The Biggest Lie Tech People Tell Themselves — and the Rest of Us

Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end. But this isn’t a normal class, and you’re not just watching the lectures: They’re watching you back. Every time the facial recognition system decides that you look bored, distracted, or tuned out, it makes a note. And after each lecture, it only asks you about content from those moments.

This isn’t a hypothetical system; it’s a real one deployed by a company called Nestor. And if you don’t like the sound of it, you’re not alone. Neither do the actual students.

When I asked the man behind the system, French inventor Marcel Saucet, how the students in these classes feel about being watched, he admitted that they didn’t like it. They felt violated and surveilled, he said, but he shrugged off any implication that it was his fault. “Everybody is doing this,” he told me. “It’s really early and shocking, but we cannot go against natural laws of evolution.”

As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than any individual inventor or CEO. They say they are simply caught in a tide, swept along in a current they cannot fight. They say it inevitably leads them to facial recognition (now even being deployed on children), smart speakers that record your intimate conversations, and doorbells that narc on your neighbors. They say we can’t blame these companies for the erosion of privacy or democracy or trust in public institutions — that was all going to happen sooner or later.

“When have we ever been able to keep the genie in the bottle?” they ask. Besides, they argue, people buy this stuff so they must want it. Companies are simply responding to “natural selection” by consumers. There is nobody to blame for this, they say. It’s as natural as gravity.

Perhaps no one states this belief more clearly than inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: “The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which describes the acceleration of the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process.”

In fact, our world is shaped by humans who make decisions, and technology companies are no different.

To claim that these devices are the result of some kind of ever-improving natural process not only misunderstands how evolution works, but it also suggests that everything from biological weapons to fraudulent startups like Theranos to Juicero (the $400 machine that squeezed juice out of packets) are necessary and natural.

While these “innovations” range from the dangerous to the silly, they share a common thread: Nothing about them is “natural.” No natural process is creating a “smart” hairbrush or a “smart” flip flop or a “smart” condom. Or a Bluetooth-enabled toaster, a cryptocurrency from a photography company, or an internet-connected air freshener.

Evolution is a terrible metaphor for technology

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

In some situations, even if we can’t literally put a technological genie back in a bottle, we can artificially intervene to make sure the genie plays by specific rules.

There are clear laws about what companies can and can’t do in the realm of biological weapons. The FDA ensures drugs are tested for efficacy and safety before they can be sold. The USDA ensures new food research is done with care. We don’t let anybody frack or drill for oil or build nuclear power plants wherever they like. We don’t let just anybody make and sell cars or airplanes or guns.

So the assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not. (...)

This endless, punishing race in the name of “progress” is often what drives consumer behavior, too. Despite the “American dream” — security, safety, prosperity — being more and more out of reach for everyday Americans, the idea that it’s just around the corner drives people to purchase these products.

If you have the newest app, people think their lives will be easier, you’ll have more free time, more quality time. Commercials promise more backyard barbecues under sparklers and birthday surprise parties facilitated by internet-connected light bulbs.

And when we buy the products, tech companies take that as a green light to continue on their “inevitable” path, inching ever toward a world where Amazon knows exactly what you’re doing, thinking, feeling — perhaps even before you do. “It’s all a loop,” says Stark. “It’s weird. That’s what puts people in this bind. They think they should be able to have it all. They can’t, and technology is a kind of prophylactic to cope with this stuff.”

by Rose Eveleth, Vox | Read more:
Image: Zoë van Dijk

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Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.

At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture.

I first grew concerned about Amazon’s power five years ago. I felt anxious about how the company bullied the book business, extracting ever more favorable terms from the publishers that had come to depend on it. When the conglomerate Hachette, with which I’d once published a book, refused to accede to Amazon’s demands, it was punished. Amazon delayed shipments of Hachette books; when consumers searched for some Hachette titles, it redirected them to similar books from other publishers. In 2014, I wrote a cover story for The New Republic with a pugilistic title: “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” Citing my article, the company subsequently terminated an advertising campaign for its political comedy, Alpha House, that had been running in the magazine.

Since that time, Bezos’s reach has only grown. To the U.S. president, he is a nemesis. To many Americans, he is a beneficent wizard of convenience and abundance. Over the course of just this past year, Amazon has announced the following endeavors: It will match potential home buyers with real-estate agents and integrate their new homes with Amazon devices; it will enable its voice assistant, Alexa, to access health-care data, such as the status of a prescription or a blood-sugar reading; it will build a 3-million-square-foot cargo airport outside Cincinnati; it will make next-day delivery standard for members of its Prime service; it will start a new chain of grocery stores, in addition to Whole Foods, which it already owns; it will stream Major League Baseball games; it will launch more than 3,000 satellites into orbit to supply the world with high-speed internet.

