Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China is a Terrible Idea

Perhaps because it lies at the perfect nexus of genuinely-very-complicated and impossibly-confounded-by-marketing-buzzword-speak, the term “AI” has become a catchall for anything algorithmic and sufficiently technologically impressive. AI, which is supposed to stand for “artificial intelligence,” now spans applications from cameras to the military to medicine.

One thing we can be sure about AI — because we are told it so often and at so increasingly high a pitch — is that whatever it actually is, the national interest demands more of it. And we need it now, or else China will beat us there, and we certainly wouldn’t want that, would we? What is “there,” exactly? What does it look like, how would it work, and how would it change our society? Irrelevant! The race is on, and if America doesn’t start taking AI seriously, we’re going to find ourselves the losers in an ever-widening Dystopia Gap.

A piece on Politico this week by Luiza Ch. Savage and Nancy Scola exemplifies the mix of maximum alarm and minimum meaning that’s become so typical in our national (and nationalist) discussion around artificial intelligence. “Is America ceding the future of AI to China?” the article asks.

We’re meant to take this possibility as not only very real but as an unquestionably bad thing. One only needs to tell the public that the country risks “ceding” control of something — literally anything — to the great foreign unknown for our national eyes to grow wide.

“The last time a rival power tried to out-innovate the U.S. and marshaled a whole-of-government approach to doing it, the Soviet Union startled Americans by deploying the first man-made satellite into orbit,” the article says. “The Sputnik surprise in 1957 shook American confidence, galvanized its government and set off a space race culminating with the creation of NASA and the moon landing 50 years ago this month.”

Our new national dread, the article continues, is “whether another Sputnik moment is around the corner” — in the form of an AI-breakthrough from the keyboards of Red China instead of Palo Alto.

Forget that Sputnik was not actually a “surprise” for the powers that be, or that Sputnik itself was basically a beeping aluminum beach ball — “barely more than a radio transmitter with batteries,” the magazine Air & Space once said. There’s a bigger problem here: Framing the Cold War as a battle of innovators conveniently avoids mentioning that the chief innovation in question wasn’t Sputnik or the Space Shuttle or any peacetime venture, but the creation of an arsenal for instant global nuclear holocaust at the press of a button.

Sure, yes, it’s doubtful we could have “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to space travel without having first “marshaled a whole-of-government approach” to rocket-borne atomic genocide, but to highlight the eventual accomplishments of NASA without acknowledging that it entailed a very close dance with a worldwide apocalypse is ahistoric and absurd. To use this comparison to goad us into another nationalist tech race with a global military power is outright dangerous — if only because the victory remains completely undefined. How would we “beat” China, exactly? Beat them at what, exactly? Which specific problems do we hope to use AI to fix? At a point in history when cities are beginning to scrutinize and outright ban “AI” technologies like facial recognition, are we sure the fixes aren’t even worse than the problems? Nationalists caught in an arms race have no time to answer questions like these or any others; they’ve got a race to win!

All anyone can manage to do is bark that we need more, more, more AI, more investments, more R&D, more collaborations, more ventures, more breakthroughs, simply more AI. Maybe we’ll worry about what we needed all of this for in the first place once we’ve beaten China there. Or maybe an algorithm will explain it to us, along with the locations of all our family members and a corresponding score that quantifies their social utility and biometric trustworthiness.

The Politico piece is full of worried voices cautioning that we can’t let Americans fall behind in the global invasive-surveillance race, completely unable to explain why this would be a bad thing. “The city of Tianjin alone plans to spend $16 billion on AI — and the U.S. government investment still totals several billion and counting,” despairs Elsa Kania of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. “That’s still lower by an order of magnitude.” Amy Webb, a New York University business school professor, told Politico, “We are being outspent. We are being out-researched. We are being outpaced. We are being out-staffed.”

Of course, it’s not just these researchers, nor is it just Politico: The necessity of absolute American dominance in an extremely unpredictable, deeply hazardous, and altogether hard to comprehend field has made the great leap from think-tank anxiety nightmare to political talking point. At the first Democratic presidential debate, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg sounded the alarm:

China is investing so they could soon be able to run circles around us in artificial intelligence, and this president is fixated on the relationship as if all that mattered was the balance on dishwashers. We have a moment when their authoritarian model is an alternative to ours because ours looks so chaotic because of internal divisions. The biggest thing we have to do is invest in our own domestic competitiveness.

In the same breath as he states this technology is being used to bolster authoritarianism abroad, Buttigieg urges a renewed national investment in that very technology at home. (...)

Even moderate voices find themselves hopelessly caught in the pro-AI fervor, the rush to develop this technology for its own sake. New America’s Justin Sherman has written numerous articles about why framing AI development as an “arms race” is wrongheaded — but only because it leaves out all the other potentially frightening and draconian gifts a nationalist AI sprint could produce. “Competing AI development in the United States and China needs to be reframed from the AI arms race rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean AI development itself doesn’t matter,” Sherman wrote in March. “In fact, the opposite is true.”

Sherman highlights a couple of nonweapon AI applications we ought to not leave to the Chinese, like the potential to use self-teaching software to detect cancer — though he provides only a glancing admission that “many legal and ethical issues plague AI in healthcare (e.g., data privacy, AI bias).” It’s hard to square the belligerent drumbeat of AI nationalism with a calm, composed approach to making sure these technologies are only developed and deployed within a rigorous ethical framework, after all. Moving fast and breaking things is the American way.

by Sam Biddle, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Chambers Bay or Bust – 72 holes in One Day

This is the saga of four guys’ 33-mile trek over tough terrain that began at the crack of dawn and ended 16 hours later at last light, playing 72 holes along the way.

Participants in this unique odyssey at Chambers Bay Golf Course on July 1, 2019 are all members of the Trossachs Golf Group (more about that later). The four intrepid players were Peter Wengert, Michael Lynch (a Chambers Bay member and spearhead of what he called his “quest,”), Paul Schweitzer and John Scholl.

John had just over a week to prepare for the uncommon challenge (the original idea was a mere 36 holes on the June 21 Summer Solstice) and started six straight days of carbo-loading, during which he gained five pounds. He also stepped up his normal morning-walk regimen by adding a hill that matched the grades he’d encounter at Chambers Bay.

Michael scheduled the order of play and time targets for all 72 holes, a Rubik’s Cube that took into account the public would begin arriving early in the day and slow them down, if they had followed the normal sequence of holes. The routing was further complicated by their self-imposed rule that no hole could be played twice in the same round for each of the four rounds.

Michael said a re-routing in the afternoon, with the help of a porter (“Skip hole 13, go to No. 1, then return to 13 to complete 13-18 before 9:30pm”) was “key to our success.” John said another key was that “Michael buying lunch and a round of drinks for one of the foursomes we encountered going from No.9 to No. 10 in the afternoon helped us get ahead.”

