Thursday, February 13, 2020
With the Beatles
What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.
There’s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl, I mean—whom I remember well. I don’t know her name, though. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles.
This was in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. It was early autumn. The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again. She was hurrying down the long, dim hallway of the old school building, her skirt fluttering. I was the only other person there. She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious. The LP “With the Beatles.” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I have a clear memory that it was the original, British version of the album, not the American or the Japanese version.
She was a beautiful girl. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell—that beautiful, nameless girl clutching “With the Beatles” to her chest.
My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared.
A dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, “With the Beatles.”
That was the only time I saw that girl. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade. (We were the so-called baby-boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. I looked for her every time I used that hallway.
Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.)
Later, I got to know a few women, and went out with them. And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I’d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964. That silent, insistent thrill in my heart, the breathless feeling in my chest, the bell ringing gently in my ears.
Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning.
When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.
I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.
There’s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl, I mean—whom I remember well. I don’t know her name, though. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles.This was in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. It was early autumn. The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again. She was hurrying down the long, dim hallway of the old school building, her skirt fluttering. I was the only other person there. She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious. The LP “With the Beatles.” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I have a clear memory that it was the original, British version of the album, not the American or the Japanese version.
She was a beautiful girl. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell—that beautiful, nameless girl clutching “With the Beatles” to her chest.
My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared.
A dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, “With the Beatles.”
That was the only time I saw that girl. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade. (We were the so-called baby-boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. I looked for her every time I used that hallway.
Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.)
Later, I got to know a few women, and went out with them. And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I’d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964. That silent, insistent thrill in my heart, the breathless feeling in my chest, the bell ringing gently in my ears.
Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning.
When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.
by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Adrian Tomine
Yuval Noah Harari's History of Everyone, Ever
In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.
“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”
Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“Homo Deus” (2017) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.” (...)
Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”
He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens—there will be something else.” (...)
Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.
Image: Olaf Blecker
[ed. See also: Yuval Noah Harari & Steven Pinker in Conversation (Duck Soup); and Homo Deus – How Data Will Destroy Human Freedom (Duck Soup).]
“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“Homo Deus” (2017) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.” (...)
Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”
He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens—there will be something else.” (...)
Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.
by Ian Parker, New Yorker | Read more:
[ed. See also: Yuval Noah Harari & Steven Pinker in Conversation (Duck Soup); and Homo Deus – How Data Will Destroy Human Freedom (Duck Soup).]
Seattle's Asian Art Museum Completes a Major Restoration and Expansion
Seattle's Asian Art Museum Completes a Major Restoration and Expansion (Architectural Digest).
Image: Tim Griffith
[ed. One of my favorite places to visit in Seattle, surrounded by Volunteer Park, botanical gardens, Black Sun sculpture by Isamu Noguchi (inspiration for Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun), and graveyard next door containing Bruce and Brandon Lee's gravesites. And, in other architectural news: Jeff Bezos buys lavish Beverly Hills estate for record $165m – report (The Guardian); and Tour Jack L. Warner's House in Beverly Hills (the one Bezos just bought - Architectural Digest).]
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Shares of Bedding Unicorn Casper Collapsed by 72% from Magical Pre-IPO Valuation
Casper Sleep Inc., a money-losing cash-burning retailer of foam-mattresses, duvets, sheets, and other bedding items, had dressed itself up as some sort of magical tech company to obtain its former hyper-inflated unicorn status with a fantastical “valuation” of $1.1 billion during its last round of funding on March 27, 2019. But it has been one heck of a ride downhill from there.
At today’s closing price, Casper’s market valuation of $312 million has collapsed by 72% from that unicorn “valuation” of $1.1 billion. (...)
Casper’s IPO had been misbegotten from get-go. Its amended IPO prospectus filed on January 27 was instantly picked apart by yours truly, who included a photo of its enticing “mail-order-bride” marketing approach. Casper disclosed that it wanted to offer its shares at an IPO price in the range of $17 to $19 a share. An IPO price of $18 a share would have given the company a valuation of $705 million, down 36% from the $1.1 billion valuation as unicorn.
At the time, I postulated: “The Casper IPO will test just how much appetite there still is in this market for money-losing overvalued cash-burn machines in ho-hum low-tech businesses, such as bedding.”
Turns out, not much appetite. Even this lowered price range wasn’t saleable, and so the company and underwriters set the IPO price at $12 a share last Wednesday evening. Then they worked hard to obtain that initial “pop” Thursday morning and clean out some retail investors, before everyone threw in the towel.
To make sure everyone understood that this wasn’t some kind of online ho-hum bedding retailer, competing with all ho-hum bedding retailers in the world that market their products online in the US on platforms such as Amazon or eBay, and competing with every legacy bedding and foam-mattress retailer in the US, Casper surrounded itself with the aura of being some kind of tech company with an app that would disrupt the world of bedding as we know it.
Casper is in the business of marketing, advertising, and selling mattresses, duvets, sheets, and the like, and this is a low-margin business with no barriers to entry, open to the entire world, requiring huge marketing expenses to achieve any kind of growth. (...)
But it spent a gazillion dollars on its fancy and overwhelmingly cool 34,000 square-foot headquarters at 230 Park Avenue South in New York City, as is appropriate for a unicorn. Unicorns spend money. They don’t make money. That’s the deal. But investor appetite for this sort of thing, while still astoundingly robust, is clearly not as robust as it used to be.
At today’s closing price, Casper’s market valuation of $312 million has collapsed by 72% from that unicorn “valuation” of $1.1 billion. (...)
