Let’s Not Repeat the Mistakes of the War on Terror

Americans often respond to tragedy by turning to ill-considered, dangerous ideas. But the suddenly popular idea of launching a domestic version of the war on terror — proposed in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton — is one of the worst ever.

The most ominous call for a new war on terror has come in an opinion article by John Allen and Brett McGurk in the Washington Post. Allen is a former Marine general and, in 2014, was named by President Barack Obama as a special envoy dealing with the Islamic State. In 2015, McGurk succeeded Allen in that role and continued under Donald Trump until last December. Their August 6 article had a headline designed to frighten: “We worked to defeat the Islamic State. White nationalist terrorism is an equal threat.”

The two former officials wrote that “we worked with all departments and agencies of the U.S. government to develop a comprehensive and multi-faceted campaign to defeat Islamic State terrorists on the battlefield, but also, and crucially, through counter-finance, counter-messaging and information sharing across the United States and globally… these efforts have stopped attacks and saved lives.”

This time, they want the war on terror to be at home, focused on white supremacist extremists. That would be the wrong answer to the problem of rising violence by white supremacists. It is a serious issue that will require serious thought and action. But simplistic answers like launching a domestic war on terror would certainly lead to unintended consequences that would cascade for decades, and might be worse than those that stemmed from the original global war on terror.

With their comparison of ISIS to white supremacists, Allen and McGurk strongly suggest that the government should bring the tools and tactics used against ISIS back home. Cleverly, they never quite say precisely what part of the war on ISIS should be used inside the United States — such specifics might lead to criticism and controversy. They simply raise the notion of turning America into an anti-terror war zone. That kind of vague rhetoric is exactly how the original war on terror got sold to the American people.

After the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the United States, stunned and angry, decided that it was a good idea to launch a global war on terror. Expansive new powers were granted to the government to fight this worldwide war, while old rules and regulations that were supposedly anachronistic and in the way of the fight against terrorism were eliminated — or illegally skirted. Eighteen years later, the results are in.

The global war on terror has been a catastrophe.

After 9/11, the CIA engaged in torture, and the National Security Agency secretly spied on millions of U.S. citizens without court approval. In 2003, the U.S. invasion of Iraq shattered the country and led to a generation of political and social chaos. U.S. troops have gone back to re-fight the same war in Iraq over and over, and now American children born at about the time of 9/11 may be deployed to the same fields in Iraq and Afghanistan where their parents fought. The bottom line: A total of between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the U.S. post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, according to a 2018 study by the Costs of War Project at the Watson Center for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Now it seems like everybody wants to do that again.

Just as Allen and McGurk’s article was published, similar language was coming from a joint statement issued by a group of six former senior directors for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from both parties: Nicholas Rasmussen, Joshua Geltzer, Jen Easterly, Luke Hartig, Chris Costa and Javed Ali. “We call on our government to make addressing this form of terrorism as high a priority as countering international terrorism has become since 9/11,” they stated. “This also means providing a significant infusion of resources to support federal, state and local programs aimed at preventing extremism and targeted violence of any kind.”

This is terrible advice. At a time when the American system of government is already being sorely tested by a demagogue and would-be autocrat in the White House, it would be disastrous to grant more power to the Justice Department and the nation’s security services.

The underlying assumption common among these new arguments is that the global war on terror was a great success, and so should be copied and brought home. Allen and McGurk, for instance, take great credit in their op-ed for having defeated ISIS. It was a grand coalition of “nearly 80 partners” that they brought together and led in a march to victory. The truth is much more squalid.

ISIS was a product of the American enterprise in the Middle East. The United States didn’t originally go to Iraq to fight ISIS. It grew out of the chaos and violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and so the rise of ISIS was an unintended consequence of the global war on terror. To now argue that the global war on terror stopped ISIS is to ignore the fact that the global war on terror is also responsible for its rise in the first place.

What’s more, the ground forces that finally pushed ISIS from the major cities of Iraq and toppled its so-called caliphate were led in part by Iranian-backed Shia militias. They slaughtered Sunni Iraqis on their way to defeating ISIS. The United States turned a blind eye to the fact that American air power was in an unspoken alliance with Shia death squads committing atrocities as they rampaged across northern Iraq.

Some national security pundits arguing for a domestic war on terror have anticipated such criticism. “Addressing domestic terrorism does NOT mean blindly recreating what the US has done to fight int’l terrorism,” tweeted Geltzer, one of the signatories to the joint statement by former counterterrorism officials. “It means learning the RIGHT lessons & adapting them to this context.”

