Prediction Market FAQ

This is a FAQ about prediction markets. I am a big proponent of them but have tried my hardest to keep it fair. For more information and other perspectives, see Wikipedia, the scholarly literature (eg here), and Zvi.

1. What are prediction markets?
2. Why believe prediction markets are accurate?
3. Why believe prediction markets are canonical?
4. What are the most common objections to prediction markets?
5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets?
6. What’s the current status of prediction markets?
7. What can I do to help promote prediction markets?

1. What are prediction markets?

Prediction markets are like stock markets, but for beliefs about future events. For example, you can buy or sell shares in events like “The Democrats will win the next election” or “A Category 5 hurricane will hit Florida this year”.

Typically, a share pays out $1 if the event occurs, and nothing if it doesn’t. In this scenario, the price of the share will naturally represent the market’s belief about the likelihood of the event. For example, if a share in “The Democrats will win the next election” trades for $0.20, then the market believes there’s a 20% chance the Democrats will win the next election.

Why does this work? If it didn’t, you could make easy money. Suppose that a share in “The sun will rise tomorrow” was priced at $0.20, even though there’s a 100% chance that will happen. You could spend all your money on shares, and then, when the sun inevitably rose and the shares paid out $1, you would quintuple your money. If you think about different situations, you’ll realize that the only time you neither want to buy nor sell is when you think the share’s price correctly represents the probability.

Prediction markets have two good qualities: in ideal situations, they are accurate and canonical.

By accurate, I mean that that over the long run, they will be at least as accurate as any other source of information.

By canonical, I mean that they short-circuit discussion of “which expert should we trust?” or “how do we know which sources are biased?” All prediction markets speak with a single unified voice, that voice will always be at least as trustworthy as any individual expert, and it cannot be biased. If you’re not sure which of many competing experts (or supposed experts) to trust, you should always trust a prediction market instead of any of them. And the same is true of people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who doubt all the sources you trust and vice versa.

According to Pew Research , a poll of experts named “the breakdown of trusted information sources” as one of the leading challenges of the 21st century (who are these “experts”? was the poll fair? did Pew really say this, or am I making it up?) Millions of words have been written on how to solve this crisis, with most ideas being impossibly naive or dangerously authoritarian. I think prediction markets are a genuine solution, one that can’t come fast enough.

The rest of this FAQ tries to expand on these ideas, justify these surprising claims, answer some common objections, and explain where the prediction market industry is right now. It will start by presenting the theoretical argument for why prediction markets should work, then go into some reasons why they might work less well in real life, then try to bound how much damage the real-life problems can cause.

Because prediction markets work a lot like other markets (eg the stock market), some of this FAQ will be too basic and obvious for people who already have a good understanding of finance. You can skip these parts once you notice them.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

[ed. See also: The Buying Things From A Store FAQ (skip to 10); and, Self-Serving Bias (ACT).]

John Callahan

via:

[ed. See also: Is New York Turning Into Los Angeles? (NYT).]

A USC Office Removes 'Field' From Its Curriculum, Citing Possible Racist Connotations

An office within the University of Southern California's School of Social Work says it is removing the term "field" from its curriculum because it may have racist connotations related to slavery.

The newly renamed Office of Practicum Education, formerly known as the Office of Field Education, within the university's Suzanne-Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, is making the change in order to be more inclusive, according to a memo sent out to faculty and students this week and obtained by NPR.

"This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language," the memo reads. "Language can be powerful, and phrases such as 'going into the field' or 'field work' may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."

The change at the USC school comes as a growing number of entities take steps to remove terminology with ties to slavery or racism. Within the computer science field, some people are ditching terms like "master" and "slave," while the Girl Guides of Canada recently renamed its "Brownies" branch. And two offices within the Michigan health department announced this month that their employees will no longer use the term "field workers."

Mildred Joyner, the president of National Association of Social Workers (NASW), said she applauds the USC office for its change — and while she isn't aware of other universities doing the same, she disagrees with those that say the office is going too far.

"I don't know what going too far means," she said. "Does that mean going too far to treat people with dignity and respect and remove all language that oppresses people? Then kudos to that department." (...)

