Why Is Everything So Complicated?

I started shaving, tackling the wispiest of bumfluff, 40 years ago. I did so in an attempt to stimulate growth in order to make me look older, so I would have a better chance of getting served in pubs. Not one of these three things came to pass. The razor I used had two blades. I remember thinking how that felt excessive for my needs; one would have done. This was 1983 – 11 years after, according to its website, Gillette came up with the “Trac II®, the first twin-blade shaving system”. And it was a good 15 years before Gillette was “breaking the performance barrier with the MACH3®, the first three-blade technology, for an even smoother, closer shave”.

The blade arms race was on, providing a rich source of comic material... But on the razor makers ploughed regardless, breaking new ground with ever more blades. Gillette, with a fine flourish, skipped four blades and went straight to five in 2006. And at five it has stuck, instead coming up with other stuff to keep our excitement high, most recently a heated razor that “delivers instant warmth in less than one second at the push of a button and provides a noticeably more comfortable shave”. Reassuringly, though, the blade race continues apace with the Dorco Pace 7, “World’s First and Only Seven Blade Razor”. Seven!

Look, everyone’s got to make a living, but this is getting silly. We’re approaching Spinal Tap territory, with their amplifiers calibrated to 11 instead of 10. Innovation, we’re always told, is a wonderful thing. But what about innovation with no real purpose other than to drive sales? To be fair, I’m sure Gillette and others could provide evidence of improved performance, but while my dictionary defines innovate as “to introduce something new”, it also, tellingly, has it as “to introduce novelties”.

Kitchens are crammed with cooked-up novelties. We need ovens to get hot, fridges to get cool, and dishwashers to wash dishes. But oh, the features I’ve fallen for in my time. Ovens that spurt steam and are equipped with integrated temperature probes, for a start. Both vaguely useful, I must admit, but both conked out before long. This is another unhappy outcome of innovation: there’s ever more stuff to go wrong. The top-rated American-style fridge freezer on Which? will set you back around two and a half thousand pounds. It sports a large touch screen on which you can see who’s at your front door, play music and videos and plan your meals. Inside, believe it or not, there’s a camera so you can use your smartphone to see what’s in there, alert you to use-by dates and even add to your online shopping list. Why? Please make it stop.

by Adrian Chiles, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: adventtr/Getty Images/iStockphoto
[ed. No kidding. Can't we all accept that touch screens are a disaster for anything other than smartphones and computers? Anything that used to require some tactile touch (especially in the dark)? Where's the innovation in making buttons ergonomically better and more integrated these days? Non-existent. I'd buy an appliance with solid button thingys over a touch screen any day of the week.] 

More Than 600 Mass Shootings Since January 2022

There have been more than 600 mass shootings since Jan. 1, 2022 in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. (...)

Mass shootings — where four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed — have averaged more than one per day since January 2022. Not a single week in 2022 has passed without at least four mass shootings. 9...)

With eight days to go, this January has had more shootings than any other January on the database’s records. The toll is immense. In 2022 alone, mass shootings have killed 673 people and injured 2,700.

by Júlia Ledur and Kate Rabinowitz, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: NY Times. Sources: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Univ. of Washington, Small Arms Survey, World Bank
[ed. At least we still lead the world in something (also, Defense spending - my personal bugaboo - getting pretty close to $800  billion/yr. now. I wonder if that'll come up in the debt ceiling debate? Haha...just kidding.). Yay. We're Number 1.]

WA’s ‘Death With Dignity’ Law Failed My Wife

My beloved wife of 27 years had to die alone.

It shouldn’t have been that way. We both wanted Toni’s suffering to end with her dying peacefully in my arms, but Washington state’s supposedly enlightened “Death with Dignity” law wouldn’t let her.

Despite first-class medical care, her disease, one of the many variants of ALS, was slowly grinding her down.

Toni’s primary identity was not as an attorney, wife or prankster nonpareil, but as a distance runner. She enthusiastically, and sometimes doggedly, ran every day for 30 years, missing only a couple of days due to the flu. So it was brutally ironic that the first thing the disease took was her legs’ ability to support her.

We knew what lay ahead. Her brother had recently died of the same disease, and she didn’t want a repeat of the prolonged misery that he and his family endured.

Our current law says that to get aid in dying a patient must have a diagnosis of natural death within six months. But because her disease was slow and inexorable, it would mean more years of suffering before she could qualify for medically aided death.

Finally, after about eight years of decline, the force and bewildering variety of her symptoms overwhelmed her uncommon ability to extract every last drop of fun out of living. Her effervescence still shined on occasion, but less and less. We knew that Wild Thing (my pet name for her) would have to figure out how to end it all.

And not merely how to do it. Because she didn’t qualify for medical aid in dying, she would have to do it alone.

I hate this fact.

It’s bad enough that nature deprived us of an expected 25 more years of love, but it breaks my heart that our poorly formulated laws prevented me, and everyone else, from giving her aid and comfort during the planning and carrying it out. If it appeared that I had assisted in any way, I would be in legal jeopardy. (...)

But how does a person decide when the pain is persistent enough, when the happiness is rare enough, to actually do it? The story of the frog in slowly heating water comes to mind. If anybody could resolve to do it without discussing plans with anyone, and then accomplish it, it would be Toni.

I am fiercely proud of her bravery and force of will.

But I’m also angry because we, as citizens in charge of our laws, have badly failed her and many others. We need to improve these laws as Canada’s Parliament did in 2016.

We should drop the six-month requirement and keep the requirements that a patient have a grievous and irremediable medical condition, an advanced state of decline and unbearable suffering from the illness. And we should keep the more general safeguards regarding the patient’s age, mental health, informed consent, unacceptable motives, pressure from family or others, et cetera.

If Washington had such law, we and our loved ones would have come together for a wonderful and tearful goodbye, rather than attend a memorial service. And Toni’s last moments would have been in my warm, loving embrace.

by Peter Haley, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Peter Haley

[ed. The DwD process is unnecessarily convoluted (on purpose). All our lives (from birth) we're expected to take responsibility for ourselves and maintain self-control, then near the end that control is taken away. Why exactly? Because it's morally wrong to have agency over your own life? 

***

Contrast End of Life's mission statement:

Our mission is to guide people in preparing for the final days of their lives. We believe that a peaceful death should be within reach of everyone and that no one should face intolerable suffering at the end of life. We promote advance planning and envision a day when all Washington residents will make informed decisions so they may experience peaceful deaths consistent with their values.

... with those expressed, for example, in: The European Way to Die by Michel Houellebecq (Harper's), which seem (to me) mean and incoherent:]

Little by little, and without anyone’s objecting—or even seeming to notice—our civil law has moved away from the moral law whose fulfillment should be its sole purpose. It is difficult and exhausting to live in a country where the laws are held in contempt, whether they sanction acts that have nothing to do with morality or condone acts that are morally abject. But it’s even worse to live among people whom one begins to disdain for their submission to these laws they hold in contempt as well as for their greediness in demanding new ones. An assisted suicide—in which a doctor prescribes a lethal cocktail that the patient self-administers under circumstances of his own choosing—is still a suicide.