They had begun playing from the 6,500-yard Sand tees the first round, did a combo Sand and the 6,000-yard White tees the second, a combo 6,900-yard Navy, Sand and White tees the third, and the Whites on the fourth. By the end of the day, John’s pedometer registered 65,825 steps, which translates to some 33 miles, equal to the distance from Chambers Bay in South Tacoma to the Renton City Hall, and that’s without all the elevation changes.

During the ordeal, John consumed nearly 9,000 calories, in every-two-hour mini-meals. All of the guys had their coolers with food and drinks strategically placed at the Oasis tents around the course, with the aid of the porters in their small electric truck-carts.

Chambers Bay is well-known for not allowing the traditional electric golf carts, despite the rolling terrain that goes from a low of 25 feet above sea level near the water to a high of 197 feet, repeatedly. And there’s one lone signature tree on the course, which is why John carried an umbrella on a dry, sunny day.

Note that John is pulling his cart up one of the many hills. He’s a sales exec at Rainier Industries, which is best known for its tent and awning products. He asked one of the workers in that section to make him a custom harness so he could pull his golf cart up the hills, in order to employ different muscles than those used in pushing the cart on level and downhill stretches. Talk about preparation.

The four all finished the feat without incident. John admits he “hit the wall” about 2:30pm but got his second wind and felt fine at the end. He finished blisterless, thanks to three sock changes and plenty of foot powder.

Knowing super-competitive John’s keen interest in scoring as well as I do, the most amazing thing to me was that he still had not added up the scores when we had breakfast two days later (when he was well-rested and five pounds lighter). He estimated that he shot an average of just under 100 per round for each of the four rounds. This only proved to me that the whole experience was about much more than a golf score to all four of the guys.

John still struggles to explain why he decided to undertake the challenge. “I guess the best thing I can say is that, once I agreed to do it, I felt accountable to the group.”

by Larry Coffman, WSGA Golf News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Classic.]

Polishing the Nationalist Brand in the Trump Era

Ever since Donald J. Trump laid waste to its ideological shibboleths with his victory at the polls, the conservative intellectual class has been scrambling to keep up with him.

And earlier this week, at the first major gathering dedicated to wresting a coherent ideology out of the chaos of the Trumpist moment, the president was upending their efforts again.

On Sunday evening, some 500 policy thinkers, theorists, journalists and students gathered in a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton here for the start of the National Conservatism Conference, a three-day event dedicated to charting a new path for conservatism under the banner of nationalism.

And not the kind associated with tiki torches and Nazi salutes, the conference was at pains to make clear.

“We are nationalists, not white nationalists,” David Brog, one of the organizers, said in his welcoming remarks, calling any equation of the two “a slander.” He then pointed to the door and invited anyone who “defines our American nation in terms of race” who had slipped through the conference’s careful screening to leave.

But inconveniently, just a few hours earlier, President Trump had let loose with tweets calling for four freshman congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from, throwing an awkward wrench into the messaging.

Not that Mr. Trump’s name was mentioned in the program or the mission statement for the event, which was organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a newly formed public affairs institute. It featured headlining speeches by Tucker Carlson, John Bolton and Peter Thiel, as well as some three dozen speakers on panels covering topics like immigration, foreign policy and economic nationalism. The names of Burke and Lincoln may have been uttered as much as the president’s.

Conservatives have always prided themselves on being driven by ideas, and the big idea here was that nationalism — shorn of its darker associations — could provide an intellectual banner now that the conservatism based on free trade, libertarian economics and military interventionism that held sway for decades has run out of gas.

“Today is our independence day,” Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, author of the recent book “The Virtue of Nationalism” and the conference’s intellectual prime mover, declared in his fiery opening remarks. “We declare independence from neoconservatism. We declare independence from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism.”

“There is something that unites everyone in this room,” he continued. “We are national conservatives.”

Those in attendance may not have all agreed. They included reform conservatives and religious traditionalists, ardent Trumpists and former Never-Trumpers, and more than a few unconverted free-marketeers and others who were keeping a skeptical eye on the proceedings.

Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of conservatism and director of political studies at the Niskanen Center, described the gathering as part of an ongoing effort by conservatives to unite “under an ideological banner that Trump himself doesn’t carry.”

“They are trying to find a way to retroactively justify their support of Trumpism under a broader conservative movement,” he said.“But that’s a tricky assignment.”

Detoxifying nationalism

Just how tricky was suggested by those tweets from the president, and the muted response to them at the conference.

In the hotel bar, the national uproar over the tweets unspooled continuously on the television (at least until it was switched to Fox News). But in the conference sessions, there was virtually no reference to them, and little appetite among those chattering in the halls to offer more than tepid criticism, if that.

“They were bad,” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (and a recovering Never-Trumper), said a bit grimly, when asked about the tweets. “His trolling at its worst. Unproductive. Indefensible.”

Mr. Hazony, caught in the hallway between sessions, waved the question away. “It’s a great honor to be running the intellectual part of political conservatism,” he said. “We just don't have to deal with that stuff.”

Helen Andrews, the managing editor of The Washington Examiner and a contributor to various conservative publications, looked puzzled when asked on Monday about the tweets, and said she hadn’t seen them.

As for nationalism, she said she saw “no downside” to embracing it. “I don’t think it’s a word that needs to be detoxified, even as the term conservatism sometimes needs to get detoxified,” she said.

But some others expressed reservations about the new political brand being road-tested.

Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs and a speaker at the conference, said that the label “national conservatism” captured some of his own interest in a conservatism that focuses on social health, rather than just the market.

“But I don’t think we can just go around saying nationalism is the answer to our problems,” he said. He added, “People are not crazy to worry when they hear that term.”

Soil, but not blood

When it came to defining who belonged to the nation, there was lots of talk of soil and rootedness, alongside repeated disavowals of blood, or its modern equivalent, DNA.

In a talk called “Why America Is Not an Idea,” Mr. Lowry, the author of the forthcoming book “The Case for Nationalism,” took aim at “one of our most honored clichés”: that the essence of Americanism lies only in its ideals.

The problem with this “overintellectualized understanding of America,” he said, is “it slights the absolutely indispensable influence of culture.”

Even the phrase “city on a hill,” an emblem of American universalism, he said, comes from East Anglia, and is rooted in “a particular soil, a particular place, a particular way of thinking.”

We should insist, Mr. Lowry said, “on the assimilation of immigrants into a common culture.” A panel on immigration happening simultaneously echoed that theme of culture, but with a much harder, racially exclusionary edge. Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was removed from teaching first-year students last year after writing an article questioning the abilities of black students, offered what she called “the cultural case” for reduced immigration.