In other words, let’s take the good parts of the global war on terror and not the bad parts. Sorry, but there were no good parts. The global war on terror will go down in history as one of the most shameful periods in American history.

by James Risen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Elise Swain/The Intercept, Getty Images

For Whom The (Fake) Bell Tolls

I’m an attorney in Virginia, and I just left a court house where a small town is investigating a large issue of public corruption. I can’t give many details to protect the anonymity of my client and the privacy of others, but it was truly astonishing how many people were at the court that day to answer questions about what had happened in that town.

It was a sad state of affairs. But as I walked out of the courthouse. I looked across and I could hear church bells ringing. Then a police car pulled into an intersection with its lights on, and the officer started directing traffic. A line of cars started to flow from a church. I stopped a while to stand in respect, because though I live near DC, I’m from a small town, and I know that’s just what you do.

But then the church bells stopped in a jarring way. Apparently, they weren’t church bells. It was a recording of church bells being broadcast over speakers from a church steeple. That really got to me, and I’ve thought about it as I continued to walk away.

It was fake. That’s why it got to me. It had the appearance of gravitas and honor and old-ness, but it was a cheap recording that probably worked well in the beginning and was probably quite cost effective. But now it has aged, and the cheap underbelly of what we see on the outside showed itself. It wasn’t pretty.

Then eventually, the music started again. Church bell recording, as the cars continued to pass. But it wasn’t a hymn like it had been before. It was “The Star Spangled Banner” — “The Star Spangled Banner,” played on recorded church bell chimes was being used to mark a funeral. Why?

Because this is rural America, and it is crumbling. It is crumbling for multiple reasons, and I’m sure only one of them is things like the massive public corruption issue playing out in the courthouse. I’m sure another reason is the thinness of institutions that is hard to recognize when they’re going well, but the recording of the church bells cutting off in a jarred series of static and clicks was quite an epiphany (apocalypse?) illustrating that problem.

The fact that the church-bell tune that popped up right afterwards was “The Star Spangled Banner” just completed the sad metaphor. Why is that an appropriate song? “Be still my Soul.” “Be Thou My Vision.” “Amazing Grace.” There are endless better choices. Why “The Star Spangled Banner”?

Maybe because that “Americanism” is the only religion still standing in places like that. And it has a thinness to it that the fake church-bells only exaggerate when you know that they aren’t real and are just a recording.

by Rod Dreher, American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ira Carter
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Elina Sarlin, Reflection 2016
via:

Hard Seltzer is This Summer’s Biggest Scam

It’s the summer of 2019, and you are drowning in hard seltzer. Those White Claw variety packs are everywhere you look, from the park to the barbecue to the grocery store checkout aisle, where the customers in front of you and behind you are loading up on 100-calorie cans of gluten-free, ruby grapefruit-flavored fizz. You’re probably, inexplicably, drinking hard seltzer all of a sudden, even though 10 months ago you didn’t know such a thing existed, and you’re still not quite sure it’s actually seltzer, and you don’t know how this can got into your hand.

Hard seltzer is “the drink of the summer,” according to the Washington Postand every other media outlet. White Claw, the brand which if we’re splitting hairs is the actual drink of the summer, has transcended its existence as a mass-produced canned beverage and transformed into a series of viral memes. The comedian Trevor Wallace had a particularly successful run satirizing the prototypical “White Claw guy” on social media — so successful that when he tried to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “AIN’T NO LAWS WHEN YOU’RE DRINKING CLAWS,” he got a cease and desist from the company’s legal team. (“We are incredibly grateful for all the support,” says Sanjiv Gajiwala, White Claw’s vice president of marketing. “Unfortunately we do have a trademark. There are laws.”)

When Four Loko announced that it would also be getting into the hard seltzer game, we started to get a sense of what this category will look like when taken to its illogical extreme. “Hard seltzer ran so we could fly,” read the tweet that introduced Four Loko Seltzer Sour (flavor: “with a hint of blue razz”), identified on its label as “the hardest seltzer in the universe,” at a lofty 14% alcohol by volume. (The other hard seltzers, by comparison, are between 4% and 5% abv, though Natural Light and Pabst have announced plans for future releases that will clock in, respectively, at 6% and 8%.)

By the beginning of this summer, hard seltzer sales were up 193% year over year, said a Nielsen report. Beer sales, by contrast, declined by 1.6% last year. White Claw, which comprises 9% of the total flavored alcoholic beverage category (and about 60% of the hard seltzer category specifically, the company says), was up 289% by volume in 2018 over the previous year, according to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis; Truly, a close second with 6% of the category, was up 278%. The Bay Area loves White Claw even more than the rest of the country, it seems: Sales in San Francisco and Oakland are up 791% over last year, even outpacing the 524% growth in California as a whole.