Bezos’s ventures are by now so large and varied that it is difficult to truly comprehend the nature of his empire, much less the end point of his ambitions. What exactly does Jeff Bezos want? Or, to put it slightly differently, what does he believe? Given his power over the world, these are not small questions. Yet he largely keeps his intentions to himself; many longtime colleagues can’t recall him ever expressing a political opinion. To replay a loop of his interviews from Amazon’s quarter century of existence is to listen to him retell the same unrevealing anecdotes over and over.

To better understand him, I spent five months speaking with current and former Amazon executives, as well as people at the company’s rivals and scholarly observers. Bezos himself declined to participate in this story, and current employees would speak to me only off the record. Even former staffers largely preferred to remain anonymous, assuming that they might eventually wish to work for a business somehow entwined with Bezos’s sprawling concerns.

In the course of these conversations, my view of Bezos began to shift. Many of my assumptions about the man melted away; admiration jostled with continued unease. And I was left with a new sense of his endgame.

Bezos loves the word relentless—it appears again and again in his closely read annual letters to shareholders—and I had always assumed that his aim was domination for its own sake. In an era that celebrates corporate gigantism, he seemed determined to be the biggest of them all. But to say that Bezos’s ultimate goal is dominion over the planet is to misunderstand him. His ambitions are not bound by the gravitational pull of the Earth. (...)

In a way, Bezos has already created a prototype of a cylindrical tube inhabited by millions, and it’s called Amazon.com. His creation is less a company than an encompassing system. If it were merely a store that sold practically all salable goods—and delivered them within 48 hours—it would still be the most awe-inspiring creation in the history of American business. But Amazon is both that tangible company and an abstraction far more powerful.

Bezos’s enterprise upends long-held precepts about the fundamental nature of capitalism—especially an idea enshrined by the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. As World War II drew to its close, Hayek wrote the essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” a seminal indictment of centralized planning. Hayek argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society. When markets collectively set a price, that price reflects the discrete bits of knowledge scattered among executives, workers, and consumers. Any governmental attempt to replace this organic apparatus—to set prices unilaterally, or even to understand the disparate workings of an economy—is pure hubris.

Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy that Hayek never imagined any single entity could hope to achieve. At any moment, its website has more than 600 million items for sale and more than 3 million vendors selling them. With its history of past purchases, it has collected the world’s most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire, which allows it to anticipate both individual and collective needs. With its logistics business—and its growing network of trucks and planes—it has an understanding of the flow of goods around the world. In other words, if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day.

What makes Amazon so fearsome to its critics isn’t purely its size but its trajectory. Amazon’s cache of knowledge gives it the capacity to build its own winning version of an astonishing array of businesses. In the face of its growth, long-dormant fears of monopoly have begun to surface—and Amazon has reportedly found itself under review by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. But unlike Facebook, another object of government scrutiny, Bezos’s company remains deeply trusted by the public. A 2018 poll sponsored by Georgetown University and the Knight Foundation found that Amazon engendered greater confidence than virtually any other American institution. Despite Donald Trump’s jabs at Bezos, this widespread faith in the company makes for a source of bipartisan consensus, although the Democrats surveyed were a touch more enthusiastic than the Republicans were: They rated Amazon even more trustworthy than the U.S. military. In contrast to the dysfunction and cynicism that define the times, Amazon is the embodiment of competence, the rare institution that routinely works. (...)

In its current form, Amazon harkens back to Big Business as it emerged in the postwar years. When Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors, was nominated to be secretary of defense in 1953, he famously told a Senate confirmation panel, “I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” For the most part, this was an aphorism earnestly accepted as a statement of good faith. To avert class warfare, the Goliaths of the day recognized unions; they bestowed health care and pensions upon employees. Liberal eminences such as John K. Galbraith hailed the corporation as the basis for a benign social order. Galbraith extolled the social utility of the corporation because he believed that it could be domesticated and harnessed to serve interests other than its own bottom line. He believed businesses behave beneficently when their self-serving impulses are checked by “countervailing power” in the form of organized labor and government.

Of course, those powers have receded. Unions, whose organizing efforts Amazon has routinely squashed, are an unassuming nub of their former selves; the regulatory state is badly out of practice. So while Amazon is trusted, no countervailing force has the inclination or capacity to restrain it. And while power could amass in a more villainous character than Jeff Bezos, that doesn’t alleviate the anxiety that accompanies such concentration. Amazon might be a vast corporation, with more than 600,000 employees, but it is also the extension of one brilliant, willful man with an incredible knack for bending the world to his values.

by Franklin Foer, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg/Landov via

Who Killed the American Arts?

