Outrage Culture Is Ruining Foreign Policy

August and September 2018 were two significant months for the outrage culture that has afflicted the U.S. public square in recent years. In August, the California Democratic Party called for a boycott of In-N-Out Burger because of a $25,000 donation that company made to the state Republican Party. A few weeks later, some Americans burned their sneakers over a Nike television ad featuring the blackballed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Ever since, I have wondered how foreign diplomats posted in Washington try to capture the current moment in U.S. politics. Do they and the foreign ministers, prime ministers, presidents, kings, and queens they serve grasp the near-constant state of indignation that has gripped society, fueling polarization and even fear in recent years? It seemed absurd to me that a beloved burger joint became the object of political ire among Democrats and that people, the majority of whom seemed to be supporters of President Donald Trump, were burning their sneakers. I cannot even imagine what those diplomatic cables say.

These episodes were no doubt regarded as the oddities and excesses of the current moment in American politics and may have been a source of confusion and dismay for U.S. allies, but the Kaepernick story and the burger boycott (which failed) had no effect on foreign policy. Yet this may be changing. In recent months, outrage—and its cousin, virtue signaling—have made it harder and harder to have a conversation about U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the world and U.S. priorities in it are changing, this sad state of affairs is putting Americans at a disadvantage.

There are already countries in the Middle East that elites in the United States tend to view through their own ideological prisms. As I wrote last summer: Egypt, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia are “red” in the sense that Republicans tend to be—or are perceived to be—more supportive of these governments than Democrats. In turn, Iran, the 2015 nuclear deal, and Palestine are—or are perceived to be—“blue” given that Democrats tend to support engagement with the Iranians, back the nuclear agreement, and express sympathy with the Palestinians in greater numbers than Republicans. This state of affairs, I argued, was not a positive development. Looking back, I was a bit too Pollyannish for fear of giving offense—it is actually ludicrous, moronic, and dangerous.

In Washington these days there is no conversation or debate about foreign policy; there is only politics. The appreciation of a complex world in fine-grained shades of gray—the recognition of which once indicated an active and fertile mind—has given way to a binary world of absolutes. Folks choose teams and advocate for what is best for their side, not necessarily what is in the best interest of the United States. This seemed clear as the conversation— though it was more like people talking in their own echo chambers—about the U.S. killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani unfolded. There was far greater interest among journalists, analysts, and activists in scoring points. That is how you get fury over a manufactured controversy in which Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate challenging Trump, allegedly changed her position on Suleimani’s demise. She did no such thing. I suppose that this type of nonsense is to be expected in a political campaign season, but it is precisely because the stakes in a confrontation with Iran are so high that the indignation and trolling were inappropriate.

There were a bevy of interesting analyses written over the last two weeks, but the overall quality of the discourse over the Suleimani hit was diminished by partisanship in which two basic facts seemed to get lost. First, Suleimani was the leader of the Quds Forces who had copious amounts of American, Syrian, and Iraqi blood on his hands, and he had devoted his violent life to doing the bidding of a regime built on a worldview that is hostile to the United States and American ideals. Second, killing Suleimani contained serious risks. Acknowledging the former should not qualify as support for the Trump administration, and recognizing the latter does not make one an apologist for Iran’s leaders. It should be ok to use the conjunction “but” or caveat a declaratory statement with a complicating factor. The world is maddeningly complicated (and interesting), and unless Americans can acknowledge that in their public discourse, they will have a foreign policy built on the defective assumptions of ideologues. (...)

There are a variety of compelling reasons to rethink the U.S.-Saudi relationship, but that is hard to do if one team believes that the Saudis are the root of all evil and the other is not willing to acknowledge there is a problem. It may very well be that smart individuals on both sides recognize the complexities and nuance of the Saudi issue but are constrained from publicly discussing them for fear of retribution and opprobrium from fellow team members. In other words, ideological purity tests. How did we get here? That is a rhetorical question. We all know how.

by Steven A. Cook, Foreign Policy |  Read more:

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Pentagon Racks Up $35 Trillion in Accounting Changes in One Year

The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone -- a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

The figure dwarfs the $738 billion of defense-related funding in the latest U.S. budget, a spending plan that includes the most expensive weapons systems in the world including the F-35 jet as well as new aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.