The memo from the USC office, which quickly gained attention on social media, is being met with both support and derision. And students within the department are also split over the decision, according the Daily Trojan, a campus newspaper. Students told publication that they were unsure whether the term "field" truly had racist connotations, and some considered it to be a stretch.

A USC official told NPR that the decision is being made from one office within the department and not the university as a whole.

"The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words," Elizabeth A. Graddy, the university's interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said in a statement to NPR. "We will continue to use words – including 'field' – that accurately encompass and describe our work and research."

by Giulia Heywood, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. The natural evolution of people looking around for something to justify their continued existence. What happens when everything is finally diversified (if ever)? Will these people just go away? See also: No Longer A Selling Point, Some Residents Want 'Plantation' Removed (NPR).]

Dinosaur Jr.

 

[See also: A 25-Year-Old Dinosaur Jr. Song Is a Hit in Japan. Nobody Knows Why. (Pitchfork) (... because it's great?).]

Eduard Arkadievich Steinberg, Composition with a fish.

via:

via:

Tom Tom Club

What you gonna do when you get out of jail? I'm gonna have some fun. What do you consider fun? Fun, natural fun.

I'm in Heaven. With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend. There's no beginning and there is no end. Time isn't present in that dimension. You'll take my arm. When we're walkin', rolling and rocking. It is one time I'm glad I'm not a man. Feels like I'm dreaming, but I'm not sleeping.

I'm in Heaven. With the maven of funk mutation. Clinton's musicians such as Bootsy Collins. Raise expectations to a new intention. No one can sing. Quite like Smokey, Smokey Robinson. Wailin' and skankin' to Bob Marley. Reggae's expanding with Sly and Robbie.

Oops! Your mama said uh. Oops! Your mama said uh
Oops! Your mama said uh. Oops! Your mama

All the weekend. Boyfriend was missing. I surely miss him. The way he'd hold me in his warm arms. We went insane when we took cocaine. [Gibberish language by Lani Weymouth]... Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon.

Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow. Who needs to think when your feet just go. With a hippie-the-hip and a hippie-the-hop. Who needs to think when your feet just go. Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon.

Who needs to think when your feet just go. "Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon, Bohannon"
James Brown, James Brown
James Brown, James Brown

If you see him. Please remind him, unhappy boyfriend. Well he's the genius of love. He's got a greater depth of feeling. Well he's the genius of love. He's so deep.

[ed. Probably one of the most sampled songs in modern pop history (with a can't help but make you feel good vibe). See also: Chris Frantz: 'If you knew David Byrne, you would not be jealous of him' (The Guardian). Btw: Bohannon.]

Pat Metheny

[ed. A living genius (eg. see 1:05- 2:10, second video). See also: Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society: Music and the Brain With Pat Metheny (DS Repost).]

China COVID Deaths Expected to Accelerate to 9,000 a Day

Beijing, December 29 (Reuters) - Around 9,000 people in China are probably dying each day from COVID-19, UK-based health data firm Airfinity said on Thursday, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago, as infections ripped across the world's most populous nation.

COVID infections started to sweep across China in November, picking up pace this month after Beijing dismantled its zero-COVID policies including regular PCR testing on its population and publication of data on asymptomatic cases.

Cumulative deaths in China since Dec. 1 likely reached 100,000 with infections totalling 18.6 million, Airfinity said in a statement. It says it uses modelling based on data from Chinese provinces before the recent changes to reporting cases were implemented.

Airfinity expects China's COVID infections to reach their first peak on Jan. 13 with 3.7 million cases a day.

That is in contrast to the several thousands of cases reported by health authorities a day, after a nationwide network of PCR test sites was largely dismantled as authorities pivoted from preventing infections to treating them.

by Reuters |  Read more:

Image: Tingshu Wang/Reuters
[ed. See also: South Korea shares eye-opening Covid statistics to defend its new rules for travelers from China (CNBC).]

The Written World and the Unwritten World

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public—that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.

This new birth is always accompanied by special rites that signify the entrance into a different life: for example, the rite of putting on my glasses, since I’m nearsighted and read without glasses, while for the farsighted majority the opposite rite is imposed, that is, of taking off the glasses used for reading.