The arts in America are dying. In the 20th century, Americans defined the world’s popular culture, but the 21st century world has no need of America’s arts. Through technology transfer, the world entertains itself with knock offs like Bollywood and K-Pop. In the 20th century, Americans created a new art form in jazz and its derivatives, and turned Hollywood into the world’s dream factory. In the 21st century, African American music has collapsed into monotone misogyny, and digital sex (see Julie Bindel) is America’s real movie business. Americans are in the gutter, looking up at porn stars. And the rest of the world is barely looking, or listening, or reading at all. (...)

Everything is derivative and nostalgic. Nothing of note happened in painting or dance — or criticism, because the task of the American critic is to write obituaries and rewrite press releases. In music, Taylor Swift, once the Great White Hope of a dying industry, emitted a scrupulously bland album by committee. The jazz album of the year was, as it was last year, a studio off cut from John Coltrane, who died in 1967. The show, or what remained of it, was stolen by Lizzo, an obese but self-affirming squawker who, befitting an age of irony and multi-tasking, is the first person to twerk and play the flute at the same time. Meanwhile at the Alamo of high culture, 87-year-old John Williams marked the Tanglewood Festival’s 80th anniversary by perpetrating selections from Star Wars and Saving Private Ryan for an audience of equally geriatric and tasteless boomers.

In a dying culture, the best cases, like Wynton Marsalis and Bob Dylan in music, are curators of the Museum of American Greatness. The worst reflect a spiral into coarse nostalgia, as the needle wears out the groove: Stadium Country, Quentin Tarantino, the decay of fiction into self-help and affirmative action. The worst of all subordinate aesthetic values to political dogma, which is why it’s an offense to point out that the decline from Duke Ellington and Aretha Franklin to A$AP Rocky and Lizzo is a slide from civilization to barbarism.

by Dominic Green, The Spectator | Read more:
Image: MTV
[ed. See also: Who’s Got the Country Music Blues? (The American Conservative).]

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Betteridge's Law

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no". It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. (...)

Ian Betteridge's name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?".(Schonfeld 2009):

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr's suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles:

If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'.

by Wikipedia |  Read more: 

Must the House Vote to Authorize an Impeachment Inquiry?

Since taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm election of 2018, the Democrats have been exploring how it might be possible to pursue an impeachment inquiry while retaining some plausible deniability about whether they are actually doing so. As President Trump has continued to behave in his usual manner, and as the Democratic caucus has gradually coalesced around the view that an impeachment might be necessary, the process has become more explicit. As the center of gravity in the caucus shifted toward impeachment after the revelation of Trump’s phone call within Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi finally announced that the “House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”

But what counts as an “official impeachment inquiry,” and what is required to move forward with one? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sent a letter to Pelosi asking her to “suspend” the impeachment inquiry until “transparent and equitable rules and procedures” could be put in place and a floor vote authorizing an impeachment inquiry could be taken. Pelosi responded that no vote was necessary. Now White House Counsel Pat Cipollone has written to Pelosi informing her that the administration will not cooperate with the House’s “constitutionally invalid” impeachment inquiry, in part because the House had not voted “to authorize such a dramatic constitutional step” or provided the president with “due process protections.”

Is it constitutionally acceptable for the House speaker to initiate an impeachment “by means of nothing more than a press conference”? In short, yes.

The constitutional text on this issue is spare. The Constitution simply says that the House has the sole power of impeachment. Ultimately, if the House wants to impeach someone, it needs to muster a simple majority in support of articles of impeachment that can be presented to the Senate. How the House gets there is entirely up to the chamber itself to determine. There is no constitutional requirement that the House take two successful votes on impeachment, one to authorize some kind of inquiry and one to ratify whatever emerges from that inquiry. An impeachment inquiry is not “invalid” because there has been no vote to formally launch it, and any eventual impeachment would not be “invalid” because the process that led to it did not feature a floor vote authorizing a specific inquiry. (...)

Impeachment has frequently been analogized to a grand jury indictment, and the analogy is informative here. The House is a prosecutorial body in an impeachment context. The House members themselves must decide what steps they think are necessary to satisfy themselves that a particular impeachment is warranted and to prepare a credible case that can be argued in the Senate, where the defense will have an opportunity to poke holes in it. It might be prudent for the House to create a more robust adversarial proceeding in order to help the House members themselves assess the strength of the case, but any such process is for the benefit of informing the House, not protecting the accused from a possible impeachment. A federal officer has no particular right not to be impeached, and the bar for impeachment is consequently set low.

The Senate trial, by contrast, provides an opportunity for an accused officer to mount a robust defense, plead his or her case, and seek total vindication. The procedural bar for a Senate conviction is set high. There, the House can have no expectation of a sympathetic hearing and the defendant can make use of the fact that a bipartisan supermajority in the upper chamber will almost always be necessary to remove him or her from office. It might not be possible to impeach a ham sandwich in the House, but the accused has no expectation of a fair or bipartisan hearing in the lower chamber.