Casper’s IPO had been misbegotten from get-go. Its amended IPO prospectus filed on January 27 was instantly picked apart by yours truly, who included a photo of its enticing “mail-order-bride” marketing approach. Casper disclosed that it wanted to offer its shares at an IPO price in the range of $17 to $19 a share. An IPO price of $18 a share would have given the company a valuation of $705 million, down 36% from the $1.1 billion valuation as unicorn.At the time, I postulated: “The Casper IPO will test just how much appetite there still is in this market for money-losing overvalued cash-burn machines in ho-hum low-tech businesses, such as bedding.”
Turns out, not much appetite. Even this lowered price range wasn’t saleable, and so the company and underwriters set the IPO price at $12 a share last Wednesday evening. Then they worked hard to obtain that initial “pop” Thursday morning and clean out some retail investors, before everyone threw in the towel.
To make sure everyone understood that this wasn’t some kind of online ho-hum bedding retailer, competing with all ho-hum bedding retailers in the world that market their products online in the US on platforms such as Amazon or eBay, and competing with every legacy bedding and foam-mattress retailer in the US, Casper surrounded itself with the aura of being some kind of tech company with an app that would disrupt the world of bedding as we know it.
Casper is in the business of marketing, advertising, and selling mattresses, duvets, sheets, and the like, and this is a low-margin business with no barriers to entry, open to the entire world, requiring huge marketing expenses to achieve any kind of growth. (...)
But it spent a gazillion dollars on its fancy and overwhelmingly cool 34,000 square-foot headquarters at 230 Park Avenue South in New York City, as is appropriate for a unicorn. Unicorns spend money. They don’t make money. That’s the deal. But investor appetite for this sort of thing, while still astoundingly robust, is clearly not as robust as it used to be.
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street | Read more:
Image: Wolf Street
[ed. See also: The mattress landfill crisis: how the race to bring us better beds led to a recycling nightmare (The Guardian).]
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Endless Wars
President Trump has repeatedly promised to end what he calls America’s “endless wars,” fulfilling a promise he made during the campaign.
No wars have ended, though, and more troops have deployed to the Middle East in recent months than have come home. Mr. Trump is not so much ending wars, as he is moving troops from one conflict to another.
Tens of thousands of American troops remain deployed all over the world, some in war zones such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and — even still — Syria. And the United States maintains even more troops overseas in large legacy missions far from the wars following the Sept. 11 attacks, in such allied lands as Germany, South Korea and Japan.
Although deployment numbers fluctuate daily, based on the needs of commanders, shifting missions and the military’s ability to shift large numbers of personnel by transport planes and warships, a rough estimate is that 200,000 troops are deployed overseas today.
by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
[ed. Just in case anyone's still interested in what we're doing and where we are militarily (and why we're spending $750 billion each year on military spending, including jets that can't fight, new aircraft carriers, a new "space force", etc.). See also: United States military deployments (Wikipedia). Also in today: "President Trump released a $4.8 trillion budget proposal on Monday that includes a familiar list of deep cuts to student loan assistance, affordable housing efforts, food stamps and Medicaid, reflecting Mr. Trump’s election-year effort to continue shrinking the federal safety net." (NY Times).]
No wars have ended, though, and more troops have deployed to the Middle East in recent months than have come home. Mr. Trump is not so much ending wars, as he is moving troops from one conflict to another.Tens of thousands of American troops remain deployed all over the world, some in war zones such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and — even still — Syria. And the United States maintains even more troops overseas in large legacy missions far from the wars following the Sept. 11 attacks, in such allied lands as Germany, South Korea and Japan.
Although deployment numbers fluctuate daily, based on the needs of commanders, shifting missions and the military’s ability to shift large numbers of personnel by transport planes and warships, a rough estimate is that 200,000 troops are deployed overseas today.
by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
[ed. Just in case anyone's still interested in what we're doing and where we are militarily (and why we're spending $750 billion each year on military spending, including jets that can't fight, new aircraft carriers, a new "space force", etc.). See also: United States military deployments (Wikipedia). Also in today: "President Trump released a $4.8 trillion budget proposal on Monday that includes a familiar list of deep cuts to student loan assistance, affordable housing efforts, food stamps and Medicaid, reflecting Mr. Trump’s election-year effort to continue shrinking the federal safety net." (NY Times).]
There Are Rivers in the Sky Drenching the U.S. Because of Climate Change
Climate change is spurring a new, deep dive into a complex, little-studied weather system blamed for creating billions of dollars in flood damage across the western U.S.
Atmospheric rivers are narrow ribbons of concentrated moisture that originate in the Pacific and can flow thousands of miles before dropping rain and snow on land. Scientists are ramping up their research into the systems this winter fearful that warmer temperatures tied to climate change will boost the moisture they carry, supercharging them moving forward.
“Hurricane hunter” planes are set to fly at least 12 missions directly into the systems, double last year’s number, to gather a wide range of meteorological data. At the same time, 100 new ocean buoys will monitor how the systems form. The goal: Better warning processes to stave off flooding.
“It is 100% completely saturated air,” said Rich Henning, a flight director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who conducts onboard weather observations. “If you’re ever wondering how six feet of snow can fall in the Cascades in one day, this is exactly how all that moisture is transported.” (...)
A study released in December by Scripps and the Army Corps of Engineers found that atmospheric rivers caused 84% of the flood damage suffered in 11 western states over 40 years through 2017. The average annual cost: $1.1 billion, according to the report.
“In a warmer climate,” the study concluded, atmospheric rivers will be “more intense as they become wetter, longer, and wider; there is some indication that this is already happening.”