Every rite of passage corresponds to a change in mental attitude. When I read, every sentence has to be readily understood, at least in its literal meaning, and has to enable me to formulate an opinion: what I’ve read is true or false, right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant. In ordinary life, on the other hand, there are always countless circumstances that escape my understanding, from the most general to the most banal: I often find myself facing situations in which I wouldn’t know how to express an opinion, in which I prefer to suspend judgment.

While I wait for the unwritten world to become clear to my eyes, there is always within reach a written page that I can dive back into. I hasten to do that, with the greatest satisfaction: there at least, even if I understand only a small part of the whole, I can cultivate the illusion of keeping everything under control.

I think that in my youth, too, things went that way, but at the time I had the illusion that the written world and the unwritten world illuminated one another; that the experiences of life and the experiences of reading were in some way complementary, and every step forward in one field corresponded to a step forward in the other. Today I can say that I know much more about the written world than I once did: within books, experience is always possible, but its reach doesn’t extend beyond the blank margin of the page. Instead, what happens in the world that surrounds me never stops surprising me, frightening me, disorienting me. I’ve witnessed many changes in my lifetime, in the vast world, in society, and many changes in myself, too, and yet I can’t predict anything, not for myself or for the people I know, and even less regarding the future of the human race. I couldn’t predict the future relations between the sexes, between the generations, future developments of society, of cities and nations, what type of peace there will be or what type of war, what significance money will have, which of the objects in daily use will disappear and which appear as new, what sort of vehicles and machines will be used, what the future of the sea will be, of rivers, animals, plants. I know very well that I share this ignorance with those who, on the contrary, claim to know: economists, sociologists, politicians. But the fact that I am not alone gives me no comfort.

I take some comfort in the thought that literature has always understood something more than other disciplines, but this reminds me that the ancients saw in letters a school of wisdom, and I realize how unattainable every idea of wisdom is today. (...)

Some, in order to have contact with the world outside, simply buy the newspaper every morning. I am not so naive. I know that from the papers I get a reading of the world made by others, or, rather, made by an anonymous machine, expert in choosing from the infinite dust of events those which can be sifted out as “news.”

Others, to escape the grip of the written world, turn on the television. But I know that all the images, even those most directly drawn from life, are part of a constructed story, like the ones in the newspapers. So I won’t buy the newspaper, I won’t turn on the television but will confine myself to going out for a walk.

But everything I see on the city streets already has its place in the context of homogenized information. This world I see, which is usually recognized as the world, appears to my eyes—mostly, anyway—already conquered, colonized by words, a world covered by a thick crust of discourses. The facts of our life are already classified, judged, commented on, even before they happen. We live in a world where everything is read even before it starts to exist.

by Italo Calvino, The Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Atelier of the Boxes, Ivory Writing Tablet and Lid (Medieval, between 1340 and 1360, Northern France) via Wikimedia Commons.

Jeff Beck (1944- 2023)

[ed. Saw Jeff back in the 70s, right after his Blow by Blow album came out. He could coax music out of a guitar that no one else could. A true innovator. See also: here (NY Times); and here (Rolling Stone). Also, Crossroads, 2007. ]

[PS: Also thought it interesting, after perusing Jeff's history, to mention his early involvement with Screaming Lord Sutch. Per Wikipedia: 

(Sutch) was an English musician and perennial parliamentary candidate. He was the founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and served as its leader from 1983 to 1999, during which time he stood in numerous parliamentary elections. He holds the record for contesting the most Parliamentary elections, standing in 39 elections from 1963 to 1997. As a singer, he variously worked with Keith Moon, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Charlie Watts, John Bonham and Nicky Hopkins, and is known for his recordings with Joe Meek including "Jack the Ripper" (1963). (...)

During the 1960s Screaming Lord Sutch was known for his horror-themed stage show, dressing as Jack the Ripper, pre-dating the shock rock antics of Arthur Brown and Alice Cooper. Accompanied by his band, the Savages, he started by coming out of a black coffin (once being trapped inside of it, an incident parodied in the film Slade in Flame). Other props included knives and daggers, skulls and "bodies". (...)

Sutch's album Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends was named in a 1998 BBC poll as the worst album of all time, a status it also held in Colin Larkin's book The Top 1000 Albums of All Time, despite the fact that Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Jeff Beck, Noel Redding and Nicky Hopkins performed on it and helped write it.]

History takes a stranger path than can be imagined sometimes...

The Learned Helplessness of Pete Buttigieg

The apocalyptic airline meltdown over the Christmas break stranded thousands of Americans, ruining their vacations and costing them a fortune in unexpected fees. It wasn't just Southwest Airlines' meltdown, either – as stranded fliers sought alternatives, airlines like AA raised the price of some domestic coach tickets to over $10,000.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Southwest's growth strategy has seen the airlines add more planes and routes without a comparable investment in back-end systems, including crew scheduling systems. SWA's unions have spent years warning the public that their employer's IT Infrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.

But successive administrations have failed to act on those warnings. Under Obama and Trump, the DoT was content to let "the market" discipline the monopoly carriers, though both administrations were happy to wave through anticompetitive mergers that weakened the power of markets to provide that discipline. Obama waved through the United/Continental merger and the Southwest/AirTran merger, while Trump waved through Virgin/Alaska.

While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in Covid relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-04/airlines-got-the-sweetest-coronavirus-bailout-around

Incredibly, the airlines got even worse under the Biden administration. In the first six months of 2022, US airlines cancelled more flights than they had in all of 2021, while the airlines increased their profits by 45% – and kept it, rather than using it to pay back the $10b in unpaid refunds they owed to fliers:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/economic-liberties-releases-model-legislation-to-eliminate-airlines-liability-shield/

Dozens of state attorneys general – Republicans and Democrats – wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, begging him to take action on the airlines. After months without action, they wrote again, just days before the Christmas meltdown:

https://www.levernews.com/state-officials-warned-buttigieg-about-airline-mess/

For his part, Secretary Buttigieg claimed he was doing all he could, trumpeting the order to refund fliers as evidence of his muscular regulatory approach (recall that these refunds have not been paid). He assured Americans that the situation "is going to get better by the holidays."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FlD6fHq8-g&t=145s

But the numbers tell the tale. Under Buttigieg, the DOT "issued fewer enforcement orders in 2021 than in any single year of the Trump and Obama administrations." (...)

Buttigieg's defenders trotted out a laundry list of excuses for the failure, ranging from the nonsensical to the implausible to the contradictory – Pete's Army continued to claim that the aviation meltdown was the weather's fault, even after Buttigieg himself went on national TV to say this wasn't the case:

https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1608075800254767105?s=20&t=wmaJq3OWU0r0e6TS9V-9sA

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying. But there is a difference between being powerless and acting powerless. (...)

The are a lot more recent examples of the DOT using this power than there are of the FTC using its Section 5 authority, like the Tarmac Delay Rule. But as Robert Kuttner writes, the airlines reneged on their end of the $54b bailout, slashing staffing levels and failing to invest in IT modernization – examples of the "unfair and deceptive" practices that the DOT could intervene to prevent:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/

As Dayen writes, "The definition of 'deceptive' is 'likely to mislead a consumer, acting reasonably under the circumstances.' If the airline scheduled a flight, took money for the flight, and knew it would have to cancel it (or, if you prefer, knew it would have to cancel some flights, all of which it took money for), that seems plainly deceptive."

This is the same authority that Buttigieg used to fine 5 non-US airlines (and Frontier, the tiny US carrier that flies 2% of domestic routes) for cancelling their flights – his signature achievement to date. But as Dayen points out, this authority isn't limited to taking action after the fact.

The DOT can – and should – act before Americans' flights are canceled. It can use its authority under 41712(a) to "say that the cancellation itself is an unfair and deceptive practice and issue a fine for each canceled flight." It could "promulgate a rule saying that cancellations due to insufficient crews, or due to dysfunctional computer scheduling systems, are unfair and deceptive, with stiff fines for each violation."

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

The Party’s Over for Us. Where Do We Go Now?

For decades, conservative values have been central to Bret Stephens’s and David Brooks’s political beliefs, and the Republican Party was the vehicle to extend those beliefs into policy. But in recent years, both the party and a radicalized conservative movement have left them feeling alienated in various ways. Now, with an extremist fringe seemingly in control of the House, the G.O.P. bears little resemblance to the party that was once their home. Bret and David got together to suss out what happened and where the party can go.

Bret Stephens: Lately I’ve been thinking about that classic Will Rogers line: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” A century or so later, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot. Is it even possible to call the Republican Party a “party” anymore?

David: My thinking about the G.O.P. goes back to a brunch I had with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza in the ’80s that helps me see, in retrospect, that people in my circle were pro-conservative, while Ingraham and D’Souza and people in their circle were anti-left. We wanted to champion Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and a Reaganite foreign policy. They wanted to rock the establishment. That turned out to be a consequential difference because almost all the people in my circle back then — like David Frum and Robert Kagan — ended up, decades later, NeverTrumpers, and almost all the people in their circle became Trumpers or went bonkers.

Bret: Right, they weren’t conservatives. They were just illiberal.

David: Then in 1995 some friends and I created a magazine called The Weekly Standard. The goal was to help the G.O.P. become a mature governing party. Clearly we did an awesome job! I have a zillion thoughts about where the Republican Party went astray, but do you have a core theory?

Bret: I have multiple theories, but let me start with one: The mid-1990s was also the time that Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House and Fox News got started. Back then, those who were on the more intelligent end of the conservative spectrum thought a magazine such as The Weekly Standard, a channel such as Fox and a guy like Gingrich would be complementary: The Standard would provide innovative ideas for Republican leaders like Gingrich, and Fox would popularize those ideas for right-of-center voters. It didn’t work out as planned. The supposed popularizers turned into angry populists. And the populists turned on the intellectuals.

To borrow Warren Buffett’s take about investing, the conservative movement went from innovation to imitation to idiocy. It’s how the movement embraced Donald Trump as a standard-bearer and role model. All the rest, as they say, is Commentary.

Your theory?

David: I think I’d tell a similar story, but maybe less flattering to my circle. The people who led the Republican Party, either as president (Ronald Reagan through the Bushes), members of Congress (Jack Kemp, John McCain, Paul Ryan) or as administration officials and intellectuals (Richard Darman, Condi Rice) believed in promoting change through the institutions of established power. They generally wanted to shrink and reform the government but they venerated the Senate, the institution of the presidency, and they worked comfortably with people from the think tanks, the press and the universities. They were liberal internationalists, cosmopolitan, believers in the value of immigration.

Bret: I’d add that they also believed in the core values of old-fashioned liberalism: faith in the goodness of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, free speech, political compromise, the political process itself. They believed in building things up, not just tearing them down. I would count myself among them.

David: Then the establishment got discredited (Iraq War, financial crisis, the ossifying of the meritocracy, the widening values gap between metro elites and everybody else), and suddenly all the people I regarded as fringe and wackadoodle (Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, anybody who ran CPAC) rose up on the wave of populist fury.

Everybody likes a story in which the little guy rises up to take on the establishment, but in this case the little guys rode in on a wave of know-nothingism, mendacity, an apocalyptic mind-set, and authoritarianism. Within a few short years, a somewhat Hamiltonian party became a Jacksonian one, with a truly nihilistic wing.

Bret: Slightly unfair to Jackson, who at least opposed nullification, but I take your overall point. (...)

David: When people ask me whether they should end a relationship they’re in, I answer them with a question: Are the embers dead? Presumably when the relationship started there was a flame of love. Is some of that warmth still there, waiting to be revived, or is it just stone-cold ash? In my relationship with the G.O.P., the embers are dead. I look at the recent madness in the House with astonishment but detachment. Isaiah Berlin once declared he belonged to “the extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement,” and if that location is good enough for old Ike Berlin, it’s good enough for me.

Bret: I wouldn’t have had trouble calling myself a Republican till 2012, when I started to write pretty critically about the direction the party was taking on social issues, immigration and foreign policy. In 2016 I voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in my life, did it again in 2020, and I think of myself as a conservative-minded independent. If I haven’t finalized my divorce from the G.O.P., we’re definitely separated and living apart.

David: I suppose I went through stages of alienation. By the early 2000s, I came to believe that the free market policies that were right to combat stagnation and sclerosis a few decades earlier were not right for an age of inequality and social breakdown. Then the congressional Republicans began to oppose almost every positive federal good, even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump brought the three horsemen of the apocalypse — immorality, dishonesty and bigotry. The party, complicit in all that, is dead to me, even though, I have to say, a good chunk of my friends are Republicans.

Bret: I’m loath to give up completely on Republicans only because I believe a successful democracy needs a morally healthy conservative party — one that channels conservative psychological tendencies into policies to check heedless progressivism while engaging productively with an evolving world. I see no other plausible vehicle to advance those policies. Still, the party’s road to recovery is going to be long and hard. And it’s going to require some courageous and credible conservatives to speak up and denounce the current direction of the party.

by David Brooks and Bret Stephens, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times
[ed. Cracks me up (in a sad way). All this soul searching over something that's been obvious to most Democrats for decades. You broke it, you bought it.]

This and That

ATM Robbery, Ireland

Amazing drone control

via: here and here

The Cheetahs Made a Kill. Then the Safari Trucks Swarmed In.

The video surfaced online around October. Filmed from a distance, it shows an antelope grazing on the African plain. Suddenly, two cheetahs race toward it and the antelope takes off, running toward the camera. But the cats are too fast. They converge on it and bring it down. They begin to feed.

Almost at that exact moment, a second drama unfolds: The safari vehicles that have been parked in the background begin to move. One dark-colored 4x4 hits the gas and begins driving closer to the animals. Then vehicle after vehicle is on the move — green, brown white, in various states of repair. You can hear the voices of the guides within yelling at one another. Some start to honk their horns. The vehicles form a circle, jockeying for position as their passengers hold up cellphones to record the cheetahs and their meal.

A woman’s voice can be heard in the background. “Are they stupid?” she asks.

The video was filmed in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, home to many of the Big Five animals (lions, leopards, elephants, buffalo and rhinoceroses) that safari participants tick off their lists. The identity of the video’s creator remains unknown, as does the date it was shot.

It was originally shared by a Twitter account using the name @DrumChronicles and has been viewed more than 175,000 times since it appeared. Guides and conservationists who have seen it said the video underscored a problem many of them have observed since the Kenyan government began lifting most pandemic-related travel restrictions: safari vehicles packed with cellphone-wielding tourists led by guides who are willing to get too close to the animals.

Overcrowding at popular safari spots was a serious issue before the pandemic, but as tourists have returned to Kenya, the problem has come back with alarming speed and “appears to be heightened by pent-up travel demand,” said Judy Kepher-Gona, director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Agenda, an organization based in Kenya that has called for stricter monitoring in the reserve.

“Sadly, what is seen in this video is the rule and not the exception in Masai Mara reserve,” she said.

In February, a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying tourists got so close to a family of cheetahs, the vehicle nearly ran over one of the cubs.

In August, Simon Espley, the chief executive of Africa Geographic, a travel and conservation company, watched in horror as 60 vehicles idled on both sides of the Mara River, which runs through the reserve, mere feet from where hundreds of wildebeests and zebras were slowly amassing at a crossing point during their migration in the Masai Mara.

When the hooves hit the water, there was a “crazy, chaotic rush as hundreds of tons of steel lunged forward with screaming engines” from the 4x4s that maneuvered to get closer to the herds, Mr. Espley said.

“It was surreal and sickening as we all converged on what is only a few hundred meters of riverbank, jostled for position and somehow avoided collisions,” he said.

Mr. Espley, whose company had organized the safari trip for a group of photographers, said he felt “regret and unease” about being part of that crowd. “Everyone in our safari vehicle did,” he said. The travelers asked their guide, a local Masai, to drive them away immediately.

“He was happy to oblige,” Mr. Espley said.

by Maria Cramer and Costas Christ, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Simon Espley
[ed. No interest in Africa (or many other places) for this reason. Aggressive tourism. Industrial tourism. Call it what you want. Unique experiences/destinations around the world are being plasticized, eroded and lost. The only answer seems to be more restrictive access/regulations. But for whom?]

AI Will Dominate Music and Songwriting

[ed. It already is with Auto-Tune (Rick Beato). See also: How I Got an AI Theme Song for My Substack (Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker).]

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

I bet you're wondering how we got here...

I can’t promise what’s happening with Twitter is just the public meltdown of a malignant narcissist. I can’t promise it’s not more practice. Twitter is much bigger, much more influential, and much more ingrained into the fabric of modern society than Livejournal ever was. It’s a big bite to swallow. But it’s happened before. We know governmental entities with vested interests in eliminating avenues of effective dissent and the dissemination of truth (Saudi Arabia, China, others) provided funding for Musk to complete his purchase when he couldn’t otherwise pull it off. We see him, barely months at the helm, take off any remaining mask of progressivism or moral purpose and speed-run a descent into radicalization while working day and night, not even to make money, but to change anything that might smack of mercy or kindness or acceptance of others. To welcome monsters and ban journalists. To get people who’ve managed not to fall into the right-wing oubliette to turn against Ukraine, turn against vaccines, turn against Jews, turn against LGBTQ+ community but especially gender-nonconforming human fucking beings, turn against fact-checking, turn against economic aid packages meant to benefit them and not him, turn against liberal democracy, turn against each other.

Yeah, Twitter was a mess. Sure. Any sufficiently large gathering of humans won’t always be a great time. But it wasn’t a hell

Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.

Hurting each other is just ever so much more useful than talking and connecting. Leaving people alone doesn’t produce narcissistic supply. It doesn’t feed the need to control and force that some humans, it seems, have always been and always will be born with.

And look, I’m not going to sit here and go full anti-capitalist vision quest on you. I understand these sites aren’t free to run. Servers, bandwidth, coders, mods, everything costs. We all have to eat and the costs involved in the operation of these kinds of networks can get unreal and unwieldy. And until we achieve post-scarcity, all these things must be done by people who also need to eat and live. I surely don’t expect to be handed mature social networks all run by Andrews out of the good of their hearts and the pleasure of making little things.

And I also understand that we are the generation who has to go through this part of it. We’re the ones born in time to be forced to make the rules and defend them. To say hey maybe one guy shouldn’t be able to own the village square. Because it was never remotely possible before. It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too. This is our actual Oregon Trail. We have to walk it on foot. We have to be the ones who fuck up and we have to be the ones who fix it. We have to be the ones who learn the lessons the hard way and write it all down so someday people get to just hop in a plane and sleep for five hours rather than die in the snow wrapped around our shivering children, praying for a dawn that is far too distant to help us now.

And we’ve seen very clearly this year that even progress that seems obvious and settled 50 years down the track is always vulnerable to people who confuse the ignorance of their own childhoods with the absence of societal problems. (...)

There isn’t enough money printed to change who they are. Elon Musk is (or was) the richest man on Earth. He’s losing money like a teenage nosebleed every time he goes further to the right. This is just the shape of his soul, it’s not a feint for profit. It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option.

And I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired of running from that Nothing, that creeping enforced sameness, that self-programming grey goo of empty fear of the Other. Running from oasis to oasis in a desert of uncaring where empathy never wets the sand.

I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love. (...)

I’m just so angry.

by Catherynne M. Valente, Welcome To Garbagetown |  Read more:

Image: (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Heisenberg Media, CC BY 2.0; modified via:)

[ed. See also: What the fediverse (does/n't) solve (Pluralistic).]

Congress Must Listen to Working Families and Overhaul Healthcare, Minimum Wage and Education

I am proud to be assuming the chairmanship of the US Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions committee (Help), a committee with wide jurisdiction over some of the most important issues facing the American people. As I move into that position I’m thinking about how we can best address some of the serious challenges facing my fellow Vermonters and working families all across the country.

Today, in terms of health, we have a dysfunctional healthcare system in which we spend the astronomical and unsustainable sum of nearly $13,000 for every man, woman and child, twice as much as most developed countries and almost 20% of our GDP. Yet, despite that huge expenditure, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and we have worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy than many other nations. While the insurance companies make huge profits, over 500,000 people declare bankruptcy each year from medically related debt, and over 68,000 die because they can’t afford the care they need. Our complicated and fragmented system is so broken that it cannot even produce the number of doctors, nurses, dentists and mental health personnel that we desperately need.