Politically, the Democratic leadership is avoiding a vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry because thus far they seem uncertain whether they could win such a vote. If a vote authorizing an impeachment is seen by some citizens as indistinguishable from a vote to impeach, then House members in purple districts might well prefer to know how strong the case for impeachment actually is before they have to go on record effectively supporting an impeachment. In a perfect world, voters would be able to distinguish support for an impeachment inquiry from support for an impeachment—but in our imperfect world, the House leadership is expected to protect caucus members from unnecessary politically damaging votes. As a matter of institutional design, Congress’s ability to inquire into misconduct should not be held hostage by such electoral calculations. Rather, the system should allow for a process that allows the investigation of allegations of misconduct and uncovering of the facts, and that forces politicians to take responsibility for how they respond to those facts. A system that instead puts a thumb on the scale on the side of hiding potential misconduct is hardly in the public interest, even if it might serve the immediate personal or partisan interests of those who fear that their conduct might come under scrutiny. Americans should be reluctant to build into constitutional practice such a bias toward obstructing investigations. The constitutional framers did not themselves build in that kind of bias.

by Keith E. Whittington, LawFare | Read more:
Image:D. Myles Cullen

Don't Force Patients Off Opioids Abruptly, New Guidelines Say, Warning Of Severe Risks

There's no doubt that opioids have been massively overprescribed in U.S. In the haste to address the epidemic, there's been pressure on doctors to reduce prescriptions of these drugs — and in fact prescriptions are declining. But along the way, some chronic pain patients have been forced to rapidly taper or discontinue the drugs altogether.

Now, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a new message for doctors: Abrupt changes to a patient's opioid prescription could harm them.

On Thursday, the agency issued new guidelines for physicians on how best to manage opioid prescriptions. They recommend a deliberate approach to lowering doses for chronic pain patients who have been on long-term opioid therapy.

"It must be done slowly and carefully," says Adm. Brett P. Giroir, MD, assistant secretary for health for HHS. "If opioids are going to be reduced in a chronic patient it really needs to be done in a patient-centered, compassionate, guided way."

This is a course correction of sorts. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued prescribing guidelines. Those highlighted the risks of addiction and overdose and encouraged providers to lower doses when possible. In response, many doctors began to limit their pain pill prescriptions, and in some cases cut patients off.

These guidelines led to rigid rules in some cases. Giroir says it's concerning that some clinicians, policymakers, and health systems are "interpreting guidelines as mandates."

"A guideline is a guideline it's not a mandate or a rule that works for every single patient," he says.

The new HHS guidance cautions that a hasty removal of the medication can lead to acute withdrawal symptoms, provoke thoughts of suicide and lead patients to seek out illicit opioids "as a way to treat their pain or withdrawal symptoms."

Entirely discontinuing opioids for a chronic pain patient is not always appropriate, according to the guidelines: "Unless there are indications of a life-threatening issue, such as warning signs of impending overdose, HHS does not recommend abrupt opioid dose reduction or discontinuation." (...)

A growing concern about prescribing rules

The new tapering guidance follows earlier efforts to signal that too much emphasis on reducing opioids for chronic pain patients may backfire.

Earlier this year, both the CDC and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration put out statements about the dangers of suddenly discontinuing the medication or rapidly decreasing the dose.

In March, more than 300 doctors and health professionals, including three former White House Drug Czars, warned the CDC in a letter of the "widespread misapplication" of its 2016 opioid prescribing guidelines for chronic pain.

Even though the guidelines were voluntary and geared toward primary care doctors, the recommendations became a template for states and others seeking to minimize the risk of opioids.

Dr. Stefan Kertesz, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, was a lead author on that letter to the CDC.

He says the new guidance from HHS does well to highlight the risks of tapering, but there are still many obstacles to making it "useful and protective of patients."

"We have to be concerned that the governmental and nongovernmental agencies continue to incentivize dose reductions that violate the precepts of this document and hold no one accountable for harm to patients when doses are forced down across the board," says Kertesz.

Clinicians across the country remain under immense pressures to curb prescribing. Kertesz notes that Medicaid, as well as states and private payers, still have policies that lead to forced dose reductions.

"Until those laws, regulations, quality metrics and criteria are revisited, we will have to live with a heart-breaking conflict between what well-intentioned experts think is good practice and what our health system and laws incentivize," he says.

In the current environment, doctors worry prescribing opioids could endanger their ability to practice, especially if state medical boards or law enforcement agencies identify them as high prescribers in the electronic databases maintained by states.

Kertesz says a growing body of research is undermining the "foolish assumption that because pills have gone down, safety has been created."