She defended President Trump’s vulgar comment last year disparaging immigration from certain countries, to laughter and applause. And she dismissed the idea that immigrants somehow became American simply by living here, which Ms. Wax (borrowing a term used by white nationalists and self-described “race realists”) mocked as the “magic dirt” argument.

There’s no reason that “people who come here will quickly come to think, live and act just like us.” she said. Immigration policy, she said, should take into account “cultural compatibility.”

“In effect,” she said, this “means taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”

by Jennifer Schuessler, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Justin T. Gellerson
[ed. I think the term we're looking for is cluster fuck. Forget it conservatives, you supported it, you own it.]

The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream

Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived. Anbu excelled, and so began a rapid upward trajectory. She enrolled in medical school. “Why,” her father was asked, “do you send her there?” Among their Chettiar caste, husbands commonly worked abroad for years at a time, sending back money, while wives were left to raise the children. What use would a medical degree be to a stay-at-home mother?

In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his mother was a pediatrics professor and his father was an economics professor who had served as an adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

When Chetty was 9, his family moved to the United States, and he began a climb nearly as dramatic as that of his parents. He was the valedictorian of his high-school class, then graduated in just three years from Harvard University, where he went on to earn a doctorate in economics and, at age 28, was among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be offered tenure. In 2012, he was awarded the MacArthur genius grant. The following year, he was given the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most promising economist under 40. (He was 33 at the time.) In 2015, Stanford University hired him away. Last summer, Harvard lured him back to launch his own research and policy institute, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential social scientists of his generation. “The question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of the country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a Nobel Prize, but when.”

The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin.

In 2013, Chetty released a colorful map of the United States, showing the surprising degree to which people’s financial prospects depend on where they happen to grow up. In Salt Lake City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that. (...)

Charlotte is one of America’s great urban success stories. In the 1970s, it was a modest-size city left behind as the textile industry that had defined North Carolina moved overseas. But in the 1980s, the “Queen City” began to lift itself up. US Airways established a hub at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and the region became a major transportation and distribution center. Bank of America built its headquarters there, and today Charlotte is in a dead heat with San Francisco to be the nation’s second-largest banking center, after New York. New skyscrapers have sprouted downtown, and the city boundary has been expanding, replacing farmland with spacious homes and Whole Foods stores. In the past four decades, Charlotte’s population has nearly tripled.

Charlotte has also stood out in Chetty’s research, though not in a good way. In a 2014 analysis of the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked last in ability to lift up poor children. Only 4.4 percent of Charlotte’s kids moved from the bottom quintile of household income to the top. Kids born into low-income families earned just $26,000 a year, on average, as adults—perched on the poverty line. “It was shocking,” says Brian Collier, an executive vice president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, which is working with Opportunity Insights. “The Charlotte story is that we are a meritocracy, that if you come here and are smart and motivated, you will have every opportunity to achieve greatness.” The city’s true story, Chetty’s data showed, is of selective opportunity: All the data-scientist and business-development-analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of-towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor.

To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology, and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope.

Drawing on anonymized government data over a three-decade span, the researchers linked children to the parents who claimed them as dependents. The atlas then followed poor kids from every census tract in the country, showing how much they went on to earn as adults. The colors on the atlas reveal a generation’s prospects: red for areas where kids fared the worst; shades of orange, yellow, and green for middling locales; and blue for spots like Salt Lake City’s Foothill neighborhood, where upward mobility is strongest. It can also track children born into higher income brackets, compare results by race and gender, and zoom out to show states, regions, or the country as a whole.

The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the United States look better than high-mobility countries such as Denmark, while others look more like a developing country. The Great Plains unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is caught by an island of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on the Oglala Lakota by European settlers. These stark differences recapitulate themselves on smaller and smaller scales as you zoom in. It’s common to see opposite extremes of opportunity within easy walking distance of each other, even in two neighborhoods that long-term residents would consider quite similar.

To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster opportunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find local interventions that can address these factors—and to prove, with experimental trials, that the interventions work. The end goal is the social equivalent of precision medicine: a method for diagnosing the particular weaknesses of a place and prescribing a set of treatments. This could transform neighborhoods, and restore the American dream from the ground up.

If all of this seems impossibly ambitious, Chetty’s counterargument is to point to how the blue is marbled in with the red. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has never happened,” he told me over lunch one day. “It happens just down the road.”

Yet in Charlotte, where Opportunity Insights hopes to build its proof of concept, the atlas reveals swaths of bleak uniformity. Looking at the city, you first see a large bluish wedge south of downtown, with Providence Road on one side and South Boulevard on the other, encompassing the mostly white, mostly affluent areas where children generally grow up to do well. Surrounding the wedge is a broad expanse in hues of red that locals call “the crescent,” made up of predominantly black neighborhoods where the prospects for poor children are pretty miserable. Hunger and homelessness are common, and in some places only one in five high-school students scores “proficient” on standardized tests. In many parts of the crescent, the question isn’t What’s holding kids back? so much as What isn’t holding them back? It’s hard to know where to start.

The most significant challenge Chetty faces is the force of history. In the 1930s, redlining prevented black families from buying homes in Charlotte’s more desirable neighborhoods. In the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new interstates. It’s common to hear that something has gone wrong in parts of Charlotte, but the more honest reading is that Charlotte is working as it was designed to. American cities are the way they are, and remain the way they are, because of choices they have made and continue to make.

Does a professor from Harvard, even one as influential and well funded as Chetty, truly stand any chance of bending the American story line? On his national atlas, the most obvious feature is an ugly red gash that starts in Virginia, curls down through the Southeast’s coastal states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—then marches west toward the Mississippi River, where it turns northward before petering out in western Tennessee. When I saw this, I was reminded of another map: one President Abraham Lincoln consulted in 1861, demarcating the counties with the most slaves. The two maps are remarkably similar. Set the documents side by side, and it may be hard to believe that they are separated in time by more than a century and a half, or that one is a rough census of men and women kept in bondage at the time of the Civil War, and the other is a computer-generated glimpse of our children’s future.

by Gareth Cook, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Images: Library of Congress and Opportunity Insights / U.S. Census Bureau

Isovaline

Isovaline is a rare amino acid transported to earth by the Murchison meteorite, which landed in Australia in 1969. The discovery of isovaline in the biosphere demonstrates an extraterrestrial origin of amino acids and has been linked to the homochirality of life on earth [1] suggesting a role in the origin of life.[2] (...)

This novel first-in-class compound has potential for treatment of acute and chronic pain, without the negative side effects associated with other commonly used analgesics.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. The things you learn every day! See also: Know Your Gabapentinoids (SSC).]