Although it gets scant public attention compared with airstrikes, troop deployments, sexual assault statistics or major weapons programs, the reliability of the Pentagon’s financial statement is an indication of how effectively the military manages its resources considering that it receives over half of discretionary domestic spending.

The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.

There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The watchdog agency will release a report on the subject Wednesday after reviewing more than 200,000 fourth-quarter 2018 adjustments totaling $15 trillion.

by Anthony Capaccio, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Mind boggling, on 35 trillion levels.]

Google’s Latest User-Hostile Design Change Makes Ads and Search Results Look Identical

Did you notice a recent change to how Google search results are displayed on the desktop?

I noticed something last week — thinking there must be some kind of weird bug messing up the browser’s page rendering because suddenly everything looked similar: A homogenous sea of blue text links and favicons that, on such a large expanse of screen, come across as one block of background noise.

I found myself clicking on an ad link — rather than the organic search result I was looking for.

Here, for example, are the top two results for a Google search for flight search engine ‘Kayak’ — with just a tiny ‘Ad’ label to distinguish the click that will make Google money from the click that won’t…

Turns out this is Google’s latest dark pattern: The adtech giant has made organic results even more closely resemble the ads it serves against keyword searches, as writer Craig Mod was quick to highlight in a tweet this week.

Last week, in its own breezy tweet, Google sought to spin the shift as quite the opposite — saying the “new look” presents “site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded ‘Ad’ label for ads”: (...)

But Google’s explainer is almost a dark pattern in itself.

If you read the text quickly you’d likely come away with the impression that it has made organic search results easier to spot since it’s claiming components of these results now appear more “prominently” in results.

Yet, read it again, and Google is essentially admitting that a parallel emphasis is being placed — one which, when you actually look at the thing, has the effect of flattening the visual distinction between organic search results (which consumers are looking for) and ads (which Google monetizes).

Now a user of Google’s search engine has — essentially — only a favicon between them and an unintended ad click. Squint or you’ll click it.

This visual trickery may be fractionally less confusing in a small screen mobile environment — where Google debuted the change last year. But on a desktop screen these favicons are truly minuscule. And where to click to get actual information starts to feel like a total lottery.

A lottery that’s being stacked in Google’s favor because confused users are likely to end up clicking more ad links than they otherwise would, meaning it cashes in at the expense of web users’ time and energy.

by Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch |  Read more:
Images: Google and Twitter
[ed. I thought I'd screwed up my settings and fiddled around for a while trying to get the old Google back. No luck. Deception - not a good look.]

Bill Evans

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Sign Stealing Fallout: Like the Steroids Scandal

So, have you caught baseball fever yet?

Pitchers and catchers report for spring training in a month, which usually is cause for celebration. But the carnage from baseball’s cheating scandal continues to grow, casting a pall on what should be a joyous time of pleasant anticipation.

Instead, the darkest week in recent memory took another victim Thursday when Carlos Beltran departed as rookie manager of the New York Mets, before he had even begun.

There were lots of euphemisms to describe Beltran’s exit, just as there had been with Red Sox manager Alex Cora two days earlier. But the reality, when all the platitudes are stripped away, is they were both fired. Just as Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow had been Monday, for their entanglement in the plot to use center-field cameras and replay-room monitors to steal signs during the 2017 and ’18 seasons. Cora was the Astros’ bench coach in 2017, and Beltran played for Houston that season.

What we have now is a burgeoning crisis that in many ways parallels the steroids scandal of the late 1980s and into the 1990s.

In both cases, the credibility of the sport takes a substantial hit. The most vital element for any professional sport, its lifeblood, is the inherent belief from the public that the competition is on the up and up.

Anything that compromises that trust poses a grave threat – and steroids certainly did that. Fans were left to wonder who was using, who was clean and whether the eye-popping offensive statistics of the era had any validity.