It won’t take much of a temperature change to boost their moisture content, according to John Dickson, a flood researcher who is the chief executive officer of Aon Edge, a Montana-based flood insurance provider. A rise of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit can boost water vapor in the air by 7%, he said.
“Our world continues to change and our land use practices are constantly evolving,” Dickson said., “Yet we rely on risk management tools that are decades old to navigate the current times.”
Besides helping forecasts in the western U.S., the new data will have international significance, since the rivers can originate in oceans worldwide.
“There has been an amazing amount of research on the hurricane problem and tornadoes and nor’easters,” said Marty Ralph, a Scripps scientist. “But it turns out atmospheric rivers are a real issue on the West Coast, and they have not really had that much attention.”
Atmospheric rivers are narrow ribbons of concentrated moisture that originate in the Pacific and can flow thousands of miles before dropping rain and snow on land. Scientists are ramping up their research into the systems this winter fearful that warmer temperatures tied to climate change will boost the moisture they carry, supercharging them moving forward.
“Hurricane hunter” planes are set to fly at least 12 missions directly into the systems, double last year’s number, to gather a wide range of meteorological data. At the same time, 100 new ocean buoys will monitor how the systems form. The goal: Better warning processes to stave off flooding.
“It is 100% completely saturated air,” said Rich Henning, a flight director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who conducts onboard weather observations. “If you’re ever wondering how six feet of snow can fall in the Cascades in one day, this is exactly how all that moisture is transported.” (...)A study released in December by Scripps and the Army Corps of Engineers found that atmospheric rivers caused 84% of the flood damage suffered in 11 western states over 40 years through 2017. The average annual cost: $1.1 billion, according to the report.
“In a warmer climate,” the study concluded, atmospheric rivers will be “more intense as they become wetter, longer, and wider; there is some indication that this is already happening.”
It won’t take much of a temperature change to boost their moisture content, according to John Dickson, a flood researcher who is the chief executive officer of Aon Edge, a Montana-based flood insurance provider. A rise of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit can boost water vapor in the air by 7%, he said.
“Our world continues to change and our land use practices are constantly evolving,” Dickson said., “Yet we rely on risk management tools that are decades old to navigate the current times.”
Besides helping forecasts in the western U.S., the new data will have international significance, since the rivers can originate in oceans worldwide.
“There has been an amazing amount of research on the hurricane problem and tornadoes and nor’easters,” said Marty Ralph, a Scripps scientist. “But it turns out atmospheric rivers are a real issue on the West Coast, and they have not really had that much attention.”
by Brian K. Sullivan, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory
Monday, February 10, 2020
Self-Flagellation and Stuffed Goody Bags
There must be a word – maybe in German, or possibly in Korean – for that piquant feeling of being at one of the most exclusive events in the world, surrounded by people who have only ever turned left on a plane, but are now cheering on a movie about the corrosive effects of class barriers. Don’t get me wrong: it was genuinely delightful to be in the Dolby theatre in Hollywood on Sunday night, watching Parasite bulldoze its way through the awards. And goodness, how the audience was on Parasite’s side, with the cheers becoming so much more pronounced for it than any of its other fellow nominees that it felt almost awkward by the end. Still, let’s remember that a significant number of those applauding the film with one hand were, in the other hand, holding the gift bag for the nominees, worth an impressively humble $225,000 (£174,000).
Offerings inside included $20,000 worth of “facial rejuvenation treatments” and “a book that empowers girls”. That’s right, girls: maybe one day you will feel so empowered that you, too, can have five figures-worth of chemicals injected into your face! But look, as Parasite’s win proved, the Oscars LOVES poor people, so also included was “a cleanser that supports showers for the homeless”. If you’re asking: “Why not just give the whole damn bag – hell, even the whole $225,000 – to the homeless instead of to people who earn seven to eight figures a film?” then you are insufficiently empowered, because you are asking the wrong questions. I can recommend a book for that.
The significance of Parasite’s win should not be downplayed, but it is also true that when it comes to efforts at inclusivity, the Oscars ceremony is a veritable master of making small gestures to buy itself some licence, and this year was filled with absolutely classic examples before the event even started.
In the run-up to Sunday night, an enormous amount of hot air was spewed into the atmosphere about the Academy’s efforts at being a bit more environmentally friendly than sticking a private jet directly into the earth’s lung and choking it. I don’t know about you, but there is nothing I enjoy more than hearing about the half-hearted eco efforts of the 0.0001%. There have been press releases about “plant-based” meals at the event and doomy warnings about the negative environmental impact of sequins. If you think finger-wagging about sequins while your guests take private jets to the beach house and helicopters to music festivals is the literalisation of fiddling while Rome burns, well, that’s ridiculous. Unlike a sequin, no one would put a fiddle on a dress, because it’s just not very slimming.
Most of all, there were promises that (some of) the guests would (maybe) re-wear an outfit, as opposed to getting a new one for the ceremony. This is the celebrity equivalent of going off-grid and, last month, Stella McCartney posted a deeply excited tweet in which she praised Joaquin Phoenix for “making choices for the future of the planet”, this particular choice being “to wear this same tux for the entire award season”. That the much-worn tux just happened to be by one Stella McCartney is surely a coincidence, and I have no doubt that McCartney would have been just as happy if Phoenix had decided to clothe his body solely in Gucci, Pucci, or Fiorucci. If you save a tree in the forest, but don’t send out a press release about it, did you save it at all? (...)
Yet when I arrived at the theatre on Sunday afternoon, I struggled to find any celebrities re-wearing their clothes. Well, to be honest, I struggled to find any celebrities, full stop. In previous years, everyone – celebrities and peasants alike – walked down the red carpet together, but this year, only the A-listers were granted that privilege, with the rest of us shunted off to the gutter, hidden behind a white screen, thus sparing TV watchers at home from seeing our hideous zombie faces. It felt – and yes, you might have seen this Parasite analogy coming – like being stuck in the basement, watching the rich and the beautiful frolic in the sunshine above us. (...)