2RAUMWOHNUNG

Humanity Is Not Sleeping; It’s In An Induced Coma

In the late 1960s, the sudden widespread availability of psychedelics combined with the circulation of eastern philosophy to the west to begin a radical transformation of human consciousness. Our species, desperate to transcend the residual trauma from two world wars and the existential terror of the nuclear age, began moving into a wildly unprecedented relationship with its capacity for abstract thought.

For the first time ever, humans began disentangling themselves from egoic consciousness on a mass scale, suddenly using thought as the useful tool it’s meant to be rather than the life-dominating addiction that it had become up until that point. World leaders not only permitted this transformation but actively facilitated it, realizing from their own encounters with this new revolution that humanity relinquishing its egoic mental constrictions opened up the possibility for the creation of paradise on earth.

As we became less egocentric, our values and interests changed. This led to changes in the way we vote, in the kinds of media we chose to consume, and in the kinds of ideas which were popularized.

This set the stage for the next level of human evolution in the arrival of the internet. For the first time in history humans were able to network their minds all around the world in real time, by the thousands, then by the millions, then by the billions. Our harmonious relationship with our inner world suddenly segued smoothly into the ability to develop a harmonious relationship with our outer world, no longer confined by space and time in sharing ideas and information with each other.

With clear minds networked in a truly democratic way we were quickly able to identify and solve all the remaining problems in our world, and we saw ourselves transitioning into a collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem which gave us all a quality of life that had been unimaginable up until a few decades ago.

Now, here in 2019, all human creativity and ingenuity goes toward finding new ways to help us survive and thrive and understand. Technological innovation, once mostly stagnated in the cognitive cul-de-sacs of figuring out new ways to exploit and dominate each other and commit more efficient acts of mass military violence, is now flourishing and expanding at an exponential rate. We have indeed created Heaven on earth together.

Oh,

but,

that was just a dream I had.

It could have gone down like that. There’s no reason it couldn’t have. Maybe in a parallel universe it did. But, here in this timeline, it didn’t.

Here in this timeline, the people in power wanted to remain in power thank you very much, even if it meant making life worse for everyone in the long run, including themselves.

Here in this timeline, we had all the medicine we needed to cure our sickness, but we were forbidden from using it.

Here in this timeline, plutocrats bought up all the media so they can tell us every day how important it is to continue bolstering the status quo, and that the only thing up for debate is what strategies we should use to do so.

Here in this timeline they got us dependent on money, and then devalued it to ensure that we’re working harder and harder for less and less so we have no time to expand our consciousness of our inner or outer worlds.

Here in this timeline psychedelics were made as illegal as heroin or cocaine, and their use was stigmatized as a dangerous activity for criminals and degenerates.

Here in this timeline, control of the internet was quickly shored up by plutocratic interests and government agencies, and traffic is now directed toward authorized platforms sharing authorized narratives which bolster the status quo and manufacture consent for establishment agendas.

Here in this timeline, we had all the tools to escape this prison, but they were taken from us and replaced with more prison bars. Taken by people who were more clever than the rest of us, and who had enough money and influence to shut the whole thing down.

For some weird reason I found myself watching a spiritual guru-type guy discussing his political views on a video yesterday, and, like most spiritual guru-type people, his view of our political reality was highly malnourished. He kept talking about how all our problems are the result of humanity being deeply unconscious, and how that unconsciousness leads us to elect deeply unconscious leaders. Like “elected leaders” are the ones calling the shots. No mention of plutocrats, opaque government agencies or propaganda; the only problem, according to spiritual guru-type guy, is that we’re all equally asleep at the wheel and all equally responsible for what’s going on.

Spiritual guru-type guy is wrong. Humanity is not sleeping. Humanity is in an induced coma.

by Caitlin Johnstone |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Chrome 76 Prevents Sites From Detecting Incognito Mode

Google Chrome 76 will close a loophole that websites use to detect when people use the browser's Incognito Mode.

Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed some websites preventing you from reading articles while using a browser's private mode. The Boston Globe began doing this in 2017, requiring people to log in to paid subscriber accounts in order to read in private mode. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers impose identical restrictions.

Chrome 76—which is in beta now and is scheduled to hit the stable channel on July 30—prevents these websites from discovering that you're in private mode. Google explained the change yesterday in a blog post titled, "Protecting private browsing in Chrome."

Google wrote:

Today, some sites use an unintended loophole to detect when people are browsing in Incognito Mode. Chrome's FileSystem API is disabled in Incognito Mode to avoid leaving traces of activity on someone's device. Sites can check for the availability of the FileSystem API and, if they receive an error message, determine that a private session is occurring and give the user a different experience. 

With the release of Chrome 76 scheduled for July 30, the behavior of the FileSystem API will be modified to remedy this method of Incognito Mode detection.

Using the Chrome 76 beta today, I confirmed that the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times were unable to detect that my browser was in private mode. However, all three sites were able to detect private mode in Safari for Mac, Firefox, and Chrome 75.

Google acknowledged that websites might find new loopholes to detect private mode, but it pledged to close those, too. "Chrome will likewise work to remedy any other current or future means of Incognito Mode detection," Google's blog post said.

Change affects publisher paywalls

Google also acknowledged that this change will make it harder for publishers to enforce paywalls. Many news sites limit readers without subscriptions to a certain number of articles per month, but entering private mode can bypass these article limits.

Google noted that the article-limit model "is inherently porous, as it relies on a site's ability to track the number of free articles someone has viewed, typically using cookies." Google recommended that publishers monitor Chrome 76's impact on readership before making changes:

Sites that wish to deter meter circumvention have options such as reducing the number of free articles someone can view before logging in, requiring free registration to view any content, or hardening their paywalls. Other sites offer more generous meters as a way to develop affinity among potential subscribers, recognizing some people will always look for workarounds. We suggest publishers monitor the effect of the FileSystem API change before taking reactive measures since any impact on user behavior may be different than expected and any change in meter strategy will impact all users, not just those using Incognito Mode.

Incognito Mode is not a full privacy system

While Google said it "recognize[s] the goal of reducing meter circumvention," it also said that "any approach based on private browsing detection undermines the principles of Incognito Mode."

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Google

via:

Why I Left Planned Parenthood

This week, I left my position as the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood.

In my farewell message to colleagues, I cited philosophical differences over the best way to protect reproductive health. While the traditional approach has been through prioritizing advocating for abortion rights, I have long believed that the most effective way to advance reproductive health is to be clear that it is not a political issue but a health care one. I believed we could expand support for Planned Parenthood — and ultimately for abortion access — by finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who can unite behind the goal of improving the health and well-being of women and children.