"Taper might help some patients if you do it 100% correctly," he says, "And in reality, we are mostly doing it wrong."

Increasingly, patients with chronic pain are echoing these concerns as their doses are being lowered or discontinued.

Lessons learned from a Seattle clinic

The dangers of paring back opioid prescribing came into sharp focus for Dr. Joseph Merrill when his primary care clinic in Seattle tightened its rules around opioid prescribing nearly a decade ago.

The new policy at Harborview Medical Center aimed for a more cautious approach to prescribing the pills – measures like urine drug tests, dosing recommendations and guidance to taper patients on higher doses.

"We felt there was enough data to show high doses of opioids for chronic pain could be unsafe," says Merrill, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

After the rules took effect, Merrill began to notice certain patients weren't faring well. Some were missing appointments. Others appeared to be using illicit drugs or misusing their prescriptions.

"We had the sense that we were losing some patients," he says.

Over the next five years, the clinic used an in-house registry to track 572 of its patients who were on chronic opioid therapy for pain. More than half had their opioids discontinued.

Merrill says the results were a "wake-up call"

About 20% of the patients died during the study period of all causes. Close to 4% died of a definite or possible overdose and most of those were people whose prescriptions were stopped.

"The most concerning finding was that the group of patients whose opioid prescriptions were discontinued had a higher rate of overdose death than the group who stayed on their opioid medications," Merrill says. (...)

About half of the patients who were discontinued later experienced an opioid-related hospitalization or emergency department visit.

"The typical rate of discontinuation was one day, which essentially means people were not tapered at all – they were just stopped," Mark says.

She says the University of Washington study is more evidence that doctors don't feel well-equipped to help patients who are potentially misusing opioids, "other than by having them discontinue opioids which resulted in as high or higher opioid death rates." (...)

In the big picture, Merrill says, the seesaw in opioid prescribing – from liberal dispensation to the current climate of restriction – needs to stop.

"I think neither of those extremes is appropriate," he says.

by Will Stone and Allison Aubrey, NPR |  Read more: 

Image: Douglas Sacha/Getty Images

[ed. Who could have known? Well, actually, anyone with half a brain. I've been highlighting this problem for years. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. It's as if during the AIDS epidemic the only response doctors, hospitals and politicians could come up with was to tell patients to stop having sex. They've all been complicit in making this epidemic worse. It remains to be seen whether there'll be any real change.]

Shitty or genius?
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The Dawn of the Age of Geoengineering

Let’s be honest. The world’s governments might not coordinate to stop climate change.

Between bickering over which country is paying the bill, the fact that the major costs of climate change are decades away, and countless more urgent political problems caused by the sudden surge of populism around the world, it’s possible sensible policies like carbon taxes won’t be fully adopted in time.

Fortunately, technology and entrepreneurship are contributing solutions. Solar and wind energy is plummeting in price. Transport is electrifying because it turns out electric cars are simply better than conventional ones.

But also, there is still a chunk of humanity with the determination, audacity, and ingenuity to succeed on a massive scale where political coordination has so far failed. Meet the geoengineers.

Here are four of my favorite large-scale projects to improve Earth’s environment.

Pleistocene Park

I’ve been following the effort to bring Mammoths back to Siberia since 2017 when I read Ross Andersen’s spellbinding feature on the subject in The Atlantic (highly suggested).

The core idea is delightfully counterintuitive: Siberia has too many trees. In ages past, Siberia used to be grassland, and today it is mostly forest. Although trees can sequester carbon in their trunks and branches (at least until they burn or decompose), Siberian forests have significant drawbacks with respect to climate change.

First, forests don’t reflect a lot of solar radiation. A treeless, grassy Siberia would increase Earth’s albedo, reflecting more solar energy back into space. Forests absorb more solar radiation and put it into the ground as heat.

Second, forests are poor habitats for snow-trampling herd animals. In the winter, a thick layer of snow acts as an insulator on the permafrost, preventing frigid above-ground temperatures from reaching deep into the Earth’s crust, where they can shore up the frozenness of the permafrost. When large herds of grazing animals trample the snow, its insulating properties are reduced and the permafrost can hard freeze. Forests reduce these snow-trampling grazing populations.

These effects matter because Arctic permafrost is potentially a carbon bomb. Legions of microbes lay in suspended animation in the frozen soil. If the temperature of the soil rises only 3 more degrees (C), the microbes will come to life, eat, reproduce, and start generating carbon emissions. Arctic permafrost contains more carbon than all the planet’s forests and the atmosphere combined. Thawing permafrost could therefore be a tipping point, leading to significantly more carbon in the atmosphere and a runaway warming scenario. An increase in albedo from converting the terrain to steppe would mean that the Siberian permafrost would absorb less heat, allowing it to stay frozen longer. And the trampled snow from the return of herding animals would allow Siberia’s frigid winter air to keep the permafrost deep-frozen.