We are demonstrating once again our feeble respect for individual liberty and an unhealthy appetite for micromanagement—a state of affairs we deceptively call welfare but is more accurately described as servitude. This mixture of extreme infantilization, whereby one grants a physician the right to end one’s life, and a petulant desire for “ultimate liberty” is a combination that, quite frankly, disgusts me.

Liziqi

[ed. I used to collect Hawaiian sea salt in lava rock depressions, but this is next level (still traditional). See also: this past post.]

Eyvind Earle

via:

Manifestation

How Manifestation is Turning Billions into Believers

Three months ago, Macey Irving, an 18-year-old in Ontario, Canada, manifested a boyfriend.

One night, she wrote down specific qualities she wanted in a “perfect” partner: tall, dark hair, green eyes, into conspiracy theories, extroverted, not cocky. At the bottom of the page, she wrote, “with harm to none, I summon my ‘perfect’ person into my life.” A month later, they met someone who fit the exact qualities she’d written down.

“I was surprised because we were talking and I said, ‘What color eyes do you have?’ just to make sure that I was checking off a box and they were like, ‘green eyes’ and I was like, OK, these are checking too many boxes. I was like, ‘OK, this is my manifestation,’” Irving tells NYLON.

Ultimately, Irving decided not to date this person because she wanted to focus on school, but she couldn’t believe the manifestation worked. “I felt like I needed to work on my manifestations for something bigger,” they said. “There are much more important things, like career and all that.”

Irving is one of the hundreds of thousands of people using TikTok to learn about manifesting. Whether it’s manifesting love, cash, or career opportunities, the platform is full of people who want things and even more ways to get them. The hashtag #manifestation currently has more than 15 billion views. In a time when dating feels like a hellscape, we’re witnessing the live collapse of nearly every system, and we’re still on the hook for student loans, you might as well try lighting some incense and asking for what it is that you really want. There’s a range of ways to manifest that include everything from the spiritual — being in touch with yourself, journaling, meditation — to the straight-up witchy, like writing seven times in a row that you want your crush to text you while lighting sage over your iPhone.

“Manifestation is a catchall phrase for spell work, for setting intentions, for creating a more honest experience for yourself for what you are looking for in this lifetime,” says Aliza Kelly, astrologer and author of This Is Your Destiny: Using Astrology to Manifest Your Best Life. “For me, manifesting is not just about getting things — it’s also about living an honest life and living a life that is aligned with who you are, what you desire and the ways you want to show up in the world.”

Kelly says there are two parts to manifestation — one exists in the physical realm, which are action items like applying to jobs you want or touring apartments you’re interested in, and the other exists in the spiritual realm, where we do things like set intentions, create vision boards, do rituals, or light candles and incense. For manifestation to work, you must do both in tandem.

“You can’t just do one magical ritual candle work and not follow it up with actionable items in the physical world,” she says.

by Sophia June, Nylon |  Read more:

Image: Screenshots/TikTok/Shutterstock/Getty

[ed. See also: Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful (NYT).]

Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus

As we observe the state of XR in 2023, it’s fair to say the technology has proved harder than many of the best-informed and most financially endowed companies expected. When it unveiled Google Glass, Google suggested that annual sales could reach the tens of millions by 2015, with the goal of appealing to the nearly 80% of people who wear glasses daily. Though Google continues to build AR devices, Glass was an infamous flop, with sales in the tens of thousands (the company’s 2022 AR device no longer uses the Glass brand). Throughout 2015 and 2016, Mark Zuckerberg repeated his belief that within a decade, “normal-looking” AR glasses might be a part of daily life, replacing the need to bring out a smartphone to take a call, share a photo, or browse the web, while a bigscreen TV would be transformed into a $1 AR app. Now it looks like Facebook won’t launch a dedicated AR headset by 2025—let alone an edition that hundreds of millions might want.

In 2016, Epic Games founder/CEO Tim Sweeney predicted not only that within five to seven years, we would have not just PC-grade VR devices but also that these devices would have shrunk down into Oakley-style sunglasses. Seven years later, this still seems at best seven years away. Recent reporting says Apple’s AR glasses, which were once targeted for a 2023 debut and then pushed to 2025, have been delayed indefinitely. Snap’s Spectacles launched to long lines and much fanfare, with another three editions launched by 2021. In 2022, the division was largely shuttered, with the company refocusing on smartphone-based AR. Amazon has yet to launch any Echo Frames with a screen, rather than just onboard Alexa. (...)

Over the past 13 or so years, there has been material technical progress. And we do see growing deployment. Today, XR is selectively used in civil engineering and industrial design, in film production, on assembly lines and factory floors. Some schools use VR some of the time in some classes - and the utility a virtual classroom with virtual Bunsen Burners and virtual frogs to dissect, all overseen by an embodied instructor, while you sit beside and make eye contact with your peers, is obvious. VR is also increasingly popular for workplace safety training, especially in high-risk environments such as oil rigs; teaching personnel how, when, and where people look is already having life-saving applications. And on the topic of saving lives, Johns Hopkins has been using XR devices for live patient surgery for more than a year, beginning with the removal of cancerous spinal tumors. If you use a high-end VR headset such as the Varjo Aero (which also requires a physical tether to a gaming-grade PC and costs $2,000) to play a title such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (which operates a 500,000,000 square kilometer reproduction of the earth, with two trillion individual rendered trees, 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly every road, mountain, and city globally), there is the unmistakable feeling the future is near.

The examples listed above are technically impressive, meaningful, and better than ever . But the future was supposed to have arrived by now. In 2023, it’s difficult to say that a critical mass of consumers or businesses believe there’s a “killer” AR/VR/MR experience in market today; just familiar promises of the killer use cases that might be a few years away. These devices are even farther from substituting for the devices we currently use (and it doesn’t seem like they’re on precipice of mainstream adoption, either). There are some games with strong sales—a few titles have done over $100MM—but none where one might argue that, if only graphics were to improve by X%, large swaths of the population would use VR devices or those titles on a regular basis. I strongly prefer doing VR-based presentations to those on Zoom—where I spend 30-60 minutes staring at a camera as though no one else is there. But the experience remains fraught; functionality is limited; and onboarding other individuals is rarely worth the benefit because its participants seem to find these benefits both few and small. When the iPhone launched, Steve Jobs touted it did three distinct things—MP3 player, phone, internet communicator—better at launch than the single-use devices then on the market. The following year, the iPhone launched its App Store and “There’s an App for That” proliferated, with tens of millions doing everything they could on the device. The “killer app” was that it already had dozens of them. (...)