When the board hired me to chart this new course, I knew that it would be challenging. Few organizations, let alone organizations under constant siege, accept change easily. Indeed, there was immediate criticism that I did not prioritize abortion enough. While I am passionately committed to protecting abortion access, I do not view it as a stand-alone issue. As one of the few national health care organizations with a presence in all 50 states, Planned Parenthood’s mandate should be to promote reproductive health care as part of a wide range of policies that affect women’s health and public health.

Another area of contention was my attempt to depoliticize Planned Parenthood. The organization and the causes it stands for have long been in the cross hairs of political attacks. In the last few months, seven states have passed laws banning abortion before many women even know that they are pregnant. Just this past Monday, the Trump administration announced that it would start enforcing a gag rule that would prohibit doctors and nurses working in federally funded clinics from referring patients to abortion care.

I had been leading our organization’s fights against these attacks, and believe they offer even more reason for Planned Parenthood to emphasize its role in providing essential health care to millions of underserved women and families. People depend on Planned Parenthood for breast exams, cervical cancer screenings, H.I.V. testing and family planning. To counter those who associate the organization with only abortion and use this misconception to attack its mission, I wanted to tell the story of all of its services — and in so doing, to normalize abortion care as the health care it is.

For me, as a physician, it was also simply good medical care to treat the whole patient. There were already some Planned Parenthood health centers that provided full-spectrum care. In one clinic I visited, a new mother could get a checkup while her baby was vaccinated. If she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, she could receive mental health services right there, too.

With high-quality affordable health care out of reach for so many, Planned Parenthood has a duty to maximize its reach. I began efforts to increase care for women before, during and after pregnancies, and to enhance critically needed services like mental health and addiction treatment.

But the team that I brought in, experts in public health and health policy, faced daily internal opposition from those who saw my goalsas mission creep. There was even more criticism as we worked to change the perception that Planned Parenthood was just a progressive political entity and show that it was first and foremost a mainstream health care organization.

Perhaps the greatest area of tension was over our work to be inclusive of those with nuanced views about abortion. I reached out to people who wrestle with abortion’s moral complexities, but who will speak out against government interference in personal medical decisions. I engaged those who identify as being pro-life, but who support safe, legal abortion access because they don’t want women to die from back-alley abortions. I even worked with people who oppose abortion but support Planned Parenthood because of the preventive services we provide — we share the desire to reduce the need for abortion through sex education and birth control.

There were early signs that this approach galvanized new allies and was moving the needle on public perception. Despite many shocking laws passed this year, more legislation to protect abortion access passed in 2019 than in any year in recent history. An NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll last month showed that support for Roe v. Wade was at the highest point in four decades.

But in the end, I was asked to leave for the same reason I was hired: I was changing the direction of Planned Parenthood.

by Leana S. Wen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters

Dipnet Fever

KENAI — Hundreds of Alaskans gathered at the mouth of the Kenai River to dipnet for sockeye salmon on July 18, 2019. Early-risers crowded the north shore of the river, standing nearly shoulder to shoulder by 8 a.m to fish the hours surrounding the morning high tide. Many had luck and left with full coolers by the time the tide had ebbed at midday.

The dipnet fishery is a personal-use fishery, which means it’s open to Alaska residents only. Many camped in tents and RVs while others came and went in hours. Participants must have valid sport fishing license and a personal use permit, and Alaska State Trooper Cassandra Hajicek said they need to keep the papers in easy reach. She walked along the beach Thursday requesting to see the documents from participants.

Each head of household is allowed 25 sockeye, plus 10 more fish for each additional household member. Limits are combined throughout all Alaska personal use fisheries.

by Marc Lester, ADN |  Read more (for more pictures):

Images: Marc Lester
[ed. This used to be fun, then it wasn't.]

Best Fly Fishing Knots

via: Best Fly Fishing Knots (Fly Fisherman)
[ed. For future reference. (I was reading an old magazine in my doctor's office). See also: Lessons from a Simple Fly (the Pheasant Tail & Partridge); and The Philosophy of Fly-Fishing (Paris Review).]

 

Deb H.  Falls Creek, AK (7/19/19)

Washington State’s Big Bet On ‘Free College’

Washington state doesn’t have a problem finding educated people to work in its booming high-tech economy – it’s just most of those people come from out of state.

This is why Washington enacted the landmark Workforce Education Investment Act into law in May 2019.

The main idea behind the new law is to make college more affordable. It does so by providing state aid grants that will cover much or all of tuition for more Washington resident students – 36,000 more by 2021 who are eligible based on their income, according to a Senate source with knowledge of the plan. This will be done through the new Washington College Grant.

The bill was passed at a time when several presidential candidates are pushing ambitious plans on college affordability. Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, himself a presidential candidate, has said the bill puts Washington state “ahead of the nation” in providing college access, but has not made it a centerpiece of his campaign.

I’m the author of a book about how states finance higher education. Here are what I see as the most significant aspects of what has been described as Washington state’s “free college” plan.

1. Businesses will pay for it

Since the new Workforce Investment Act will benefit employers, they’re the ones who are going to pay most for it. Firms hiring workers with advanced skills will pay various amounts more in business taxes. For instance, under the new law, advanced computing businesses with gross revenues over US$100 billion – meaning Amazon and Microsoft – will pay the highest rates on their state business taxes. Under the new law, both firms will pay an increase of two-thirds on what they already pay in business taxes, up to a $7 million annual limit per firm.

If it seems unusual that this tax surcharge is directed at specific firms, that’s because it is. The firms’ willingness to pay increased tax rates in order to produce more of the workers they need at home was a big factor in building legislative support for the new tax. Employers in Washington state have long complained about the “skills gap”: that is, how hard it is to find skilled workers locally.

Indeed, the state ranks third in the nation for attracting workers from elsewhere with a bachelor’s degree or higher. But when it comes to producing an educated workforce among its own citizens, Washington comes up short. It is in the bottom 10 states in producing college graduates.

2. Funding for financial aid is guaranteed

One of the most significant features of the new law is that it guarantees for the first time that funding will actually be available to cover the grants. This is important because, since the Great Recession, the state has been unable to fund all of the eligible students who applied for the State Need Grant. In 2018, for instance, more than a quarter of eligible applicants, some 22,600, were turned away. This has been deeply unpopular.

The fact that the grant money is guaranteed may lead students – especially first-generation college students – to do more to prepare for college, because they know the cost is covered, according to to research by Laura Perna, a higher education researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

3. More money, fewer rules

Washington state’s new college affordability initiative differs from the “free college” efforts being undertaken by other states such as Tennessee and Oregon. In other states, such as these, Rhode Island and, soon, Massachusetts, the “free college” initiatives are mostly limited to tuition-free community college for some students. But in Washington state, the Workforce Education Investment Act provides money for students to attend not only a community college, but four-year public and private colleges and universities.