So how do we convert Siberia to grassland? Nikita Zimov is already doing it. He is director of Pleistocene Park, a 144 km² grassy Siberian reserve founded by his father, gonzo scientist Sergey Zimov. The Zimovs have spent the past two decades ripping up trees and reintroducing grazing herds, including bison, moose, wild horses, yaks, and reindeer.

The plan is working. Nikita Zimov says the permafrost, which is at around –3º outside the park, is 17º colder (!) inside the park. The question then, is how to expand the park as efficiently as possible.

Here’s where the project gets really audacious: the plan is to bring back woolly mammoths. Like much other megafauna, mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, hunted to extinction by our human ancestors. Mammoths provided the Pleistocene with the valuable services of grazing, trampling snow and moving it around to get to the grass below, and uprooting trees. Nothing will make a mammoth happier, it is thought, than ripping a tree out of the icy ground, just as modern elephants enjoy doing the same in the warmer ground of Africa. Based on everything we know, mammoths were a critical part of the Siberian Steppe ecosystem, and their extinction at human hands is what caused the forests to take hold.

To bring back woolly mammoths, we don’t need mammoth DNA perfectly preserved in amber as in Jurassic Park. Instead, geneticists are starting from mammoths’ closest living relative, the Asian elephant, and adding genes that provide traits that could help them to survive in cold climates. If we give Asian elephants a nice layer of subcutaneous fat, a thicker coat of hair, smaller ears (so that the extremities don’t freeze), and some hemoglobin adapted for the cold, that may be enough to allow them to survive in the cold, Siberian winter. Modify perhaps as few as 50 genes. From there, it is thought, evolution will resume and make them more mammoth-like.

This genetic work is going on at the Wyss Institute at Harvard, led by ubiquitous geneticist George Church. There, scientists are identifying genes that could aid winter survival of Asian elephants, CRISPRing them into living elephant fibroblasts, and reprogramming the fibroblasts into pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells, with luck, will be used to produce new “mammoth” embryos. Once enough likely-to-survive mammoth-like elephants are incubated (artificially, because Asian elephants are endangered) to form a herd, they can be released into Pleistocene Park to help transform, maintain, and expand it—and, over a few generations, to transform themselves into better mammoths.

by Eli Dourado |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Can we really prevent all warming for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geoengineering technique of Marine Cloud Brightening? (LessWrong)

Costco Doesn’t Make Much Money Selling You Groceries

Have you ever wondered how Costco makes money?

Most people know that the membership-only mega-retailer sells items in large quantities at what are basically wholesale prices, so where’s the profit in that? Turns out, it’s all in the membership fees, according to a Twitter thread that went viral over the weekend.

The thread by an investor explained to the general public what most experts in retail circles have known for some time — Costco’s high volume of sales and rapid turnover of inventory are not the real reason the company is so profitable: the memberships are. The cheapest membership option is the Gold Star card, which costs $60 annually. The more expensive membership card, the Gold Star Executive card, costs $120 a year and has added perks like 2% cash back on eligible purchases.

Here’s how it works:

Since Costco operates at very low gross margins — if you buy 5 pounds of peanut butter for $10, the company makes only $1 off your purchase, according to the thread — it can’t make big bucks just by selling you things cheaply. But, since the retailer has developed a reputation for having consistently lower prices than its competitors, it has something called “price authority,” meaning Costco can lean on suppliers for competitive prices and also rely on consumers to steadily continue signing up for and renewing their memberships. The company had a 90% member renewal rate in the U.S. and Canada last year (and 88% worldwide), according to the company’s annual report.

There are more than 53 million paid members as of this year, according to the Twitter thread. That means Costco is on track to make $4.3 billion from memberships in 2019, which accounts for essentially all of the company’s profit so far, the thread says.

by Alix Langone, Money | Read more:
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Off the Rails

Hanoi closes trackside cafes thronged by selfie-seeking tourists.

It's the kind of shot every Instagram connoisseur yearns for: century-old railway tracks cutting through dusty backstreets, flanked by tourists drinking beer or iced tea mere inches from the slow-moving trains.

The sight has become such a draw in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi that authorities have set a weekend deadline for the removal of dozens of cafes that have cropped up, citing safety concerns.

"I love it. It's crazy, and completely different to anywhere I've been before," said Australian tourist Laura Metze, after a train rumbled by.

"I can also see why they would close it down because it's pretty dangerous."

Built in 1902 under French colonial rulers, the railway to Vietnam's northern provinces carries passengers and cargo mostly between Hanoi and the eastern city of Haiphong, and the remote towns of Lang Son and Lao Cai, on the mountainous border with China.

