Saturday, October 26, 2019
When GoFundMe Gets Ugly
GoFundMe has become the largest crowdfunding platform in the world— 50 million people gave more than $5 billion on the site through 2017, the last year fundraising totals were released. The company used to take 5 percent of each donation, but two years ago, when Facebook eliminated some charges for fundraisers, GoFundMe announced that it would do the same and just ask donors for tips. (Company officials wouldn’t say whether this model is profitable, though the site does have other sources of revenue, such as selling its online tools to nonprofits; the “grand ambition,” Solomon told me, is to have all internet charity, whether initiated by individuals or large organizations, flow through GoFundMe.)
The spectacularly fruitful GoFundMes are the ones that make the news—$24 million for Time’s Up, Hollywood’s legal-defense fund to fight sexual harassment; $7.8 million for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando—but most efforts fizzle without coming close to their financial goals. Comparing the hits and misses reveals a lot about what matters most to us, our divisions and our connections, our generosity and our pettiness. And even the blockbuster successes, the stories that make the valedictory lap that is GoFundMe’s homepage, are much more complicated than any viral marketer would care to admit. (...)
Gofundme campaigns that go viral tend to follow a template similar to Chauncy’s Chance: A relatively well-off person stumbles upon a downtrodden but deserving “other” and shares his or her story; good-hearted strangers are moved to donate a few dollars, and thus, in the relentlessly optimistic language of GoFundMe, “transform a life.” The call-and-response between the have-nots and the haves poignantly testifies to the holes in our safety net—and to the ways people have jerry-rigged community to fill them. In an era when membership in churches, labor unions, and other civic organizations has flatlined, GoFundMe offers a way to help and be helped by your figurative neighbor.
What doesn’t fit neatly into GoFundMe’s salvation narratives are the limits of private efforts like Matt White’s. GoFundMe campaigns blend the well-intentioned with the cringeworthy, and not infrequently bring to mind the “White Savior Industrial Complex”—the writer Teju Cole’s phrase for the way sentimental stories of uplift can hide underlying structural problems. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,” Cole wrote in 2012. “It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” (...)
Search the GoFundMe site for cancer or bills or tuition or accident or operation and you’ll find pages of campaigns with a couple thousand, or a couple hundred, or zero dollars in contributions. While the platform can be a stopgap solution for families on the financial brink—one study estimated that it prevented about 500 bankruptcies from medical-related debt a year, the most common reason for bankruptcy in the U.S.—the average campaign earns less than $2,000 from a couple dozen donors; the majority don’t meet their stated goal. (...)
Part of the allure of GoFundMe is that it’s a meritocratic way to allocate resources—the wisdom of the crowd can identify and reward those who most need help. But researchers analyzing medical crowdfunding have concluded that one of the major factors in a campaign’s success is who you are—and who you know. Which sounds a lot like getting into Yale. Most donor pools are made up of friends, family, and acquaintances, giving an advantage to relatively affluent people with large, well-resourced networks. A recent Canadian study found that people crowdfunding for health reasons tend to live in high-income, high-education, and high-homeownership zip codes, as opposed to areas with greater need. As a result, the authors wrote, medical crowdfunding can “entrench or exacerbate socioeconomic inequality.” Solomon calls this “hogwash.” The researchers made assumptions based on “limited data sets,” he said, adding that GoFundMe could not give them better information, because of privacy concerns.
The Roys did not have a robust social-media network, or real-life one, for that matter. A native of England, Richard has no family nearby, and his wife’s only relatives are her aging mother and a sister. Laila had deleted her Facebook account not long after her twins’ premature birth, a tense, precarious time when vague well wishes and “likes” from acquaintances only made her feel more alone. Richard worked from home and had only a couple hundred Facebook friends. “Maybe if he worked for a large local company and I worked for a large local company, maybe if we were churchgoers—that’s another network. But I don’t go to church, and he doesn’t either,” Laila said. “I have been told explicitly by social workers that you should go to church just to network. But I try not to be a hypocrite.”
What’s wrong with you also influences whether you score big with medical crowdfunding, according to the University of Washington at Bothell medical anthropologist Nora Kenworthy and the media scholar Lauren Berliner, who have been studying the subject since 2013. Successful campaigns tend to focus on onetime fixes (a new prosthetic, say) rather than chronic, complicated diagnoses like Laila’s. Terminal cases and geriatric care are also tough to fundraise for, as are stigmatized conditions such as HIV and addiction- or obesity-related problems.
“It’s not difficult to imagine that people who are traditionally portrayed as more deserving, who benefit from the legacies of racial and social hierarchies in the U.S., are going to be seen as more legitimate and have better success,” Kenworthy told me. At the same time, the ubiquity of medical crowdfunding “normalizes” the idea that not everyone deserves health care just because they’re sick, she said. “It undermines the sense of a right to health care in the U.S. and replaces it with people competing for what are essentially scraps.”
by Rachel Monroe, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Akasha Rabut
The spectacularly fruitful GoFundMes are the ones that make the news—$24 million for Time’s Up, Hollywood’s legal-defense fund to fight sexual harassment; $7.8 million for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando—but most efforts fizzle without coming close to their financial goals. Comparing the hits and misses reveals a lot about what matters most to us, our divisions and our connections, our generosity and our pettiness. And even the blockbuster successes, the stories that make the valedictory lap that is GoFundMe’s homepage, are much more complicated than any viral marketer would care to admit. (...)
Gofundme campaigns that go viral tend to follow a template similar to Chauncy’s Chance: A relatively well-off person stumbles upon a downtrodden but deserving “other” and shares his or her story; good-hearted strangers are moved to donate a few dollars, and thus, in the relentlessly optimistic language of GoFundMe, “transform a life.” The call-and-response between the have-nots and the haves poignantly testifies to the holes in our safety net—and to the ways people have jerry-rigged community to fill them. In an era when membership in churches, labor unions, and other civic organizations has flatlined, GoFundMe offers a way to help and be helped by your figurative neighbor.What doesn’t fit neatly into GoFundMe’s salvation narratives are the limits of private efforts like Matt White’s. GoFundMe campaigns blend the well-intentioned with the cringeworthy, and not infrequently bring to mind the “White Savior Industrial Complex”—the writer Teju Cole’s phrase for the way sentimental stories of uplift can hide underlying structural problems. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,” Cole wrote in 2012. “It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” (...)
Search the GoFundMe site for cancer or bills or tuition or accident or operation and you’ll find pages of campaigns with a couple thousand, or a couple hundred, or zero dollars in contributions. While the platform can be a stopgap solution for families on the financial brink—one study estimated that it prevented about 500 bankruptcies from medical-related debt a year, the most common reason for bankruptcy in the U.S.—the average campaign earns less than $2,000 from a couple dozen donors; the majority don’t meet their stated goal. (...)
Part of the allure of GoFundMe is that it’s a meritocratic way to allocate resources—the wisdom of the crowd can identify and reward those who most need help. But researchers analyzing medical crowdfunding have concluded that one of the major factors in a campaign’s success is who you are—and who you know. Which sounds a lot like getting into Yale. Most donor pools are made up of friends, family, and acquaintances, giving an advantage to relatively affluent people with large, well-resourced networks. A recent Canadian study found that people crowdfunding for health reasons tend to live in high-income, high-education, and high-homeownership zip codes, as opposed to areas with greater need. As a result, the authors wrote, medical crowdfunding can “entrench or exacerbate socioeconomic inequality.” Solomon calls this “hogwash.” The researchers made assumptions based on “limited data sets,” he said, adding that GoFundMe could not give them better information, because of privacy concerns.
The Roys did not have a robust social-media network, or real-life one, for that matter. A native of England, Richard has no family nearby, and his wife’s only relatives are her aging mother and a sister. Laila had deleted her Facebook account not long after her twins’ premature birth, a tense, precarious time when vague well wishes and “likes” from acquaintances only made her feel more alone. Richard worked from home and had only a couple hundred Facebook friends. “Maybe if he worked for a large local company and I worked for a large local company, maybe if we were churchgoers—that’s another network. But I don’t go to church, and he doesn’t either,” Laila said. “I have been told explicitly by social workers that you should go to church just to network. But I try not to be a hypocrite.”
What’s wrong with you also influences whether you score big with medical crowdfunding, according to the University of Washington at Bothell medical anthropologist Nora Kenworthy and the media scholar Lauren Berliner, who have been studying the subject since 2013. Successful campaigns tend to focus on onetime fixes (a new prosthetic, say) rather than chronic, complicated diagnoses like Laila’s. Terminal cases and geriatric care are also tough to fundraise for, as are stigmatized conditions such as HIV and addiction- or obesity-related problems.
“It’s not difficult to imagine that people who are traditionally portrayed as more deserving, who benefit from the legacies of racial and social hierarchies in the U.S., are going to be seen as more legitimate and have better success,” Kenworthy told me. At the same time, the ubiquity of medical crowdfunding “normalizes” the idea that not everyone deserves health care just because they’re sick, she said. “It undermines the sense of a right to health care in the U.S. and replaces it with people competing for what are essentially scraps.”
by Rachel Monroe, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Akasha Rabut
The Not-Com Bubble Is Popping
It is easy to look at today’s crop of sinking IPOs—like Uber, Lyft, and Peloton—or scuttled public offerings, like WeWork, and see an eerie resemblance to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.
Let’s first understand what exactly that bubble was: a mania of stock speculation, in which ordinary investors—from taxi drivers to Laundromat owners to shoe-shiners—bid up the price of internet-related companies for no good reason other than “because, internet.” Companies realized that they could boost their stock price by simply adding the prefix e- (as in “e-Bay”) or the suffix com (as in Amazon.com) to their corporate names to entice, and arguably fool, nonprofessionals. “Americans could hardly run an errand without picking up a stock tip,” The New York Times reported in its postmortem.
As prices became untethered from reality, the Nasdaq index doubled in value between 1999 and 2000 without “any plausible candidate for fundamental news to support such a large revaluation,” as the economists J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin wrote in a paper on the bubble. The crash was equally swift and arbitrary. Between February 2000 and February 2002, the NASDAQ lost three-quarters of its value “again without substantial negative fundamental news,” DeLong and Magin wrote. By late 2000, more than $5 trillion in wealth had been wiped out. This sudden rise and sudden collapse in asset prices—without much change in information about the underlying assets—is the very definition of a bubble.
The current situation is different, in at least two important ways.
by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic | Read more:
But if you look closer, today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble at all. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that what’s happening today is the very opposite of the dot-com bubble.
- Both then and now, consumer-tech companies spent lavishly on advertising and struggled to find a path to profit.
- Both then and now, companies that bragged about their ability to change the world admitted suddenly that they were running out of money.
Let’s first understand what exactly that bubble was: a mania of stock speculation, in which ordinary investors—from taxi drivers to Laundromat owners to shoe-shiners—bid up the price of internet-related companies for no good reason other than “because, internet.” Companies realized that they could boost their stock price by simply adding the prefix e- (as in “e-Bay”) or the suffix com (as in Amazon.com) to their corporate names to entice, and arguably fool, nonprofessionals. “Americans could hardly run an errand without picking up a stock tip,” The New York Times reported in its postmortem.As prices became untethered from reality, the Nasdaq index doubled in value between 1999 and 2000 without “any plausible candidate for fundamental news to support such a large revaluation,” as the economists J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin wrote in a paper on the bubble. The crash was equally swift and arbitrary. Between February 2000 and February 2002, the NASDAQ lost three-quarters of its value “again without substantial negative fundamental news,” DeLong and Magin wrote. By late 2000, more than $5 trillion in wealth had been wiped out. This sudden rise and sudden collapse in asset prices—without much change in information about the underlying assets—is the very definition of a bubble.
The current situation is different, in at least two important ways.
by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Bright Leaf
A habit. A comfort. An addiction. An indulgence. A nuisance. A crime. A vice. A sin. An error. A joy.
Surprising cigarette-smoking locations:
The dentist’s chair in Italy. The dentist was a friend of the family with whom I was staying. His name was Gigi and he could see me that afternoon. It was a gum abscess, quite painful. He was both quick and careful while fixing it.
Then I felt faint.
“Just stay there,” he said. “Don’t get up.” He brought me some water and put his hand on my arm. “Have a cigarette,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
It did.
Driving lessons at the age of thirty-five. Driving made me nervous, which was why I’d put off learning for so long. I went for one jerky spin around the parking lot with my instructor. Then: “Pull over.”
I came to an abrupt stop.
“Lady,” he asked, “Do you smoke?”
“Yes.”
“So will you please have a cigarette. You’re too tense.”
“I don’t know if I can smoke and drive at the same time,” I said.
“You gotta learn. Might as well do it all at once.”
In Charles DeGaulle airport. Decades after smoking had been banned in the air and then almost everywhere else, I found a small, yellowed room on the floor below gate access with a sign on the door in three languages: SMOKING. Inside, several travelers were stoking up for their voyages. I joined them. I had four cigarettes in a row, enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. I was halfway across the Atlantic before I wanted another, and by then I thought I could make it. (...)
People do not hesitate to tell me to stop smoking and to inform me how dangerous it is, in case I haven’t heard about that. Some kinds of bad behavior are off-limits for comment: drinking too much, eating too much, spending time with idiots or losers. Doing those things may provoke disapproval, but almost nobody will criticize the person in public. Smoking is not like that. People often justify this by talking about secondhand smoke, but since I don’t smoke inside and they aren’t exposed to my secondhand smoke, this argument doesn’t have much weight.
At eight-thirty one morning I was walking to work at my proofreading job through an almost-deserted Harvard Square. Another woman was walking about fifteen feet in front of me. I lit a cigarette. She began waving her hands around her head and making little coughing sounds. After a block of this, she turned around.
“Would you put that cigarette out,” she said. She had a disdainful, pained expression.
“I think Harvard Square is big enough for both of us,” I said.
I crossed the street, but I kept smoking. (...)
What is smoking for? People who don’t smoke think it’s for feeding an addiction, and they’re right. Once you’ve started smoking, it’s hard to stop. But that’s a narrow definition. There’s a physical addiction and there’s also a spiritual addiction. Perhaps you could call it a metaphysical addiction.
To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with.
It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something. Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore. I’m grateful that I can’t smoke inside anymore. Now, about once an hour, I can stop whatever I’m doing without making an excuse for stopping it, and go outside. Then I am with birds and trees, or with skyscrapers and trucks, or with rain, or with the sunset that is beginning, pink and streaky, over in the west. The whole world is there and I am also there, but I have nothing to do except watch it or ignore it and smoke my cigarette.
Smoking is also a punctuation mark, probably a period, but sometimes an exclamation point. Dinner’s in the oven, time for a cigarette. Did all the errands on my list, cigarette! Finished reading that book, emptied the dishwasher, got through to that person who never answers the phone: cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.
And a clock. Smoking is both a marker of the passage of time and a way to elude time. I know how long an hour is because nicotine tells me. Then the cigarette gives me four or five minutes (I am not sure how many minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette) that are not exactly minutes. They are pure existence. (...)
Though it’s embarrassing to admit, I didn’t want to participate in the general wellness culture. I didn’t want to be one of the many people who were improving themselves by going on juice fasts, cutting out red meat, or meditating daily. Smoking was my meditation. I didn’t want to hear from people who’d been telling me or even begging me to stop smoking how wonderful it was that I had finally done so. I had (and still have) an adolescent kind of rebelliousness. I saw that, and I knew it was ridiculous and petulant and inappropriate (a terrible word used by people who were on juice fasts or who didn’t eat red meat) for a supposedly adult person. That was one reason.
The main reason, though, was that I enjoyed it.
Surprising cigarette-smoking locations:
The dentist’s chair in Italy. The dentist was a friend of the family with whom I was staying. His name was Gigi and he could see me that afternoon. It was a gum abscess, quite painful. He was both quick and careful while fixing it.
Then I felt faint.
“Just stay there,” he said. “Don’t get up.” He brought me some water and put his hand on my arm. “Have a cigarette,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”It did.
Driving lessons at the age of thirty-five. Driving made me nervous, which was why I’d put off learning for so long. I went for one jerky spin around the parking lot with my instructor. Then: “Pull over.”
I came to an abrupt stop.
“Lady,” he asked, “Do you smoke?”
“Yes.”
“So will you please have a cigarette. You’re too tense.”
“I don’t know if I can smoke and drive at the same time,” I said.
“You gotta learn. Might as well do it all at once.”
In Charles DeGaulle airport. Decades after smoking had been banned in the air and then almost everywhere else, I found a small, yellowed room on the floor below gate access with a sign on the door in three languages: SMOKING. Inside, several travelers were stoking up for their voyages. I joined them. I had four cigarettes in a row, enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. I was halfway across the Atlantic before I wanted another, and by then I thought I could make it. (...)
People do not hesitate to tell me to stop smoking and to inform me how dangerous it is, in case I haven’t heard about that. Some kinds of bad behavior are off-limits for comment: drinking too much, eating too much, spending time with idiots or losers. Doing those things may provoke disapproval, but almost nobody will criticize the person in public. Smoking is not like that. People often justify this by talking about secondhand smoke, but since I don’t smoke inside and they aren’t exposed to my secondhand smoke, this argument doesn’t have much weight.
At eight-thirty one morning I was walking to work at my proofreading job through an almost-deserted Harvard Square. Another woman was walking about fifteen feet in front of me. I lit a cigarette. She began waving her hands around her head and making little coughing sounds. After a block of this, she turned around.
“Would you put that cigarette out,” she said. She had a disdainful, pained expression.
“I think Harvard Square is big enough for both of us,” I said.
I crossed the street, but I kept smoking. (...)
What is smoking for? People who don’t smoke think it’s for feeding an addiction, and they’re right. Once you’ve started smoking, it’s hard to stop. But that’s a narrow definition. There’s a physical addiction and there’s also a spiritual addiction. Perhaps you could call it a metaphysical addiction.
To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with.
It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something. Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore. I’m grateful that I can’t smoke inside anymore. Now, about once an hour, I can stop whatever I’m doing without making an excuse for stopping it, and go outside. Then I am with birds and trees, or with skyscrapers and trucks, or with rain, or with the sunset that is beginning, pink and streaky, over in the west. The whole world is there and I am also there, but I have nothing to do except watch it or ignore it and smoke my cigarette.
Smoking is also a punctuation mark, probably a period, but sometimes an exclamation point. Dinner’s in the oven, time for a cigarette. Did all the errands on my list, cigarette! Finished reading that book, emptied the dishwasher, got through to that person who never answers the phone: cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.
And a clock. Smoking is both a marker of the passage of time and a way to elude time. I know how long an hour is because nicotine tells me. Then the cigarette gives me four or five minutes (I am not sure how many minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette) that are not exactly minutes. They are pure existence. (...)
Though it’s embarrassing to admit, I didn’t want to participate in the general wellness culture. I didn’t want to be one of the many people who were improving themselves by going on juice fasts, cutting out red meat, or meditating daily. Smoking was my meditation. I didn’t want to hear from people who’d been telling me or even begging me to stop smoking how wonderful it was that I had finally done so. I had (and still have) an adolescent kind of rebelliousness. I saw that, and I knew it was ridiculous and petulant and inappropriate (a terrible word used by people who were on juice fasts or who didn’t eat red meat) for a supposedly adult person. That was one reason.
The main reason, though, was that I enjoyed it.
by Susanna Kaysen, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Federico Faruffini: 'La Lectora'. Wikimedia Commons.
Friday, October 25, 2019
Just 6% of US adults on Twitter account for 73% of Political Tweets
A small number of prolific U.S. Twitter users create the majority of tweets, and that extends to Twitter discussions around politics, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center out today. Building on an earlier study, which discovered that 10% of users created 80% of tweets from U.S. adults, the organization today says that just 6% of U.S. adults on Twitter account for 73% of tweets about national politics.
Though your experience on Twitter may differ, based on who you follow, the majority of Twitter users don’t mention politics in their tweets.
In fact, Pew found that 69% never tweeted about politics or tweeted about the topic just once. Meanwhile, across all tweets from U.S. adults, only 13% of tweets were focused on national politics.
The study was based on 1.1 million public tweets from June 2018 to June 2019, Pew says (2,427 users participated).
Similar to its earlier report about how prolific users dominate the overall conversation, Pew found there’s also a small group of very active Twitter users dominating the conversation about national politics — and they all tend to be heavy news consumers and more polarized in their viewpoints.
Only 22% of U.S. adults even have a Twitter account, and of those, only 31% are defined as “political tweeters” — that is, they’ve posted at least five tweets and have posted at least twice about politics during the study period.
Within this broader group of political tweeters, just 6% are defined as “prolific” — meaning they’ve posted at least 10 tweets and at least 25% of their tweets mention national politics.
This small subset then goes on to create 73% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the subject of national politics.
What’s concerning about the data is that it’s those who are either far to the left or far to the right who are the ones dominating the political conversation on Twitter’s platform. A majority of the prolific political tweeters (55%) say they identify as either “very liberal” or “very conservative.” Among the non-political tweeting crowd, only 28% chose a more polarized label for themselves.
This polarized subgroup also heavily leans left. For example, those who strongly approve of President Trump generated 25% of all tweets mentioning national politics. But those who strongly disapprove of Trump generated 72% of all tweets mentioning national politics. (They’re also responsible for 80% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the platform.)
This isn’t a fully representative picture of U.S. politics. The share of U.S. adults on Twitter who strongly disapprove of Trump (55%) is 7 percentage points higher than the share of the general public that holds this view (48%).
Trump supporters, as a result, are under-represented on Twitter. Perhaps this is because they’ve flocked to alternate platforms; or because they don’t tweet their views as often in public; or because they violate Twitter’s policies more often, resulting in bans. Or as is likely, it’s a combination of factors. In any event, the reasoning was beyond the scope of this study.
The study also found the prolific tweeters are highly engaged with the news cycle; 92% follow the news “most of the time,” compared to 58% of non-prolific political tweeters and 53% of non-political tweeters. They’re also civically engaged, as 34% have attended a political rally or event, 57% have contacted an elected official and 38% have donated to campaigns.
Also of note, the political tweets are more likely to come from older users. Those ages 65 and older produce only 10% of all tweets from U.S. adults, but they contribute 33% of tweets related to national politics. And those 50 and older produce 29% of all tweets but contribute 73% of tweets mentioning national politics.
Though your experience on Twitter may differ, based on who you follow, the majority of Twitter users don’t mention politics in their tweets.
In fact, Pew found that 69% never tweeted about politics or tweeted about the topic just once. Meanwhile, across all tweets from U.S. adults, only 13% of tweets were focused on national politics.
The study was based on 1.1 million public tweets from June 2018 to June 2019, Pew says (2,427 users participated).Similar to its earlier report about how prolific users dominate the overall conversation, Pew found there’s also a small group of very active Twitter users dominating the conversation about national politics — and they all tend to be heavy news consumers and more polarized in their viewpoints.
Only 22% of U.S. adults even have a Twitter account, and of those, only 31% are defined as “political tweeters” — that is, they’ve posted at least five tweets and have posted at least twice about politics during the study period.
Within this broader group of political tweeters, just 6% are defined as “prolific” — meaning they’ve posted at least 10 tweets and at least 25% of their tweets mention national politics.
This small subset then goes on to create 73% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the subject of national politics.
What’s concerning about the data is that it’s those who are either far to the left or far to the right who are the ones dominating the political conversation on Twitter’s platform. A majority of the prolific political tweeters (55%) say they identify as either “very liberal” or “very conservative.” Among the non-political tweeting crowd, only 28% chose a more polarized label for themselves.
This polarized subgroup also heavily leans left. For example, those who strongly approve of President Trump generated 25% of all tweets mentioning national politics. But those who strongly disapprove of Trump generated 72% of all tweets mentioning national politics. (They’re also responsible for 80% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the platform.)
This isn’t a fully representative picture of U.S. politics. The share of U.S. adults on Twitter who strongly disapprove of Trump (55%) is 7 percentage points higher than the share of the general public that holds this view (48%).
Trump supporters, as a result, are under-represented on Twitter. Perhaps this is because they’ve flocked to alternate platforms; or because they don’t tweet their views as often in public; or because they violate Twitter’s policies more often, resulting in bans. Or as is likely, it’s a combination of factors. In any event, the reasoning was beyond the scope of this study.
The study also found the prolific tweeters are highly engaged with the news cycle; 92% follow the news “most of the time,” compared to 58% of non-prolific political tweeters and 53% of non-political tweeters. They’re also civically engaged, as 34% have attended a political rally or event, 57% have contacted an elected official and 38% have donated to campaigns.
Also of note, the political tweets are more likely to come from older users. Those ages 65 and older produce only 10% of all tweets from U.S. adults, but they contribute 33% of tweets related to national politics. And those 50 and older produce 29% of all tweets but contribute 73% of tweets mentioning national politics.
by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: Pew Research Center
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Why We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
There’s a quote that’s stuck with me for some time from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom: “You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so f***ing smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?”
American urbanists and bike advocates are smart, or at least well informed. We know how important cycling is. We are educated about cycling cities in other parts of the world and how they are so much better for health, well-being, economics, traffic, pollution, climate, equity, personal freedom, and on and on.
But if we’re so smart how come we lose so goddamn always?
Why is the best we seem to be able to accomplish just a few miles of striped asphalt bike “lanes,” or if we’re lucky, a few blocks of plastic pylons—“protected” bike lanes?
Our current model is to beg for twigs
More often than not, bike infrastructure is created reactively. Typically in response to a collision or near collision with a car, an individual or advocacy group identifies a single route that needs better infrastructure. We gather community support and lobby local officials for the desired change, trying as hard as we can to ask for the cheapest, smallest changes so that our requests will be seen as realistic.
What’s the problem with this model?
It’s like imagining a bridge and asking for twigs—useless, unable to bear any meaningful weight, easily broken. And it’s treating bike infrastructure like a hopeless charity case.
This makes bike infrastructure seem like a small, special-interest demand that produces no real results in terms of shifting to sustainable transportation, and it makes those giving up road space and tax dollars feel as though they are supporting a hopeless charity.
But when roads, highways, and bridges are designed and built, they aren’t done one neighborhood at a time, one city-council approval at a time. We don’t build a few miles of track, or lay down some asphalt wherever there is “local support” and then leave 10-mile gaps in between.
And yet this is exactly how we “plan” bike infrastructure.
Bike lanes are intermittent at best in most North American cities, and since they are usually paint jobs that put cyclists between fast-moving traffic and parked cars with doors that capriciously swing open, only experienced riders brave them. The lanes are easily blocked anyway, by police, delivery trucks, and film crews, if not random cars banking on the low likelihood of being ticketed.
This kind of bike “infrastructure” doesn’t actually do very much to protect existing cyclists, let alone encourage and inspire the general population to start cycling.
Why are we settling for easily broken twigs? The total number of people on bikes and other micromobility modes like scooters and skateboards is large and growing. An enormous force has been divided and conquered, splintered among thousands of neighborhoods.
In the grand scheme of things, the twig bike lanes we fight for aren’t going to create the significant mode shift needed for the environmental, social, and safety gains we hope to achieve. No one wants to fight for twigs. This cycle does nothing to inspire and grow a strong pro-micromobility movement.
Cars and trucks get billions in federal, state, and local money. Governments can mindlessly belch out vast sums for highway widenings—see the $1.6 billion spent on a single-lane addition to the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, even though we’ve known for years that it would not make a dent in travel times. With all this money seemingly available for car infrastructure, some of which is absolutely useless or makes traffic worse, there’s only a pittance devoted to robust bike networks. Why?
Bigger is better for infrastructure projects
For infrastructure projects, the larger you make it, the bigger the engineering and construction firms vying to get lucrative contracts, the more jobs are created, and bigger ribbon-cutting ceremonies politicians can go to. Expensive projects get media coverage, fire up the imagination, and grab hold of valuable mind share.
Our tweets and op-eds may vaunt the vital virtues of car-free mobility, but our infrastructure demands and budget sizes sadly do not. By lowballing our demands, we micromobilists are pitching ourselves as a niche, special-interest group: We are tacitly agreeing that cars are and should be the dominant mode of transportation, making our near nonexistent position in the budgetary pecking order inevitable. We also leave billions on the table by doing little to go after state and federal transportation funds.
by Terenig Topjian, City Lab | Read more:
American urbanists and bike advocates are smart, or at least well informed. We know how important cycling is. We are educated about cycling cities in other parts of the world and how they are so much better for health, well-being, economics, traffic, pollution, climate, equity, personal freedom, and on and on.But if we’re so smart how come we lose so goddamn always?
Why is the best we seem to be able to accomplish just a few miles of striped asphalt bike “lanes,” or if we’re lucky, a few blocks of plastic pylons—“protected” bike lanes?
Our current model is to beg for twigs
More often than not, bike infrastructure is created reactively. Typically in response to a collision or near collision with a car, an individual or advocacy group identifies a single route that needs better infrastructure. We gather community support and lobby local officials for the desired change, trying as hard as we can to ask for the cheapest, smallest changes so that our requests will be seen as realistic.
What’s the problem with this model?
It’s like imagining a bridge and asking for twigs—useless, unable to bear any meaningful weight, easily broken. And it’s treating bike infrastructure like a hopeless charity case.
This makes bike infrastructure seem like a small, special-interest demand that produces no real results in terms of shifting to sustainable transportation, and it makes those giving up road space and tax dollars feel as though they are supporting a hopeless charity.
But when roads, highways, and bridges are designed and built, they aren’t done one neighborhood at a time, one city-council approval at a time. We don’t build a few miles of track, or lay down some asphalt wherever there is “local support” and then leave 10-mile gaps in between.
And yet this is exactly how we “plan” bike infrastructure.
Bike lanes are intermittent at best in most North American cities, and since they are usually paint jobs that put cyclists between fast-moving traffic and parked cars with doors that capriciously swing open, only experienced riders brave them. The lanes are easily blocked anyway, by police, delivery trucks, and film crews, if not random cars banking on the low likelihood of being ticketed.
This kind of bike “infrastructure” doesn’t actually do very much to protect existing cyclists, let alone encourage and inspire the general population to start cycling.
Why are we settling for easily broken twigs? The total number of people on bikes and other micromobility modes like scooters and skateboards is large and growing. An enormous force has been divided and conquered, splintered among thousands of neighborhoods.
In the grand scheme of things, the twig bike lanes we fight for aren’t going to create the significant mode shift needed for the environmental, social, and safety gains we hope to achieve. No one wants to fight for twigs. This cycle does nothing to inspire and grow a strong pro-micromobility movement.
Cars and trucks get billions in federal, state, and local money. Governments can mindlessly belch out vast sums for highway widenings—see the $1.6 billion spent on a single-lane addition to the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, even though we’ve known for years that it would not make a dent in travel times. With all this money seemingly available for car infrastructure, some of which is absolutely useless or makes traffic worse, there’s only a pittance devoted to robust bike networks. Why?
Bigger is better for infrastructure projects
For infrastructure projects, the larger you make it, the bigger the engineering and construction firms vying to get lucrative contracts, the more jobs are created, and bigger ribbon-cutting ceremonies politicians can go to. Expensive projects get media coverage, fire up the imagination, and grab hold of valuable mind share.
Our tweets and op-eds may vaunt the vital virtues of car-free mobility, but our infrastructure demands and budget sizes sadly do not. By lowballing our demands, we micromobilists are pitching ourselves as a niche, special-interest group: We are tacitly agreeing that cars are and should be the dominant mode of transportation, making our near nonexistent position in the budgetary pecking order inevitable. We also leave billions on the table by doing little to go after state and federal transportation funds.
Image:Robert Galbraith/Reuters
[ed. Bike-centric planning, no. Micromobility, yes. There are lots of ways to get around (I like golf carts myself).]
On Achieving Quantum Supremacy
In a paper today in Nature, and a company blog post, Google researchers claim to have attained “quantum supremacy” for the first time. Their 53-bit quantum computer, named Sycamore, took 200 seconds to perform a calculation that, according to Google, would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. (A draft of the paper was leaked online last month.)
The calculation has almost no practical use—it spits out a string of random numbers. It was chosen just to show that Sycamore can indeed work the way a quantum computer should. Useful quantum machines are many years away, the technical hurdles are huge, and even then they’ll probably beat classical computers only at certain tasks. (See “Here’s what quantum supremacy does—and doesn’t—mean for computing.”)
But still, it’s an important milestone—one that Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, compares to the 12-second first flight by the Wright brothers. I spoke to him to understand why Google has already spent 13 years on a project that could take another decade or more to pay off.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. (Also, it was recorded before IBM published a paper disputing Google’s quantum supremacy claim.)
MIT TR: You got a quantum computer to perform a very narrow, specific task. What will it take to get to a wider demonstration of quantum supremacy?
Sundar Pichai: You would need to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer with more qubits so that you can generalize it better, execute it for longer periods of time, and hence be able to run more complex algorithms. But you know, if in any field you have a breakthrough, you start somewhere. To borrow an analogy—the Wright brothers. The first plane flew only for 12 seconds, and so there is no practical application of that. But it showed the possibility that a plane could fly.
A number of companies have quantum computers. IBM, for example, has a bunch of them online that people can use in the cloud. Why can their machines not do what Google’s has done?
The main thing I would comment on is why Google, the team, has been able to do it. It takes a lot of systems engineering—the ability to work on all layers of the stack. This is as complicated as it gets from a systems engineering perspective. You are literally starting with a wafer, and there is a team which is literally etching the gates, making the gates and then [working up] layers of the stack all the way to being able to use AI to simulate and understand the best outcome.
The last sentence of the paper says “We’re only one creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications.” Any guesses as to what those might be?
The real excitement about quantum is that the universe fundamentally works in a quantum way, so you will be able to understand nature better. It’s early days, but where quantum mechanics shines is the ability to simulate molecules, molecular processes, and I think that is where it will be the strongest. Drug discovery is a great example. Or fertilizers—the Haber process produces 2% of carbon [emissions] in the world [see Note 1]. In nature the same process gets done more efficiently.
So how far away do you think an application like improving the Haber process might be?
I would think a decade away. We are still a few years away from scaling up and building quantum computers that will work well enough. Other potential applications [could include] designing better batteries. Anyway, you’re dealing with chemistry. Trying to understand that better is where I would put my money on.
Even people who care about them say quantum computers could be like nuclear fusion: just around the corner for the next 50 years. It seems almost an esoteric research project. Why is the CEO of Google so excited about this?
Google wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for the evolution we have seen in computing over the years. Moore’s Law has allowed us to scale up our computational capacity to serve billions of users across many products at scale. So at heart, we view ourselves as a deep computer science company. Moore’s Law is, depending on how you think about it, at the end of its cycle. Quantum computing is one of the many components by which we will continue to make progress in computing.
The other reason we’re excited is—take a simple molecule. Caffeine has 243 states or something like that [actually 1048—see Note 2]. We know we can’t even understand the basic structure of molecules today with classical computing. So when I look at climate change, when I look at medicines, this is why I am confident one day quantum computing will drive progress there.
by Gideon Lichfield, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
The calculation has almost no practical use—it spits out a string of random numbers. It was chosen just to show that Sycamore can indeed work the way a quantum computer should. Useful quantum machines are many years away, the technical hurdles are huge, and even then they’ll probably beat classical computers only at certain tasks. (See “Here’s what quantum supremacy does—and doesn’t—mean for computing.”)But still, it’s an important milestone—one that Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, compares to the 12-second first flight by the Wright brothers. I spoke to him to understand why Google has already spent 13 years on a project that could take another decade or more to pay off.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. (Also, it was recorded before IBM published a paper disputing Google’s quantum supremacy claim.)
MIT TR: You got a quantum computer to perform a very narrow, specific task. What will it take to get to a wider demonstration of quantum supremacy?
Sundar Pichai: You would need to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer with more qubits so that you can generalize it better, execute it for longer periods of time, and hence be able to run more complex algorithms. But you know, if in any field you have a breakthrough, you start somewhere. To borrow an analogy—the Wright brothers. The first plane flew only for 12 seconds, and so there is no practical application of that. But it showed the possibility that a plane could fly.
A number of companies have quantum computers. IBM, for example, has a bunch of them online that people can use in the cloud. Why can their machines not do what Google’s has done?
The main thing I would comment on is why Google, the team, has been able to do it. It takes a lot of systems engineering—the ability to work on all layers of the stack. This is as complicated as it gets from a systems engineering perspective. You are literally starting with a wafer, and there is a team which is literally etching the gates, making the gates and then [working up] layers of the stack all the way to being able to use AI to simulate and understand the best outcome.
The last sentence of the paper says “We’re only one creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications.” Any guesses as to what those might be?
The real excitement about quantum is that the universe fundamentally works in a quantum way, so you will be able to understand nature better. It’s early days, but where quantum mechanics shines is the ability to simulate molecules, molecular processes, and I think that is where it will be the strongest. Drug discovery is a great example. Or fertilizers—the Haber process produces 2% of carbon [emissions] in the world [see Note 1]. In nature the same process gets done more efficiently.
So how far away do you think an application like improving the Haber process might be?
I would think a decade away. We are still a few years away from scaling up and building quantum computers that will work well enough. Other potential applications [could include] designing better batteries. Anyway, you’re dealing with chemistry. Trying to understand that better is where I would put my money on.
Even people who care about them say quantum computers could be like nuclear fusion: just around the corner for the next 50 years. It seems almost an esoteric research project. Why is the CEO of Google so excited about this?
Google wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for the evolution we have seen in computing over the years. Moore’s Law has allowed us to scale up our computational capacity to serve billions of users across many products at scale. So at heart, we view ourselves as a deep computer science company. Moore’s Law is, depending on how you think about it, at the end of its cycle. Quantum computing is one of the many components by which we will continue to make progress in computing.
The other reason we’re excited is—take a simple molecule. Caffeine has 243 states or something like that [actually 1048—see Note 2]. We know we can’t even understand the basic structure of molecules today with classical computing. So when I look at climate change, when I look at medicines, this is why I am confident one day quantum computing will drive progress there.
by Gideon Lichfield, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image: Google/MIT Technology Review
[ed. See also: Quantum supremacy from Google? Not so fast, says IBM. (MIT Technology Review).]
Why They Bulldozed Your Block
My first memories of life are in a public-housing project. My parents, then college students, had two kids, and then quickly three, and soon found subsidized housing in a new high-rise in Philadelphia, with brightly colored plastic doors and gray concrete terraces, where we lived for three years. At the tail end of the great period of the fifties Western, all the kids on the concrete balconies played at “Davy Crockett” and “Gunsmoke,” riding hobbyhorses and firing cap guns up and down their gray length, a form of play as alien now as Homeric poetry.
This was the heyday of urban redevelopment, when city planners, doing what was then called “slum clearance,” created high-density, low-cost public housing, often on a Corbusian model, with big towers on broad concrete plazas. In the still optimistic late fifties and early sixties, it was possible to imagine and actually use public housing as its original postwar planners had imagined it could be used: not as a life sentence but as a cheerful, clean platform that people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds without much money could use in a transition to another realm of life.
It was a dream that was over almost before it began and has since been condemned by all sides: by urbanists who came to hate the uniformity of its structures and their negation of street life; by minority communities who increasingly recognized these places as artificial ghettos, without the distinctive character and variety of real neighborhoods; and by the city officials who had to police the plazas. As Alex Krieger, a Harvard professor of urban design, writes in “City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present” (Harvard), “Having an address in such places was like wearing a scarlet letter—perhaps a P, as in ‘I am Poor.’ ” Such places were publicly executed throughout the eighties and nineties, imploded with dynamite by despairing state and city governments. (All the great implosion videos are of either casinos or public housing, a sign of the American times.) Schuylkill Falls, the public-housing project of my happy early memory, was among them, demolished in 1996 after sitting abandoned and desolate for twenty years.
Now, however, for the first time in a half century, the people who built the bad stuff are reëmerging as possible models of how we might yet build good stuff—with a reclamation of such once-banished terms as “urban renewal” and “high-rise housing.” This revival has been pushed forward by the same force that has recently pushed other forms of public neo-progressivism, at least rhetorically: a desire for public action in the face of the obvious impasse of the private, with free-market mechanisms having left city housing so costly that teachers and cops often live two hours outside the neighborhoods they serve. You “can’t trust the private sector to protect the public interest” was the city planner Edward Logue’s most emphatic aphorism on the subject, and it is one that has taken on new life.
Even New York’s “master builder,” Robert Moses himself, a hate object for later urbanists, who preferred preservation to innovation and the small-scale to the large, has come in for a revisionist look: whatever his faults, he built city amenities for city people—playgrounds and parks and the Triborough Bridge—rather than splinters filled with condos for the ultra-rich. Not since the Beaux-Arts revival of the mid-seventies, when neoclassical ornament and elaborate façades became fashionable again—when Philip Johnson could put a Chippendale edifice on the A.T. & T. building—has there been such a return of the architectural repressed. It is even possible to speak again in praise of the brutalist style in which much of that fifties and sixties public building was done. When people begin to cast a fonder eye on the Port Authority Bus Terminal, it means an epoch has altered.
Ed Logue was the consensus villain of the old urban planning. In a 2001 interview between the writer James Kunstler and the sainted urbanist Jane Jacobs, Logue was the subject of an extended hate:
Simple sides-taking exercises between good guys and bad guys turn out to betray the far more complicated fabric of big-city life. Logue’s mixed achievement is a testament either to the inadequacies of his proposals or to the intractability of his problems, and probably to both at once. (...)
What defeated Logue’s vision in the magazines and universities was the rise of Jane Jacobs and the conservationist left. For Jacobs, “dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes” were the city. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), she showed a generation how small enterprise helped sustain the complex ecology of mutual unplanned effort that makes cities work. Logue and Jacobs once had an onstage debate, in which Logue needled Jacobs about her highly romantic vision of her West Village neighborhood—he’d been out there at 8 p.m. and hadn’t seen the ballet of the street that she cooed over. (Jacobs was an instinctive Whitmanesque poet, not a data collector: you don’t count the angels on the head of a small merchant.) Logue also made the serious point that the emerging anti-renewal consensus was fine for someone who already had a safe place in the West Village. For those who didn’t, it was just a celebration of other people’s security.
But what defeated people like Logue on the ground was the increasingly agonized racial politics of big cities. In 1967, Logue ran for mayor of Boston, and, though regarded as a serious contender, was squeezed between another reformist candidate, Kevin White, and Louise Day Hicks, a ferocious anti-busing activist. (Her slogan: “You know where I stand.”) Determined to protect Irish neighborhoods from interfering outsiders who wanted to bus their children, and from “the element”—that is, minorities who wanted to take over their beloved blocks—Hicks is a reminder that the fault lines visible now in America are a long-standing feature of the American foundation.
Cohen makes a larger point about the context in which Logue and his colleagues rose and fell. In the early years of the Cold War, “expertise” was seen as a powerful support of liberal democracies. This was the expertise of engineers and architects—and of a growing class of professionals who had been able to go to colleges that their parents could not attend. The traumas of the sixties upended faith in experts. The same people who designed the Strategic Hamlet Program, in Vietnam, had remade downtown New Haven (and, one could argue, on similar principles: replacing the exposed, organic village with a secured fortress, the mall). The expertise of the urban planner was undermined as well, by the new prestige attached to the preservationist, which, for good or ill, remains undiminished. As the next generation of development would show, however, what tends to replace expertise is not the intelligence of the street. What replaces expertise is the idiocy of the deal.
by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert; photograph by LeRoy Ryan / The Boston Globe / Getty (man)This was the heyday of urban redevelopment, when city planners, doing what was then called “slum clearance,” created high-density, low-cost public housing, often on a Corbusian model, with big towers on broad concrete plazas. In the still optimistic late fifties and early sixties, it was possible to imagine and actually use public housing as its original postwar planners had imagined it could be used: not as a life sentence but as a cheerful, clean platform that people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds without much money could use in a transition to another realm of life.
It was a dream that was over almost before it began and has since been condemned by all sides: by urbanists who came to hate the uniformity of its structures and their negation of street life; by minority communities who increasingly recognized these places as artificial ghettos, without the distinctive character and variety of real neighborhoods; and by the city officials who had to police the plazas. As Alex Krieger, a Harvard professor of urban design, writes in “City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present” (Harvard), “Having an address in such places was like wearing a scarlet letter—perhaps a P, as in ‘I am Poor.’ ” Such places were publicly executed throughout the eighties and nineties, imploded with dynamite by despairing state and city governments. (All the great implosion videos are of either casinos or public housing, a sign of the American times.) Schuylkill Falls, the public-housing project of my happy early memory, was among them, demolished in 1996 after sitting abandoned and desolate for twenty years.Now, however, for the first time in a half century, the people who built the bad stuff are reëmerging as possible models of how we might yet build good stuff—with a reclamation of such once-banished terms as “urban renewal” and “high-rise housing.” This revival has been pushed forward by the same force that has recently pushed other forms of public neo-progressivism, at least rhetorically: a desire for public action in the face of the obvious impasse of the private, with free-market mechanisms having left city housing so costly that teachers and cops often live two hours outside the neighborhoods they serve. You “can’t trust the private sector to protect the public interest” was the city planner Edward Logue’s most emphatic aphorism on the subject, and it is one that has taken on new life.
Even New York’s “master builder,” Robert Moses himself, a hate object for later urbanists, who preferred preservation to innovation and the small-scale to the large, has come in for a revisionist look: whatever his faults, he built city amenities for city people—playgrounds and parks and the Triborough Bridge—rather than splinters filled with condos for the ultra-rich. Not since the Beaux-Arts revival of the mid-seventies, when neoclassical ornament and elaborate façades became fashionable again—when Philip Johnson could put a Chippendale edifice on the A.T. & T. building—has there been such a return of the architectural repressed. It is even possible to speak again in praise of the brutalist style in which much of that fifties and sixties public building was done. When people begin to cast a fonder eye on the Port Authority Bus Terminal, it means an epoch has altered.
Ed Logue was the consensus villain of the old urban planning. In a 2001 interview between the writer James Kunstler and the sainted urbanist Jane Jacobs, Logue was the subject of an extended hate:
Q: He went on to inadvertently destroy both New Haven and much of central Boston by directing Modernist urban renewal campaigns in the 1960s. Did you watch these schemes unfold and what did you think of them?
A: I thought they were awful. And I thought he was a very destructive man and I came to that opinion during the first time I met him, which was in New Haven.Lizabeth Cohen’s new book, “Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is an attempt to salvage the villain’s reputation, mostly by putting it in the Tragedy of Good Intentions basket instead of the Arrogance of Élitist Certainties basket, albeit recognizing that these are adjacent baskets. Cohen, an American historian at Harvard, reminds the reader, as any first-rate historian would, that what look, in the retrospective cartooning of polemical history, like obvious choices and clear moral lessons are usually gradated and surprising. Logue, whose career was more far reaching and ambitious than that of any other urbanist of his time, helped remake New Haven, Boston, and New York, and his ambitions for city planning were thoroughly progressive: “To demonstrate that people of different incomes, races, and ethnic origins can live together . . . and that they can send their children to the same public schools.” Despite his reputation as a “slum-clearer,” Logue was uncompromising about the primacy of integration. “The pursuit of racial, not just income, diversity in residential projects animated all his work,” Cohen writes. (Jane Jacobs, to put it charitably, didn’t really notice that her beloved Hudson Street, in the West Village, tended toward the monochrome.)
Simple sides-taking exercises between good guys and bad guys turn out to betray the far more complicated fabric of big-city life. Logue’s mixed achievement is a testament either to the inadequacies of his proposals or to the intractability of his problems, and probably to both at once. (...)
What defeated Logue’s vision in the magazines and universities was the rise of Jane Jacobs and the conservationist left. For Jacobs, “dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes” were the city. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), she showed a generation how small enterprise helped sustain the complex ecology of mutual unplanned effort that makes cities work. Logue and Jacobs once had an onstage debate, in which Logue needled Jacobs about her highly romantic vision of her West Village neighborhood—he’d been out there at 8 p.m. and hadn’t seen the ballet of the street that she cooed over. (Jacobs was an instinctive Whitmanesque poet, not a data collector: you don’t count the angels on the head of a small merchant.) Logue also made the serious point that the emerging anti-renewal consensus was fine for someone who already had a safe place in the West Village. For those who didn’t, it was just a celebration of other people’s security.
But what defeated people like Logue on the ground was the increasingly agonized racial politics of big cities. In 1967, Logue ran for mayor of Boston, and, though regarded as a serious contender, was squeezed between another reformist candidate, Kevin White, and Louise Day Hicks, a ferocious anti-busing activist. (Her slogan: “You know where I stand.”) Determined to protect Irish neighborhoods from interfering outsiders who wanted to bus their children, and from “the element”—that is, minorities who wanted to take over their beloved blocks—Hicks is a reminder that the fault lines visible now in America are a long-standing feature of the American foundation.
Cohen makes a larger point about the context in which Logue and his colleagues rose and fell. In the early years of the Cold War, “expertise” was seen as a powerful support of liberal democracies. This was the expertise of engineers and architects—and of a growing class of professionals who had been able to go to colleges that their parents could not attend. The traumas of the sixties upended faith in experts. The same people who designed the Strategic Hamlet Program, in Vietnam, had remade downtown New Haven (and, one could argue, on similar principles: replacing the exposed, organic village with a secured fortress, the mall). The expertise of the urban planner was undermined as well, by the new prestige attached to the preservationist, which, for good or ill, remains undiminished. As the next generation of development would show, however, what tends to replace expertise is not the intelligence of the street. What replaces expertise is the idiocy of the deal.
by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Should We Pay to Enter Bookstores?
While browsing a table of new books at the Strand and spotting one that I wanted to buy, I experienced a common, modern-day itch: Do I purchase the book there and then from the Strand without pause, thus supporting bookstores, publishers, authors, and everything that I believe in? Or do I drive myself crazy by pulling out my phone and checking how much money I would save were I to buy the book online? The Strand was selling the book at a modest discount off of its suggested retail price, but I suspected that it would be less expensive on a certain ubiquitous Web site. Sure enough, the same book was listed there, brand new, for ten dollars less than the Strand’s price. If I ordered it from this Web site, it would be delivered to my door, the next day, for free.
The moral high ground is to buy the book from the Strand. The store afforded me the pleasure of browsing the shelves on a weeknight in New York. The store’s owners permitted me to pick up the book and read a few pages, for as long as I wished. They should have my money. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that I chose three additional books and that each of those books was also ten dollars less online. I could save forty bucks, which isn’t chump change. So the question then becomes, where do we draw the line? Are we expected to underwrite David’s battle with Goliath, no matter what the cost? I want to give my money to the Strand. I’m willing to pay more in exchange for the intangibles that I’m offered by a store’s physical existence. But I fear that this business model, whereby physical retailers are basically relying on a code of honor from their customers, is just not sustainable.
So why not monetize the intangibles? The Strand, and stores like it, could charge an admission fee. Something token, like a dollar. For a buck, you’re granted access to everything the store has to offer. You can browse to your heart’s delight. There’s no pressure to make a purchase. And, if you do buy something, perhaps the item costs close to what it would cost online, because all of those dollars would have allowed the store to lower its prices.
I’m not an economist, so maybe this idea is an unsophisticated one. More than five thousand people walk into the Strand every day, according to the owner, Nancy Bass Wyden. (“It’s department-store numbers,” she said.) Would every one of those people be willing to contribute a dollar to provide enough of a cushion to allow for quasi-online prices? And what about the little shop in the rural community, the one that might see twenty customers walk through its doors on an average day? Twenty dollars or so a day may not be enough to keep that store afloat. Is there perhaps some sort of revenue-sharing system that could be instituted, whereby all of those single dollars go into one big pot that each participating physical retailer gets an appropriate share of?
As it turns out, the idea is not entirely new. In 2013, the then U.K. HarperCollins C.E.O., Victoria Barnsley, floated the notion of a pay-to-browse model for bookstores in an interview with the BBC. A follow-up piece in the Washington Post found that a sampling of American booksellers were hostile to the idea, but a few daring retailers overseas have since begun experimenting with variations on this model. In Porto, Portugal, visitors to the world-famous Livraria Lello bookstore pony up five euros (about $5.50 USD) for an entry voucher, the cost of which is then subtracted from a purchase. And Bunkitsu, a bookstore in Tokyo, charges customers the equivalent of a whopping fourteen dollars for the experience of browsing its inventory and exhibition space. (Included with the admission fee is access to a reading area, where patrons are permitted to kick off their shoes, help themselves to unlimited quantities of coffee and green tea, and read anything they like.)
The booksellers I spoke to in New York were generally uninterested in this sort of radical move. Miles Bellamy, the majority owner of Spoonbill & Sugartown, in Williamsburg, dismissed the idea. “I would never charge people to walk into the store. No. It’s just not classy.” Spoonbill will mark its twentieth anniversary this fall, but Bellamy says that the celebration will be a muted one. The neighborhood’s real-estate explosion in the past ten or fifteen years has not resulted in what he expected to be an uptick in business, and times are challenging for the shop. The artists and intellectuals that Bellamy once relied upon, back when Williamsburg was hip, are now all but extinct, having been mostly replaced by tourists and Wall Street types. (A couple who was book-browsing overheard our conversation, and they offered themselves as proof of the former. “They’ll never get us out!” one of them exclaimed, before asking Bellamy to recommend the best book that he could think of in that moment. Bellamy immediately fetched a copy of Tom McCarthy’s “Remainder.” “It’s kinda weird, I dunno,” he told them. “Do you like weird books?”)
Bellamy was adamant that he does not want to rely on gimmicky revenue streams like coffee, tote bags, and notepads in order to stay afloat (“Anything but books,” he said, sardonically)—and certainly not an entrance fee. “I want to do it the traditional way,” he told me. “If the greatest city in the world can’t support me, I’m gonna close my doors and head up a country road,” he declared. Sarah McNally, the owner of the McNally Jackson chain, feels the same way. “Bookstores are havens,” she said. “They’re one of the few public spaces left. It’s my responsibility as a bookstore owner to figure out how to stay competitive. Charging admission?” she asked, incredulously. “What about children? What about teen-agers? Absolutely not,” she said. “I’d rather close.”
But Wyden is not opposed to exploring new models. Her store’s continued success may have as much to do with its iconic status and longevity (her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, opened its doors in 1927) as with her initiatives to drive sales through author readings and signings, both on-site and off. The Strand was hosting four different events on the day that I spoke to her, each in a different location, and all of which required attendees to either purchase the book being promoted or a fifteen-dollar Strand gift card for later use. (...)
I know that people with a fondness for other physical things that are bought in physical stores have a similar feeling about those experiences. For me, it’s bookstores. I want them to always be there. I want to be able to get lost in them, to lose track of time in them, to encounter titles and authors and subjects in them that I hadn’t anticipated, and to leave them with an armload of titles that leave me brimming with anticipation. In this confounding era of online retail, I’m certainly willing to pay a premium for such pleasures, but an extra thirty or forty per cent seems to be too large an ask. There must be a way to level the playing field a bit, ideally sooner than later.
by Howard Fishman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Robert Samuel Hanson
The moral high ground is to buy the book from the Strand. The store afforded me the pleasure of browsing the shelves on a weeknight in New York. The store’s owners permitted me to pick up the book and read a few pages, for as long as I wished. They should have my money. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that I chose three additional books and that each of those books was also ten dollars less online. I could save forty bucks, which isn’t chump change. So the question then becomes, where do we draw the line? Are we expected to underwrite David’s battle with Goliath, no matter what the cost? I want to give my money to the Strand. I’m willing to pay more in exchange for the intangibles that I’m offered by a store’s physical existence. But I fear that this business model, whereby physical retailers are basically relying on a code of honor from their customers, is just not sustainable.
So why not monetize the intangibles? The Strand, and stores like it, could charge an admission fee. Something token, like a dollar. For a buck, you’re granted access to everything the store has to offer. You can browse to your heart’s delight. There’s no pressure to make a purchase. And, if you do buy something, perhaps the item costs close to what it would cost online, because all of those dollars would have allowed the store to lower its prices.I’m not an economist, so maybe this idea is an unsophisticated one. More than five thousand people walk into the Strand every day, according to the owner, Nancy Bass Wyden. (“It’s department-store numbers,” she said.) Would every one of those people be willing to contribute a dollar to provide enough of a cushion to allow for quasi-online prices? And what about the little shop in the rural community, the one that might see twenty customers walk through its doors on an average day? Twenty dollars or so a day may not be enough to keep that store afloat. Is there perhaps some sort of revenue-sharing system that could be instituted, whereby all of those single dollars go into one big pot that each participating physical retailer gets an appropriate share of?
As it turns out, the idea is not entirely new. In 2013, the then U.K. HarperCollins C.E.O., Victoria Barnsley, floated the notion of a pay-to-browse model for bookstores in an interview with the BBC. A follow-up piece in the Washington Post found that a sampling of American booksellers were hostile to the idea, but a few daring retailers overseas have since begun experimenting with variations on this model. In Porto, Portugal, visitors to the world-famous Livraria Lello bookstore pony up five euros (about $5.50 USD) for an entry voucher, the cost of which is then subtracted from a purchase. And Bunkitsu, a bookstore in Tokyo, charges customers the equivalent of a whopping fourteen dollars for the experience of browsing its inventory and exhibition space. (Included with the admission fee is access to a reading area, where patrons are permitted to kick off their shoes, help themselves to unlimited quantities of coffee and green tea, and read anything they like.)
The booksellers I spoke to in New York were generally uninterested in this sort of radical move. Miles Bellamy, the majority owner of Spoonbill & Sugartown, in Williamsburg, dismissed the idea. “I would never charge people to walk into the store. No. It’s just not classy.” Spoonbill will mark its twentieth anniversary this fall, but Bellamy says that the celebration will be a muted one. The neighborhood’s real-estate explosion in the past ten or fifteen years has not resulted in what he expected to be an uptick in business, and times are challenging for the shop. The artists and intellectuals that Bellamy once relied upon, back when Williamsburg was hip, are now all but extinct, having been mostly replaced by tourists and Wall Street types. (A couple who was book-browsing overheard our conversation, and they offered themselves as proof of the former. “They’ll never get us out!” one of them exclaimed, before asking Bellamy to recommend the best book that he could think of in that moment. Bellamy immediately fetched a copy of Tom McCarthy’s “Remainder.” “It’s kinda weird, I dunno,” he told them. “Do you like weird books?”)
Bellamy was adamant that he does not want to rely on gimmicky revenue streams like coffee, tote bags, and notepads in order to stay afloat (“Anything but books,” he said, sardonically)—and certainly not an entrance fee. “I want to do it the traditional way,” he told me. “If the greatest city in the world can’t support me, I’m gonna close my doors and head up a country road,” he declared. Sarah McNally, the owner of the McNally Jackson chain, feels the same way. “Bookstores are havens,” she said. “They’re one of the few public spaces left. It’s my responsibility as a bookstore owner to figure out how to stay competitive. Charging admission?” she asked, incredulously. “What about children? What about teen-agers? Absolutely not,” she said. “I’d rather close.”
But Wyden is not opposed to exploring new models. Her store’s continued success may have as much to do with its iconic status and longevity (her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, opened its doors in 1927) as with her initiatives to drive sales through author readings and signings, both on-site and off. The Strand was hosting four different events on the day that I spoke to her, each in a different location, and all of which required attendees to either purchase the book being promoted or a fifteen-dollar Strand gift card for later use. (...)
I know that people with a fondness for other physical things that are bought in physical stores have a similar feeling about those experiences. For me, it’s bookstores. I want them to always be there. I want to be able to get lost in them, to lose track of time in them, to encounter titles and authors and subjects in them that I hadn’t anticipated, and to leave them with an armload of titles that leave me brimming with anticipation. In this confounding era of online retail, I’m certainly willing to pay a premium for such pleasures, but an extra thirty or forty per cent seems to be too large an ask. There must be a way to level the playing field a bit, ideally sooner than later.
by Howard Fishman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Robert Samuel Hanson
Age-Proofing A Home Won’t Come Cheap
Dennis and Chris Cavner, in their early 70s, are preparing to move less than two blocks away into a 2,720-square-foot, ranch-style house they bought this year. But first a renovation is underway, taking the 45-year-old property all the way back to its studs. When the work is finished, these baby boomers are confident the move will land them in their forever home.
“We wanted to find a house that we could live in literally for the rest of our lives,” Dennis Cavner said. “We were looking specifically for a one-story house and one that had a flat lot, to age in place.”
For most of American history, people have moved in with relatives or gone to a care facility to live out their final years. Baby boomers don’t want either, and those with resources have generally created the modern idea of remaking old age to fit their lifestyle and retrofitting their homes for aging in place. Design and construction firms are coming up with safety features that look good as well. Think of it as the age-defying home.
Aging in place is a major financial commitment, one that may be at odds with retirees’ plans to downsize their lives and budgets and squirrel away cash in anticipation of rising health care costs. The Cavners are rebuilding this house — assessed at $700,000 around the time of the sale — from a shell. The remodel could easily cost $300,000 in the hot Austin market.
Leaving nothing to chance, the Cavners are paying for a number of modifications they might never need. For instance, neither uses a wheelchair, but contractors are making all doorways 3 feet wide — just in case. The master bath roll-in shower, flat and rimless, will provide room to maneuver. In the kitchen, drawers, rather than cabinets, will allow easy access in a wheelchair.
The Cavners are closely watching details of the renovation, but this dramatic late-life relocation wasn’t a hard decision.
For some seniors, aging in place might amount to simple modifications, such as adding shower grab bars or replacing a standard toilet with one that sits taller. But many seniors anticipate a financial crunch as they try to plan for their future on a fixed income, uncertain how far their savings and retirement funds will stretch.
A report released last week by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies may fuel these concerns. It cites growing income disparity for older Americans in the wake of the Great Recession, and says “ensuring financial and housing security in retirement will be a struggle.”
For those 65 and older, it said, “the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. By 2050, almost one-quarter of Americans will be 65 or older, according to the Census. Surveys conducted over the past decade show that older adults overwhelmingly want to age in their homes.
Yet many houses aren’t suited to “aging in place,” said Abbe Will, associate project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard.
“Currently, a lot do not have single-floor living — especially in certain parts of the country. There are lots of stairs and multistory homes when land is more valuable,” she said. And “many homeowners don’t necessarily have the funds to do aging in place.”
Home modifications and costs vary widely — starting with those simple safety features in the bathroom or lever doorknobs throughout the house — to more extensive changes, such as widening doorways or lowering light switches to wheelchair height. Will said simple retrofits, such as grab bars, “could be several hundred dollars,” but a “whole bathroom remodel would be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”
In a recent survey of 1,000 people age 65 and older by the California-based nonprofit SCAN (formerly the Senior Care Action Network), 80% of respondents were concerned about their ability to age in place. The driver appears to be financial: About 60% said they have less than $10,000 in savings (including investments and retirement plans).
“We don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline as we age,” said sociologist Deborah Thorne of the University of Idaho, lead author of a study that found skyrocketing bankruptcy rates among those 65 and older.
The research, recently published in the journal Sociological Inquiry, finds the share of older Americans filing for bankruptcy has never been higher. “And bankrupt households are more likely than ever to be headed by a senior — the percent of older bankrupt filers has increased almost 500 percent since 1991,” the study found.
The Harvard report also cited the burden of debt among those ages 65 to 79, with nearly half of those homeowners carrying a mortgage in 2016. And people are carrying substantially more student loan and credit card debt into retirement as well.
by Sharon Jayson, Kaiser Health News via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: Sharon Jayson
“We wanted to find a house that we could live in literally for the rest of our lives,” Dennis Cavner said. “We were looking specifically for a one-story house and one that had a flat lot, to age in place.”
For most of American history, people have moved in with relatives or gone to a care facility to live out their final years. Baby boomers don’t want either, and those with resources have generally created the modern idea of remaking old age to fit their lifestyle and retrofitting their homes for aging in place. Design and construction firms are coming up with safety features that look good as well. Think of it as the age-defying home.Aging in place is a major financial commitment, one that may be at odds with retirees’ plans to downsize their lives and budgets and squirrel away cash in anticipation of rising health care costs. The Cavners are rebuilding this house — assessed at $700,000 around the time of the sale — from a shell. The remodel could easily cost $300,000 in the hot Austin market.
Leaving nothing to chance, the Cavners are paying for a number of modifications they might never need. For instance, neither uses a wheelchair, but contractors are making all doorways 3 feet wide — just in case. The master bath roll-in shower, flat and rimless, will provide room to maneuver. In the kitchen, drawers, rather than cabinets, will allow easy access in a wheelchair.
The Cavners are closely watching details of the renovation, but this dramatic late-life relocation wasn’t a hard decision.
For some seniors, aging in place might amount to simple modifications, such as adding shower grab bars or replacing a standard toilet with one that sits taller. But many seniors anticipate a financial crunch as they try to plan for their future on a fixed income, uncertain how far their savings and retirement funds will stretch.
A report released last week by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies may fuel these concerns. It cites growing income disparity for older Americans in the wake of the Great Recession, and says “ensuring financial and housing security in retirement will be a struggle.”
For those 65 and older, it said, “the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. By 2050, almost one-quarter of Americans will be 65 or older, according to the Census. Surveys conducted over the past decade show that older adults overwhelmingly want to age in their homes.
Yet many houses aren’t suited to “aging in place,” said Abbe Will, associate project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard.
“Currently, a lot do not have single-floor living — especially in certain parts of the country. There are lots of stairs and multistory homes when land is more valuable,” she said. And “many homeowners don’t necessarily have the funds to do aging in place.”
Home modifications and costs vary widely — starting with those simple safety features in the bathroom or lever doorknobs throughout the house — to more extensive changes, such as widening doorways or lowering light switches to wheelchair height. Will said simple retrofits, such as grab bars, “could be several hundred dollars,” but a “whole bathroom remodel would be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”
In a recent survey of 1,000 people age 65 and older by the California-based nonprofit SCAN (formerly the Senior Care Action Network), 80% of respondents were concerned about their ability to age in place. The driver appears to be financial: About 60% said they have less than $10,000 in savings (including investments and retirement plans).
“We don’t know what’s coming down the pipeline as we age,” said sociologist Deborah Thorne of the University of Idaho, lead author of a study that found skyrocketing bankruptcy rates among those 65 and older.
The research, recently published in the journal Sociological Inquiry, finds the share of older Americans filing for bankruptcy has never been higher. “And bankrupt households are more likely than ever to be headed by a senior — the percent of older bankrupt filers has increased almost 500 percent since 1991,” the study found.
The Harvard report also cited the burden of debt among those ages 65 to 79, with nearly half of those homeowners carrying a mortgage in 2016. And people are carrying substantially more student loan and credit card debt into retirement as well.
by Sharon Jayson, Kaiser Health News via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: Sharon Jayson
The End Of College Is Coming
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how America’s broken healthcare industry was bankrupting families. Well, the cost of college has jumped WAY more than the cost healthcare.
The cost of a four-year degree has shot up 15X in the past 40 years, as you can see here:
If car prices jumped as much as tuition, a base model Toyota Corolla would cost $90,000 today.
As costs have zoomed higher, kids are burying themselves under bigger and bigger piles of debt. Student loan balances have snowballed over 400% in the past 15 years. Last month, they hit $1.5 trillion:
If student debt were a stock, every Wall Street analyst would be screaming “bubble.”
And get this… Americans now owe more for student debt than they owe for credit cards and auto loans... combined!
In fact, the average kid takes out $35,000 in debt… a 75% jump in 10 years. That’s a deep hole to dig out of before you’re legally allowed to drink beer.
And student loans are the only type of debt you can’t escape, no matter what.
Declaring bankruptcy can wipe away your mortgage, your credit card debt, and even stop IRS wage garnishments. But it won’t take a penny off your student loans.
Turn 65 and haven’t paid off your student loans? They’ll raid your Social Security check each month.
What Do Healthcare and College Have in Common?
The government’s dirty fingerprints are all over both.
As you may know, the Federal government practically owns the student loan market.
More than 94% of all student loans come directly from the US government. And the small 6% slice that doesn’t come from the government is still fully guaranteed by the government.
If you’ve applied for a mortgage lately, you know it’s a painful process. You fill out stacks of paperwork, pay steep fees, and hand over a full accounting of your family’s finances.
But thanks to Uncle Sam, trillions of dollars in student loans get handed out to 17-year-old kids like candy on Halloween. This free money has warped the whole system and pushed college costs far beyond all reason.
Think about it this way: When banks were handing out no-money-down mortgages in the early 2000s to anyone with a pulse, what happened to house prices?
They SOARED.
Well, colleges know Uncle Sam is bankrolling students, so they hike fees year after year. A recent New York Fed study found for every new dollar of federal student aid, colleges hike tuition by 65 cents.
The cost of a four-year degree has shot up 15X in the past 40 years, as you can see here:
If car prices jumped as much as tuition, a base model Toyota Corolla would cost $90,000 today.
As costs have zoomed higher, kids are burying themselves under bigger and bigger piles of debt. Student loan balances have snowballed over 400% in the past 15 years. Last month, they hit $1.5 trillion:
If student debt were a stock, every Wall Street analyst would be screaming “bubble.”
And get this… Americans now owe more for student debt than they owe for credit cards and auto loans... combined!
In fact, the average kid takes out $35,000 in debt… a 75% jump in 10 years. That’s a deep hole to dig out of before you’re legally allowed to drink beer.
And student loans are the only type of debt you can’t escape, no matter what.
Declaring bankruptcy can wipe away your mortgage, your credit card debt, and even stop IRS wage garnishments. But it won’t take a penny off your student loans.
Turn 65 and haven’t paid off your student loans? They’ll raid your Social Security check each month.
What Do Healthcare and College Have in Common?
The government’s dirty fingerprints are all over both.
As you may know, the Federal government practically owns the student loan market.
More than 94% of all student loans come directly from the US government. And the small 6% slice that doesn’t come from the government is still fully guaranteed by the government.
If you’ve applied for a mortgage lately, you know it’s a painful process. You fill out stacks of paperwork, pay steep fees, and hand over a full accounting of your family’s finances.
But thanks to Uncle Sam, trillions of dollars in student loans get handed out to 17-year-old kids like candy on Halloween. This free money has warped the whole system and pushed college costs far beyond all reason.
Think about it this way: When banks were handing out no-money-down mortgages in the early 2000s to anyone with a pulse, what happened to house prices?
They SOARED.
Well, colleges know Uncle Sam is bankrolling students, so they hike fees year after year. A recent New York Fed study found for every new dollar of federal student aid, colleges hike tuition by 65 cents.
Image: RiskHedge/Bureau of Labor Statistics
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Failing Upward
WeWork Needed a Bailout—But Adam Neumann Still Leaves a Billionaire
WeWork’s value has tumbled, about 2,000 employees are being cut and many investors are nursing losses after the firm’s bailout.
But founder Adam Neumann is still a billionaire.
SoftBank Group Corp.’s proposed rescue package of WeWork involves Neumann selling about $1 billion of stock and getting a $185 million consulting fee from the Japanese firm even as the deal values the struggling office-sharing company at $8 billion, according to people familiar with the transaction. That’s down from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Neumann will leave the company’s board though he still can assign two seats.
On these terms, Neumann’s net worth would be at least $1 billion, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. While that’s a fraction of what it was on paper in January -- the last time SoftBank made an investment in WeWork -- it’s a remarkable return from a business that has never made a profit and seen its initial public offering spurned by skeptical investors.
A spokeswoman for Neumann declined to comment.
WeWork parent We Co.’s withdrawn prospectus sketched out ways Neumann has already monetized some of his stake. He sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stock in earlier funding rounds, according to the Wall Street Journal. He also has a $500 million credit line -- secured by WeWork shares -- from UBS Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Credit Suisse Group AG. About $380 million was outstanding as of July 31. JPMorgan also loaned him $97.5 million.
That $500 million loan will now be repaid, a person familiar with the matter said. The SoftBank deal extends $500 million of credit to Neumann.
The bank loans helped Neumann, 40, collect assets worthy of a billionaire at a time when most of his net worth was on paper. Over the years he bought about $100 million of properties, including a Manhattan townhouse, a Westchester County farm and an 11-acre California estate. He also owns 10 commercial properties, four of which are leased to WeWork.
WeWork’s value has tumbled, about 2,000 employees are being cut and many investors are nursing losses after the firm’s bailout.
But founder Adam Neumann is still a billionaire.
SoftBank Group Corp.’s proposed rescue package of WeWork involves Neumann selling about $1 billion of stock and getting a $185 million consulting fee from the Japanese firm even as the deal values the struggling office-sharing company at $8 billion, according to people familiar with the transaction. That’s down from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Neumann will leave the company’s board though he still can assign two seats.
On these terms, Neumann’s net worth would be at least $1 billion, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. While that’s a fraction of what it was on paper in January -- the last time SoftBank made an investment in WeWork -- it’s a remarkable return from a business that has never made a profit and seen its initial public offering spurned by skeptical investors.A spokeswoman for Neumann declined to comment.
WeWork parent We Co.’s withdrawn prospectus sketched out ways Neumann has already monetized some of his stake. He sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stock in earlier funding rounds, according to the Wall Street Journal. He also has a $500 million credit line -- secured by WeWork shares -- from UBS Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Credit Suisse Group AG. About $380 million was outstanding as of July 31. JPMorgan also loaned him $97.5 million.
That $500 million loan will now be repaid, a person familiar with the matter said. The SoftBank deal extends $500 million of credit to Neumann.
The bank loans helped Neumann, 40, collect assets worthy of a billionaire at a time when most of his net worth was on paper. Over the years he bought about $100 million of properties, including a Manhattan townhouse, a Westchester County farm and an 11-acre California estate. He also owns 10 commercial properties, four of which are leased to WeWork.
by Tom Metcalf, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Adam Neumann
[ed. There's probably a good lesson here for would-be tech billionaires. No need to have a particularly unique product (WeWork); scam the system (Martin Shkreli, Turing Pharmaceuticals); be indicted for fraudulent business practices (Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos); or even have a profitable business model (Travis Kalanick, Uber). All you need is deep market penetration. Just rope in a few big initial investors, hype your product like crazy, focus on creating a successful/lucrative IPO, exit with golden parachute (if or when everything goes to hell).]
Gmail Hooked Us on Free Storage. Now Google Is Making Us Pay.
Google lured billions of consumers to its digital services by offering copious free cloud storage. That’s beginning to change.
The Alphabet Inc. unit has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That’s happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar.
When people hit those caps, they realize they have little choice but to start paying, or risk losing access to emails, photos and personal documents. The cost isn’t excessive for most consumers, but at the scale Google operates, this could generate billions of dollars in extra revenue each year for the company. Google didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People’s in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google’s other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.