Other states’ free college initiatives, for the most part, are “last dollar” programs. The most prominent example is Tennessee. In last dollar programs, the state money students get is applied toward their college costs only after they have gotten other financial aid, such as federally administered Pell Grants. These last dollar state grants typically cover only tuition and cannot be applied to living costs.

The new Washington program, however, offers “first dollar” grants. This allows students to apply Pell and other aid to college costs besides tuition, such as books, room and board, and transportation. This lowers the amount that students have to borrow for college.

Also, unlike in some states’ “free college” programs, there is no residency requirement after graduation. This is not the case in, for example, New York, where students who get their tuition covered by an Excelsior Scholarship must live and work in New York for the same number of years that they received the scholarship. Otherwise, their scholarship becomes a repayable loan.

The new law also seeks to help those who need training that doesn’t necessarily involve college. For instance, students can use the grants for Registered Apprenticeship programs, which sometimes charge tuition. The act also provides substantial new money – $11.5 million for the next two-year budget cycle – for Career Connect Washington, an effort to bring employers and educators together to design programs that emphasize the skills employers seek.

by William Zumeta, The Conversation | Read more:
Image: VDB/Shutterstock

Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.

So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.

TYLER COWEN: I am here today with Neal Stephenson, who is arguably the world’s greatest author of speculative fiction and science fiction. Welcome, Neal.

NEAL STEPHENSON: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me on your program.

COWEN: Let me start with some general questions about tech. We will get to your new book.

How will physical surveillance evolve? There’s facial surveillance, gait surveillance in China that’s coming to many airports. What’s your vision for this?

STEPHENSON: When you say physical surveillance, you just mean —

COWEN: They record your face, they know who you are, they track your movements.

STEPHENSON: Actually recording you while you’re wandering around somewhere, as opposed to tapping your phone, that kind of thing.

COWEN: And if you jaywalk, they’ll fine your bank account, and you’ll get a text message two minutes later.

STEPHENSON: Right. Well, I think it’s just going to be based on what people are willing to tolerate and put up with. There’s already something of a backlash going on over the use of facial recognition in some cities in this country. I think people just have to be diligent and be aware of what’s happening in that area and push back against it.

COWEN: Is there a positive scenario for its spread?

STEPHENSON: For it spreading?

COWEN: Right. Is it possible it will make China a more cooperative place, a more orderly place, and in the longer run, they’ll be freer? Or is that just not in the cards?

STEPHENSON: I’m not sure if cooperative, orderly, and freer are compatible concepts, right? Cooperative and orderly, definitely. People who are in internment camps are famously cooperative and orderly, but . . .

Freedom is a funny word. It’s a hard thing to talk about because to a degree, if this kind of thing cuts down, let’s say, on random crime, then it’s going to make people effectively freer. Especially if you’re a woman or someone who is vulnerable to being the victim of random crime, and some kind of surveillance system renders that less likely to happen, then, effectively, you’ve been granted a freedom that you didn’t have before.

But it’s not the kind of statutory freedom that we tend to talk about when we’re talking about politics and that kind of thing.

COWEN: Other than satellites, which are already quite proven, what do you think is the most plausible economic value to space?

STEPHENSON: It’s tough making a really solid economic argument for space. There’s a new book out by Daniel Suarez called Delta-V, in which he’s advancing a particular argument, which is a pretty abstract idea based on how debt works and what you have to do in order to keep an economy afloat. But I think it’s a thing that people need to do because they want to do it, as opposed to because there’s a sound business argument for it.

COWEN: Do you think, socially, we’re less willing or able to do it psychologically than, say, in the 1960s?

STEPHENSON: Well, the ’60s was funny because it was a Cold War propaganda effort on both sides. The whole story of how that came about is a really wild story that begins with World War II, when Hitler wants to bomb London. But it’s too far away, so he has to build big rockets to do it with. So rockets advance way beyond where they would have advanced had he not done that.

Then we grab the technology, and suddenly we need it to drop H bombs on the other side of the world. So again, trillions of dollars of money go into it, and then it becomes so dangerous that we can’t actually use it for that. Instead, we use that rocket technology to compete in the propaganda sphere. I once knew a grizzled old veteran of that ’60s space program who said that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph.

So that’s how that all happened, and it happened way earlier than any kind of rational economic argument could be made for it. I still think it’s the case that, if we’re going to do things in space, it’s more for psychological reasons than it is for money reasons.

COWEN: If we had a Mars colony, how politically free do you think it would be? Or would it just be like perpetual martial law? Like living on a nuclear submarine?

STEPHENSON: I think it would be a lot like living on a nuclear submarine because you can’t — being in space is almost like being in an intensive care unit in a hospital, in the sense that you’re completely dependent on a whole bunch of machines working in order to keep you alive. A lot of what we associate with freedom, with personal freedom, becomes too dangerous to contemplate in that kind of environment.

COWEN: Is there any Heinlein-esque-like scenario — Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where there’s a rebellion? People break free from the constraints of planet Earth. They chart their own institutions. It becomes like the settlements in the New World were.

STEPHENSON: Well, the settlements in the New World, I don’t think are a very good analogy because there it was possible — if you’re a white person in the New World and you have some basic skills, you can go anywhere you want.

An unheralded part of what happened there is that, when those people got into trouble, a lot of times, they were helped out by the indigenous peoples who were already there and who knew how to do stuff. None of those things are true in a space colony kind of environment. You don’t have indigenous people who know how to get food and how to get shelter. You don’t have that ability to just freely pick up stakes and move about.

On social media

COWEN: You saw some of the downsides of social media earlier than most people did in Seveneves. It’s also in your new book, Fall. What’s the worst-case scenario for how social media evolved? And what’s the institutional failure? Why do many people think they’re screwing things up?

STEPHENSON: I think we’re actually living through the worst-case scenario right now, so look about you, and that’s what we’ve got. Our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality.

And that’s now been dissolved out from under us, and we don’t have a mechanism to address that problem.

COWEN: But what’s the fundamental problem there? Is it that decentralized communications media intrinsically fail because there are too many voices? Is there something about the particular structure of social media now?

STEPHENSON: The problem seems to be the fact that it’s algorithmically driven, and that there are not humans in the loop making decisions, making editorial, sort of curatorial decisions about what is going to be disseminated on those networks.

As such, it’s very easy for people who are acting in bad faith to game that system and produce whatever kind of depiction of reality best suits them. Sometimes that may be something that drives people in a particular direction politically, but there’s also just a completely nihilistic, let-it-all-burn kind of approach that some of these actors are taking, which is just to destroy people’s faith in any kind of information and create a kind of gridlock in which nobody can agree on anything.