No wonder, then, that nearly every beverage behemoth has launched an entry: White Claw is part of Mark Anthony Brands, which also makes Mike’s Hard Lemonade; Truly is from Boston Beer Co., which you know as Sam Adams; Bon & Viv belongs to Anheuser-Busch InBev; Henry’s is MillerCoors’; Crook & Marker is from the makers of antioxidant water Bai; Corona is behind Refresca. Smirnoff makes the unimaginatively titled Smirnoff Spiked Sparkling Seltzer. While beer sales fall, these companies aren’t going to get caught without a hard seltzer brand to ride that wave.

The forebear of today’s hard seltzer boom, of course, is Zima, MillerCoors’ clear, carbonated malt beverage that would definitely have been a viral meme if viral memes had existed in the 1990s. (Zima was discontinued in the U.S. in 2008 but MillerCoors revived it in 2018, announcing in a press release that it was bringing back “Z2K” for a limited release.) But Zima was typecast as a girly drink, with all the virility of a white wine cooler.

The bonkers achievement of the current hard seltzer mania, unlike Zima, is its ability to appeal to men as well as women — an achievement made possible, Amy McCarthy noted in Eater, by the contemporary conception of the “evolved bro” who enjoys “crossfit alongside paleo and keto diets.” This bro, McCarthy writes, has updated patriarchal values with “face masks, potentially disordered eating and an open and honest affection for spiked seltzer.” (...)

But here’s the thing. It’s a lie. Hard seltzer is not seltzer. Seltzer is carbonated water. “Hard seltzer” is a flavored malt beverage — essentially the same as a Lime-A-Rita or a Colt 45 or a Smirnoff Ice. These products derive their alcohol from fermented malted grains and are then carbonated, flavored and sweetened.

by Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle|  Read more:

Image: Russell Yip / The Chronicle
[ed. Ack.]

First Kidney Failure, Then A $540,842 Bill For Dialysis

For months, Sovereign Valentine had been feeling progressively run-down. The 50-year-old personal trainer, who goes by “Sov,” tried changing his workout and diet to no avail.

Finally, one Sunday, he drove himself to the hospital in the small town of Plains, Mont., where his wife, Jessica, happened to be the physician on call. “I couldn’t stop throwing up. I was just toxic.”

It turned out he was in kidney failure and needed dialysis immediately.

“I was in shock, but I was so weak that I couldn’t even worry,” he said. “I just turned it over to God.”

He was admitted to a nearby hospital that was equipped to stabilize his condition and to get his first dialysis session. A social worker there arranged for him to follow up with outpatient dialysis, three times a week. She told them Sov had two options, both about 70 miles from his home. They chose a Fresenius Kidney Care clinic in Missoula.

A few days after the treatments began, an insurance case manager called the Valentines warning them that since Fresenius was out-of-network, they could be required to pay whatever the insurer didn’t cover. The manager added that there were no in-network dialysis clinics in Montana, according to Jessica’s handwritten notes from the conversation. (The insurance company disputes this, saying that its case manager told Jessica there were no in-network dialysis clinics in Missoula.)

Jessica repeatedly asked both the dialysis clinic staff and the insurer how much they could expect to be charged, but couldn’t get an answer.

Then the bills came.

Patient: Sovereign Valentine, 50, a personal trainer in Plains, Mont. He is insured by Allegiance, through his wife’s work as a doctor in a rural hospital.

Total Bill: $540,841.90 for 14 weeks of dialysis care at an out-of-network Fresenius clinic. Valentine’s insurer paid $16,241.73. The clinic billed Valentine for the unpaid balance of $524,600.17.

Service Provider: Fresenius Medical Care, one of two companies (along with rival DaVita) that control about 70% of the U.S. dialysis market.

Medical Treatment: Hemodialysis at an outpatient Fresenius clinic, three days a week for 14 weeks.

What Gives: As the dominant providers of dialysis care in the U.S., Fresenius and DaVita together form what health economists call a “duopoly.” They can demand extraordinary prices for the lifesaving treatment they dispense — especially when they are not in a patient’s network. A 1973 law allows all patients with end-stage renal disease like Sov to join Medicare, even if they’re younger than 65 — but only after a 90-day waiting period. During that time, patients are extremely vulnerable, medically and financially.

Fresenius billed the Valentines $524,600.17 — an amount that is more than the typical cost of a kidney transplant. It’s also nearly twice Jessica’s medical school debt. Fresenius charged the Valentines $13,867.74 per dialysis session, or about 59 times the $235 Medicare pays for a dialysis session.