After everyone in the Dolby theatre recovered from dislocating their shoulder after patting themselves on the back for Parasite’s win, we made our way to the Governor’s Ball, the official Oscars after-party. And what better way to celebrate a movie about the rising up of an underclass than a party where waiters were dutifully spraying gold dust on mini chocolate Oscars for the guests’ enjoyment? If it was hard to see the celebrities from behind the white screen on the red carpet, it was downright impossible in the Governor’s Ball, with the whole room filled with golden flecks of dust.
“The whole evening has been dripping with glamour!” was the nominee Florence Pugh’s take on it. But this was Pugh’s debut at the Oscars, and that was a verdict only a first-timer could make. One of the many strange things about the Oscars is that, for an event so exclusive and elite, it feels decidedly tacky and overcrowded – a bit like a Hilton hotel, really. And it gets palpably worse every year.
Offerings inside included $20,000 worth of “facial rejuvenation treatments” and “a book that empowers girls”. That’s right, girls: maybe one day you will feel so empowered that you, too, can have five figures-worth of chemicals injected into your face! But look, as Parasite’s win proved, the Oscars LOVES poor people, so also included was “a cleanser that supports showers for the homeless”. If you’re asking: “Why not just give the whole damn bag – hell, even the whole $225,000 – to the homeless instead of to people who earn seven to eight figures a film?” then you are insufficiently empowered, because you are asking the wrong questions. I can recommend a book for that.
The significance of Parasite’s win should not be downplayed, but it is also true that when it comes to efforts at inclusivity, the Oscars ceremony is a veritable master of making small gestures to buy itself some licence, and this year was filled with absolutely classic examples before the event even started.In the run-up to Sunday night, an enormous amount of hot air was spewed into the atmosphere about the Academy’s efforts at being a bit more environmentally friendly than sticking a private jet directly into the earth’s lung and choking it. I don’t know about you, but there is nothing I enjoy more than hearing about the half-hearted eco efforts of the 0.0001%. There have been press releases about “plant-based” meals at the event and doomy warnings about the negative environmental impact of sequins. If you think finger-wagging about sequins while your guests take private jets to the beach house and helicopters to music festivals is the literalisation of fiddling while Rome burns, well, that’s ridiculous. Unlike a sequin, no one would put a fiddle on a dress, because it’s just not very slimming.
Most of all, there were promises that (some of) the guests would (maybe) re-wear an outfit, as opposed to getting a new one for the ceremony. This is the celebrity equivalent of going off-grid and, last month, Stella McCartney posted a deeply excited tweet in which she praised Joaquin Phoenix for “making choices for the future of the planet”, this particular choice being “to wear this same tux for the entire award season”. That the much-worn tux just happened to be by one Stella McCartney is surely a coincidence, and I have no doubt that McCartney would have been just as happy if Phoenix had decided to clothe his body solely in Gucci, Pucci, or Fiorucci. If you save a tree in the forest, but don’t send out a press release about it, did you save it at all? (...)
Yet when I arrived at the theatre on Sunday afternoon, I struggled to find any celebrities re-wearing their clothes. Well, to be honest, I struggled to find any celebrities, full stop. In previous years, everyone – celebrities and peasants alike – walked down the red carpet together, but this year, only the A-listers were granted that privilege, with the rest of us shunted off to the gutter, hidden behind a white screen, thus sparing TV watchers at home from seeing our hideous zombie faces. It felt – and yes, you might have seen this Parasite analogy coming – like being stuck in the basement, watching the rich and the beautiful frolic in the sunshine above us. (...)
After everyone in the Dolby theatre recovered from dislocating their shoulder after patting themselves on the back for Parasite’s win, we made our way to the Governor’s Ball, the official Oscars after-party. And what better way to celebrate a movie about the rising up of an underclass than a party where waiters were dutifully spraying gold dust on mini chocolate Oscars for the guests’ enjoyment? If it was hard to see the celebrities from behind the white screen on the red carpet, it was downright impossible in the Governor’s Ball, with the whole room filled with golden flecks of dust.
“The whole evening has been dripping with glamour!” was the nominee Florence Pugh’s take on it. But this was Pugh’s debut at the Oscars, and that was a verdict only a first-timer could make. One of the many strange things about the Oscars is that, for an event so exclusive and elite, it feels decidedly tacky and overcrowded – a bit like a Hilton hotel, really. And it gets palpably worse every year.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Matt Petit/AMPAS/AFP via Getty Images
A Conundrum: Who Owns Louisiana Land After It Washes Away?
Louisiana's continual land loss has created a monumental legal headache: When privately owned land vanishes under the water, who does it belong to?
A task force created in the summer of 2018 to come up with policy recommendations sent its list of possible solutions to state lawmakers Friday, ahead of their regular session.
The problem is a result of the state's rapidly changing landscape. About 80 percent of Louisiana's coast is privately owned. But, under an old law, as coastal erosion and sea level rise turn the land into open water the area becomes property of the state, including the mineral rights underneath.
Private landowners have become more adamant about restricting access to water on their property in order to assert their claim to the minerals underneath it. But boaters often have difficulty figuring out where private property ends and public waterways begin. Since 2003, Louisiana law does not require landowners to post signs demarcating their property. The resulting confusion led the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS, to announce in 2017 that it would no longer host professional fishing tournaments in Louisiana tidal waters, where fishers risk being arrested.