COWEN: If we go back to the world of 2006, where there’s Google Reader, there’s plenty of blogs, RSS is significant, algorithms are much, much less important — does that work well in your view? Or is the problem more deeply rooted than that?

STEPHENSON: Well, I think, at the end of the day, people are not going to agree on facts unless there’s a reason for them to do so. I’ve been talking about a really interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it. Procedures were developed that would enable people to agree on what was factual, and that had a huge impact on culture and on the economy and everything else.

And now that’s, as I said, going away, and the only way to bring it back is, first, to have a situation where people need and want to agree on facts.
On what the future will look like

COWEN: Your idea of this smart book, which is in Diamond Age — do you think that will ever happen? There will be a primer that people use, and it’s online, and it will educate them and teach them how to be more disciplined?

STEPHENSON: A lot of different people have taken inspiration from The Diamond Age and worked on various aspects of the problem. It’s always interesting to talk to them because it’s sort of a classic “six blind men and the elephant” thing, where I’ll hear from someone who says, “Oh, I’m working on something inspired by The Diamond Age.” And I ask them what that means to them, and it’s always a little different.

Sometimes it’s how do we physically build something that could do what that book does? Sometimes it’s how do we organize knowledge, how do we set up curricula that are adaptable to the needs of a particular reader? It’s really not just one technology. It’s a whole basket of different hardware and software technologies, and people are definitely coming at that from various angles right now.

COWEN: What do you think stops it from happening? We don’t have the tech? Or just users aren’t interested, or what? What’s the constraint?

STEPHENSON: It’s just kind of distributed among a large number of different projects. There’s not any one big, centralized, this-is-it version of the thing, which isn’t necessarily bad. That’s a great way for people to spawn a lot of ideas and do a lot of decentralized work on a project, but nothing is pulling it together into the primer.

COWEN: In your early novels, like Snow Crash, Diamond Age, there’s a sense that states often have become quite weak. Do you think in reality, the state has ended up staying more powerful, for reasons which are surprising? Or you foresaw that?

STEPHENSON: I certainly didn’t foresee anything. In Snow Crash, in Diamond Age, I’m kind of riffing on a way of thinking that I saw quite a bit among basically libertarian-minded techies during the ’80s and the ’90s that was all about getting rid of the nation-state and reducing the power of nation-states.

If that was happening, I think it got flipped in the other direction, basically, by 9/11. When something like that happens, it immediately creates a desire in a lot of people’s minds to return to a more centralized, authoritarian nation-state arrangement, and that’s the trajectory that we’ve been on ever since.

by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. I've been waiting for this interview since it was first announced.]

Shopify and the Power of Platforms

While I am (rightfully) teased about how often I discuss Aggregation Theory, there is a method to my madness, particularly over the last year: more and more attention is being paid to the power wielded by Aggregators like Google and Facebook, but to my mind the language is all wrong.

I discussed this at length last year:

• Tech’s Two Philosophies highlighted how Facebook and Google want to do things for you; Microsoft and Apple were about helping you do things better.
• The Moat Map discussed the relationship between network effects and supplier differentiation: the more that network effects were internalized the more suppliers were commoditized, and the more that network effects were externalized the more suppliers were differentiated.
• Finally, The Bill Gates Line formally defined the difference between Aggregators and Platforms. This is the key paragraph:

This is ultimately the most important distinction between platforms and Aggregators: platforms are powerful because they facilitate a relationship between 3rd-party suppliers and end users; Aggregators, on the other hand, intermediate and control it.

It follows, then, that debates around companies like Google that use the word “platform” and, unsurprisingly, draw comparisons to Microsoft twenty years ago, misunderstand what is happening and, inevitably, result in prescriptions that would exacerbate problems that exist instead of solving them.

There is, though, another reason to understand the difference between platforms and Aggregators: platforms are Aggregators’ most effective competition.

Amazon’s Bifurcation

Earlier this week I wrote about Walmart’s failure to compete with Amazon head-on; after years of trying to leverage its stores in e-commerce, Walmart realized that Amazon was winning because e-commerce required a fundamentally different value chain than retail stores. The point of my Daily Update was that the proper response to that recognition was not to try to imitate Amazon, but rather to focus on areas where the stores actually were an advantage, like groceries, but it’s worth understanding exactly why attacking Amazon head-on was a losing proposition.

When Amazon started, the company followed a traditional retail model, just online. That is, Amazon bought products at wholesale, then sold them to customers:

Amazon’s sales proceeded to grow rapidly, not just of books, but also in other media products with large selections like DVDs and CDs that benefitted from Amazon’s effectively unlimited shelf-space. This growth allowed Amazon to build out its fulfillment network, and by 1999 the company had seven fulfillment centers across the U.S. and three more in Europe.

Ten may not seem like a lot — Amazon has well over 300 fulfillment centers today, plus many more distribution and sortation centers — but for reference Walmart has only 20. In other words, at least when it came to fulfillment centers, Amazon was halfway to Walmart’s current scale 20 years ago.

It would ultimately take Amazon another nine years to reach twenty fulfillment centers (this was the time for Walmart to respond), but in the meantime came a critical announcement that changed what those fulfillment centers represented. In 2006 Amazon announced Fulfillment by Amazon, wherein 3rd-party merchants could use those fulfillment centers too. Their products would not only be listed on Amazon.com, they would also be held, packaged, and shipped by Amazon.

In short, Amazon.com effectively bifurcated itself into a retail unit and a fulfillment unit:

The old value chain is still there — nearly half of the products on Amazon.com are still bought by Amazon at wholesale and sold to customers — but 3rd parties can sell directly to consumers as well, bypassing Amazon’s retail arm and leveraging only Amazon’s fulfillment arm, which was growing rapidly:

Walmart and its 20 distribution centers don’t stand a chance, particularly since catching up means competing for consumers not only with Amazon but with all of those 3rd-party merchants filling up all of those fulfillment centers.

Amazon and Aggregation

There is one more critical part of the drawing I made above:

Despite the fact that Amazon had effectively split itself in two in order to incorporate 3rd-party merchants, this division is barely noticeable to customers. They still go to Amazon.com, they still use the same shopping cart, they still get the boxes with the smile logo. Basically, Amazon has managed to incorporate 3rd-party merchants while still owning the entire experience from an end-user perspective.

This should sound familiar: as I noted at the top, Aggregators tend to internalize their network effects and commoditize their suppliers, which is exactly what Amazon has done.

Amazon benefits from more 3rd-party merchants being on its platform because it can offer more products to consumers and justify the buildout of that extensive fulfillment network; 3rd-party merchants are mostly reduced to competing on price.

That, though, suggests there is a platform alternative — that is, a company that succeeds by enabling its suppliers to differentiate and externalizing network effects to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem. That alternative is Shopify.