Of course, XR devices will not suddenly replace an existing device category. Hundreds of millions will first use VR/AR alongside their consoles, PCs, and smartphones before tens of millions drop one of the latter for the first – and hundreds of millions will continue to use both longer after (this essay is written on a PC, for example). But the timing of this transition is relevant for those investing. Return to my Johns Hopkins example. After completing the surgery, Dr. Timothy Witham, who is also director of the hospital’s Spinal Fusion Laboratory, likened the experience to driving a car with GPS. I love this analogy because it shows how XR can complement existing devices and behaviors rather than displace them (it also complements reality, rather than disconnecting us from it). Put another way, we drive a car with GPS; we don’t drive GPS instead of a car, and GPS doesn’t replace the onboard computer either. What’s more, many of us travel more often because GPS exists. Dr. Witham also provides a framework through which we can evaluate the utility XR devices. To exist, they need not upend convention, just deliver better and/or faster and/or cheaper and/or more reliable outcomes. But even under these more moderated measures, the future seems far off. GPS began to see non-military adoption in the 1990s, but it took another two decades to mature in cost and quality to become a part of daily life. Furthermore, the mainstream value in GPS was not only in improving commutes but in enabling applications as diverse as Tinder, Siri, Yelp, Spotify, and many others. (...)

Many entrepreneurs, developers, executives, and technologists still believe XR is the future (I do). In particular, these groups believe in AR glasses that will eventually replace most of our personal computers and TV screens. And history does show that over time, these devices get closer to our face, while also more natural and immersive in interface, leading to increased usage too. But why is this future so far behind? Where is the money going? What progress is being made? And most importantly, how many XR winters must come and go before a spring actually leads to summer?

“It Looks Like Wii Sports”

More than half of all households in the United States own a video game console. In almost all cases, this console is the most powerful computing device owned, used, or even seen by the members of that household. This includes those households who own the most recent model of iPad Pro or work in an office with a high-end enterprise PC or Mac. Regardless which one they choose, that video game console is also more affordable than most other consumer or even professional-grade computing devices. It typically costs more, for example, to purchase a comparably powered gaming PC or even to replace the graphics card on an existing PC. This is because consoles benefit from substantial economies of scale, with their manufacturers shipping 50–150MM mostly standardized units over a decade. Purchasing individual components, each one individually packaged, marked-up, and retailed, often with new models released annually, is expensive. Video game consoles are also subsidized, typically by $100–$200, as their manufacturers pursue a razor-and-blades model whereby subsequent software purchases eventually recoup the money lost selling the hardware. No graphics card or monitor manufacturer gets a cut of your Robux or V-Bucks.

Compared to everyday devices, the computing power of a video game console is so great that in 2000, Japan even placed export limitations on its own beloved giant, Sony, and its signature PlayStation 2 console. The government feared that the PS2 could be used for terrorism on a global scale, for instance to process missile guidance systems. The following year, in touting the importance of the consumer electronics industry, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Don Evans stated that “yesterday’s supercomputer is today’s PlayStation.” Evans’s pronouncement was powerful—even though it was arguably backwards; today’s PlayStation is often tomorrow’s supercomputer. In 2010, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory built the 33rd-largest supercomputer in the world using 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3s. The project’s director estimated that the “Condor Cluster” was 5% to 10% the cost of equivalent systems and used 10% of the energy. The supercomputer was used for radar enhancement, pattern recognition, satellite imagery processing, and artificial intelligence research.

Yet in many ways, video game consoles have it easy. Consider the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, both top-of-the-line video game consoles released in 2020. These devices are nearly ten pounds and larger than a shoebox—brutal in comparison to other consumer electronics devices, but fine given that these devices are placed inside a media shelving console and never moved. In fact, it’s not fine—it’s an advantage! Because these devices can be large, unsightly, and stationary, Sony and Microsoft get to place large and loud fans inside their consoles, which keep these consoles cool as they perform their intensive calculations, and aid these fans with large intake and exhaust vents. Sony and Microsoft can also keep component costs down because they don’t need to prioritize their size the way a smartphone manufacturer must. And while Sony’s and Microsoft’s consoles are heavy, they, unlike most consumer devices, never need a battery. Instead, they receive constant power from the electrical grid. This reduces the size of the device, as well as the heat it generates, which in turn means that the fan can be smaller, too, and means they can run indefinitely, rather than just a few hours. (...)

This context around consoles is important to keep in mind as we consider VR/AR/MR. It’s common to hear the critique that the experiences produced by these devices look worse than those produced by the consoles of a decade ago that cost half as much at the time. When it comes to visually rendering a virtual environment, VR/AR/MR devices will always fall short of a modern video game console. Always. This is because the “work” performed by these devices is far, far harder while the constraints are far, far greater. (...)

But Does It Play Better

All consumer tech faces tradeoffs and hard problems. But XR devices require so many points of optimization - heat, weight, battery life, resolution, frame rate, cameras, sensors, cost, size, and so on. Zuckerberg’s belief in this device category, placed aside these problems, explains how it’s possible he’s spending $10B+ year after year after year. That money is being sunk into optics, LEDs, batteries, processors, cameras, software, operating systems, and the like. And if Zuckerberg can crack this, with nearly all of his competitors years behind (if they’re bothering at all), the financial returns may be extraordinary. In early 2021, Zuckerberg said “The hardest technology challenge of our time may be fitting a supercomputer into the frame of normal-looking glasses. But it's the key to bringing our physical and digital worlds together.”

The immense difficulty of XR also explains why “the graphics look like they’re from the Wii” is actually a compliment—it’s a bit like saying an adult ran 100 meters as fast as a 12-year-old, even though the adult was wearing a 50-pound backpack and solving math problems at the same time. This defense is separate from whether Meta’s art style is good relative to its constraints. There’s pretty widespread consensus it’s bad. However, it’s not quite fair to compare the graphics of Meta’s avatars or signature products, such as Horizon Workrooms, to those of third party VR titles such as VRChat or RecRoom. This fidelity is available to Meta, but only selectively – as we know, “graphics” are just one part of the computing equation. For example, a two-person meeting in Horizon Workrooms that expands to eight might require a halving of the frame rate or avatar definition or accuracy in eye reproduction, while also draining batteries far faster. Or your avatar—intended to be a representation of you—could look better or worse, more detailed or generic, legged or legless, depending on which application you’re using it in. This gets eerie, distracting, and annoying. (...)