When Jessica opened the first bill, she cried. “It was far worse than what I had imagined would be the worst-case scenario,” she said. (...)

Dialysis companies are quite profitable. Fresenius reported more than $2 billion in profits in 2018, with the vast majority of its revenue coming from North America. The discrepancy in payments between Medicare and commercial payers gives dialysis centers an incentive to treat as many privately insured patients as possible and to charge as much as they can before dialysis patients enroll in Medicare. It may also give dialysis centers an incentive to charge the few out-of-network patients they see outlandish prices.

“The dialysis companies may think they can get closer to what they want from the health plans by staying out-of-network and charging these prices that are totally untethered to their actual costs,” said Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. “They have the health plans over a barrel.”

by Jenny Gold, Kaiser Health News |  Read more:

Image: Tommy Martino for KHN
[ed. See also: Dialysis Industry Spends Big To Protect Profits and Taking Dialysis Providers to Task: Nowhere But In The USA (KHN)]

The Great Seattle Pot Heist

Regina Liszanckie was about to head to work when she got the text from the owners of the business next door to hers: The razor-wire-topped chain-link gate and front door to her building were swinging open, and a single jar of marijuana lay on the ground beside the gate. She had been robbed.

Four months earlier, in September 2017, Liszanckie’s business, Plantworks, had joined the thousand-plus other “producer-processors” licensed to supply Washington’s burgeoning trade in recreational marijuana. She and her partner set out to grow high-end “craft” weed in 2,500 square feet of an anonymous industrial strip in Seattle’s North End. On the night of the break-in in January 2018, Plantworks had a full crop—26 pounds of high-quality dried, cured flower, worth about $52,000—ready to deliver to local cannabis shops.

The thieves, recounts Liszanckie, bypassed the live plants and headed straight for the ready-to-sell stock, cleaning it out. It was devastating.

Liszanckie asked around and discovered she was just one in a rash of growers in and around Seattle who’ve suffered similar break-ins, six of whom consented to be interviewed for this article. Their accounts followed a pattern: The burglars came in the wee hours and speedily cut the electricity to the security cameras and alarms. Sometimes they smashed through walls to get in, avoiding the alarms on the doors. Because even the legal grow operations tend to be unsigned and inconspicuously located in small warehouses and industrial strips, the noise went unnoticed. And the burglars chose their targets well: Bypassing large grow operations with highly secure, purpose-built facilities, they hit smaller, more vulnerable growers producing high-end, easy-to-move weed.

The robbers also showed an uncanny sense of timing, striking just as the growers had amassed inventories of cut, cured, ready-to-sell product worth thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The growers began posting news of the heists on Instagram, swapping conjectures as to how the burglars knew where and when to strike. Two hypotheses emerged. The first: that an employee at a retail pot shop was either involved in the break-ins or telling the burglars whom to hit.

But as the burglaries continued, the growers came to suspect that the criminals had found another way of getting the information they needed to target vulnerable businesses offering big payoffs: The government was giving it to them.

After Washington’s residents became the first in the nation (together with Colorado’s) to vote to legalize recreational marijuana sales and possession in 2012, the state liquor board, newly renamed the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board (WLCB) adopted exhaustive rules and regulations to govern the new trade. These require that cannabis producers and processors provide much more detailed information about their activities to the state each month than other businesses are obliged to provide—things like exactly how many plants they grow and harvest by batch and strain, how much inventory they hold and how much they sell, when, to whom, for how much. Whenever they transport product, they must file cargo manifests with detailed vehicle information. “We plant a seed, we report it,” Liszanckie says. “You take a cutting, you report it. How long you dry. What the final weight was. How soon did it go out door? What did you sell, who did you sell it to, for how much? What did they mark it up to? Easily 25 percent of our time is given over to tracking.”

The state and state-licensed data firms then post much of this information online, where it is available to the public.

In other words, Liszanckie and other growers fear that this system, put in place to ensure transparency and accountability in the newly legalized industry, may also leave a data trail that leads thieves straight to their doors, right when the pickings are fattest.

“If you are a crook, it’s a veritable laundry list of targets,” says Andrew Marris, a partner in the Seattle cannabis grower Fire Bros., which lost what it says was $200,000 worth of weed to burglars last summer.

by Eric Scigliano, Politico | Read more:
Image: Owen Freeman

Do Women’s Clothes Seem Weird Lately? Because I’m Into It

The consensus among my friends, as well as a lot of the women I follow on the internet, is that clothes suck lately. This summer, if you were to pop into any of the fast fashion outlets where trends both live and die, you’d find a strange mix of styles, indeed: ’90s-era crop tops and babydoll dresses, wacky prints, poofy sleeves, ruching and draping, and big, boxy shapes that don’t appear to align with the build of any actual human body. One could sum up fashion right now as “sexy baby” or “cursed prairie” or, as my friend and editor Rachel put it, a bizarre blend of both “modest and horny.”