It uses an old-fashioned French narrow gauge, and is so old that when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited Hanoi in February for a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, he had to stop at the border and continue by car.

In Hanoi, the line brushes the rear of houses and shops as it snakes through the city's dense centre. Vendors stroll on the tracks, selling snacks on skewers, while some visitors sit on the railway lines and soak in the vibe.

In recent months, crowds of tourists have gathered along the railway to snap selfies with passing trains or lounge at trackside cafes.

On Sunday, a train had to make an emergency stop soon after leaving Hanoi railway station to avoid hitting tourists, state media said.

The next day, the city's governing body ordered the cafes removed by Saturday to "ensure traffic safety", at the request of the transport ministry.

"Though the railway cafes attract tourists, they are, in fact, violating some regulations," Ha Van Sieu, a government tourism official, told media on Tuesday.

New and creative tourism products are encouraged, but must conform to legal regulations, Sieu added.

Vietnam received 12.87 million foreign visitors in the first nine months of this year, up nearly 11% on the year, government data shows.

by Khanh Vu, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: Reuters/Kham via
[ed. See also: Has Overtourism Killed Big Sur? (Outside). I know, irony.]

Buried Treasure

Gerrymandering Font

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Toshihiko Okuya, untitled (2016)
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Jalib Johnson

[ed. See also: Red House.]

Is Your Retirement Fund Ruining Our Economy?

In the mid-2000s, Michael Burry smelled trouble in the housing market, realizing that big banks were packaging shady subprime mortgages and reselling them as surefire investments. He concluded that it would lead to a spectacular collapse, made a huge bet against the market and, ultimately, tons of money. His story was dramatized in the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis and in a Hollywood movie in which he was played by Christian Bale.

Burry recently told Bloomberg that he sees another massive bubble happening. This time, he says, it's in index funds. Instead of relying on financial experts to actively pick winners and losers, index funds buy everything in a market, passively going up and down as the entire market goes up and down. If you're saving for retirement, there's a good chance you're invested in at least one of them.

In 1995, index funds represented only 4% of the total assets invested in equity mutual funds. By 2015, that had jumped to 34%. There is now over $4 trillion in passive funds indexed to the U.S. stock market, more than the market cap of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google combined.

Index funds make a persuasive offer. Don't pursue the expensive and risky strategy of buying and selling individual stocks. Don't pay brokers or mutual funds big fees to move money around for you. Instead, just park your money in these passive moneymakers, which offer lower fees, diversified risk, and — as the data has made clear — better returns over the long run.

It sounds almost too good to be true, and Burry is arguing it is. And he's not alone in expressing concerns about the astonishing rise of index funds.

The Price Isn't Right

Actively buying and selling stocks and bonds provides a service to the market: It's called "price discovery." If something is overvalued, traders sell it. If it's undervalued, they buy it. That moves the price of the asset — and it is the crucial mechanism to make sure the price is right, signaling its true value.

But index funds don't really discover prices. Investors just dump money into these investments, which mindlessly hold stock in companies whether they're doing well or not. Burry believes the fall of active buying and selling has led to overvaluations, and he's predicting a crash in the value of the large companies held in index funds. "I just don't know what the timeline will be. Like most bubbles, the longer it goes on, the worse the crash will be," he told Bloomberg. He's now investing in small companies, which he says are often ignored by index funds.

Burry has not disclosed much about his data or methodology. And like any trader, he could be wrong. But, even if he is, concerns about index funds go well beyond bubbles.

A Specter

Legal scholars Lucian A. Bebchuk and Scott Hirst recently published a working paper called "The Specter of the Giant Three." The vast majority of money flowing into index funds are run by three companies: Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street Global Advisors. Their combined average stake in each of the top 500 American corporations (the S&P 500) has gone from 5.2% in 1998 to 20.5% in 2017.

The market for index funds, Bebchuk and Hirst argue, naturally favors bigness. Managing a trillion dollar fund is not dramatically more expensive than managing a billion dollar firm. This means the big firms can use their larger revenue streams to offer consumers lower fees, giving them a competitive advantage. Innovations in types of index funds are also easy to copy, meaning that it's especially hard for small companies to disrupt the big ones.

As more and more people put their money in index funds, Bebchuk and Hirst believe these companies will just continue getting bigger and bigger. And, unlike many other investors, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street reliably vote at shareholder meetings, which makes them even more influential when it comes to company decision-making. If trends continue, Bebhcuk and Hirst project these three companies could cast over 40% of the votes in every single one of the 500 largest American corporations within the next couple decades.

"In this Giant Three scenario, three investment managers would largely dominate shareholder voting in practically all significant U.S. companies that do not have a controlling shareholder," Bebchuk and Hirst warn. They fear this could have drastic implications for corporate governance and competition.

by Greg Rosalski, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Pixabay

When Biking and Bears Don’t Mix

The death of a ranger, Brad Treat, in 2016 was a wake-up call for grizzly bear biologists.