And now, with the World Series champions in both 2017 (Astros) and ’18 (Red Sox) having been implicated in cheating plots, the core integrity of the game once again is in question. The pursuit of a title is what fans invest the bulk of their emotional energy into; now, two of the past three titles are tainted.

So, for that matter, are the achievements of an Astros team that is obviously hugely talented. But we will always wonder how much of their success must be attributed to the benefits of having someone bang a trash can when an offspeed pitch was coming.

As it was with steroids, the collateral damage is substantial. The Dodgers may have been jobbed out of two World Series championships, having lost to the Astros in seven games in 2017 and the Red Sox in five games in 2018. Maybe the narrative that their manager, Dave Roberts, can’t win the big one is based on an entirely false premise.

Dodger pitchers Yu Darvish and Clayton Kershaw both were accused of choking under pressure after getting thrashed in World Series games in Houston. You have to look at that much differently now. There are young pitchers around baseball who may have had their careers derailed because they had the misfortune to face an Astros team that knew exactly what they were going to throw.

Teams may have missed the playoffs, and managers fired, for the same reason. Joe Girardi was let go as Yankees manager in 2017 just five days after losing the ALCS in seven games to the Astros. In that series, the Yankees dropped a pair of one-run games in Houston. Who knows how much of that was attributable to the Astros’ cheating?

The ripple effect of all this is massive. The tentacles are far-reaching and intertwined. And just as was the case during the heart of the steroids era, there is a deep suspicion that the whole business is far more widespread than just the parties getting the publicity and punishment. There has been much insinuation, in fact, that this kind of sign-stealing goes back further than 2017, and reaches much deeper than just two teams.

by Larry Stone, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: David Zalubowski / The Associated Press

Nike Air Force The Great Wave off Kanagawa

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[ed. See also: Nike's Vaporfly running shoes and tumbling records (Reuters).]

Uncanny Valley

Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. “What should we do about the culture?”

It’s not just the salespeople, of course. It’s never just the salespeople. Our culture has been splintering for months. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. They’ve noticed the sea change. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore; we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. People keep using the word paranoid. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less.

We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.

This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. It feels like ours. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.

But we see now that we’ve been swimming in the Kool-Aid, and we’re coming up for air. We were lucky and in thrall and now we are bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people — some kids — unfathomably rich. We throw our dead cigarettes on the sidewalk and grind them out under our toes. Phones are opened and taxis summoned; we gulp the dregs of our beers as cartoon cars approach on-screen. We disperse, off to terrorize sleeping roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Eight hours later we’ll be back in the office, slurping down coffee, running out for congealed breakfast sandwiches, tweaking mediocre scripts and writing halfhearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the table.

I skim recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Change the world around you. Help humanity thrive by enabling — next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. We have engineers in TopCoder’s Top 20. We’re not just another social web app. We’re not just another project-management tool. We’re not just another payment processor. I get a haircut and start exploring.

Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.

But this office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.

It’s not clear whether I’m here for lunch or an interview, which is normal. I am prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide leads me through the communal kitchen, which has the trappings of every other start-up pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and Goldfish, bowls of Popchips and miniature candy bars. There’s the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars, and in the fridge are flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It can be hard to tell whether a company is training for a marathon or eating an after-school snack. Once I walked into our kitchen and found two Account Mana­gers pounding Shot Bloks, chewy cubes of glucose marketed to endurance athletes. (...)

Ours is a "pickax-during-the-gold-rush" product, the kind venture capitalists love to get behind. The product provides a shortcut to database infrastructure, giving people information about their apps and websites that they wouldn’t necessarily have on their own. All our customers are other software companies. This is a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry. I would say more, but I signed an NDA.

I am the inaugural customer support rep, or Support Engineer. My job involves looking at strangers’ codebases and telling them what they’ve done wrong in integrating our product with theirs, and how to fix it. There are no unsolvable problems. Perhaps there are not even problems, only mistakes. After nearly three years in book publishing, where I mostly moved on instinct, taste, and feeling, the clarity of this soothes me.