I hear everybody’s qualms about this moment in style — and I respect them! — but I have to go against the grain here and speak my truth: I am loving it.

I’ve been a fan of fashion’s weird journey for years now. I love a good sack dress, even though I am one of the millions of people who hover somewhere between straight and plus sizes and they are not technically “flattering” on my body type. If I were to follow fashion magazine convention, I should always wear something that draws attention to my waist, where I'm smallest, and draws attention away from where I’m biggest: ass, hips, thighs. I shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes or, really, any sort of loud pattern at all but, rather, dark, neutral tones for their slimming effects. Anything architectural, bulky, or frilled is certainly a no-no — those additions will just make me take up more space, not less.

But where’s the fun in that?

I appreciate the value of simple, timeless clothing and can understand that if you’re a less risk-taking dresser, shopping must be pretty stressful these days. Maybe I’m just a hopeless trend monster, but I don’t know, man — I’m having the time of my life. I love these loud patterns! I love the bold color, the fascinating shapes, the funky additions to an otherwise unremarkable top or skirt that give it some flair. I love that fashion right now isn’t about what’s technically the most “flattering,” because those rules are designed with the thinnest, whitest, and most conventionally beautiful among us in mind.

The game is already rigged; even if we follow every rule, we still can’t really win. So why not just go wild and lean into the wackiness of it all? If I’m never actually going to attain the unattainable ideal of the sexy-but-not-too-sexy woman, then I might as well have a good time when I’m getting dressed in the morning.

by Shannon Keating, BuzzFeed |  Read more:

Image: Abbey Lossing for BuzzFeed News

The Shadow World
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[ed. The local grocery store was packed today with young people, all stocking up for a 4-day EDM festival at The Gorge. I told the checkout guy something like that would probably kill me... 4 days. Of EDM.]

The Big Splat

When the Earth Had Two Moons (Nautilus)
Image: M. Jutzi (U. Bern), E. Asphaug (ASU, UCSC)

It’s Official: Parts of California Are Too Wildfire-Prone to Insure

California is facing yet another real estate-related crisis, but we’re not talking about its sky-high home prices. According to newly released data, it’s simply become too risky to insure houses in big swaths of the wildfire-prone state.

Last winter when we wrote about home insurance rates possibly going up in the wake of California’s massive, deadly fires, the insurance industry representatives we interviewed were skeptical. They noted that the stories circulating in the media about people in forested areas losing their homeowners’ insurance was based on anecdotes, not data. But now, the data is in and it’s really happening: Insurance companies aren’t renewing policies areas climate scientists say are likely to burn in giant wildfires in coming years.

Insurance companies dropped more than 340,000 homeowners from wildfire areas in just four years. Between 2015 and 2018, the 10 California counties with the most homes in flammable forests saw a 177 percent increase in homeowners turning to an expensive state-backed insurance program because they could not find private insurance.

In some ways, this news is not surprising. According to a recent survey of insurance actuaries (the people who calculate insurance risks and premiums based on available data), the industry ranked climate change as the top risk for 2019, beating out concerns over cyber damages, financial instability, and terrorism. While having insurance companies on board with climate science is a good thing for, say, requiring cities to invest in more sustainable infrastructure, it’s bad news for homeowners who can’t simply pick up their lodgings and move elsewhere.

“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in a statement. “This data should be a wake-up call for state and local policymakers that without action to reduce the risk from extreme wildfires and preserve the insurance market we could see communities unraveling.”

A similar dynamic is likely unfolding across many other Western states, according to reporting from the New York Times.

by Nathanael Johnson, Grist | Read more:
Image: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez
[ed. Might want to re-think buying that coastal or riverfront property, too.]

St. Vincent

St. Vincent (Annie Clark)
via: here and here (from the ifuckinglovestvincent Tumblr blog).
[ed. Talent to burn. See also: Los Ageless. St. Vincent's Life in 6+ Riffs, and Being a Guitar God (YouTube)]

Real Estate for Dummies

The aborted Greenland purchase, however, was not necessarily the response many geopolitical strategists had in mind and comes at a time when Mr. Trump has seemed particularly erratic. In recent days, he proudly quoted a radio host declaring that Israeli Jews love him as if he were the “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God,” while Mr. Trump himself accused Jews who vote for Democrats of “great disloyalty.”

