the eager participation of the audience, she read lines of dialogue and asked the crowd to guess their source.

Ellen’s joke depended on our common understanding that in the decades since Anita Hill’s testimony, HR has created a huge body of instructional films, computer training modules, seminar scripts, and written policies on sexual harassment. That a subject as urgent and—in its own, lurid way—bound with eros, fear, and guilt created an oeuvre known primarily for its stupefying dullness should have been a clue that the serious issue of harassment was being funneled through a bureaucracy whose aim was not (at least not purely) protecting women workers.

Hill’s testimony riveted the nation. It occurred years before the forensically prurient Starr Report became part of breakfast-table discourse; before hard-core pornography became a subject of open conversation; before sex workers were interviewed, respectfully, on staid national news programs. It was unprecedented: a dignified and extremely well-educated woman testifying before a group of male senators about pubic hair on a Coke can, all while the camera whirred before her and the entire country looked on. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of sui generis event that should not have resonated on a deeply personal level with any woman, save perhaps some of Clarence Thomas’s law clerks. Yet it did resonate with women—millions of them. Their response was nonpartisan, unifying, nationwide, and—for many men—eye-opening. The concept, if not the linguistic formation, of “Me too” was born almost overnight. Hill’s composure in the face of withering and often humiliating male commentary (including, let us not forget, that of Joe Biden) was stirring. “I am not given to fantasy,” she said simply. “This is not something I would have come forward with if I were not absolutely sure.”

Hill’s testimony gave American women a way of understanding something that the Supreme Court had decided four and a half years earlier, in the famous Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson case, which established that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination as defined by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. A potent combination of factors was born: Women could sue for sexual harassment, and their employer could be on the line for big damages. That last fact caught the attention of American employers and is the true father of the system that Ellen and so many other Americans have mocked.

At solving the problem, HR is not great. At creating protocols of “compliance” to defend a company against lawsuits? By that criterion, it has been a smashing success. How do we know? Partly because employers are so devoted to it; the first thing many an executive will do when a company is under scrutiny for sexual harassment is heap praise on its crackerjack HR team, and describe the accused men as outliers.

Pam Teren, an employment lawyer in Los Angeles, graduated from law school and began working at a firm in 1990. “I thought I’d probably never have a sexual-harassment case,” she told me. The next year, Anita Hill testified, and these cases poured in. She told herself, “This is a five-year window. Because how simple is this? Don’t grab women. Don’t stare at their chests.” We both laughed—it really was pretty obvious. She figured that men would catch on quickly and the window would close. But she was wrong. Like thousands of lawyers across the country, she has been taking sexual-harassment cases ever since. Her entire career has been devoted to this work.

by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: New Studio

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If Kim Jong-Un Opened a KFC, Would You Eat There?

Philip Morris is pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes, because “society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future”. Also, KFC “promises not to let vegans down” with their new meatless chicken-like nuggets. They’ll have to compete with factory-farming mega-conglomerate Tyson Foods, who are coming out with their own vegetarian chicken option.

Clearly this is progress. Tobacco-free cigarettes have helped a lot of people quit smoking; meat substitutes have helped a lot of people (recently sort of including me) become vegetarian. I want a smoke-free meatless future. But does it become a mockery when the same companies that provided the smoky meaty past are selling it to us? If they make a fortune being evil, resist change, and lose, should they get to make a second fortune being good? If Hitler, when the war turned against him, quit the Nazism industry and opened a matzah bakery, would you buy his matzah?

I think the answer is supposed to be yes. I’ve heard many smart people argue that we should offer evil dictators a comfortable and lavish retirement, free from any threat of justice. After all, if they take the offer, they’ll go off and enjoy their retirement instead of continuing to dictate. But if they expect to be put on trial for war crimes the second they relinquish power, they’ll hold on to power forever. If Hitler had been willing to give up and open a bakery when he lost Stalingrad in 1943, think how many lives would have been saved by letting him. And if Kim Jong-Un wants to give up and move to Tahiti, of course you say yes.

In the same way, if evil companies want to go good, you should let them. If they have a line of retreat, they won’t fight so hard against change. If Tyson Foods wants to use its lobbyists to support meat substitutes instead of sabotaging them, that’s good for everybody. If they want to use their research budget to push plant-based meats forward, so much the better.

The counterargument is that punishment is the only tool we have to make bad actors do good things. If dictators fear punishment, maybe they won’t dictate to begin with. If companies know that moral progress will eventually leave the immoral companies bankrupt, maybe they’ll try being moral before it’s immediately profitable.

We’re in a weird situation where before anything happens, we might want to precommit to “punish companies who do evil, no matter what”. After companies have started doing evil, we might want to break our previous precommitment and switch to “let evil companies avoid punishment if they stop doing evil”. And after companies have stopped doing evil, we might want (if only for the sake of our own sense of justice) to break both of our previous precommitments and go with “punish them after all”.

What is the right action?

I’m not sure, but I lean toward “buy the meatless chicken from KFC”, for a few reasons.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: via

Georges Rouault, Paysage avec barque
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Back to the Future

Former Vice President Joe Biden told affluent donors Tuesday that he wanted their support and -- perhaps unlike some other Democratic presidential candidates -- wouldn’t be making them political targets because of their wealth.

“Remember, I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, you know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who’s made money,” Biden told about 100 well-dressed donors at the Carlyle Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side, where the hors d’oeuvres included lobster, chicken satay and crudites.

“Truth of the matter is, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done,” Biden said. “We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change,” he said. (...)

Invoking Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s goal of political “revolution,” Biden suggested that he would be the antidote by making marginal changes that would improve the lives of working and middle class Americans without slapping onerous taxes on the rich.

“When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution,” he said. Also perhaps hinting at President Donald Trump he continued: “It allows demagogues to step in” and blame what’s wrong in voters’ lives on “the other.”

“You’re not the other,” Biden told the assembled group, most of whom were wearing suits. “I need you very badly.”

by Jennifer Epstein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg