Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness

Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.

At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, the sun began to lower from its position in the sky in a westward trajectory, eventually disappearing below the horizon. Reports of this global emergency continued to file in from across the continent until 5:46 p.m. PST, when the entire North American mainland was officially declared dark.

As the phenomenon hit New York, millions of motorists were forced to use their headlights to navigate through the blackness. Highways flooded with commuters who had left work to hurry home to their families. Traffic was bottlenecked for more than two hours in many major metropolitan areas.

Across the country, buses and trains are operating on limited schedules and will cease operation shortly after 12 a.m. EST, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters in outlying areas effectively stranded in their homes.

Despite the high potential for danger and decreased visibility, scientists say they are unable to do anything to restore light to the continent at this time.

"Vast gravitational forces have rotated the planet Earth on an axis drawn through its north and south poles," said Dr. Elena Bilkins of the National Weather Service. "The Earth is in actuality spinning uncontrollably through space."

Bilkins urged citizens to remain calm, explaining that the Earth's rotation is "utterly beyond human control."

"The only thing a sensible person can do is wait it out," she said.

Commerce has been brought to a virtual standstill, with citizens electing either to remain home with loved ones or gather in dimly lit restaurants and bars.

"I looked out the window and saw it getting dark when I was still at the office working," said Albert Serpa, 27, a lawyer from Tulsa, OK, who had taken shelter with others at Red's Bar and Grill. "That's when I knew I had to leave right away."

Ronald Jarrett, a professor of economics at George Washington University who left his office after darkness blanketed the D.C. metro area, summed up the fears of an entire nation, saying, "Look, it's dark outside. I want to go home," and ended the phone interview abruptly.

Businesses have shut their doors, banks are closed across the nation, all major stock exchanges have suspended trading, and manufacturing in many sectors has ceased.

Some television stations have halted broadcasting altogether, for reasons not immediately understood.

Law-enforcement agencies nationwide were quick to address the crisis.

Said NYPD spokesman Jake Moretti: "Low-light conditions create an environment that's almost tailor-made for crime. It's probably safe to say we'll make more arrests in the next few hours than we have all day."

Darkness victims describe hunger pangs, lassitude, and a slow but steady loss of energy, forcing many to lie down. As many as two-thirds of those believed afflicted have fallen into a state of total unconsciousness.

Many parents report that their younger children have been troubled, even terrified, by the deep darkness. To help allay such fears, some parents are using an artificial light source in the hallway or bedroom.

As of 2 a.m. EST, the continent was still dark, the streets empty and silent. However, some Americans remained hopeful, vowing to soldier on despite the crisis.

"I don't plan on doing anything any different," said Chicago-area hospice worker Janet Cosgrove, 51. "I'm going to get up in the morning and go to work."

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: Satellite view at 4:50 p.m. EST shows sun disappearing from the sky. Houston-area victims flee their workplaces ahead of the growing wave of darkness.

Katherine Lam

via:

Bad Bunny

Tracking Transparency: The Problem With Apple’s Plan to Stop Facebook’s Data Collection

On Monday, Apple released iOS 14.5, the smartphone update that Facebook fears.

The operating system upgrade includes improvements like a Face ID that’s better attuned to face masks, as well as more convenient interoperability between Siri and various music apps. What’s generating the most discussion, though, is a tool called App Tracking Transparency, which allows users to prevent apps from sharing identifiable personal data with third parties. The tool, billed as a major step forward for user privacy, could roil the digital ads industry, whose major players often track users as they move between apps on their phones. The update should’ve shown up on your iPhone by now; if you weren’t prompted to download it, go to “Software Update” under your general settings. It’s a milestone for the consumer web and a possible blow to social media’s business model, which depends on selling highly personalized advertising. There’s one hitch: Even when you turn it on, you might not notice a single thing has changed.

Whenever you download an app using iOS 14.5, a notification will appear asking whether you want to allow it to “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.” You can either select “Ask App Not to Track” or “Allow.” You can also opt in or out of tracking for an app at any time by navigating to the “Privacy” menu in the device’s settings and clicking on “Tracking.” From there you’ll see a list of apps alongside switches you can toggle to turn the tool on or off. Asking an app not to track you means that it isn’t allowed to transmit any of the identifiable location, contact, health, browsing history, or other info that it collected on you with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else who might be interested in learning more about you. This should prevent, say, Facebook from serving you ads on grills based on the fact that you were searching for them on Chrome. Apps won’t be able to combine data they gather on you with information collected elsewhere by third parties.

It might seem like a fairly unremarkable feature, but App Tracking Transparency has the potential to reorient users’ relationships with their personal data, primarily by making the tracking opt-in. Prior to iOS 14.5, users did have the ability to limit the data that apps shared, but the default was to allow tracking, and you had to proactively check the settings to turn it off. Having the apps themselves ask this question upfront is an important aspect of the shift. “It’s not just giving users the choice,” said Gennie Gebhart, acting activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the internet-rights advocacy group. “It’s forcing these app developers to ask permission and possibly just stop tracking preemptively so they don’t have this scary permission associated with their app.” There’s a whole industry built around targeting ads using personal data, and if enough people start regularly opting out of tracking, Apple’s new tool could frustrate many of the businesses in this space. Facebook, in particular, is expecting the tool to have a small but noticeable effect on its revenue and has been taking out full-page ads characterizing Apple’s move as hurting small businesses. During the company’s quarterly earnings call in January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg accused Apple of trying to “use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.”

However, if you turn tracking off for everything, will there be any actual differences in how you use your apps or what ads you see? According to Gebhart, it might not be so clear-cut. For instance, if you’re searching for grills on Chrome and then see ads for them on Facebook, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the tool isn’t doing its job. The ad-targeting ecosystem is so complex and multilayered that there are a number of ways that Facebook could determine that you want a grill just from your activity through first-party tracking on its own app. The platform could gather that you’re a middle-aged man who just bought a house in the suburbs at the beginning of the summer and determine that it’s likely that you’re in the market for a grill without ever looking at your Chrome browsing history. In other words, there probably won’t be any noticeable signs indicating that the tool is or isn’t working. You’ll know in theory that apps shouldn’t be swapping your data amongst themselves, but it likely won’t look all that different in practice.

This opacity is partly meant to make the user experience simpler. Being constantly exposed to the under-the-hood mechanics of the apps on your phone could be overwhelming. At the same time, though, keeping all this tracking hidden serves to obscure just how much of your personal info your apps are collecting and sharing. Apple’s new tool adds some more transparency—and thus friction—back into the equation, but there’s still a lot you won’t really be able to see. “There’s so much going on under the surface that advertisers and data brokers don’t want you to see, and all of the sudden Apple is forcing some of that above the surface, but it’s hard to say what to look for to know whether App Tracking Transparency is working,” Gebhart said, adding that users will continue to be at a disadvantage in trying to maintain their privacy online because of this dramatic information asymmetry. Still, one change that could result from Apple’s move is more chicanery from the data-hoovering business, which will need to find more creative ways to build profiles of internet users that can help advertisers target consumers. That’s why Gebhart says she’ll track which apps, if any, Apple decides to kick off its store for violating the tracking rules and any changes in strategy that companies in the digital ads industry are making.

With Apple acting as an unofficial regulator of user privacy, how will companies that want your data cope? It helps to understand how Apple’s update works.

by Aaron Mak, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images

[ed. See also: Apple robbed the mob’s bank (Mobile Dev Memo).]

Decision Fatigue: Inside Netflix’s Quest to End Scrolling

Ten years ago, Netflix got the idea that its app should work more like regular TV. This was early on in its transition from DVD delivery to streaming on demand, and product engineers at the company were still figuring out how the platform’s user interface would work. Instead of having subscribers start their streaming sessions scrolling through rows and rows of content, they wondered what would happen if a show or movie simply began playing as soon as someone clicked into the app — you know, like turning on your dad’s boxy old Zenith.

“It was the early days of Netflix having a television user interface, and we saw this as a great possibility,” says Todd Yellin, who as vice-president of product for the streaming giant helps shape how users interact with the platform. They liked the idea so much, they quietly tested it out among a small slice of subscribers.

But users weren’t impressed. “It failed,” the 14-year Netflix vet tells me. “The technology wasn’t as good. And I don’t think consumers were ready for it.”

Netflix believes audiences are ready now. Today, the company is launching Play Something, a new viewing mode designed to make it easier for the indecisive among us to quickly find something to watch. As with those early forays into instant-playing content, the goal of this new shuffle feature is to eliminate, or at least ease, the Peak TV-era anxiety so many of us feel while trying to find something to watch. But unlike its past attempt, it won’t be automatic: You’ll have to opt in — either at start-up or when you’re browsing your home page. If you do, the usual page upon page of box art and show descriptions disappears. Instead, the Netflix matrix chooses something it thinks you’ll be into and just starts streaming it, along with an onscreen graphic briefly explaining why it chose that title. Don’t like what you see? A quick button press skips ahead to another selection. If you suddenly decide an earlier selection is actually a better pick, you can also go backward. (The feature will initially be available on all Netflix TV apps and, soon, on mobile for Android devices.)

by Josef Adalian, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Martin Gee

FDA Will Authorize Pfizer COVID Vaccine for Ages 12 and Older

The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to authorize the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for adolescent kids aged 12-15 years within a week, according to federal officials who spoke with the New York Times. If and when that happens, it would mark the first time any coronavirus vaccine has been authorized for emergency use for Americans under the age of 16 — a long-awaited development for countless parents in the U.S., as well as the beginning of a new phase in the country’s vaccine rollout.

Pfizer has previously reported that its vaccine was found to be as effective in the 12-15 age group as it was in adults, with no additional side effects, in its clinical trial involving adolescents. (The side effects were in line with what recipients aged 16-25 experienced.) FDA authorization of the vaccine for the new age group would likely be followed by a quick review from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel, as was the case for other previous vaccine authorizations. After the panel makes its recommendation, vaccine administration sites would likely be able to start giving out doses to adolescents immediately.

As the Times notes, amid consistent supply and weakening demand, there is currently a vaccine surplus in the U.S., including some 31 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine which have already been delivered throughout the country — by itself would roughly be enough to fully vaccine every adolescent. While all people 16 and older are currently eligible to receive a COVID vaccine, it’s not clear if all states would immediately expand that eligibility to ages 12 and over following the FDA authorization of the Pfizer vaccine.

by Chas Danner, Intellingencer |  Read more:

Image: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

[ed. See also: ‘Long Hauler’ Study Shows Covid Can Kill Months After Infection (Bloomberg)]

Higher Ed 2.0 (What We Got Right/Wrong)

Higher education is the most important industry in America. It’s the vaccine against the inequities of capitalism, the lubricant of upward economic mobility, and the midwife of gene therapies and search engines. College graduates lead longer, healthier, and more prosperous lives. University research provides the raw material for corporate innovation. Our institutions call to our shores the best and the brightest from around the world, many of whom stay to make America a stronger nation, and form connective tissue with their home countries.

Higher ed presents a promise for America and the world. But every year, my industry falls further from that promise. The underpinnings of that view are simple and static: Higher ed has increased its prices by 1,400 percent since the late 1970s, but the product has not appreciably changed — the biggest cost driver is administrative bloat. And, rather than catalyzing economic mobility, U.S. higher ed is stifling it. At 38 of the top 100 colleges in America, including five of the Ivies, there are more students from the top 1 percent of income earning households than there are from the bottom 60 percent.

Yet, higher ed’s brand strength (nobody donates $20 million to name a building on Apple’s campus), cash reserves (among elite institutions), and stranglehold on the American psyche have insulated it from disruption for decades. The litmus test for success — and for determining your role in our species — is if (and which) college your daughter graduates from. Suzy might be a heroin addict, but if she’s at Dartmouth, all is forgiven.

Last year, we predicted the pandemic would be the fist of stone that finally meets higher ed’s glass jaw. Were we correct regarding the coming storm? Or were we alarmist, underestimating institutional strength (or rather, inertia)? The answer is … yes.

K-Shaped (College) Recovery

As we begin to emerge from Covid-19 (God’s ears), American colleges look like the rest of America. Specifically, the fifth installment of the Hunger Games franchise, wherein our society engages in the idolatry of economic winners, everyone else hopes to survive, and many meet a gruesome end.

The most selective schools received 17 percent more applications than last year, and the elite of the elite saw even greater increases: Yale, 33 percent; Harvard, 43 percent; MIT 66 percent. The rich are getting richer. (...)

Admission to a top school can be life changing, but in a country that graduates over 3.5 million people from high school every year, the 1,700-person freshman class at Harvard is immaterial. Over the past 30 years, the number of seats at Ivy League schools has increased only 14 percent, while the number of high school graduates has expanded by 44 percent. The Ivy League sits on a total endowment of $140B, and shares this wealth with just 17,000 freshmen each year. (...)

A year ago, I predicted that these schools would leverage their extraordinary brand strength and the forced adoption of distance learning technology to partner with big tech and radically expand their class sizes. “In 10 years,” I told New York magazine, “it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000.”

I was wrong. The leadership and alumni of elite universities continue to register tremendous psychic reward from the Hermès-ification of their institutions, versus any remaining claim of public service.

Wildlings

While the lords of American higher ed fortify their walls, and the erasures of second-tier castles multiply, there is a gathering force about to ignite a fire the North has never seen. Last year, I believed the change would occur on the supply side, with expanded enrollments at the top schools. It now looks as if the demand side will change the game: Employers are rethinking certification.

From Elon to Apple, some of the most admired employers are dropping the college degree requirement from more and more jobs. Over 130 companies have committed to accepting Google-certified courses as equivalent to credits earned at traditional four-year colleges. More than 250,000 people took Google’s IT certificate program in its first two years — and 57 percent of them did not have a college degree.

Similarly, Amazon announced a partnership with Lambda School, launching a nine-month, full-time training program in software engineering, designed to put graduates in jobs with an average base salary of $80,000. Students are not obligated to pay anything upfront; instead, they pay based on their salary after graduation. Again: no college degree required.

Here in Florida, Governor DeSantis has proposed using $75 million in federal Covid relief funds to invest in vocational training programs. There’s a scarcity of skilled tradespeople, and those are good paying, secure jobs — it will be a long time before robots replace electricians and plumbers.

This is bad news for schools without the global brand equity of the elites. They are being unbundled, piece by piece, just as newspapers were dissected (classifieds, movie listings, news, sports) and sold for parts to benign billionaires. Today, we have a handful of elite newspapers that are thriving, a wasteland of dead/dying second-tier papers, and a roiling maelstrom of tech-enabled news sources serving the mass market. Since 2004, two thousand newspapers have shuttered. It could be as bloody among universities.

by Scott Galloway, No Mercy No Malice |  Read more:

Image: Prof G Analysis of Ivycoach Data

What “Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” Really Means.

The Biden administration has finally announced its North Korea policy after having completed a three-month long policy review. And the policy it has decided on is a bit of a surprise.

That’s because its stated end goal is apparently the same as Pyongyang’s: “The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

That specific phrase, “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” is one the North Korean government likes to use a lot. To Pyongyang, it means that it is willing to dismantle its nuclear program if and only if South Korea also denuclearizes.

But South Korea doesn’t have any nuclear weapons. What it does have is what’s called the US “nuclear umbrella.” That basically means that the US promises to defend South Korea from the North — up to and including with the use of US nuclear weapons. (There are also currently 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea to defend it from potential aggression from the North.)

So what North Korea understands from this phrase is, “Sure, we’ll give up our nukes, just as soon as you (President Biden) withdraw all US military support for South Korea.”

That is a very different end goal than what the US has traditionally, at least until President Donald Trump came along, sought: the “denuclearization of North Korea.” That phrasing implies Pyongyang is the only one that must make nuclear concessions. It’s an end goal that would see North Korea give up all of its nuclear weapons while South Korea is still under US nuclear protection.

If you’re Kim Jong Un, that’s one hell of a difference. In the first scenario, he gives up his nuclear arsenal, which makes his regime more vulnerable, but it’s offset by the US no longer supporting South Korea with its nukes, either. In the second scenario, he just gives up his nukes, making his regime more vulnerable. Period.

So the difference of a couple of words here isn’t just semantics — the wording really, really matters.

Which brings us to another question: Why would the Biden administration adopt wording on the perennially thorny nuclear issue that North Korea likes?

Partly because it might make Kim happy — and that’s potentially a good thing.

Three reasons why Biden probably adopted North Korea’s favorite nuclear phrasing

When Biden announced that US troops would be leaving Afghanistan, he noted that one reason for his decision was that former President Trump made a deal with the Taliban that a full withdrawal would happen.

“It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something,” the president said.

Biden may have come to a similar conclusion here. In 2018, Trump met with Kim in Singapore and signed a declaration which stated they would “work towards the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

That may not be the formulation Biden would like, but it is the latest US-North Korea deal on the books, and so he may have honored that. Anything else would look like a unilateral backtrack in the diplomatic process, experts said.

“It’s the right formulation to use because both sides agreed to it,” said Vipin Narang, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at MIT.

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in also adopted this phrase in his yearslong efforts to broker a deal between Pyongyang and Washington. He supported it in an April interview with the New York Times, noting that it was “clearly an achievement” for Trump and Kim to have met in Singapore and signed an agreement.

Moon is coming to the White House on May 21, and it would’ve been awkward if the US dropped the formulation he backs just weeks before his arrival.

by Alex Ward, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

[ed. They should just get on with it. In this day and age, nobody is going to nuke anybody (Israel excluded). And if a nuclear war did break out, a broken treaty would be the least of our concerns. North Korea is suffering economically and this is a prime opportunity.]

FDA To Ban Menthol Cigarettes

FDA Commits to Evidence-Based Actions Aimed at Saving Lives and Preventing Future Generations of Smokers (FDA)

Image: The Onion

Why Power Is Getting Woke

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is one of the nation’s top diplomats, second only to the Secretary of State. And one of the most basic, fundamental duties of a diplomat, especially at such a high level, is to manage the image and reputation of a country throughout the rest of the world. And that’s no small or superficial task — a country’s reputation and public image is a core part of its foreign policy. Often referred to in more academic circles as “soft power,” the positive attitudes and feelings that both the leaders and average citizens of foreign nations have toward a country’s culture, people, and political system are one of its major tools for influencing global affairs and managing international conflicts. And it’s generally believed that the more soft power a country has, the less it has to rely on more coercive “hard power” measures like military action, economic sanctions, etc.

So with that in mind, consider the recent controversy-generating comments made by President Biden’s newly appointed UN ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, in a remote address:

I have seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles. But I also shared these stories to offer up an insight, a simple truth I’ve learned over the years: Racism is not the problem of the person who experiences it. Those of us who experience racism cannot, and should not, internalize it, despite the impact it can have on our everyday lives. Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist. And in today’s world, that's every society. In America that takes many forms. It's the white supremacy that led to the senseless killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other black Americans. It's the spike in hate crimes over the past three years against Latino Americans, Sikh, Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, and immigrants. And it's the bullying, discrimination, brutality, and violence that Asian Americans face every day, especially since the outbreak of COVID-19. That's why the Biden administration has made racial equity a top priority across the entire government. And I'm making it a real focus of my tenure at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

The reason I highlight these comments now is not to litigate them directly, however controversial they are. And they indeed remain controversial, on multiple levels, despite what feels like a thorough cultural revolution in every institutional power center in the country. But I think in this instance there is far more to be learned by setting aside that debate, resting your culture war trigger finger for a moment, and instead asking the question: What on earth could possess America’s UN ambassador to decide to broadcast the message that America is a deeply racist country down to its bones? Even if you were to accept some, or maybe even all, of what she’s saying as being true, what sort of powerful incentives could convince a top diplomat to engage in a highly controversial debate that not only has nothing to do with her job, but is in fact quite literally the opposite of her job description? How did we get here?

Wokeness isn’t radical, it’s repressive

One thing to know about Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is that she isn’t exactly a radical activist storming the gates of power. She is power. Prior to becoming the UN ambassador, Thomas-Greenfield was a Senior Vice President at a “global business strategy” firm called Albright Stonebridge Group, an international lobbying and PR firm for multinational corporations and financial institutions, and perhaps the most powerful and influential of its kind. It was founded and is chaired by former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The main service it offers is to help the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporate and non-governmental entities navigate political and regulatory hurdles in foreign countries (often very poor countries: Thomas-Greenfield headed their Africa practice).

But perhaps an even better example of this phenomenon is the very man who appointed Thomas-Greenfield: President Biden. In the nearly half century he spent in political office before assuming the presidency, Joe Biden wasn’t exactly known for being a social justice crusader. From his tough on crime focus, anti-busing stance, and drug war hawkishness to his open affection for colleagues who were former segregationists and his trademark habit of making politically incorrect gaffes, Biden was about as unwoke of a politician as they came. But that all now seems to have completely reversed: It feels as if not a day goes by where Biden isn’t heard decrying the country’s “systemic racism” while branding every new initiative as a step toward achieving the newly fashionable concept of “equity.”

And while he might be the most high profile (and perhaps most consequential) example, Biden’s overnight conversion characterizes a broader elite “awokening” that seems to have infected nearly an entire leadership class. What could explain all of it?

It’s extremely common to find critics of “wokeness” and critical race theory decrying it as a radical activist- and academic-driven plot to upend the basic foundations of American society. And while it certainly does like to present itself that way, and is even believed to be exactly that by its most true believers, it’s an analysis that fails to explain why every Fortune 500 company, establishment politician, media executive, and entertainer has become an evangelist for these ideas. After all, radicalism is about threatening and upending existing power structures. What we’re seeing now is quite the opposite. Far from seeing these ideas as a threat, the existing power structure is enthusiastically adopting them as something of a ruling class ideology. So unless you think all of these people are critical theory sleeper cells who are just now being awakened to carry out a plot decades in the making, the more likely explanation is that not only are these ideas compatible with power, but something about them must actually lend themselves to protecting and even enhancing that power. In other words, it’s an ideology that seems much more suited not to radicalism, but to the opposite: repression.

The privatization of politics

One of the most conspicuous things about woke politics is that it politicizes everything. It inserts politics into every space, interaction, and relationship. It problematizes, deconstructs, and dismantles. It calls out and it cancels. And above all, it personalizes politics. But in doing so, it redefines politics itself away from something that takes place in the public sphere — as a way of taking collective action to solve public problems and hold powerful people and institutions accountable — and instead into a matter of personal morality, behaviors, and actions. It privatizes, diffuses, and decentralizes politics. Something that we used to do collectively with a set of defined common purposes with clear objectives is increasingly becoming something we do in the office, with our friends and family members, or while sitting alone at home on the internet.

Woke politics makes politics less about what powerful people do, and more about what everyone does. Sometimes it’s even about what dead people did, in which case we might take down a statue if there is one, or just call for a “reckoning” (whatever that is).

But at a certain point, this stops looking like politics at all, and instead a sort of “anti-politics” — something that diverts energy and attention away from traditional political activity and toward something completely different. And when you see the most powerful people in society, from CEOs to elected officials — the people for whom politics is explicitly an accountability and power-limiting mechanism — championing and encouraging this trend, it has to make you wonder at least a little bit: Maybe the point of politicizing everything is to make you forget what actual politics is?

by Shant Mesrobian, Inquire | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Interesting perspective (as are the comments to this article). Something is clearly up, although I'm not sure what, exactly. The late Harvard law professor Derrick Bell coined the term “interest convergence” to note that the interests of Black people in achieving racial equality are accommodated only when they converge with the interests of white people. So what are those interests now? Simple voter demographics? Virtue signalling, tribal identification, marketing, pacification, distraction, accomodation, redirection? Personally, I don't think policing speech or behavior and shaming everyone into submission is a good strategy for winning minds, but as the author suggests, might be great for obfuscating the real levers of power (or pushing the pendulum in an opposite direction). See also (for a good laugh): Letter from former Jeopardy! contestants regarding offensive terminology and gesture.]

Rubén Blades

Rubén Blades, a Salsa Legend, Swings in a Different Direction: Jazz (NYT)

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

Get big fast was an early Amazon motto. The slogan sounds like a fratty refrain tossed around at the gym. Jeff Bezos had it printed on T-shirts. More than twenty-five years after leaving his position as a Wall Street hedge-fund executive to found Amazon, Bezos’s size anxiety is long gone. (At least as it pertains to his company; the CEO’s Washington, DC, house has eleven bedrooms and twenty-five bathrooms, a bedroom-to-bathroom ratio that raises both architectural and scatological questions.) Bezos is now worth $180 billion. Amazon, were it a country, would have a larger GDP than Australia.

Such numbers are nonsensically large—there’s no way to make them stick. But in 2017, Bezos demonstrated what they mean. That was the year the company conducted a nationwide sweepstakes to choose a location for its second headquarters, or HQ2, as it was called. Seattle was already a company town: Amazon had more than 40,000 employees there, and as much of the city’s office space as the next forty largest employers combined. It was time to take over a new city.

Local and state governments raced to undercut each other. It wasn’t only tax credits that in some locations amounted to over $1 billion; the subsidies offered to Amazon were a display of abject creativity. Bezos is a Trekkie, so Chicago had Star Trek star William Shatner narrate the city’s pitch video. Tucson, Arizona, sent a giant saguaro cactus to Amazon headquarters. Sly James, Kansas City’s mayor at the time, bought and reviewed one thousand Amazon products, giving every item five stars. But the locations Bezos selected—New York City and Northern Virginia—were always going to win. Together, the chosen bids gave the company over $3 billion in tax incentives and grants.

The spectacle was about more than financial benefits; the company sought to flex its power over elected officials. Amazon had engaged in these displays before, such as when it threatened to move jobs out of Seattle after the city council passed a law that would’ve taxed large employers for each employee earning over $150,000 to fund homelessness-outreach services. Indeed, New York had its winning status revoked after a coalition of working-class organizations, left-leaning politicians, and pissed-off residents made too much noise about the downsides of hosting HQ2. The point is to beg on one’s knees; ingratitude is disqualifying.

But the contest was also about Amazon’s life-blood: data. The company learned exactly what each location was willing to give up. It received a precise picture of the strengths, weaknesses, and points of resistance in each corner of the nation. How many NDAs would Alabama officials sign? What did Boston’s elected officials think the region’s future looks like? How many young people in Columbus were entering the workforce each year? How low would Orlando go? The HQ2 affair was a national demonstration of fealty to a private corporation by publicly elected officials. Sure, everyone already knew Amazon was powerful, but this was different: a corporate entity told politicians to jump, and they asked “How high?” How did this happen?

Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America goes a long way toward answering that question. MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, investigates the country left in Amazon’s wake, crisscrossing the United States from what he calls the winning cities to those regions on the losing side. His contention is that corporate concentration creates geographic bifurcation. Places like Boston, New York, Washington, DC, the Bay Area, and Seattle win the lottery, attracting an influx of well-heeled residents. Capital divests from other areas—midsize cities in the Midwest, much of the Rust Belt—leaving them hollowed out. Low-wage jobs and drug addictions replace union benefits. But the division is internal to the winning regions too. Poor residents within the lucky cities suffer. Desperation reigns, expectations are lowered, and elected officials become increasingly willing to give Amazon anything in exchange for the promise of jobs.

Using the tech giant as a focal point allows MacGillis to show that this state of affairs was a choice, not an inevitability. It’s not that “good jobs left”; the transformation of work was engineered. Fulfillment meticulously documents how that process plays out, with the fate of millions haggled over by a handful of people in tucked-away conference rooms.

When Amazon wanted to build two new warehouses in 2015, it reached out to JobsOhio, a private nonprofit created by then-governor John Kasich to oversee negotiations over tax incentives with companies. “Every month,” writes MacGillis, “a board called the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved the incentives negotiated by Jobs-Ohio.” On July 27, 2015, it was Amazon’s turn to meet with the tax board. The company promised two thousand full-time jobs. In exchange, it wanted a fifteen-year tax credit worth $17 million in addition to a $1.5 million cash grant from the state liquor-monopoly profits controlled by JobsOhio. The result? “The board approved the credit 4-0.”

Surveying Amazon’s operations in the state, MacGillis writes that “the company had, in a sense, segmented its workforce into classes and spread them across the map: there were its engineering and software-developer towns, there were the data-center towns, and there were the warehouse towns.” Amazon chose the Columbus area as its location for Amazon Web Services US East, and picked three towns north of the city for its centers. Hilliard, Dublin, and New Albany were “the right sort of exurban communities to target: wealthy enough to support good schools for employees’ kids, but also sufficiently insecure in their civic infrastructure and identity to be easy marks.” The company secured its standard extractions: a fifteen-year exemption from property taxes—worth around $5 million for each data center—accelerated building permits, and waived fees. It required the community to sign NDAs before negotiations could even begin. Dublin threw in sixty-eight acres of farmland for free, and a guarantee that the company did not have to contract with union labor.

The warehouses, by contrast, are south and east of the city, areas poorer than those in the north. The sites in Obetz and Etna are near I-270 and “close enough to the struggling towns of southern and eastern Ohio to be in plausible reach of a long commute for those desperate enough to undertake it.” Amazon’s warehouses come with the standard suite of exemptions—even though ambulances and fire trucks are often called to the locations, which one investigation showed have twice the rate of serious injuries as other warehouses, the company does its best to avoid paying taxes for emergency services.

Tax avoidance is foundational to the company’s empire. MacGillis enumerates a long, damning list of the company’s schemes:

There was the initial decision to settle in Seattle to avoid assessing sales tax in big states such as California. There was the decision to hold off as long as possible on opening warehouses in many large states to avoid the sales taxes there. Amazon employees scattered around the country often carried misleading business cards, so that the company couldn’t be accused of operating in a given state and thus forced to pay taxes there. In 2010, the company went so far as to close its only warehouse in Texas and drop plans for additional ones when state officials pushed Amazon to pay nearly $270 million in back sales taxes there, forcing the state to waive the back taxes. By 2017, the company had even created a secret internal goal of securing $1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.

This is predictable behavior for a company run by a man whose focus has always been on getting as rich as possible. But the government’s support for this cause testifies to its class character. A capitalist state takes its cues from executives. When a region has mostly low-paying work and little in the way of a social-welfare net, it’ll beg employers for jobs with a higher wage (even if that wage is below the industry average, as is true of Amazon’s warehouses). There is no neutrality, only officials groveling at Bezos’s feet, deferring to his fake-business-card-carrying minions. Working-class immiseration is the direct result.

by Alex Press, Bookforum |  Read more:

Image: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Unauthorized Bread

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?

Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.

Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.

The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.

The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.

And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.

Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.

She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.

She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.

She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.

The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked. She wasn’t the only one who had the Disher/Boulangism double whammy, either. Some poor suckers also had the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by HP-NewsCorp—fridges, toothbrushes, even sex toys—all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company’s cloud provider, Tata. While this failure was unrelated to the Disher/Boulangism doubleheader, it was pretty unfortunate timing, everyone agreed.

The twin collapse of Disher and Boulangism did have a shared cause, Salima discovered. Both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by Summerstream Funds Management, the largest hedge fund on earth, with $184 billion under management. Summerstream was an “activist shareholder” and it was very big on stock buybacks. Once it had a seat on each company’s board—both occupied by Galt Baumgardner, a junior partner at the firm, but from a very good Kansas family—they both hired the same expert consultant from Deloitte to examine the company’s accounts and recommend a buyback program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms, without gouging so deep into the companies’ operating capital as to endanger them.

It was all mathematically provable, of course. The companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders. Once this was determined, it was the board’s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it (which was handy, since they all owned fat wads of company shares) and a few billion dollars later, the companies were lean, mean, and battle ready, and didn’t even miss all that money.

Oops.

Summerstream issued a press release (often quoted in the forums Salima was now obsessively haunting) blaming the whole thing on “volatility” and “alpha” and calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” They were confident that both companies would restructure in bankruptcy, perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor, and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two.

by Cory Doctorow, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Tor Books

Daisugi, the 600-Year-Old Japanese Technique of Growing Perfectly Straight Trees Out of Other Trees

We’ve all admired the elegance of Japan’s traditional styles of architecture. Their development required the kind of dedicated craftsmanship that takes generations to cultivate — but also, more practically speaking, no small amount of wood. By the 15th century, Japan already faced a shortage of seedlings, as well as land on which to properly cultivate the trees in the first place. Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees — creating, in other words, a kind of giant bonsai.

“Written as 台杉 and literally meaning platform cedar, the technique resulted in a tree that resembled an open palm with multiple trees growing out if it, perfectly vertical,” writes Spoon and Tamago’s Johnny Waldman. “Done right, the technique can prevent deforestation and result in perfectly round and straight timber known as taruki, which are used in the roofs of Japanese teahouses.”

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture |  Read more:

Image: Wrath of Gnon

[ed. Not unique to Japan. Also called coppicing or pollarding elswhere.]

Biden’s Workmanlike Love Song to the Middle Class

The setting was only mildly traditional for a first presidential address to a joint session of Congress: 200 listeners in the House chamber instead of the usual 1,600. The galleries were empty, and the First Lady was seated on the House floor. The ceremonial entrance of the president, which is often a long time-consuming procession with handshakes and hugs, was a brisk walk to the podium with a few fist bumps. There was certainly nothing traditional about the two women standing behind the president, as vice-president and Speaker of the House.

But the structure of Joe Biden’s speech did follow the formula of many past addresses to Congress, and by Biden standards, it was well-delivered. He stuck mostly to his prepared remarks, adding a few flourishes. Here were some highlights:

Some bragging

Biden immediately said that “America is on the move again … choosing hope over fear, truth over lies, and light over darkness.” That was as close as he came to a blunt reference to the presidency he ended on January 20.

He kept the bragging tightly limited to the administration accomplishments on ending the COVID-19 pandemic and addressing the associated micro- and macroeconomic needs. It was basically a retroactive sales pitch for the American Rescue Plan. There were a few hortatory lines about vaccinations, including the quote from the Arizona nurse saying: “Every shot is like giving a dose of hope.”

The big pitch for his jobs and families plans

Very quickly, Biden got into the agenda he expects Congress to tackle in the weeks and months ahead, and which will likely be moved by the Democrats-only budget reconciliation process (though an infrastructure deal with Republicans remains possible).

What was most unmistakeable about this entire presentation was its relentless framing as practical and patriotic relief for low-to-middle-class Americans. He posited “Buy American” as a central principle of his economic policy, regularly came back to economic challenges from China, and delivered what were certainly poll-verified descriptions of the beneficiaries of his proposals:

Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic growth for years to come.

These are good-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced.

Nearly 90% of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree.

75% do not require an associate’s degree.

The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.

This was a well-crafted pitch aimed right at the heart of the GOP’s white working-class constituency. But there was plenty for Democrats, too: an emphasis on the economic plight of women, and plenty of numbers about the beneficiaries of his plans:

[T]he American Families Plan puts money directly into the pockets of millions of families.

In March we expanded a tax credit for every child in a family.

Up to a $3,000 Child Tax Credit for children over 6 — and $3,600 for children under 6.

With two parents, two kids, that’s up to $7,200 in your pocket to help take care of your family.

This will help more than 65 million children and help cut child poverty in half this year.

And it was probably the most explicitly pro-union speech a president has given in many decades: “Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions build the middle class.” He gave the PRO Act, which Republicans and their business constituencies bitterly oppose, a nice shout-out, and added a reference to the IBEW in touting his plans for electrical charging stations on highways.

The economic populist thematics were just as notable in the “broccoli” part of the American Families Plan as in the “dessert.” The tax plan will be criticized by Republicans as “class warfare,” because it really and proudly is: “It’s time for corporate America and the wealthiest one percent of Americans to pay their fair share.”

There was a lot of partisanship implied, but almost never expressed. He said something positive about Republican infrastructure proposals, and nothing negative about the Republican obstruction that is the obsessive focus of his and his party’s legislative strategy. It was as though the 45th president had been just a bad nightmare.

The less popular things

In the tradition of such addresses, Biden eventually covered the waterfront of issues. But the placement of topics very clearly reflect public opinion, and likely Biden’s priorities:

Two issues on which he made a rare reference to the GOP were gun safety and immigration, where he quite accurately called out Republicans for obstructing legislation popular with voters from both parties. But while scoring some points, you didn’t get the sense he thinks anything will change, with the possible exception of relief for Dreamers, which many Republicans in theory support. Given the timing of the speech, so soon after the Derek Chauvin trial, it was unsurprising that a pitch for police reform sounded a bit more optimistic, and Biden was careful to identify with the conviction of so many Black Americans that the verdict in that trial was just a starting point.

His quick shout-out to transgender Americans was wonderful. But his very slight attention to voting rights was troubling, given its importance not just to Democratic constituencies but to the electoral prospects of his party.

From the point of view of traditional presidential addresses, the foreign-policy sections were unusual. His main reference to national defense was to call an end to the Afghanistan War far overdue. Other foreign-policy subtopics were climate change and trade, with the latter subject bringing forth some additional warnings toward China. And then there was this amazing sentence: “The investments I’ve proposed tonight also advance a foreign policy that benefits the middle class.” Here as elsewhere Biden never strayed far from a love song to the middle class that probably had focus groups nodding approvingly.

by Ed Kilgore, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: via

Baby Blues

Baby blues and tiny sailfish. Here and here.

Finding Good in Bad Girls

From Donna Summer to Dante, everybody loves a "bad girl". She is a social construct that runs the cultural gamut from classical to cartoonish and back again, wearing only high heels and a smirk. She is literary artifice and historical fact combined; she is both retrograde and modern, a product of the patriarchy and yet empowered; she is every man's worst nightmare and his best daydream too. No plot is complete without her, no soap opera or great tragedy doesn't boast a brace. We are a society obsessed with bad girls, and we always have been.

But what's the allure of this mythical creature? There's no specific definition – it's a catch-all phrase which scoops up sulky teens and hard-faced ballbusters alike – but we all have a vision of what it means to be a bad girl. It goes something along the lines of Bettie Page in an Eighties power suit, teamed with Wonder Woman boots and wielding a bazooka – that is to say, a hybridised version of any given cliché of female independence. So far, so foggy.

The bad girl, and all her attendant archetypal baggage, has however become less of a personage and more a mental motif in the latterday power struggle between men and women. American psychiatrist Carole Lieberman has recently published a self-help book, entitled Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them & How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets, which argues that a bad girl mentality is something we could all use to our advantage – even if we're undeniably good girls.

"Kate Middleton is the quintessential example of a good girl who used bad girl strategies to win the heart of her prince," she explains. "When she was rated two out of ten by the boys in her class, she did a total makeover to make herself more appealing. Later, she strutted down the runway of her college fashion show in 'the dress' that got Prince William to stop thinking of her merely as a friend, and to fall head over heels for her."

A case of "ask not what you can do for yourself, but what a bad girl can do for you", perhaps. "I am not trying to turn good girls into bad girls," clarifies Lieberman, whose penchant for flowers, hearts and all things pink marks her clearly as one of the former. "I am trying to help good girls discover the secrets that bad girls use to win men's hearts."

Surely this is a regressive game to play in an age where men and women have assumed supposed parity; doesn't this speaks to the outmoded necessity of women using their wiles to get ahead, rather than their brains? Nowadays, we don't need these sorts of strategies.

But a brief look at the history of the bad girl reveals it to be a term applied to any women who has ever taken control of her own life. Cleopatra, for instance, or Middleton's predecessor Anne Boleyn – two women who got to the top using the only weapon in their arsenal, their sexuality.

"Anne Boleyn is remembered by her contemporaries as someone with the beast in view," says Nicola Shulman, author of Graven with Diamonds: the Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt. "She grew up in the French court and had wonderful French manners – she could write poetry, sing, dance and she was witty. And she clearly had phenomenal brains. She wasn't just worked from behind by her family. Anne Boleyn was the engine of her own destiny."

Shulman quotes contemporary evidence that Boleyn set out to become notorious and get noticed by persuading Wyatt, one of the era's most glamorous courtiers, to fall in love with her. "If the cool person is in love with you, you get the attention," continues Shulman. Boleyn also played the court's rumour mill of gossip and mischevious ditties like a pro and acted a part – she had to do so, in order to keep the King's attention for seven years. "In one poem, Wyatt refers to a new girlfriend and an old one with a system of opposites: one a simple, country girl; the other rather contrived." Boleyn created a persona for herself in order to win the throne, Shulman suggests.

Almost 500 years later, the contemporary assumption is not so different with Kate Middleton. There are those who suggest she has been trained by her mother from an early age, schooled correctly and sent to the same university as Prince William to "catch" the future king. There is no proof in any of it, needless to say, but it goes to show the consensus that women who end up with the man of their dreams cannot possibly have managed it without some sort of strategy. 

by Harriet Walker, Independent |  Read more:

Image: credit lost

[ed. Repost. For some reason, this is one of my most popular posts to date.]

Prince: Director's Cut

Prince’s searing solo turn during an ensemble performance of the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which culminated with him literally making his own electric guitar – a Tele-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat – disappear, has become cemented as a legendary moment in rock history.

The mesmeric performance, which saw Prince join Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Steve Winwood, came together to honor George Harrison's posthumous induction into the Rock and Hall of Fame at the 2004 ceremony. Also along for the ride were Harrison’s son, Dhani, and several members of Petty’s band, the Heartbreakers.

Now, a new edit of While My Guitar Gently Weeps has surfaced on YouTube, with, thankfully, even more Prince closeups. The new cut comes courtesy of Joel Gallen, who directed and produced the original Hall of Fame broadcast.

“17 years after this stunning performance by Prince, I finally had the chance to go in and re-edit it slightly – since there were several shots that were bothering me,” Gallen writes in the accompanying caption.

“I got rid of all the dissolves and made them all cuts, and added lots more close ups of Prince during his solo. I think it's better now. Let me know what you think. Joel.

by Richard Bienstock, Guitar World |  Read more:

[ed. Prince was indisputably one of rock's greatest electric guitarists, and so much more. For some background on this performance see: here (The Observer), and here (NYT).]

via:

Gordon Onslow Ford, The Birth Of Venus, 1947

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