Speaking with reporters on the South Lawn on Wednesday, he suggested that God had tapped him to lead a trade war with China. “I am the chosen one,” he said, glancing heavenward. In the Oval Office on Tuesday, he exhibited his universal suspicion. “In my world, in this world, I think nobody can be trusted,” he said.

Trump’s Interest in Buying Greenland Seemed Like a Joke. Then It Got Ugly (NY Times).

[ed. No worries! I hear Britain will be coming on the market soon. See also: Trump Goes Godly (NY Times). Maybe this post should be titled 'Dementia for Dummies - How to Recognize It, What to do About It'.]  

What Does It Even Mean to be a Tech Company in 2019?

The coworking company WeWork’s newly unveiled public filings raise a question: What does it even mean to be a tech company these days?

WeWork, which leases office space to people and businesses, is valued at a whopping $47 billion — more than 10 times its bigger rival IWG, which is considered a real estate company but does the same thing. A “tech company” like WeWork, the rationale goes, is more valuable because it is bigger, faster, stronger, and will bring in more future profits for shareholders.

“If you’re going to raise capital, it’s an easier way to get your foot in the door by saying you’re some new kind of disruptive tech company,” Paul Condra, lead emerging technology analyst at research firm PitchBook, told Recode.

That’s why WeWork went to great lengths in its filings to point out all the things that make it a tech company and, by extension, validate its price tag. It has purchased lots of other tech companies and brings that technology to bear on its regular operations by “scanning technologies and software to automate the design and construction layout of any given space,” applying “data science to compare new buildings with similar proven locations,” and using machine learning to “forecast demand for each building to set the opening day price and optimize on a real-time basis.”

It also boasts 1,000 tech employees out of 12,500 total employees.

But does that make it a tech company?

Ultimately, WeWork’s main business involves leasing buildings on a long-term basis, remodeling and styling them so they feel like trendy places to be, and then subleasing space in those buildings to people and companies on a short-term basis. It looks a lot like a real estate company.

But it’s certainly not alone in having tech aspirations. Startups of every stripe are touting their tech bona fides.

Are direct-to-consumer brands like Glossier (makeup) and Away (luggage), where you purchase goods online but otherwise don’t interact with technology, tech companies? Amazon and Etsy, which primarily function as online marketplaces — are they tech? What is it that makes Tesla a tech company but not General Motors? GM uses plenty of technology and is even making competing, autonomous electric cars.

Airbnb? DoorDash? Blue Apron? Uber? Lyft? Sweetgreen? The list goes on, as does the justification. As many have noted before me, every company is a tech company — or at least thinks it is. Katrina Lake, the CEO of clothing recommendation company StitchFix told Recode’s Kara Swisher, “if you want to be relevant 10 years from now, every company is going to be a tech company.”

“The first question is, ‘Does the company sell tech?’ That’s easy. If yes, that’s a tech company,” Condra said. “If they don’t, then you have to ask yourself, ‘Is there some kind of modern technology core to its customer acquisition or customer retention?’”

But as technology becomes increasingly central to companies’ businesses, that line becomes harder to draw.

“Twenty years ago, if the internet was an important part of a business — I’d say, ‘yes, that’s a tech company,’” Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida who tracks IPOs, told Recode. “But today, what company has a business where the internet isn’t an important part of it?”

He added, referring to other IPO researchers he’s talked with over the years, “We all agree that companies like WeWork or Etsy, whether you classify them as a technology company or not is definitely a judgment issue.”

For plucky entrepreneurs aspiring to found tech companies, that leaves many ways in. You don’t necessarily need to sell or develop technology as your main line of business. Simply using technology does the trick, and the more buzzwords you can fit in a pitch deck — AI, machine learning, data mining, blockchain — the better. Hiring engineers and software developers helps, too.

Or perhaps being a tech company is more of a mindset: We are new and we use the internet, therefore we are tech. It’s certainly a branding tool. But the distinction can feel mind-numbing.

In 2011, prominent tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen penned a widely read Wall Street Journal article, “Software Is Eating the World” that made the prescient point that software companies would take over a large portion of the economy. These days, it feels like it’s eating our brains.

by Rani Molla, Recode | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Brady/PA Images via Getty Images
[ed. See also: WeWork: Is There Any There There? (NY Times)]

Molly Tuttle

[ed. Not just three chords and a cloud of dust.]

Clare E. Rojas, Untitled, 2018
via:

Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because a Liver Fluke Tried to Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into a Zombie

Or at least this is the theory proposed in Brain Evolution Through The Lens Of Parasite Manipulation by Marco del Giudice.

The paper starts with an overview of parasite manipulation of host behavior. These are the stories you hear about toxoplasma-infected rats seeking out cats instead of running away from them, or zombie ants climbing stalks of grass so predators will eat them. The parasite secretes chemicals that alter host neurochemistry in ways that make the host get eaten, helping the parasite transfer itself to a new organism.

Along with rats and ants, there is a dizzying variety of other parasite manipulation cases. They include parasitic wasps who hack spiders into forming protective webs for their pupae, parasitic flies that cause bees to journey far from their hive in order to spread fly larva more widely, and parasitic microorganisms that cause mosquitoes to draw less blood from each victim (since that forces the mosquitoes to feed on more victims, and so spread the parasite more widely). Parasitic nematodes make their ant hosts turn red, which causes (extremely stupid?) birds to mistake them for fruit and eat them. Parasitic worms make crickets seek water; as the cricket drowns, the worms escape into the pond and begin the next stage of their life cycle. Even mere viruses can alter behavior; the most famous example is rabies, which hacks dogs, bats, and other mammals into hyperaggressive moods that usually result in them biting someone and transmitting the rabies virus.

Even our friendly gut microbes might be manipulating us. People talk a lot about the “gut-brain axis” and the effect of gut microbes on behavior, as if this is some sort of beautiful symbiotic circle-of-life style thing. But scientists have found that gut microbes trying to colonize fruit flies will hack the flies’ food preferences to get a leg up – for example, a carb-metabolizing microbe will secrete hormones that make the fly want to eat more carbs than fat in order to outcompete its fat-metabolizing rivals for gut real estate; there are already papers speculating that the same processes might affect humans. Read Alcock 2014 and you will never look at food cravings the same way again.

But del Giudice thinks this is just the tip of the iceberg. Throughout evolutionary history, parasites have been trying to manipulate host behavior and hosts have been trying to avoid manipulation, resulting in an eons-long arms race. The equilibrium is what we see today: parasite manipulation is common in insects, rare in higher animals, and overall of limited importance. But in arms race dynamics, the current size of the problem tells you nothing about the amount of resources invested in preventing the problem. There is zero problem with war between Iran and Saudi Arabia right now, but both sides have invested billions of dollars in military supplies to keep their opponent from getting a leg up. In the same way, just because mammals usually avoid parasite behavior manipulation nowdoesn’t mean they aren’t on a constant evolutionary war footing.

So if you’re an animal at constant risk of having your behavior hijacked by parasites, what do you do?

First, you make your biological signaling cascades more complicated. You have multiple redundant systems controlling every part of behavior, and have them interact in ways too complicated for any attacker to figure out. You have them sometimes do the opposite of what it looks like they should do, just to keep enemies on their toes. This situation should sound very familiar to anyone who’s ever studied biology.

Del Giudice compares the neurosignaling of the shrimp-like gammarids (small, simple, frequently hijacked by parasites) to rats (large, complex, hard to hijack). Gammarids have very simple signaling: high serotonin means “slow down”, low serotonin means “speed up”. The helminths that parasitize gammarids secrete serotonin, and the gammarids slow down and get eaten, transferring the parasite to a new host. Biologists can replicate this process; if they inject serotonin into a gammarid, the gammarid will slow down in the same way.

Toxoplasma hijacks rats and makes them fearless enough to approach cats. Dopamine seems to be involved somehow. But researchers injecting dopamine into rats don’t get the same result; in fact, this seems to make rats avoid cats more. Maybe toxoplasma started by increasing dopamine, rats evolved a more complicated signaling code, and toxoplasma cracked the code and now increases dopamine plus other things we don’t understand yet.

Aside from the brain, the immune system is the most important target to secure, so this theory should predict that immune signaling will also be unusually inscrutable. Again, this situation should sound very familiar to anyone who’s ever studied biology.

Second, you have a bunch of feedback loops and flexibility ready to deploy at any kind of trouble. If something makes dopamine levels go up, you decrease the number of dopamine receptors, so that overall dopaminergic neurotransmission is the same as always. If something is making you calmer than normal, you have some other system ready to react by making you more anxious again.

Del Giudice makes the obvious connection to psychopharmacology. Many psychoactive drugs build tolerance quickly: for example, heroin addicts constantly need higher and higher doses to get their “hit”. Further, tolerance builds in a pattern weirdly similar to antibody response – it takes a while to build up a cocaine tolerance, and you lose it over time if you don’t use cocaine, but the body “remembers” the process and a single hit of cocaine years later is sufficient to bring you back up to the highest tolerance level you’ve ever had.