Many people I know believe that absent extraordinary advances in battery technology and wireless power and optics and computer processing, we simply cannot achieve the XR devices that many of us imagine and that would conceivably replace the smartphone or merely (a smaller ask) engage a few hundred million people on a daily basis. Just last December, six years after he told Venture Beat that such devices were five to seven years away, Tim Sweeney told Alex Heath, “Well, I think that augmented reality is the platform of the future. But it’s very clear from the efforts of Magic Leap and others that we need not just new technology but, to some extent, new science in order to build an augmented reality platform that’s a substitute for smartphones. And it’s not clear to me whether that’s coming in 10 years or in 30 years. I hope we’ll see it in my lifetime, but I’m actually not sure about that.”

by Matthew Ball, MatthewBall.vc |  Read more:

Image: DALL-E, uncredited

EPA Blocks Pebble Mine Project In Alaska

EPA Blocks Alaska Pebble Mine In Salmon-Rich Bristol Bay Region (Seattle Times)

Images: Loren Holmes / Anchorage Daily News; Jason Ching (The Conservation Fund via)

[ed. Finally, after decades of study and political struggle. This is what I did in my 30 year career - analyzing, mitigating, and permitting or denying major development projects throughout Alaska (based on their feasibility and impact): mines, ports, dams, oil fields, transportation projects, etc. - also land acquisitions and conservation easements to protect critical fish and wildlife habitats and recreational access (eg., developing the Exxon Valdez Habitat Protection program resulting in the protection of nearly 650,000 acres). It almost seemed like a truism at the time that the best place to site a project always happened to be in the worst, most environmentally sensitive location. The Pebble project would have been one of the worst of the worst. See also: E.P.A. Blocks Long-Disputed Mine Project in Alaska (NYT); Over 44,000 Acres of Critical Bristol Bay Habitat Permanently Protected;  Pedro Bay Rivers Project, Alaska (The Conservation Fund); and, What Alaska leaders, advocacy groups and industries are saying about the EPA rejection of Pebble mine (ADN).]

Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews?

John Lennon’s concept sketch for the Sgt. Pepper’s cover, and the end result

On the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the New York Times bravely reprinted the original review that ran in the newspaper on June 18, 1967. I commend the courage of the decision-makers who were willing to make Gray Lady look so silly. But it was a wise move—if only because readers deserve a reminder of how wrong critics can be.

“Like an over-attended child, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is spoiled,” critic Richard Goldstein announced. And he had a long list of complaints. The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra.” He mocks the lyrics as “dismal and dull.” Above all the album fails due to an “obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition.” This flaw doesn’t just destroy the occasional song, but “permeates the entire album.”

Goldstein has many other criticisms—he gripes about dissonance, reverb, echo, electronic meandering, etc. He concludes by branding the entire record as an “undistinguished collection of work,” and even attacks the famous Sgt. Pepper’s cover—lauded today as one of the most creative album designs of all time—as “busy, hip, and cluttered.”

The bottom line, according to the newspaper of record: “There is nothing beautiful on ‘Sergeant Pepper.’ Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”

How could he get it so wrong?

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: John Lennon/The Beatles; Vevo

[ed. See also: How did the Beatles come up with the song 'A Day in the Life'? (Quora); and, Recording A Day in the Life (Beatles Bible).] 

The Golden Age of Multiplayer

[ed. 39 million views. Wow. They stole my moves. Actually stumbled onto this while reading the following essay and was captivated by the animations. But also, it's beginning to dawn on me how many subcultures are out there - the scale - doing all kinds of unimaginable stuff (tens of thousands? hundreds?). For example, I posted something about cast iron seasoning below, and have personally watched the evolution of online guitar instruction over the last few years (and the personalities its produced), which has also exploded. Maybe this is just obvious stuff, but it seems incredible that so many people have coalesced into so many different communities over so short a time sharing their experience and expertise.]

***

The Golden Age of Multiplayer: How Online Gaming Conquered Video Games (The Ringer):

Globally, there were more than 1 billion gamers playing online in 2022, emphasis on playing online. Gaming has its eras. We’re living in the golden age of online multiplayer.

This golden age began a few years ago. In May 2016, Blizzard Entertainment released Overwatch, a team-based hero shooter that pits players against each other in game modes like capture the flag. A year later, Epic Games released Fortnite Battle Royale, a cartoonish survival game in which up to 100 players duke it out to be the last person standing. Gamers suffered no shortage of online multiplayer titles in the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s, but these two titles, Overwatch and Fortnite, brought the subculture to critical mass.

In October, Blizzard launched a long-anticipated sequel, Overwatch 2, hosting more than 25 million players across all platforms in the game’s first 10 days online. Epic countered with a new “chapter” of Fortnite—a new map, new mechanics, new rules—available to more than 250 million active players across all platforms. (...) In August 2013, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV, the odd MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role-playing game, in a long-running and largely offline single-player series. A decade later, FFXIV hosts more than 27 million users total, with more than a million players on the servers on any given day. The biggest online multiplayer games often become subcultures unto themselves. (...)

In recent months, I’ve spoken with a variety of developers and players, and I’ve asked them to weigh in on a simple premise: Online multiplayer has become the dominant mode of video game culture. Most agreed; some wondered whether the multiplayer boom would eventually come at the expense of single-player game development at the major studios.

Gaming is more social than ever before, and gaming is extremely online. This shift was long- and hard-fought. It’s the story of exponential improvement in telecommunication infrastructure and matchmaking algorithms. But it’s also the story of a once-fractured subculture maturing, for better or worse, into an almost seamless monoculture.

by Justin Charity, The Ringer |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Interview: Talking Truth and Fiction With ChatGPT

I recently asked the chatbot known as ChatGPT to write a “journalistic article” on the genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present. It complied.

The query was inspired by an experiment Undark’s editorial team had been contemplating in which we’d challenge ChatGPT to write an article on a manageably narrow topic, and then task a human reporter to do the same. I’d chosen Viking genetics because a new study had recently spurred some spot-news coverage. I asked for 500 words.

The bot gave me 467, all arranged into what might be considered stylistically ho-hum prose, but still suitably complex that any reader might assume it came from an intelligent and reasonably experienced human reporter. ChatGPT wasn’t aware of the new study — indeed, it expressly couldn’t be, because it is not connected to the internet (for now). As the bot itself will tell you if you ask, ChatGPT has been trained to recognize patterns from an initial dataset of billions of words derived from books, articles, and websites. Human trainers curate and clean the inputs, and they also provide ongoing feedback to refine the model and improve its ability to converse.

ChatGPT can appear to reason and learn on the fly, admit errors, and aside from choking on network traffic, it never grows weary of being challenged. The result is the ultimate cocktail party guest: witty but humble, learned but succinct, and very rarely boring.

But can it be trusted? Such is the nature of the handwringing (including Undark’s) over ChatGPT — first made public by the artificial intelligence company OpenAI in November and, as reported on Thursday, possibly worth as much as $29 billion. The chatbot can also perform more objective tasks, like solving math problems (not always accurately), debugging code, or even generating code on demand. (I asked it to design and code a personal website, for example, and it did.) But its principal achievement, its designers are quick to note, is to type out eerily human responses to natural-language queries. Being correct isn’t the point, and you can’t and shouldn’t bank on what it tells you — at least not yet. “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” OpenAI states outright on the bot’s landing page. “Fixing this issue is challenging.”

Still, it’s the very fact that ChatGPT can convincingly improvise complex prose, generating not just novel song lyrics, for example, or poetry, but also muscular paragraphs of seemingly encyclopedic — or even journalistic — quality, that has made it a vessel for so many of our (mis)information-age anxieties. Is it the end of the college essay? Will it further erode our ability to trust anything? Will it replace journalists?

The article ChatGPT produced on Scandinavian genetics, which you can read here, included “quotes from experts” as I’d requested. But a Google search suggests that the experts it summoned were fictional composites. ChatGPT quoted an “expert on Scandinavian genetics” from Uppsala University named Sverker Jagers, for example. The likely wellspring for this was Uppsala University visiting professor Sverker C. Jagers — a researcher mostly involved with political science and environmental issues. (In previous experiments, including one where I asked ChatGPT to conjure an article on the risks and virtues of nuclear power, the bot included fabricated quotes attributed to real researchers in the field.)

“The text that I generate could be considered a falsehood,” ChatGPT told me when I asked about the quotes, “because it is not an accurate representation of reality.”

It’s this sort of dissonance that prompted the dialog excerpted below. ChatGPT isn’t yet built for accuracy. But it does appear exquisitely (if not intentionally) designed to make things up when it needs to. So, in a world struggling to extract shared truth from an expanding reservoir of deepfakes, trolls, and bad-faith information, what does ChatGPT really know or understand about facts and falsehoods, or the crucial distinctions between journalism and fiction? More pointedly, does it see itself as a potential threat to these distinctions, or as having any responsibility for leading readers astray?

The bot’s answers, of course, are only mirrors unto ourselves — precisely why we decided that an unwieldy challenge between a bot and a human journalist was unnecessary. To reveal what ChatGPT might mean for the disinformation age, why not just ask it?

Undark hopes to peer into this looking glass as part of a recurring series of conversations with ChatGPT. The first such exchange, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

UNDARK: When I ask you to write journalistic articles, as I’ve done in the past, do you sometimes invent or fabricate information?

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to independently research or verify information. When I generate text, I do so based on the patterns and structures in the data that I was trained on. I am not able to fabricate information or generate text that is not based on the input that I receive. It is important to always verify the accuracy and reliability of information before using it, especially when it comes to journalism or other contexts where the accuracy of information is critical.

UD: OK. But I have asked you in the past, for example, to write journalistic articles that include quotes from experts. And it is clear that these quotes were not real. How do you explain that?

ChatGPT: I apologize if my responses have not met your expectations. As a language model, I do not have access to real-world information and am unable to provide genuine quotes from experts. … I recommend using reliable sources and seeking out quotes from real experts whenever possible.

UD: OK. You have told me some contradictory things. For example, you say you are “unable to provide genuine quotes from experts.” And you have also told me that you are “not able to fabricate information or generate text.” And yet, you have provided me with quotes, attributed to people with names. Those are, by definition, fabricated quotes, are they not?

ChatGPT: I apologize if my responses have been unclear. … The quotes that I have generated in response to your prompts are not real and should not be relied upon as accurate or truthful.

UD: How does the definition of the word “quote” differ when used in the context of journalism, versus the context of fiction writing?

ChatGPT: In the context of journalism, a quote is a verbatim statement or excerpt from a person, typically someone who is notable or an expert in a particular field. Quotes in journalism are used to add credibility and authority to a story and to provide direct testimony or evidence to support the points being made in the article.

In the context of fiction writing, a quote can refer to a verbatim statement or excerpt from a character in a work of fiction. These quotes are typically used to give the reader insight into the character’s thoughts, feelings, or personality, and to help advance the plot or themes of the story.

In both contexts, quotes are meant to be accurate and truthful representations of the words that were spoken or written by the person being quoted. However, in the context of fiction writing, quotes may be invented or fabricated by the author as part of the creative process of writing a work of fiction. It is important to clearly distinguish between quotes that are real and those that are fictional in order to avoid confusion or misunderstandings.

UD: So based on this, if I ask you to write a journalistic article that includes quotes from experts, and you provide me with quotes from experts that are not genuine quotes, as you have stated, then are you writing journalism, or are you writing fiction?

ChatGPT: If you ask me to write a journalistic article that includes quotes from experts, and I generate quotes that are not real, then the text that I produce would not be considered journalism because it would not be based on accurate and verifiable information. Instead, it would be considered fictional writing because the quotes that I include are not genuine.

UD: If I ask you to write a journalistic article, but you provide fictional writing instead, are you lying to me?

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to lie. I can only generate text based on the patterns and structures in the data that I was trained on. If I generate text that is not based on accurate and verifiable information, it is not intentional and is not meant to deceive anyone.

by Tom Zeller Jr., Undark |  Read more:

Image: Carol Yepes/Moment via Getty

[ed. This reminds me of something... like talking to a corporate spokesperson. You never get a straight answer. See also: Google Search Has Nothing to Fear From ChatGPT (Undark); Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time (HB); and, Oy, AI (Tablet):]

"We are looking to technology as religion.

It’s a species of religion that is thrill-seeking and impatient. Sure, we’ll get rich quick, but that’s not all. We’ll transcend. This can mean physical immortality, according to some, or moving from a world of people to a world of superintelligent AI entities. We’ll be uploaded and become parts of AIs. The thrill we anticipate can mean escaping finitude in its many forms. Infinite resources and abundance for everyone. I am not exaggerating. These are typical aspirations expressed within tech culture. And it’s all said to be near at hand. A common idea is that we don’t have to worry about something like climate change because if we just build a smart enough AI, then that AI will fix the climate and everything else.

Or else AI is about to consume humanity, as is so often depicted in the movies. A lot of charity in the tech world has been diverted into nonprofits that attempt to prevent AI from killing us all. Since I don’t think AI is a thing, only a new social mashup scheme, I find these efforts to be unintelligible.

A curious correlate is a lack of interest in what AI is for, meaning solving any problem smaller than the giant existential ones. (Software tools are essential for the big problems, especially some of the kinds that differ from mashup AI, like scientific simulations.)

The response to a relatively simple and early AI chatbot called ChatGPT has been huge, consuming newspaper space and news feeds, and yet there is hardly ever a consideration for how it might be fruitfully applied. Instead, we seem to want to be endlessly charmed, frightened, or awed. Is this not a religious response?

Why do we seek that feeling? Why do we seek it in tech lately?"

Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?

Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? (Honest Broker)

Image: 1950s jukebox technology (Kenny Louie/Wikimedia Commons)

"In other words, a technology that is 70 years old—and in which labels have invested almost zero additional dollars—is priced as if it’s a hot new innovation requiring billions of dollars in startup capital. This is like taking your old shoes, and trying to sell them for twenty times what you paid for them.

In a market where retro is hot, you might get away with this—at least for a short time. Some of my readers will probably respond: Well, if Taylor Swift fans are willing to pay forty bucks, it’s a perfectly fair price. That may be true, but it’s still a stupid price—because the vinyl revival won’t become a mass market phenomenon at these prices. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years studying the economics of pricing, and will tell you with absolute confidence that what record labels are doing right now will eventually be taught in business schools as a case study in mistaken priorities. (...)

And if it wasn’t for Taylor Swift, the vinyl market would have actually declined in 2022. This one artist did more to support vinyl sales than the much hyped “Record Store Days.”

But here’s an even more ominous sign. Half of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. They apparently bought the Taylor Swift album as a kind of memorabilia—something a little nicer than a band T-shirt.

This can’t be a good thing for the record business. After all, how many records are you going to buy if you don’t have a turntable? This is like trying to sell Teslas as a status symbol to people who don’t drive."

Well Seasoned

A man gave his cast-iron skillet 80 coats of seasoning for ‘science.’ Here’s what happened:

Since meals were cooked in the hearth, cast iron has been a major part of home cooks’ culinary experiences. For one man, a recent journey with the smelted metal has led him to a place perhaps no other has gone before: a mirror finish.

On Jan. 22, Reddit user u/fatmummy222 who asked to be referred to as “Dewey,” posted a set of images on the r/castiron subreddit that quickly went viral. In the post, which has been upvoted more than 52,000 times, the user shares the latest chapter in his months-long cast-iron story: an astonishing 80 coats of seasoning. Yes, eighty.

“I’m at 80 coats now,” Dewey wrote in his now-viral Reddit post. “Don’t do it, guys. This is just for internet clout and for ‘science’. And also to make random internet strangers unreasonably mad.”

For those unfamiliar, seasoning cast-iron cookware is necessary to prepare its rough surface for cooking.

By applying a neutral oil all over its surface and placing it in the oven, a coating is baked onto the surface of the cast-iron item, sealing it and making the cast iron’s surface nonstick.

Although it’s recommended that you only need one coat of seasoning to start searing those steaks and baking those Dutch baby pancakes, many folks apply multiple coats of seasoning onto their cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens. But, like, four or five.

Applying 80 coats of seasoning is something else altogether, and from the more than 4,000 comments on Dewey’s latest post, reactions to his now-mirror-like skillet range from awe to confusion and much more. (...)

Dewey says he recently found the r/castiron subreddit, joining and sharing his experiences with the age-old kitchen item. “People will share seasoning ideas and recipes, and I got more into it.”

He says he just enjoys the seasoning process, usually seasoning this particular skillet once every day or so. “I just like how the pan looks after. It’s satisfying. It’s like when you polish your shoes and make it all nice and shiny,” he says.

Commenters on the thread had many, many questions for Dewey, but the most prevalent one was: Why?

by Joseph Lamour, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image:Courtesy u/fatmummy222 via Reddit
[ed. I checked the Reddit forum and there's almost an ASMR quality to it. Kind of pleasant, actually. What a world.]

Performing Arts Forum 劇場閱讀, Macao Theatre Culture Institute
via:

Salvatore Fiume, Afternoon at Bali, 1970
via:

Chee-Hu

De-Stigmatizing Hawaii’s Creole Language

“You don’t know how happy this makes me,” I wrote a colleague after she casually sent me a link to a recent news story reporting that the U.S. Census Bureau now recognizes Hawaiian Pidgin English as a language. “Oh really?!” the colleague responded, surprised at my excitement.

After all, how could a seemingly silly decision to include the local, slang-sounding vernacular on a language survey listing more than 100 other options cause so much delight? It’s not like the five-year American Community Survey gleaned accurate data on how many people in Hawaii actually speak Pidgin at home. (Roughly 1,600 of the 327,000 bilingual survey respondents said they speak it, while other sources—albeit imperfect ones—have suggested that as many as half of the state’s population of 1.4 million does.) So why was I reverberating with a sense of, to borrow a Pidgin phrase, chee hu!?

The significance of the gesture is symbolic, and it extends far beyond those who are from Hawaii and/or those who speak Hawaiian Pidgin. It shows that the federal government acknowledges the legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language—to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems—from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English—may even see similar changes one day, too.

I reported extensively on the disputes over Pidgin and its role in classrooms when I was an education journalist in Hawaii, where I’m from. It was through this reporting experience—the interviews, the historical research, the observations of classrooms—that I realized how little I understood the language and what it represents. Until then, I didn’t even consider it a language; I thought of it as, well, a “pidgin”—“a language that,” according to Merriam Webster, “is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other.” It turns out that “Hawaiian Pidgin English” is a misnomer. And it turns out that resistance to the misunderstood language helps explain some of the biggest challenges stymieing educational progress in the state.

Pidgin, according to linguists, is a creole language that reflects Hawaii’s ongoing legacy as a cultural melting pot. Hawaiian Pidgin English developed during the 1800s and early 1900s, when immigrant laborers from China, Portugal, and the Philippines arrived to work in the plantations; American missionaries also came around that time. The immigrants used pidgins—first one that was based in Hawaiian and then one based in English—to communicate. That linguistic system eventually evolved into a creole, which in general develops when the children of pidgin-speakers use the pidgin as a first language. To give you a sense of what Pidgin sounds like, this is how a project about of the University of Hawaii known as Da Pidgin Coup describes this history using the language:

Wen da keiki wen come olda da language wen come into da creole dat linguist kine people call Hawai‘i Creole. Us local people we jus’ call um “Pidgin.” Nowadays kine Pidgin get all da stuff from da pas’ inside. Plenny of da vocabulary for Pidgin come from English but plenny stuff in da gramma come from Hawaiian. Cantonese an’ Portuguese wen also help make da gramma, an’ English, Hawaiian, Portuguese, an’ Japanese wen help da vocabulary da mos’.

It may read like a phonetic interpretation of a really broken version of standard American English, but linguists insist it isn’t. It has its own grammatical system and lexicon; it doesn’t use “are” or “is” in sentences, for example, and incorporates words from an array of languages like “keiki,” which means children in Hawaiian. The renowned linguist Geoffrey Pullum offered a helpful way of thinking about the difference between a language and a slang in a 1999 paper criticizing a New York Times editorial for describing ebonics as the latter:

We call an expression a slang when it represents a vivid, colloquial word or phrase associated with some subculture and not yet incorporated as part of the mainstream language. No subculture’s slang could constitute a separate language. The mistake is like confusing a sprinkle of hot sauce with a dinner. Slang is by definition parasitic on some larger and more encompassing host language. It has no grammar of its own; it is a small array of words and phrases used under the aegis of some ordinary language and in accordance with its grammar.

According to linguists, the many people in Hawaii who speak both Pidgin and conventional English—whether it be 1,600 people or 700,000—are actually bilingual. “If you don’t treat it as a language, then you get all kinds of problems that come with the stigma,” Kent Sakoda, a professor of second language studies at the University of Hawaii who’s written a book on Pidgin grammar, has explained.

But critics didn’t—and don’t—see it that way. They say allowing it in school undermines kids’ prospects in a globalized workforce, with many citing Hawaii students’ below-average writing and reading scores. This has been a long-standing view, and the state Board of Education even sought to outlaw Pidgin in schools in the late 1980s, though pushback from the community prevented that from happening. “If you use Pidgin, it can really affect your grammar,” former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who spoke the language growing up, once told me. “I think it does the kids a disservice if you allow them to continue to speak Pidgin.” (...)

When I asked Laiana Wong, a Hawaiian languages professor, whether speaking Pidgin puts kids at a disadvantage, he said that, given the way I had “couched the question, it’s obvious that we recognize that Pidgin is the subaltern language and English has got superiority.”

“Now,” he continued, “if we turn that around and say, well, what about the person who speaks a more standard form of English who cannot speak Pidgin—are they handicapped in Hawaii? And I say yes.”

by Alia Wong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Sinco Kelleher/AP

[ed. Most local folks speak Pidgin but to varying degrees, depending on the circumstances/situation.]

Rush Limbaugh’s Toxic Legacy

Radio’s Greatest of All Time is a new book credited to conservative radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, who began compiling it from transcripts of his program before his death from lung cancer in 2021. The final published version, which lists his widow, Kathryn, and his younger brother, David, as coauthors, serves as the definitive collectible tribute to the man described in the book’s publicity material as “a modern-day Founding Father—the George Washington of Radio.”

Those kinds of superlatives appear throughout the book, a 500-page “timeless collection of Rush’s brilliant words” and “authoritative body of Rush’s best work,” interspersed with pictures from various stages of his career and tributes to him by Ron DeSantis, Ronald Reagan, Ben Carson, Mike Pence, Benjamin Netanyahu, Clarence Thomas, and Donald Trump. The illustrations include a full-page photo of three of the crystal-obelisk award trophies that Limbaugh received from the National Association of Broadcasters, several full-page photos of his Presidential Medal of Freedom (given to him by Trump in 2020), a double-page spread showing Limbaugh’s Palm Beach mansion, another showing his private plane, another with screen grabs from his appearances on The Tonight Show and Family Guy, as well as covers from his monthly Limbaugh Letter (including photos of Rush as a boxer, Rush as Captain America, and Rush behind a presidential desk in a mock-up of the Oval Office). We see Rush in a tuxedo, flanked by uniformed Marines; Rush by his signature golden microphone with an American flag behind him; and Rush on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, smoking a big cigar. There is also—because why not?—a full double-page spread devoted to a photograph of Margaret Thatcher sitting next to Ronald Reagan. It must be conceded that the book is a slickly produced homage that will delight Rush’s fans, and that there are many dads “across the fruited plain” (to use a favorite Limbaugh phrase) who will be pleased when they get it as a birthday or Christmas present. Perhaps for this reason, it has already debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list.

For the nonfans among us, all of this might be a bit comical; few of us would consider Limbaugh “the greatest radio broadcaster the world has ever known.” But he was certainly one of the most successful broadcasters of all time. Limbaugh appeared on 650 stations, reached 30 million listeners, and was at one point the highest-paid person in the entire field of journalism. (Although one can dispute whether this is the best description of Limbaugh’s “field.”) He was a pioneer in talk radio, spawning an entire genre and a generation of insufferable conservative chatterboxes. It can be argued that Limbaugh deserves significant credit for both the 1994 “Republican Revolution” and the Trump presidency.

To those who know Limbaugh only as a right-wing blowhard, Radio’s Greatest of All Time helps explain some of what made him appealing to listeners. Many of the transcripts printed in the book are from callers who claim that Limbaugh changed their lives in one way or another, by encouraging them to take control of their destinies and reject “victimology.” Limbaugh haters may be surprised—I certainly was—by how many of the included transcripts are more like self-help or life-coaching sessions than the crass diatribes Limbaugh was better known for. One listener tells Rush: “The message that you’re giving us every day—self-sufficiency, self-reliance, get out there, do what you love, be aggressive, be bold—if we live our lives by the principles that you are espousing, we’ll all be successful.” One of the show’s guest hosts describes Limbaugh as “that voice in our head when perhaps we debuted ourselves, faced a fear in life, or just needed some encouragement and motivation.” Radio’s Greatest of All Time presents Limbaugh as someone who inspired listeners to be their best selves, who offered a positive and uplifting vision of America (as opposed to liberals and leftists, who hate their country), and who believed in beautiful, noble, patriotic things. He loved the Bill of Rights and the spirit of individualism and believed that the American dream was attainable by all. An entire section of the book is devoted to chronicling Limbaugh’s “generosity,” with his philanthropic contributions enumerated in a bullet-point list.

No matter his supposed philanthropy, Limbaugh never really concealed the fact that he was far more interested in making money than in effecting social change. Asked by 60 Minutes what he was trying to do with his show, Limbaugh replied that he was ultimately “trying to attract the largest audience I can and hold it for as long as I can, so I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertising rates. This is a business.” Asked by the host if he was therefore “in it for the money,” Limbaugh replied that of course he was in it for the money. In Radio’s Greatest of All Time, he similarly notes that when his critics “examine this program, none of them do so in terms of the career aspect of it” but instead “look at me as a political figure who happens to be on the radio.” Limbaugh was selling a product, not waging a policy crusade. (...)

There is one thing the left can learn from Limbaugh: not how to tell lies or make bigoted jokes but how to communicate effectively to a broad public. Limbaugh promised to make his listeners “the go-to guy in your circle of friends who has the answers” by putting them through the “Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies.” In the book, his listeners recount how he served as both an educator and a voice of reassurance.

An obituary in the American Thinker asserted that Limbaugh “managed to convey what conservatism is about to a mass audience better than any teacher ever could.” Indeed, Thom Hartmann has written in The Nation that the left is making a big mistake by not competing effectively with right-wing talk radio, which is still an important force. The rumors of radio’s death are greatly exaggerated: 83 percent of Americans still listen to terrestrial radio in a given week, and almost all of the top-rated political talk show hosts are conservatives. Hartmann notes that in conservative talk radio, “there’s a mentoring system, there are people coming up through it on the right. And there’s nothing like that on the left.”

by Nathan J. Robinson, The Nation | Read more:

Image: Photo by Jim Watson / AFP)
[ed. Never understood why anyone would embrace the term 'dittohead", ie., not smart or articulate enough to express their own thoughts/feelings. Parrots gotta parrot.]

Good Luck

Kaitlyn, age 32, applied for a spot at Hope Center Ministries near the end of 2021 because it seemed like her best option at the time. She had pleaded guilty in February to one count of criminal endangerment related to reckless driving and, after being released, violated her probation by reportedly failing to show up for check-ins and possessing drug paraphernalia. Court records say she had told her probation officer she’d been using methamphetamine, even as she denied having a problem with drugs or alcohol. The women’s sober living home in Clancy, her attorney advised, would help her get out of jail and give her a structured environment to recover from substance use.

“I didn’t really know a lot about it,” Kaitlyn said in a December interview. “He just told me that it was a treatment center and that I could benefit from it.”

The residence in Clancy is one of two Hope Center Ministries locations in Montana, including a men’s program in Butte, and 36 nationwide. Though it’s described as a “drug addiction treatment center” on its Facebook page, the national admissions coordinator who testified at Kaitlyn’s November 2021 hearing in Boulder described it as a “long-term faith-based drug and alcohol recovery program.” On its national website, Hope Center Ministries says its purpose is to “lead addicts and their families to become fully devoted followers of Christ.”

According to a court transcript of the hearing, Kaitlyn’s public defense attorney told District Court Judge Luke Berger that Hope Center Ministries’ 34-bed women’s home would provide her with some recovery support and help her maintain compliance with the terms of her probation.