The task force included representatives of landowners, oil and gas companies, environmental groups and fishers. Their final report lays out seven possible options for addressing the problem. Five incentivize landowners to allow recreational fishing by giving them some form of title to water bottoms in areas that have have eroded, including the mineral rights.
Other options include making landowners post private property markers at the boundaries of their property or expanding recreational access to include privately owned coastal waterways.
There are options in the report that would satisfy many landowners concerned about losing their mineral interests, said Taylor Darden, with the Louisiana Landowners Association. "It’s going to be up to the Legislature and its wisdom to decide what to do with it," he said.
But fishers say there's still concern that areas where they historically fished would remain off limits under the options. These areas include canals dredged through marshy areas to bring oil equipment in and out, said Emory Belton, an attorney who represented the interests of Louisiana Sportsmen’s Coalition.
"I think what my guys would really object to is a patchwork of rules for different areas because the public would be no better off in terms of knowing where they could go," he said.
by Sara Sneath, Nola.com | Read more:
Image: David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
[ed. Expect to hear a lot more about this issue as coastal lands continue to erode from climate change. Avulsion (and accretion) issues arise for a number of reasons: accretion of sediments that add to an owner's property; loss of property due to environmental factors like hurricanes and earthquakes; and, in Alaska's case, changes in coastal topography and property lines due to earthquakes and receding glaciers (isostatic rebound). Some areas get uplifted, others submerged.]
A task force created in the summer of 2018 to come up with policy recommendations sent its list of possible solutions to state lawmakers Friday, ahead of their regular session.
The problem is a result of the state's rapidly changing landscape. About 80 percent of Louisiana's coast is privately owned. But, under an old law, as coastal erosion and sea level rise turn the land into open water the area becomes property of the state, including the mineral rights underneath.
Private landowners have become more adamant about restricting access to water on their property in order to assert their claim to the minerals underneath it. But boaters often have difficulty figuring out where private property ends and public waterways begin. Since 2003, Louisiana law does not require landowners to post signs demarcating their property. The resulting confusion led the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS, to announce in 2017 that it would no longer host professional fishing tournaments in Louisiana tidal waters, where fishers risk being arrested.The task force included representatives of landowners, oil and gas companies, environmental groups and fishers. Their final report lays out seven possible options for addressing the problem. Five incentivize landowners to allow recreational fishing by giving them some form of title to water bottoms in areas that have have eroded, including the mineral rights.
Other options include making landowners post private property markers at the boundaries of their property or expanding recreational access to include privately owned coastal waterways.
There are options in the report that would satisfy many landowners concerned about losing their mineral interests, said Taylor Darden, with the Louisiana Landowners Association. "It’s going to be up to the Legislature and its wisdom to decide what to do with it," he said.
But fishers say there's still concern that areas where they historically fished would remain off limits under the options. These areas include canals dredged through marshy areas to bring oil equipment in and out, said Emory Belton, an attorney who represented the interests of Louisiana Sportsmen’s Coalition.
"I think what my guys would really object to is a patchwork of rules for different areas because the public would be no better off in terms of knowing where they could go," he said.
by Sara Sneath, Nola.com | Read more:
Image: David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
[ed. Expect to hear a lot more about this issue as coastal lands continue to erode from climate change. Avulsion (and accretion) issues arise for a number of reasons: accretion of sediments that add to an owner's property; loss of property due to environmental factors like hurricanes and earthquakes; and, in Alaska's case, changes in coastal topography and property lines due to earthquakes and receding glaciers (isostatic rebound). Some areas get uplifted, others submerged.]
Fired Salesman Disrupts Car-Buying Industry
Brian Carroll had never been fired or let go from a job. Never.
A year ago, he was dumped, very simply, because his boss needed to trim costs. No warning. No dip in performance. Just a handshake goodbye on that Monday morning in late January because the car dealership that employed him for eight years needed to save money.
“The owner came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been thinking, why should I pay you when I can do what you do?’ And he let me go,” said Carroll, 51, of Macomb Township. “I was driving home, crying my eyes out, to tell you the truth. I thought, ‘What are you going to do? How are you going to make it?’ ”
He called his wife on his way home.
“It was shocking and overwhelming and upsetting,” Angela Carroll said. “He was very good at his job. We thought we were very stable. I didn’t want him to know how freaked out I was. It makes you sick to your stomach. He had health insurance, a salary, things set in place for the future. I’d been a stay-at-home mom with three boys. I was so scared.”
Carroll loved selling cars. He had worked for dealerships in Detroit, Eastpointe, Clinton Township and Troy. And now he was out in the cold. Literally.
Then a guy called wanting a car. Carroll said he didn’t work at the dealership anymore. And the buyer said he didn’t care. Carroll decided then he would go solo. Not as the usual car “broker,” who tends to charge a direct fee to shoppers, but as a car “concierge” who planned to charge customers $0. He would work on commission.
After all, he figured, fewer people have time to go to dealerships and people like the idea of enhanced personal service. He would ride a trend of changing consumer expectations in the automotive industry, not by choice but by necessity. All by word of mouth. (...)
Just 367 days after losing his job, Carroll is selling 30 to 35 cars a month and even as many as 52. He has transformed the car-buying experience for customers in Michigan, New York, Florida and Wyoming.
Andrew Behe, 38, of Oxford wrote an online customer review that praised Carroll as an immediate gratification "Amazon Prime" experience for car shoppers.
Behe explained, “I have four kids, run three different companies and nobody has time to go to dealerships and spend the whole evening there on multiple days. I told him what I wanted and he brought it to me. He came to my house, picked up my car — a Lincoln Navigator — then drove my new car to my office. I wanted a 2019 GMC Yukon. He picked up the old car and drove over the new car the same exact day." (...)