As a nation, we must focus on the reality that the function of a rational healthcare system is to provide quality care for all, not simply huge profits for the insurance industry.

Today, as we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, the pharmaceutical industry is making record-breaking profits and more than a few executives in drug companies are becoming billionaires. Meanwhile, despite billions in government investment in prescription drug research and development, nearly one out of four Americans are unable to afford the medicine their doctors prescribe and too many seniors are splitting their lifesaving pills in half because they can’t afford them. And because Medicare doesn’t cover dental, hearing and vision, there are millions of seniors who are trying to survive without these basic healthcare needs.

But it’s not just our healthcare “system” which needs a major overhaul. In terms of education, we need to take a hard look at how we are educating our kids – from childcare to graduate school.

While psychologists tell us that the first four years of life are the most important in terms of human intellectual and emotional growth, it’s hard to deny that our childcare system is in disarray. The cost is unaffordable for many working parents, there are not enough slots available, the quality is spotty and the pay and benefits childcare workers receive is unconscionably low. This is not how we should be treating our children, the future of America.

The situation in K-12 education is not much better. For a variety of reasons – lack of respect, low pay, the stress of Covid and the politicization of school boards – thousands of gifted and dedicated teachers are quitting the profession, leaving students unprepared for the challenges they face as they enter the adult world. The future of this country depends upon the quality of education we provide our kids, and there is no reason why we cannot create the best public educational system in the world.

In terms of higher education, we face the absurd situation of hundreds of thousands of bright young people who have the desire and ability to get a college education but cannot do so because their families lack the money. How many great doctors, scientists, and teachers are we losing as a result? There are also millions of young people who need training in order to become skilled mechanics, carpenters, welders, and electricians who are not getting the post-high school training they need. Further, 45 million Americans are struggling with student debt – sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In terms of labor and our economy, we must recognize that we live in a period of more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. While the very rich become richer and three people now own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 60% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck and millions are trying to exist on starvation wages. Meanwhile, we have a pathetic federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour which has not been raised since 2009. (...)

There is a lot of discussion in the media about how “divided” our nation is and, on many issues, that is absolutely true. But what we don’t appreciate is that on some of the most important issues facing our country the American people – Democrats, Republicans, independents – are quite united.

The American people know we are being ripped off by the drug companies and they want lower prescription drugs prices.

The American people know that our healthcare system is outrageously expensive and they want universal and lower cost health care.

The American people know that education is essential to our lives and the future of this country and they want high quality and affordable education from childcare to graduate school.

The American people know that no one can survive on a $7.25-an-hour minimum wage, and they want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. (...)

At a time when too many Americans are giving up on democracy, now is the time to attempt to restore faith in our government. Now is the time for Congress to have the courage to take on the lobbyists and powerful special interests and show the American people that our government can work for them, and not just the 1%. Let’s do it.

by Bernie Sanders, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: IronHeart/Getty Images

[ed. Sounds pretty straightforward, yet also impossible. Why? Inertia. Just Capitalism in general, where any weakness is exploited in the name of competition, freedom and profit. It's the nature of the system (with a not-good ending for future generations - though rich descendants will be secure). I don't know why there haven't been more (any?) uprisings (actually, I do: the middle class has been effectively weaponized against each other over cultural/political issues, dulled by shiny objects - smartphones, social networks, Amazon/Netflix, etc. - and living in fear of falling out of their class, just trying to survive). Unfortunately, the only entity in government that does seem anxious to do as much as possible is the Supreme Court. See also: US supreme court could radically reshape clean water rules (The Guardian).]

Cobrahawk

[ed. Missed this over the holiday season... my golf buddy Matt is the bass player. Great band.]

How US State Agencies Got Funny

"I feel frustrated when my feelings aren’t heard or acknowledged!"
"Do you have the emotional/mental capacity for me to vent about you thinking about eating me right now?"

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‘Truly a renaissance period of social media’: how US state agencies got funny (The Guardian)

Image: Twitter