I learn the bare minimum, code-wise, to be able to do my job well — to ask questions only when I’m truly in over my head. Still, I escalate problems all the time. I learn how to talk to our customers about the technology without ever touching the technology itself. I find myself confidently discussing cookies, data mapping, the difference between server-side and client-side integrations. “Just add logic!” I advise cheerfully. This means nothing to me but generally resonates with engineers. It shocks me every time someone nods along.

This is not to confuse confidence with pride. I doubt myself daily. I feel lucky to have this job; I feel desperately out of place. My previous boss — breezy and helpful, earnest in the manner of a man in his early twenties bequeathed $4 million to disrupt libraries — had encouraged me to apply for the role; I had joined his publishing start-up too early and needed something new. “This is the next big company,” he had said. “It’s a rocket ship.” He was right. I had been banking on him being right. Still, there are days when all I want is to disembark, eject myself into space, admit defeat. I pander and apologize and self-deprecate until my manager criticizes me for being a pleaser, at which point it seems most strategic to stop talking.

by Anna Wiener, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007. Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery.

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophistication to Late Night Talk Shows

270 Classic Interviews, Now Online

Just as the avuncular presence of Ed Sullivan helped ease middle America into accepting Elvis Presley and The Beatles, the aw-shucks midwestern charm of Dick Cavett made Woodstock hippies seem downright cuddly when he had Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, and Joni Mitchell on just after the legendary music festival in 1969. He had a way of making everyone around him comfortable enough to reveal just a little more than they might otherwise. (See Jimi Hendrix talk about his National Anthem performance, below.)

Born in Nebraska in 1937, “the only persona [Cavett] bothered to, or needed to, develop for working on camera was of a boy from Nebraska dazzled by the bright lights of New York,” as Clive James writes in an appreciation of the TV host. As he interviewed the biggest stars of late sixties, seventies, and eighties on the long-running Dick Cavett Show, Cavett’s easygoing Midwestern demeanor disarmed both his guests and audiences. He kept them engaged with his erudition, quick wit, and breadth of cultural knowledge. (...)

Cavett, writes James, was “the most distinguished talk-show host in America… a true sophisticate with a daunting intellectual range.” He was also an empathic interviewer who could lead his guests beyond the stock responses they were used to giving in TV interviews. (David Bowie, below, reveals how he was influenced by his fans.)

Once he had his own late-night talk show, however, which ran opposite Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, it became clear that he was doing something very different. “Cavett never mugged, never whooped it up for the audience, rarely told a formally constructed joke, and listened to the guest,” writes James. He became “famous enough not to be able to go out except in disguise,” but “his style did not suit a mass audience.” This is what made—and still makes—Cavett worth watching.

by Open Culture |  Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. If you're not that familiar with Mr. Cavett's work and cultural impact, do read the Clive James link above. Also this and this. See also: Dozens of Classic Interviews from The Dick Cavett Show (Kotke.org): Some of the other videos feature John Lennon on why The Beatles ended, Jimmy Hendrix talking about performing at Woodstock, Orson Welles recounting a dinner with Adolf Hitler, Janis Joplin’s final TV interview, Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, and David Crosby fresh off of their appearances at Woodstock, Robin Williams on depression, and Carly Simon talks about stage fright. Wikipedia has a list of most notable shows and moments.]

Preparing For The Next Pandemic

As a new coronavirus spreads within China and to other countries, I’m reminded of my time in Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak of 2003. Back then, I spent an otherwise beautiful spring wearing masks in public but mostly working from home, as I reported on the disease and the struggle to contain it. Every day at the same time — 3:20 p.m., if my memory’s correct — I checked an official Hong Kong website, which I trusted completely, to see that day’s new cases. I remember my relief as the number finally trended down. When it was over, it felt as though SARS had been just a shot across the world’s bow.

For one thing’s certain: the next pandemic will come, and it may resemble the Spanish flu of 1918, which infected half a billion people. The questions are when, where and how, and whether we’ll be ready collectively. I say “collectively” because a pandemic, like climate change, doesn’t respect passports or borders. We don’t quarantine, cure or save America First, or China First or anybody first; we either put humanity first or we all lose.

There are other links between climate change and pandemics (and, to be clear, the current outbreak is still far from being one). The main connection is that global warming actually creates new disease vectors. As the permafrost thaws in places like Siberia, viruses that have been frozen for millennia, and against which animals and humans no longer have any resistance, will resurface. And as desertification and other side effects of warming move the boundaries between habitats, species will come into contact with creatures they’ve never encountered before. That’s how viruses start their journey.

What, then, are my lessons from the SARS outbreak? First, that we must plan for human nature, both in its perfidy and its heroism. I observed SARS crash into various cultures in totally different ways.

Mainland China at first suppressed information about it, fearing economic loss or political turmoil. But that allowed the virus to spread farther and faster for longer than was necessary. And once China did open up on the subject, its people no longer trusted the government’s information. Rumors circulated and often prevailed over facts, hampering the official response.

Singapore, by contrast, lived up to its reputation for iron discipline with immediate quarantines that I initially considered draconian and illiberal, but came reluctantly to respect. Taiwan initially showed the darker side of individualism, as some hospital workers, to protect themselves and their families, shirked their duties. In Hong Kong (and then Taiwan and other places too) the opposite happened, as nurses and doctors cared for the victims and valiantly fought the virus.

Nobody who’s read Albert Camus’ “The Plague” or Jose Saramago’s “Blindness” should be surprised that human beings, individually and in crowds, will respond unpredictably to such crises. Some will hoard scarce medicine or food that’s more urgently needed by others. Some will break quarantines to be with loved ones. Some will do their duty, others won’t.

The biggest lesson, which China seems to have learned, is that the government must be ruthlessly honest and transparent. The more facts, the better. Hide nothing. It was my trust in that Hong Kong website that eventually made me believe SARS was waning. Once trust between the population and the state breaks down, controlling an outbreak becomes almost impossible.

Another lesson is, thankfully, one we’ve already learned. Screening and surveillance, which should usually be used with caution in free societies, becomes necessary in an outbreak and is effective. Even now various airports around the world are digitally observing the body temperatures of passengers arriving from Wuhan, the center of the new outbreak.

Quarantine should be voluntary at first and actively encouraged by employers and government. Whoever can work from home, via Skype and such, should do so, without fearing recrimination. The more people can keep acting on their own volition, the more “agency” they believe they have, the calmer and more cooperative they will remain. Once an outbreak goes out of control, of course, quarantines must become mandatory.

But the most profound lesson is that we must cooperate as a species, with a geopolitical approach that seems to have gone out of fashion: multilateralism. We’ve always been locked in an arms race between the evolution of viruses, bacteria and fungi and our medicines against them. When a new virus appears, it potentially threatens all of us and should be fought by all of us together.

by Andreas Kluth, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Outbreak of new virus explodes in China; human-to-human spread confirmed (Ars Technica). Update (01/26/20): A Historic Quarantine (The Atlantic).]

Canefield Songs: Holehole Bushi

[ed. Such beautiful music. I grew up in the canefields of Waipahu (where many of these pictures were taken). They were my playground. And my grandparents worked the pineapple plantation on Lanai for most of their lives. Plantation life. Strong memories, and some of them very sad (such a hard life, and feelings of mono no aware, too). See also: Allison Arakawa Hole Hole Bushi (YouTube).]

Nā Pali Coast Kauai, Hawaii
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.ORG

Late last year, the nonprofit Internet Society abruptly announced a deal to sell control over the Public Interest Registry (which manages all .ORG domain registrations) to Ethos, a newly created private equity fund capitalized by three politically connected families of Republican billionaires. Under the deal, ISOC would get $1.135B to spend on various projects, and PIR would have to return a profit to their private equity investors.

The deal was incredibly fishy. For one thing, Ethos turned out to be staffed with former execs and staffers from ICANN, the body that has the power to bless or halt the sale of PIR -- and these people had come to Ethos after overseeing a highly irregular change in policy that would let PIR hit .ORG domain holders with unlimited price-hikes.