"The auto industry from top to bottom is being disrupted, and the dealership experience is no different," said Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Autotrader, an online car shopping site. "We tested concepts on 2,000 consumers about how to improve the car buying and servicing experience. When people purchase a vehicle, they want it delivered to them at any location at any time, home or office, and if they have a trade-in, they want it picked up. They basically don't want to go to the dealership for certain parts of the buying transaction."
For now, options to visiting the dealership are limited, she said.
Carvana provides the ability for buying used cars at a kiosk or online and the vehicles are dropped off at people'shouses. There are some dealers offering pickup and delivery options, Krebs said. While car brokers often charge a modest flat fee from buyers who want to avoid haggling, the idea of an independent car concierge working directly with buyers and getting paid by dealers isn't widely viewed as an established model. (...)
Skeptics may wonder how a car concierge can be trusted, that he must be getting big money from someone or inflating prices. But what he does is work now with a network of dealers so he can find the best price and offer options.
“I’m not a broker,” Carroll said. “I don’t even use that word. I don’t know that I have a title. But I’ve learned that if you take a little piece of the pie every time, the pieces will add up to a whole pie. A lot of people try to make a house payment on one deal. I want to be everybody’s ‘my guy.' If you have an accident. If you have a body shop issue? I take care of things. If you take care of one person, it turns into 10. If you do one person bad, it turns into 100.”
by Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press | Read more:
Image: Carroll family
[ed. See also: Brand Experience Centers, At-Home Maintenance, Service Pick-up and Drop-off: These are the Modern Automotive Dreams, New Research Shows (Cox Automotive).]
A year ago, he was dumped, very simply, because his boss needed to trim costs. No warning. No dip in performance. Just a handshake goodbye on that Monday morning in late January because the car dealership that employed him for eight years needed to save money.
“The owner came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been thinking, why should I pay you when I can do what you do?’ And he let me go,” said Carroll, 51, of Macomb Township. “I was driving home, crying my eyes out, to tell you the truth. I thought, ‘What are you going to do? How are you going to make it?’ ”
He called his wife on his way home.
“It was shocking and overwhelming and upsetting,” Angela Carroll said. “He was very good at his job. We thought we were very stable. I didn’t want him to know how freaked out I was. It makes you sick to your stomach. He had health insurance, a salary, things set in place for the future. I’d been a stay-at-home mom with three boys. I was so scared.”Carroll loved selling cars. He had worked for dealerships in Detroit, Eastpointe, Clinton Township and Troy. And now he was out in the cold. Literally.
Then a guy called wanting a car. Carroll said he didn’t work at the dealership anymore. And the buyer said he didn’t care. Carroll decided then he would go solo. Not as the usual car “broker,” who tends to charge a direct fee to shoppers, but as a car “concierge” who planned to charge customers $0. He would work on commission.
After all, he figured, fewer people have time to go to dealerships and people like the idea of enhanced personal service. He would ride a trend of changing consumer expectations in the automotive industry, not by choice but by necessity. All by word of mouth. (...)
Just 367 days after losing his job, Carroll is selling 30 to 35 cars a month and even as many as 52. He has transformed the car-buying experience for customers in Michigan, New York, Florida and Wyoming.
Andrew Behe, 38, of Oxford wrote an online customer review that praised Carroll as an immediate gratification "Amazon Prime" experience for car shoppers.
Behe explained, “I have four kids, run three different companies and nobody has time to go to dealerships and spend the whole evening there on multiple days. I told him what I wanted and he brought it to me. He came to my house, picked up my car — a Lincoln Navigator — then drove my new car to my office. I wanted a 2019 GMC Yukon. He picked up the old car and drove over the new car the same exact day." (...)
"The auto industry from top to bottom is being disrupted, and the dealership experience is no different," said Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Autotrader, an online car shopping site. "We tested concepts on 2,000 consumers about how to improve the car buying and servicing experience. When people purchase a vehicle, they want it delivered to them at any location at any time, home or office, and if they have a trade-in, they want it picked up. They basically don't want to go to the dealership for certain parts of the buying transaction."
For now, options to visiting the dealership are limited, she said.
Carvana provides the ability for buying used cars at a kiosk or online and the vehicles are dropped off at people'shouses. There are some dealers offering pickup and delivery options, Krebs said. While car brokers often charge a modest flat fee from buyers who want to avoid haggling, the idea of an independent car concierge working directly with buyers and getting paid by dealers isn't widely viewed as an established model. (...)
Skeptics may wonder how a car concierge can be trusted, that he must be getting big money from someone or inflating prices. But what he does is work now with a network of dealers so he can find the best price and offer options.
“I’m not a broker,” Carroll said. “I don’t even use that word. I don’t know that I have a title. But I’ve learned that if you take a little piece of the pie every time, the pieces will add up to a whole pie. A lot of people try to make a house payment on one deal. I want to be everybody’s ‘my guy.' If you have an accident. If you have a body shop issue? I take care of things. If you take care of one person, it turns into 10. If you do one person bad, it turns into 100.”
by Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press | Read more:
Image: Carroll family
[ed. See also: Brand Experience Centers, At-Home Maintenance, Service Pick-up and Drop-off: These are the Modern Automotive Dreams, New Research Shows (Cox Automotive).]
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Science for Sale
Rare is the CEO today who, in the face of public concern about a potentially dangerous product, says, “Let’s hire the best scientists to figure out if the problem is real and then, if it is, stop making this stuff.”