Mr. Treat, an avid mountain biker, was zipping along at about 25 miles an hour through dense forest near Glacier National Park in the middle of a summer afternoon when he collided with a large male grizzly bear.

Apparently startled, the bear reacted defensively and quickly killed him. A witness couldn’t see what happened but could hear it. “I heard a thud and an ‘argh,’” the unnamed witness told investigators. Then the bear made a noise “like it was hurt.” The bear disappeared before emergency responders arrived.

Dr. Christopher Servheen, who led the committee that investigated Mr. Treat’s death, said the accident prompted him to speak out publicly against recreational sports in the areas where grizzlies live.

This past summer, he tried to stop two ultramarathons in the Flathead National Forest, but the Forest Service approved the contests anyway. One was held this past weekend, at a time when bears are particularly active in foraging for food before their hibernating season begins later this year.

“We tell people not to run in grizzly bear habitat, to make noise and to be aware of their surroundings,” said Dr. Servheen, who has retired from his post as coordinator for the grizzly bear recovery program of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Agencies are permitting the very activities we are telling people not to do.”

Vast tracts of public land in the West have become favorite haunts of a growing number of mountain bikers, exploring wild areas for recreation. The Trump administration recently allowed e-bikes, or electric bikes, to be used on all federal trails where bicycles are allowed.

The increasing popularity of trail biking has brought to the fore some of the inherent conflicts in the uses of public land — natural regions or playgrounds. And while the growth of tourism may help local businesses, the forays into deeper parts of the forests by more and more people are encroaching on wildlife.

Mechanized mountain bikes and e-bikes, especially at higher speeds, are incompatible with hiking, hunting, and bird and wildlife watching, some argue. Safety is also a concern. Some mountain bikers revel at bombing down trails at 20 or 30 miles per hour on single-track trails that hikers also frequent.

And biologists like Dr. Servheen who have spent decades studying grizzlies offer reminders about protecting the bears and other wildlife that unwittingly share their territory with more people and more mechanized vehicles.

In its report on Mr. Treat’s fatal accident, the interagency committee concluded: “The bear apparently had no time to move to avoid the collision. At a speed of 20-25 miles per hour, there were only one-to-two seconds between rounding the curve, the victim seeing the bear in the trail and impacting the bear.”

Dr. Stephen Herrero, a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Calgary, spent much of his career studying grizzlies, and is the author of “Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance.” An avid mountain bike rider, he shares Dr. Servheen’s concerns.

“Bears respond to surprises usually by fleeing, but sometimes by attacking whatever it is that is surprising them,” he said. “Events like runners and bike riders and anything else that suddenly thrusts a disturbance or surprise into their environment, they sometimes respond by attacking.

“I try to avoid mountain biking in any area that is grizzly bear habitat,” Dr. Herrero said. “There are plenty of areas that aren’t.”

Bikers tend to play down the risks. Rebecca Briber, executive director of the Flathead Area Mountain Bikers, said she always carries bear spray with her on rides. “We’re always aware we are recreating in bear country,” she said. “Mountain bike-grizzly bear interactions are rare. It’s more common for hikers to be attacked.”

Other concerns include whether the increase in biking in natural areas could do more to displace grizzlies and other wildlife than hiking, because bikes cover so much more ground, Dr. Servheen said.

“The impacts are mounting because there are more and more mountain bikers and there is more pressure to go into these places with faster bikes and electric mechanized bikes,” he said. “The technology has exceeded our ability to manage it for the benefit of animals.”

Or to understand it. Some experts are raising questions about how fast-moving bikes startle not just bears, but elk, deer and other species, and disrupt their lives.

Dr. Servheen also believes that the sensational news of a grizzly bear killing a bike rider works against the bear from a public relations standpoint. “The response from many people to these kinds of attacks is that grizzly bears are dangerous and their habitat is a dangerous place,” he said. “It’s a cost the bears have to pay in terms of public support and the willingness to have grizzly bears around.”

Because the popularity of biking in these areas has grown rapidly, there is little research on its effects on wildlife. But there is a growing body of evidence that outdoor recreation of all kinds has serious consequences for wildlife.

by Jim Robbins, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Lido Vizzutti for The New York Times
[ed. This has been a problem in Alaska for years, especially where single-track trails run along salmon streams and are essentially game trails. Bikers there are just as bull-headed, and to suggest that a can of bear spray is going to protect you is ridiculous. One time, I rounded a blind corner on a bicycle and nearly broadsided a grizzly crossing the trail. Missed it by a micro-second and literally brushed it's butt going by. I didn't even have time to press my hand brakes.] 

Etienne Buyse
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