Since then, we've learned that the deal to buy PIR will be financed by hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of debt, which PIR will have to make payments on just to keep the lights on -- money it will have to make by somehow radically increasing PIR's revenues.

It's not clear how they'll do this, or why it needed doing. .ORG is home to the world's best-established human rights groups and nonprofits, and depending on how Ethos manages PIR, those organizations could see their online presence censored to appease the dictatorial governments they watchdog, or have every visitor to every .ORG tracked and the information sold to the highest bidder.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For a comprehensive overview, see: ICANN needs to ask more questions about the sale of .ORG (Boing Boing).]

Inside Tech’s Fever Dream

We’re not at a loss for in-depth accounts of the tech industry these days. Reporters, cultural critics, academic historians, and tech figures themselves have been busy trying to explain a social and economic paradigm shift that’s affected everything from our dating lives to the security of municipal infrastructure. Books like Alexandra Wolfe’s 2017 Valley of the Gods have fetishized Silicon Valley, offering portraits of tech as a culture apart, rising up to replace the moribund institutions that have failed society—academia, public transit, local news media, government. Other books, such as Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and an early mentor of Mark Zuckerberg’s, have taken a far darker view. Where these accounts converge is in portraying tech as nothing less than the catalyst of a radically new social order.

Uncanny Valley is a different sort of Silicon Valley narrative, a literary-minded outsider’s insider account of an insulated world that isn’t as insular or distinctive as it and we assume. Wiener is our guide to a realm whose denizens have been as in thrall to a dizzying sense of momentum as consumers have been. Not unlike the rest of us, she learned, they have been distracted and self-deluded in embracing an ethos of efficiency, hyperproductivity, and seamless connectivity at any cost. Arrogant software developers, giddy investors, and exorbitantly paid employees—all have been chasing dreams of growth, profits, and personal wealth, without pausing to second-guess the feeling of being “on the glimmering edge of a brand-new world,” as Wiener puts it in the middle of her book.

Now, from the vantage of 2020, the unintended consequences of the chase are glaringly obvious. But why was the recognition so slow in coming? Wiener downsizes that question to human scale: How, even half a decade ago—a lifetime in the Valley—could everyone still have been so blinkered, from those at the top down to her and others at the bottom? Complicity is Wiener’s theme, and her method: She’s an acute observer of tech’s shortcomings, but she’s especially good at conveying the mind of a subject whose chief desire is to not know too much. Through her story, we begin to perceive how much tech owes its power, and the problems that come with it, to contented ignorance. (...)

Wiener’s swerve into tech took place in post-recession America, where even graduates from prestigious universities found the old economy’s wreckage jamming the path to wealth and power. “My desires were generic,” she offers by way of explaining her jump from publishing to tech. “I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued.” Tech held out the opportunity to “feel like I was going somewhere,” to stop questioning her worth. In publishing, she writes, “nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.” (...)

To watch Wiener watching herself become absorbed by her Valley existence, and then ever so gradually alienated, is to recognize along with her that the social life of the tech industry holds the key to understanding its hypnotic sway—and the corrosive effects of its cultlike culture. Paradoxically, the Valley’s vaunted commitment to transparency and social change gets in the way of perceiving its actual social effects. (...) In the Valley, money still counts, of course: Billions of dollars slosh across the Bay Area. But Wiener was “seduced by the confidence of young men” who had recalibrated the style, and the scale, of ambition. These geniuses see themselves in direct competition with the “middle-aged leaders of industry.” Their own professed faith in principles that promise meaning and purpose, along with an “optimized” lifestyle, marks a crucial and contagious difference. Wiener bought into the narrative, trusting innovators who she thought would be enlightened versions of Wall Street titans. “I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world,” she writes, “and not just for people like themselves.”

by Ismail Muhammad, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chau Luong

Sending Bees to War

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.

This shouldn’t be happening to someone like Arp, a beekeeper with decades of experience. But his story is not unique. Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.