In fact, evidence from decades of corporate crisis behavior suggests exactly the opposite. As an epidemiologist and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health under President Obama, I have seen this behavior firsthand. The instinct for corporations is to take the low road: deny the allegations, defend the product at all costs, and attack the science underpinning the concerns. Of course, corporate leaders and anti-regulation ideologues will never say they value profits before the health of their employees or the safety of the public, or that they care less about our water and air than environmentalists do. But their actions belie their rhetoric.
Decision makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short- and long-term financial returns, and in the pursuit of these goals they place profits and growth above all else. Avoidance of financial loss, to many corporate executives, is an alibi for just about any ugly decision. This is not to say that decisions at the highest level are black-and-white or simple; they are dictated by factors such as the cost of possible government regulation and potential loss of market share to less hazardous products. And, of course, companies are afraid of being sued by people sickened by their products, which costs money and can result in serious damage to the brand. All of this is part of the corporate calculus.
Unfortunately, though, this story is old news: most people, especially Americans, have come to expect corporations to put profit above all else. Still, we mostly don’t expect there to be mercenary scientists. Science is supposed to be constant, apolitical, and above the fray. This commonsense view misses the rise of science-for-sale specialists over the last several decades and a “product defense industry” that sustains them—a cabal of apparent experts, PR flaks, and political lobbyists who use bad science to produce whatever results their sponsors want.
There are a handful of go-to firms in this booming field. Consider, as a silly but representative example, the “Deflategate” controversy in the National Football League (NFL)—the allegations that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady directed that footballs be deflated during a 2014 championship game. As part of the ensuing investigation, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hired an attorney who in turn hired Exponent, one of the nation’s best-known and most successful product defense firms.
These operations have on their payrolls—or can bring in on a moment’s notice—toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary (economists too, especially for inflating the costs and deflating the benefits of proposed regulation, as well as for antitrust issues). Much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show that a product a corporation makes or uses or even discharges as air or water pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful “experts” produce impressive-looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals (reviewed, of course, by peers of the hired guns writing the articles). Simply put, the product defense machine cooks the books, and if the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort and try again.
I describe this corporate strategy as “manufacturing doubt” or “manufacturing uncertainty.” In just about every corner of the corporate world, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Studies in animals will be deemed irrelevant, human data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure data are discredited as unreliable. Always, there’s too much doubt about the evidence, and not enough proof of harm, or not enough proof of enough harm.
This ploy is public relations disguised as science. Companies’ PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian sound bites that play well with reporters mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair-minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were hurt by the product in question. Corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as “sound science,” but in reality they merely sound like science. Such bought-and-paid-for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interests is vilified.
Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine-tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry, there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment; debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy. In earlier decades—as documented in detail by a great deal of scholarship, including Naomi Oreskes’s and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010) and my earlier book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008)—we have seen this play out with tobacco, secondhand smoke, asbestos, industrial pollution, and a host of chemicals and products. These industries’ strategy of denial is still alive and well today. Nor is this practice of hiring experts and hiding data about harms limited to health concerns and the environment. Beyond toxic chemicals, we see it with toxic information as well. (Consider the corporate misbehaviors of Facebook.)
This is not to assert that the conclusions of every study or report produced by product defense experts are necessarily wrong; it certainly is legitimate for scientists to work to prove one hypothesis in the cause of disproving another. One means by which science moves toward the real truth is by challenging and disproving supposed truth and received wisdom. Maybe there are two sides to every story—but maybe not two valid sides, and definitely not when one has been purchased at a high price, and produced by firms whose financial success rests on delivering the studies and reports that support whatever conclusion their corporate clients need.
The strategy of manufacturing doubt has worked wonders, in particular, as a public relations tool in the current debate over the use of scientific evidence in public policy. In the long run, product defense campaigns rarely hold up; some don’t pass the laugh test to begin with. But the main motivation all along has been only to sow confusion and buy time, sometimes lots of time, allowing entire industries to thrive or individual companies to maintain market share while developing a new product. Doubt can delay or obstruct public health or environmental protections, or just convince some jurors that the science isn’t strong enough to label a product as responsible for terrible illnesses.
Eventually, as the serious scientific studies get stronger and more definitive, and as the corporate studies are revealed as unconvincing or simply wrong (then generally forgotten, with the authors paying no penalty for their prevarications), the manufacturers give up and acknowledge the harm done by their products. Then they submit to stronger regulation, sometimes even costing themselves more money than they would have paid in the first place. But they can do the math: they have also been making a lot of money for all those years. Their wealth compounds. And as for the people who have been sickened or worse in the interim? Or the despoiled environment? Well, those are unfortunate. Sorry. (...)
It is not an exaggeration to say that in the product defense model, the investigator starts with an answer, then figures out the best way to support it. As often as not, the product defense investigator starts with someone else’s answer, then reviews the evidence or subjects an important study to a post-hoc “re-analysis” that magically produces the sponsor’s preferred conclusions—that the risk is not that high, the harm not that bad, or the data fatally flawed (or maybe all of these at once). These are the studies that are flogged to regulatory agencies or in litigation.
Recognizing these firms’ methods can be tremendously valuable in trying to frame public discourse in today’s toxic political environment. What follows is a kind of disinformation playbook: a field guide to the way science gets sold.
In fact, evidence from decades of corporate crisis behavior suggests exactly the opposite. As an epidemiologist and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health under President Obama, I have seen this behavior firsthand. The instinct for corporations is to take the low road: deny the allegations, defend the product at all costs, and attack the science underpinning the concerns. Of course, corporate leaders and anti-regulation ideologues will never say they value profits before the health of their employees or the safety of the public, or that they care less about our water and air than environmentalists do. But their actions belie their rhetoric.