“I was merrily using the account and one day I noticed I hadn’t received any email since the day before,” said Rod Adams, a nuclear energy analyst and retired naval officer. After using Gmail since 2006, he’d finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn’t an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way.
“I just said ‘OK, been free for a long time, now I’m paying,’” Adams said.
Other Gmail users aren’t so happy about the changes. (...)
Google has also ended or limited other promotions recently that gave people free cloud storage and helped them avoid Gmail crises. New buyers of Chromebook laptops used to get 100 GB at no charge for two years. In May 2019 that was cut to one year.
Google’s Pixel smartphone, originally launched in 2016, came with free, unlimited photo storage via the company’s Photos service. The latest Pixel 4 handset that came out in October still has free photo storage, but the images are compressed now, reducing the quality.
More than 11,500 people in a week signed an online petition to bring back the full, free Pixel photos deal. Evgeny Rezunenko, the petition organizer, called Google’s change a “hypocritical and cash grabbing move.” (...)
Smartphones dramatically increased the number of photos people take -- one estimate put the total for 2017 at 1.2 trillion. Those images quickly fill up storage space on handsets, so tech companies, including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google, offered cloud storage as an alternative. Now those online memories are piling up, some of these companies are charging users to keep them.
Apple has been doing this for several years, building its iCloud storage service into a lucrative recurring revenue stream. When iPhone users get notifications that their devices are full and they should either delete photos and other files or pay more for cloud storage, people often choose the cloud option.
In May, Google unveiled Google One, a replacement for its Drive cloud storage service. There’s a free 15 GB tier -- enough room for about 5,000 photos, depending on the resolution. Then it costs $1.99 a month for 100 GB and up from there. This includes several types of files previously stashed in Google Drive, plus Gmail emails and photos and videos. The company ended its Chromebook two-year 100 GB free storage offer around the same time, while the Pixel free photo storage deal ended in October with the release of the Pixel 4.
Gmail, Drive and Google Photos have more than 1 billion users each. As the company whittles away free storage offers and prompts more people to pay, that creates a potentially huge new revenue stream for the company. If 10% of Gmail users sign up for the new $1.99 a month Google One subscription, that would generate almost $2.4 billion a year in annual, recurring sales for the company.
by Gerrit De Vynck, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: picture alliance/Getty
The Alphabet Inc. unit has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That’s happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar.
When people hit those caps, they realize they have little choice but to start paying, or risk losing access to emails, photos and personal documents. The cost isn’t excessive for most consumers, but at the scale Google operates, this could generate billions of dollars in extra revenue each year for the company. Google didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People’s in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google’s other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.
“I was merrily using the account and one day I noticed I hadn’t received any email since the day before,” said Rod Adams, a nuclear energy analyst and retired naval officer. After using Gmail since 2006, he’d finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn’t an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way.
“I just said ‘OK, been free for a long time, now I’m paying,’” Adams said.
Other Gmail users aren’t so happy about the changes. (...)
Google has also ended or limited other promotions recently that gave people free cloud storage and helped them avoid Gmail crises. New buyers of Chromebook laptops used to get 100 GB at no charge for two years. In May 2019 that was cut to one year.
Google’s Pixel smartphone, originally launched in 2016, came with free, unlimited photo storage via the company’s Photos service. The latest Pixel 4 handset that came out in October still has free photo storage, but the images are compressed now, reducing the quality.
More than 11,500 people in a week signed an online petition to bring back the full, free Pixel photos deal. Evgeny Rezunenko, the petition organizer, called Google’s change a “hypocritical and cash grabbing move.” (...)
Smartphones dramatically increased the number of photos people take -- one estimate put the total for 2017 at 1.2 trillion. Those images quickly fill up storage space on handsets, so tech companies, including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google, offered cloud storage as an alternative. Now those online memories are piling up, some of these companies are charging users to keep them.
Apple has been doing this for several years, building its iCloud storage service into a lucrative recurring revenue stream. When iPhone users get notifications that their devices are full and they should either delete photos and other files or pay more for cloud storage, people often choose the cloud option.
In May, Google unveiled Google One, a replacement for its Drive cloud storage service. There’s a free 15 GB tier -- enough room for about 5,000 photos, depending on the resolution. Then it costs $1.99 a month for 100 GB and up from there. This includes several types of files previously stashed in Google Drive, plus Gmail emails and photos and videos. The company ended its Chromebook two-year 100 GB free storage offer around the same time, while the Pixel free photo storage deal ended in October with the release of the Pixel 4.
Gmail, Drive and Google Photos have more than 1 billion users each. As the company whittles away free storage offers and prompts more people to pay, that creates a potentially huge new revenue stream for the company. If 10% of Gmail users sign up for the new $1.99 a month Google One subscription, that would generate almost $2.4 billion a year in annual, recurring sales for the company.
by Gerrit De Vynck, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: picture alliance/Getty
What Do You Do When the Golf Course Shuts Down?
Weeds engulf the fairways. Branches break through the clubhouse windows. And buyers pass on the chance to own a home near the sixth hole.
The Crickentree golf course closed last July here in the booming northern suburbs of Columbia. Now dozens of neighbors regularly attend county meetings, wearing red shirts to show solidarity and asking officials not to grant a developer’s request to build hundreds of homes where there has been open space for decades.
“I beg you to put yourself in my shoes,” Michy Kelly recently said to the Richland County planning board, explaining why she and her husband bought their house there in 2013. “We were buying so much more than a home. We were buying peace and quiet and serenity.”
Ms. Kelly said afterward that she loves living along the fairway, though she isn’t sure which one as she has never golfed.
“It never occurred to me that people would stop doing it,” she said, “because I never understood why they did it in the first place.”
County commissioners have asked neighbors and the course’s owners to sign off on a plan for Crickentree that both sides can live with by September, when it expects to take a final vote on the rezoning. Both sides have said litigation is an option if the county decides against them.
The decline in the popularity of golf is having ripple effects in suburbs across the Sun Belt, as nearly 200 courses closed last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Communities are left with empty courses because of overbuilding during the housing boom, compounded by a 20% decline in the number of golfers since 2003, according to the trade group.
The options range from allowing the development of new neighborhoods to turning courses into public parks. It commonly takes years to sort through legal battles over zoning, obligations between the course owners and homeowners and other political fallout. In Phoenix, ongoing legal disputes have left the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course surrounded by a chain-link fence and overgrown with sagebrush for the better part of five years.
Local officials must parse through the impact of building homes in the center of an existing subdivision and potentially overtaxing schools and roads in already booming areas. Property values for nearby homes typically fall about 25% when a course fails, said Blake Plumley, an Orlando, Fla.-based golf development consultant. They can fall more than 40% if a dispute ends up in court, he said.
Here in Richland County, ECapital Management, a Fort Worth, Texas-based firm, bought the Crickentree course out of bankruptcy last year and intends to sell to a developer. It originally proposed building as many as 450 homes. Neighbors fought back with radio ads, yard signs and crowded public meetings. (...)
Crickentree homeowner Michael Koska said his 5,200-square-foot home on what was once the fifth tee box has lost at least a third of its value, based on the list prices of Crickentree homes and sales patterns for homes on other failed courses. He built the house for $565,000 in 2005 and it was appraised at $710,000 a decade ago.
“That’s life-changing kind of money, that’s ‘your kid doesn’t get to go to college, you don’t get to retire early kind of money,’ ” Mr. Koska said.
He wished he had read his neighborhood’s agreement with the course owners more closely when he built the house 14 years ago, he said. “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
Crickentree is one of at least 33 courses in South Carolina that have failed since 2012, according to Kelly Cederberg, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Arizona.
“The people who were building golf courses were not thinking about how many people were out there playing golf,” she said. “They built them to sell homes.”
by Valerie Bauerlein, WSJ | Read more:
Image: NASA/Google Earth
[ed. See also: There Aren't Enough Golfers To Keep All Of The U.S. Courses In Business (NPR); and Not All Golf Course Closures Are Failures (NGF - Q).]
The Crickentree golf course closed last July here in the booming northern suburbs of Columbia. Now dozens of neighbors regularly attend county meetings, wearing red shirts to show solidarity and asking officials not to grant a developer’s request to build hundreds of homes where there has been open space for decades.
“I beg you to put yourself in my shoes,” Michy Kelly recently said to the Richland County planning board, explaining why she and her husband bought their house there in 2013. “We were buying so much more than a home. We were buying peace and quiet and serenity.”
Ms. Kelly said afterward that she loves living along the fairway, though she isn’t sure which one as she has never golfed.“It never occurred to me that people would stop doing it,” she said, “because I never understood why they did it in the first place.”
County commissioners have asked neighbors and the course’s owners to sign off on a plan for Crickentree that both sides can live with by September, when it expects to take a final vote on the rezoning. Both sides have said litigation is an option if the county decides against them.
The decline in the popularity of golf is having ripple effects in suburbs across the Sun Belt, as nearly 200 courses closed last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Communities are left with empty courses because of overbuilding during the housing boom, compounded by a 20% decline in the number of golfers since 2003, according to the trade group.
The options range from allowing the development of new neighborhoods to turning courses into public parks. It commonly takes years to sort through legal battles over zoning, obligations between the course owners and homeowners and other political fallout. In Phoenix, ongoing legal disputes have left the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course surrounded by a chain-link fence and overgrown with sagebrush for the better part of five years.
Local officials must parse through the impact of building homes in the center of an existing subdivision and potentially overtaxing schools and roads in already booming areas. Property values for nearby homes typically fall about 25% when a course fails, said Blake Plumley, an Orlando, Fla.-based golf development consultant. They can fall more than 40% if a dispute ends up in court, he said.
Here in Richland County, ECapital Management, a Fort Worth, Texas-based firm, bought the Crickentree course out of bankruptcy last year and intends to sell to a developer. It originally proposed building as many as 450 homes. Neighbors fought back with radio ads, yard signs and crowded public meetings. (...)
Crickentree homeowner Michael Koska said his 5,200-square-foot home on what was once the fifth tee box has lost at least a third of its value, based on the list prices of Crickentree homes and sales patterns for homes on other failed courses. He built the house for $565,000 in 2005 and it was appraised at $710,000 a decade ago.
“That’s life-changing kind of money, that’s ‘your kid doesn’t get to go to college, you don’t get to retire early kind of money,’ ” Mr. Koska said.
He wished he had read his neighborhood’s agreement with the course owners more closely when he built the house 14 years ago, he said. “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
Crickentree is one of at least 33 courses in South Carolina that have failed since 2012, according to Kelly Cederberg, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Arizona.
“The people who were building golf courses were not thinking about how many people were out there playing golf,” she said. “They built them to sell homes.”
by Valerie Bauerlein, WSJ | Read more:
Image: NASA/Google Earth
[ed. See also: There Aren't Enough Golfers To Keep All Of The U.S. Courses In Business (NPR); and Not All Golf Course Closures Are Failures (NGF - Q).]
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