The Shopify Platform

At first glance, Shopify isn’t an Amazon competitor at all: after all, there is nothing to buy on Shopify.com. And yet, there were 218 million people that bought products from Shopify without even knowing the company existed.

The difference is that Shopify is a platform: instead of interfacing with customers directly, 820,000 3rd-party merchants sit on top of Shopify and are responsible for acquiring all of those customers on their own.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:
Images: Stratechery

via:

Make America Dated Again: The Chinese Reproducing US Vintage

SHANGHAI - When Shen Wei smokes a Cuban cigar and plays big-band music through his decades-old American radio, he’s whisked to a bygone era.

“The sound — it brings you back to that age,” says the 38-year-old artist and entrepreneur. “You can imagine, 80 years ago maybe, a gorgeous lady sitting over there, listening to some beautiful music. You have some connection with it.”

The cavernous ground-floor showroom where Shen traverses time is filled with U.S. military memorabilia he’s collected over the years: uniforms, helmets, hats, sunglasses, gloves, jewelry, and watches. Under a wall-mounted American flag and model fighter plane sits the large tube radio Shen bought on eBay six years ago, produced by General Electric in 1940.

As for the replica World War II-era Air Force jackets hanging on racks, they’re Shen’s original creations. To emulate the look and feel of historical jackets, he uses vegetable tanning for the leather and attaches oxidized copper buttons. If customers wish, Shen can also stitch on military patches, or paint the backs with images of aircraft, pinup girls, and cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny — just like American pilots used to do. Such customized jackets can sell for over 20,000 yuan ($2,900) apiece.

“People are getting richer. They have money to spend on this,” says Shen. “My customers are willing to pay this price to have something very unique.”

As the owner of Shanghai-based vintage brand Lucky Forces, Shen is one of a growing number of Chinese entrepreneurs faithfully re-creating Western items from the 1930s to 1960s. He sells to a burgeoning community of newly minted vintage fans in the country — typically men in their 30s and 40s — who see in the objects a timeless aesthetic, an air of prestige, and an escape from the pressures of work. But while the group is developing fast, artisans say vintage culture is still misunderstood and that the market, with its small size and competition from copycat merchants, can be a challenge.

Shen developed a particular interest in U.S. Army vintage after seeing high-grossing period films like 2001’s “Pearl Harbor” while in university. He remembers falling in love with the soldiers’ clothing, moved by the use of painted jackets as a creative distraction from the realities of war.

Over a decade later, Shen now sees his vintage collecting as a means of glimpsing into a past he never experienced but feels nostalgia for nevertheless. While his view of yesteryear might be rather narrow and romanticized, he muses, it reflects a profound desire to be somewhere other than the present. (...)

Lucky Forces may be all-American in its style, but the craft philosophy behind it originated in neighboring Japan. Shen was initially inspired to start his brand after learning of the Japanese fashion movement amekaji, or “American casual,” on websites like the influential vintage forum 33oz. Nearly 40 years ago, Japanese brands began re-creating American clothing and designs dating from the 1940s to the ’60s with a high degree of authenticity, with some even using looms and other manufacturing equipment from the era to make denim. Amekaji brands have since gained international attention for their take on old U.S. clothing, while department stores, thrift shops, fashion magazines, and events catering to the style have made Japan a mecca for Chinese vintage fans.

“After digging deeply into amekaji and vintage culture, a lot of 33oz forum users have ended up starting their own brands,” says Li Ying, manager of 33oz. Li Ying says that although China’s vintage subculture is rooted in amekaji, it has developed its own scene with a growing number of grassroots undertakings. 33oz has itself evolved from an online forum for denim fans into China’s leading promoter of vintage culture, selling clothes, organizing community fairs, and churning out social media content on platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. (...)

Cui Wei, a catering entrepreneur who organizes vintage-themed events in his spare time, has seen many Chinese artisans come and go from the domestic subculture — often failing because their meticulously handcrafted goods can be cheaply imitated and mass-produced by merchants on e-commerce platforms like Taobao.

“It’s similar to the pop music I used to do,” says Cui, a former professional singer. “Being original is hard, but making commercial music is easy.” Cui hopes his events, which he pays for at his own expense, will nurture vintage culture in China and protect brands like Lucky Forces and Han’s Pipes.

The spread of the hobby is slow, partly because it’s costly. Cui says his understanding of vintage culture — particularly amekaji — developed over the 15 trips he has taken to Japan since 2016. Even replicas of vintage clothing are pricey, leading to an expression popular among local vintage fans: “You have to be really rich to look really poor.”

by Kenrick Davis, Sixth Tone |  Read more:

Image: Kenrick Davis/Sixth Tone

At the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Competition

On a stormy day in Springfield, Mo., the Expo Center was full of menacing bears, jumping lions, flying birds, and swimming fish, all remaining pretty still as they got their hair blow-dried, feathers tweaked, or scales retouched.

Every other year since 1983, taxidermists from all over the world gather for the World Taxidermy and Fish Carving Championships. Since the 1990s, it has been organized by Larry Blomquist, owner and publisher of the taxidermy magazine Breakthrough.

“You need a lot of skills to be a good taxidermist,” he says, “a good knowledge of anatomy, habitat, sculpting, sewing, painting, and have a very creative mindset to come up with the piece to look alive and tell a story. A good taxidermist is an artist.”

About 30 judges, two for each category ranging from Large Mammals to Reptiles, walk among the entries. In front of a very stoic rabbit being attacked by a lynx, a judge comments: “He looks like he is getting a back-scratch. This is not realistic.”

“A good piece needs to display emotion; this is what makes it stands out,” says Wendy Christensen, who has been a judge for 25 years. “But it also needs to be anatomically correct.” To check accuracy, judges run their fingers through fur, inspect teeth with a flashlight, and compare pieces with reference photos.

A winning entry can take, on average, 150 hours to be completed and eventually sell for $10,000 to $20,000.

This year the Best of Show did not have fur or feathers. For the first time in the championship’s history, the top prize was awarded to a large, majestic fish called a muskellunge—better known as a “muskie”—created by Tim Gorenchan from Escanaba, Mich.

Next door to the competition is one of the largest trade shows in the taxidermy industry. Vendors populating 166 booths sell glass eyes and such other artificial parts as noses, jaws, and reproduction turkey heads, or display habitat, such as fake rocks and tree branches.

Allis Markham, a taxidermist based in Los Angeles, has been giving classes for several years in the hope of making taxidermy more popular in urban areas and among women. She says 95% of her students are women. One of her former students, Lauren Crist, a full-time animator for Disney, won first place with her blue jay this year.

The competition also includes a category for newcomers no older than 14.

by Aude Guerrucci, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Aude Guerrucci

Tanaka Minori

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