Environmental advocates argue that the huge, commercially driven proliferation of the European honeybees used on almond farms is itself undermining the ecosystem for all bees. Honeybees out-compete diverse native bee species for forage, and threaten the endangered species that are already struggling to survive climate change. Environmentalists argue a better solution is to transform the way large-scale agriculture is carried out in the US.

Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.” (...)

This year Arp’s bees, like more than two-thirds of the United States’ commercial honeybee population, will spend February in the toxic chemical soup of California’s Central Valley, fertilizing almonds one blossom at a time.

Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans. (The maker, Bayer-owned Monsanto, denies the cancer link when people use Roundup at the prescribed dosage. So far this year three US courts have found in favour of glyphosate users who developed forms of lymphoma; thousands more cases are pending.)

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness. (...)

The high price of growth

When the phenomenon called colony collapse disorder was first identified in 2006, after a record number of honeybees mysteriously disappeared or died outside their hives, it was linked to a variety of factors including loss of habitat and climate change. But the primary culprit was pesticides. Researchers found that a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids was especially lethal to bees.

Last May, the EPA pulled a dozen “neonics” from the market following a successful lawsuit brought by beekeepers and environmental groups.

But there are many chemicals that are not labeled as bee toxic, even though they can make bees sick and weaken their immune systems. While bees may survive the pollination season, they may not last the winter or may take back substances that gradually poison the entire colony.

Those on the almond growers’ side acknowledge there is a huge problem. “The bee mortality rate is too high and is unacceptable,” says the entomologist Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant for the Almond Board of California. “It is only because of the hard work and creativity of beekeepers that [almond growers] have gotten the bees they need.”

The almond board’s “best practice” guidelines encourage beekeepers to spend as little time in California’s Central Valley as possible. Honeybees can travel up to three miles in search of varied forage, so even if the almond grower is doing everything right to protect a pollination investment, the cotton or grape farmer down the road may be spraying bee-toxic chemicals on crops.

Even as almond production has steadily ramped up for decades, the number of commercial hives in the US has remained at a steady 2.7m colonies since the early 2000s. With all the challenges beekeepers face, just maintaining the bare minimum is a struggle.

by Annette McGivney, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Caitlin O’Hara

Marko Spalatin, Self Portrait, 1968
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Andrew Nawroski - Kicking the degree at 0.7
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8 Best Watercolor Marker Sets for Beginners and Professionals

Watercolor paints are a popular medium for both professional artists and hobbyists alike. But, let’s face it: they can be a bit inconvenient to use. While there are some portable watercolor sets out there, you still have to make sure that you have a palette, paintbrush, and a cup of water handy. If you get discouraged by all of the accouterments needed for watercolor painting, give watercolor markers a try.

As their name suggests, watercolor markers are essentially watercolor pigments packaged in the form of a drawing utensil. Available in sets of 12, 24, or even 48 pens, they are perfect for sketching and painting on the go. Best of all, they retain the same qualities of conventional watercolor pigments. Many brands of watercolor markers are formulated so you can blend their colors with water and a brush.

What to Look for in Watercolor Markers

You’ll find a lot of similarities among watercolor marker brands. Most of the highest-rated marker sets have nylon brush tips that will give you a painterly stroke when you draw with them. Additionally, they have water-based pigments so that you can use your favorite watercolor techniques and special effects with ease.

There are, however, some markers that use oil-based inks. This means that you won’t be able to add water to your drawing and will instead have to blend colors using other oil-based ink markers.

Before you buy a set of watercolor markers, be sure to consider what type of drawings you’ll want to make. Do you still want the option of adding water to your artwork? If so, make sure to buy a set of markers with water-based ink. Or, would you simply prefer a painterly look to your drawing? If that’s the case, then you’ll probably enjoy using the oil-based markers sans water.

by Sara Barnes, My Modern Met |  Read more:

Image: Winsor & Newton
[ed. See also: 15-Minute Watercolor Masterpieces (Anna Koliadych), Amazon.]

Charlotte Knox
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