Decision makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short- and long-term financial returns, and in the pursuit of these goals they place profits and growth above all else. Avoidance of financial loss, to many corporate executives, is an alibi for just about any ugly decision. This is not to say that decisions at the highest level are black-and-white or simple; they are dictated by factors such as the cost of possible government regulation and potential loss of market share to less hazardous products. And, of course, companies are afraid of being sued by people sickened by their products, which costs money and can result in serious damage to the brand. All of this is part of the corporate calculus.Unfortunately, though, this story is old news: most people, especially Americans, have come to expect corporations to put profit above all else. Still, we mostly don’t expect there to be mercenary scientists. Science is supposed to be constant, apolitical, and above the fray. This commonsense view misses the rise of science-for-sale specialists over the last several decades and a “product defense industry” that sustains them—a cabal of apparent experts, PR flaks, and political lobbyists who use bad science to produce whatever results their sponsors want.
There are a handful of go-to firms in this booming field. Consider, as a silly but representative example, the “Deflategate” controversy in the National Football League (NFL)—the allegations that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady directed that footballs be deflated during a 2014 championship game. As part of the ensuing investigation, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hired an attorney who in turn hired Exponent, one of the nation’s best-known and most successful product defense firms.
These operations have on their payrolls—or can bring in on a moment’s notice—toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary (economists too, especially for inflating the costs and deflating the benefits of proposed regulation, as well as for antitrust issues). Much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show that a product a corporation makes or uses or even discharges as air or water pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful “experts” produce impressive-looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals (reviewed, of course, by peers of the hired guns writing the articles). Simply put, the product defense machine cooks the books, and if the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort and try again.
I describe this corporate strategy as “manufacturing doubt” or “manufacturing uncertainty.” In just about every corner of the corporate world, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Studies in animals will be deemed irrelevant, human data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure data are discredited as unreliable. Always, there’s too much doubt about the evidence, and not enough proof of harm, or not enough proof of enough harm.
This ploy is public relations disguised as science. Companies’ PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian sound bites that play well with reporters mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair-minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were hurt by the product in question. Corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as “sound science,” but in reality they merely sound like science. Such bought-and-paid-for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interests is vilified.
Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine-tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry, there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment; debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy. In earlier decades—as documented in detail by a great deal of scholarship, including Naomi Oreskes’s and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010) and my earlier book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008)—we have seen this play out with tobacco, secondhand smoke, asbestos, industrial pollution, and a host of chemicals and products. These industries’ strategy of denial is still alive and well today. Nor is this practice of hiring experts and hiding data about harms limited to health concerns and the environment. Beyond toxic chemicals, we see it with toxic information as well. (Consider the corporate misbehaviors of Facebook.)
This is not to assert that the conclusions of every study or report produced by product defense experts are necessarily wrong; it certainly is legitimate for scientists to work to prove one hypothesis in the cause of disproving another. One means by which science moves toward the real truth is by challenging and disproving supposed truth and received wisdom. Maybe there are two sides to every story—but maybe not two valid sides, and definitely not when one has been purchased at a high price, and produced by firms whose financial success rests on delivering the studies and reports that support whatever conclusion their corporate clients need.
The strategy of manufacturing doubt has worked wonders, in particular, as a public relations tool in the current debate over the use of scientific evidence in public policy. In the long run, product defense campaigns rarely hold up; some don’t pass the laugh test to begin with. But the main motivation all along has been only to sow confusion and buy time, sometimes lots of time, allowing entire industries to thrive or individual companies to maintain market share while developing a new product. Doubt can delay or obstruct public health or environmental protections, or just convince some jurors that the science isn’t strong enough to label a product as responsible for terrible illnesses.
Eventually, as the serious scientific studies get stronger and more definitive, and as the corporate studies are revealed as unconvincing or simply wrong (then generally forgotten, with the authors paying no penalty for their prevarications), the manufacturers give up and acknowledge the harm done by their products. Then they submit to stronger regulation, sometimes even costing themselves more money than they would have paid in the first place. But they can do the math: they have also been making a lot of money for all those years. Their wealth compounds. And as for the people who have been sickened or worse in the interim? Or the despoiled environment? Well, those are unfortunate. Sorry. (...)
It is not an exaggeration to say that in the product defense model, the investigator starts with an answer, then figures out the best way to support it. As often as not, the product defense investigator starts with someone else’s answer, then reviews the evidence or subjects an important study to a post-hoc “re-analysis” that magically produces the sponsor’s preferred conclusions—that the risk is not that high, the harm not that bad, or the data fatally flawed (or maybe all of these at once). These are the studies that are flogged to regulatory agencies or in litigation.
Recognizing these firms’ methods can be tremendously valuable in trying to frame public discourse in today’s toxic political environment. What follows is a kind of disinformation playbook: a field guide to the way science gets sold.
by David Michaels, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter
What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.
And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.
If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong. (...)
Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.
In a piece explaining his work in POLITICO Magazine, Abramowitz wrote: “Over the past few decades, American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.”
Bitecofer took this insight and mapped it across the country. As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties.
“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.
[ed. Negative partisianship. See also: Taxing the SuperRich (Boston Review).]
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.
Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”
Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.
If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong. (...)
Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.
In a piece explaining his work in POLITICO Magazine, Abramowitz wrote: “Over the past few decades, American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.”
Bitecofer took this insight and mapped it across the country. As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties.
“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.
by David Freedlander, Politico | Read more:
Image: Julia Rendleman for Politico Magazine[ed. Negative partisianship. See also: Taxing the SuperRich (Boston Review).]
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