The standard explanation for tolerance is that it’s an attempt to maintain homeostasis against the sort of conditions that can cause natural variation in neurotransmitter levels. I never questioned this before. But why is the body prepared to suddenly have all its serotonin reuptake transporters inhibited? Is that something that frequently happens, out in nature? I guess maybe plant toxins could do that, but then how come the body is prepared to deal with this for months or years?

While not denying the value of these standard explanations, Del Giudice thinks defense against parasite behavior manipulation may also play a role. Remember, gammarids absolutely have parasites that try to increase their serotonin levels as a prelude to getting them killed. Is it that surprising that a lot of different animal lineages would develop a reaction of “If something other than normal cognition has started increasing your serotonin levels, it’s a trap and you need to get them back down again”? Does that explain why SSRIs don’t work for some people, or randomly stop working, or need frequent dose escalation?

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Despite Devastating Crashes, Boeing Stocks Fly High

In a turbulent world, some things remain stable, even to an irrational degree. One example is the price of Boeing stock, which, at $329 a share as of midday August 16, has barely moved—down just 1.6 percent—from a year ago.

As all the world knows, in the intervening 12 months, two Boeing 737 Max jets have crashed, killing a total of 346 people. We also know that the crashes were entirely thanks to corporate management rushing through a Rube Goldberg adaptation of a half century-old design, suborning the FAA to approve untested and incompetently programmed software control features along with other irresponsible shortcuts (such as cutting the company’s own test pilots out of MAX development planning and avoiding mention of the new control features in the airline pilots’ manuals).

Nevertheless, neither the slaughter of passengers nor the subsequent deluge of shocking revelations have had any long-term impact on the stock price. There have indeed been short-term fluctuations in the interim, notably a sharp climb in the months following the first MAX disaster in Indonesia last October, when management’s disgraceful PR spin ascribing blame to incompetent foreign pilots achieved some traction in the press. (...)

Even so, Wall Street appears unworried. Analysts still rate the stock a “strong buy” by a wide margin, with a consensus estimate that it will climb some 90 points from its currently stable position in the high $320s over the next 12 months. The $2.3 billion Boeing spent buying its own stock in the first three months of this year no doubt encouraged such bullish sentiment, part of the $43 billion splurged on price-propping buybacks since 2013.

In addition, other powerful forces are hard at work to save the corporate behemoth from going into a terminal stall. Boeing, for example, is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the 30-stock index generally if misleadingly cited as a bellwether of the market as a whole, and even the entire U.S. economy. Because the Dow is weighted by price, an upward or downward move in Boeing has a significant effect on the index, which makes it a particular object of interest for the trading desks at major Wall Street players. Hence the stock is traded very actively in the “dark pools,” otherwise known as “alternative trading systems,” with opaque names such as JP Morgan’s JPMX, operated by the big banks and major institutions as unregulated stock exchanges, courtesy of a toothless SEC.

These are ideal instruments for manipulating the market, since they don’t have to show their bids and offers to the general market place as is required on regulated exchanges. As analogy, think of carpet dealers in a bazaar negotiating prices privately among themselves behind the backs of ordinary customers.

The tender regard being exhibited by big players on Wall Street is not, of course, solely for the sake of propping up the Dow. There is a lot of money directly at stake, not least in the 67 percent of the Boeing stock owned by just five giant funds, including Vanguard ($5.3 trillion in total assets) and Blackstone ($6.8 trillion). It’s a sign that Boeing must keep borrowing money to stay afloat. Fortunately, thanks to low interest rates and the river of cash generated by the Federal Reserve since 2008, supplies are ready to hand. Thus on July 31, for example, Boeing borrowed a total of $5.5 billion via notes of varying maturities and interest rates taken up by major banks, including JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs—and that was on top of $3.5 billion borrowed in late April.

Given that it may be quite a while before money starts to flow again from airlines shopping for 737s, there is undoubtedly a lot of Wall Street interest in the alternative source for emergency Boeing cash flow: a giant taxpayer bailout in the form of a Pentagon contract of suitable proportions. Fortunately, there is a vehicle for delivering the cash: the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, the Minuteman-replacement ICBM authorized by President Obama as part of his $1 trillion nuclear modernization program. It carries a price tag, gratifying to investors, of up to $100 billion—a sum that will quite certainly be exceeded down the road.

by Andrew Cockburn, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image: pjs2005/creativecommons
[ed. Too big to fail.]

Robert Plant

[ed... "life is a big tambourine, the harder you hit it the better it seems".]