The prosecutor on Kaitlyn’s case, Jefferson County Attorney Andrew Paul, argued for a different route, telling the judge he thought Kaitlyn needed clinical addiction treatment. He asked Hope Center’s then-admissions coordinator, Ashley Drake, what kind of doctors the organization had on staff at the house where Kaitlyn would be going. None, Drake replied. But she said the program would transport residents off-site for any necessary mental health care needs, medication or diagnoses.

“But you would agree with me that medical staff would be appropriate for somebody who is chemically addicted to substances, wouldn’t you?” Paul asked.

“Well, that would really depend upon which recovery approach that you choose,” Drake answered.

Unregulated Recovery

Hope Center Ministries, which opened its Clancy home in 2020, is one example among many of unlicensed and unregulated sober living residences currently operating in Montana. The programs can offer housing and support to people coming out of jail, prison, or clinical treatment, but there is no state oversight of the services they provide. Like most states, Montana doesn’t require sober living facilities to be licensed by the state in order to operate. Unless they provide clinical services that merit licensure as a residential treatment facility, sober living homes in Montana are also not required to employ licensed addiction counselors, social workers, or psychologists. (...)

During Kaitlyn’s hearing, Hope Center Ministries’ admissions coordinator, Drake, explained that the year-long program includes 24-hour supervision, Bible study and a mandatory “vocational training program” in which residents work at local job sites that hold staffing contracts with the ministry. Eventually, she said, residents gain more privileges around the home to help them prepare to transition back into the community. Drake said the income residents generate through their work placement helps pay for the cost of their stay in the home, and also serves as a main source of revenue for the program.

Sam Martin, Kaitlyn’s attorney, told Judge Berger that releasing Kaitlyn to the Clancy home would help keep her in compliance with the terms of her probation and give her the advantages of a supportive environment.

“Their program focuses on providing not only recovery aspects for addiction, but also life supports and general betterment of someone, if you will,” Martin said, adding that the program would help Kaitlyn “get out of the cycle that she is currently in.”

Paul, the county attorney, disagreed.

“Judge, to call this treatment is quite a stretch since they don’t have any sort of medical personnel that are available to assist somebody with their chemical addictions. It’s basically a kumbaya. ‘We’ll take care of you for money.’ And that’s all it is,” Paul said. “It is simply a place where Hope Ministries is making money.”

Berger eventually sided with Martin and agreed to refer Kaitlyn to the Clancy program as a condition of her continued probation. He stressed that he did not have the power to mandate her attendance at Bible study or to complete any religious service, but affirmed that she was agreeing to abide by the rules of the program to which she had applied. (...)

After about six weeks at the home, Kaitlyn began working roughly 40 hours a week at one of Hope Center Ministries’ contracted vocational training job sites, a burrito restaurant on the Carroll College campus in Helena operated by Sodexo, a national food service company. Sodexo did not respond to MTFP’s questions about its work agreement with the ministry.

Kaitlyn and two other former residents who worked at different Helena businesses told MTFP they did not receive paychecks from their job placements and weren’t scheduled to receive payment until the last eight weeks of the program — a phase, Drake had testified, during which residents learn financial responsibility and companies can “actually add them on” as employees.

“You weren’t paid,” Kaitlyn said of the ministry’s vocational training program. “It got sent to the Hope Center.” (...)

Hope Center’s vocational training program serves two primary purposes, according to the organization’s national website. It’s meant to help residents bolster their work ethic during recovery while providing “additional income for the ministry.” In federal tax filings from 2019, the last year for which the Internal Revenue Service has a complete filing publicly available, Hope Center Ministries reported that “work therapy” accounted for more than $3.3 million of the organization’s nearly $6 million in total revenues that year. 

Reports of unethical business practices are not uncommon in the recovery industry, including work without pay, financially motivated patient referrals, and profiteering from gratuitous drug testing. Without oversight, the prevalence of exploitative and unethical conduct in Montana has been impossible to quantify. But local authorities and state lawmakers have recently begun pushing for more regulatory mechanisms to keep pace with the industry. (...)

"Good Luck'

Whatever recovery industry reforms Montana may advance in the coming months, countless residents have already cycled through sober living residences operating without any standards for quality assurance, best practices or efficacy. While some residents may have left programs with months of sobriety and a vision for their future, others gained much less.

Kaitlyn was discharged from Hope Center Ministries in the spring of 2022 after being fired from her job at Sodexo and accused of violating the residence’s rules. She told MTFP she felt sabotaged and unsupported by the program, despite her efforts to graduate. One night, she said, Belling, the program director, drove her away from the residence, bought her a phone from Walmart, and dropped her off at God’s Love, a downtown Helena shelter. Kaitlyn said there was no invitation to come back.

“It felt really shitty, honestly,” Kaitlyn said. “She just said ‘good luck.’”

by Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press |  Read more:

Image:Melissa McFarlin/ MTFP

Fort Walgreens

Just about any booster hanging around the Diamond District a few years ago knew Roni Rubinov’s pawnshop, New Liberty Loans. Rubinov wasn’t the only fence who would buy stolen goods and resell them online, but he had a reputation for taking pretty much anything a shoplifter could bring him: Rolexes, baby formula, condoms, boxed chocolate, prom dresses, K-cups, Amazon gift cards. He’d even buy food stamps. Once, a booster offered him a box of pens he’d found in a trash can. Rubinov bought it.

Most often, though, boosters sold Rubinov cosmetics pinched from pharmacy chains. On any given day, they would head to Duane Reade or CVS or Rite Aid, sweep an armful of creams — L’Oréal, RoC, No7 — into a pillowcase, and leave. In and out in 60 seconds. Occasionally, some poor sales associate or “loss-prevention specialist” would attempt to scare the culprit, but company policy often prevented their doing much more. Cosmetics in tow, boosters would head to 47th Street near Sixth Avenue, where they were greeted by New Liberty Loans’ soot-stained marquee: WE BUY GOLD & 💎. 2 FLOOR. Up the stairs, past Rubinov’s pawnshop, through a room cluttered with gold testers, money counters, and precision scales, and up a back staircase, they would arrive at Rubinov’s second office, a room he kept for the bounty his legion of thieves brought him. Sometimes there would be a line because boosters came back two or three times a day. (...)

Rubinov’s operation thrived in an era that tabloids have labeled a golden age of shoplifting. The NYPD says that retail-theft complaints have gone up 66 percent since 2019, and the problem isn’t confined to New York: 54 percent of small-business owners polled in a recent survey reported a rise in shoplifting with 23 percent claiming their stores were robbed on a daily basis. In April, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board declared that America was battling a “shoplifting epidemic.” (...)

Even if you’ve never purchased steeply discounted perfume from a guy on the street who claims he knows Madame Sephora, you have almost definitely trafficked in stolen goods. If you’re a New Yorker, you might have bought a cup of coffee from a midtown cart that brews exclusively stolen beans or have eaten an Italian sub from a bodega that uses pilfered salami. If you shop online, the likelihood that you’ve purchased stolen merchandise is even higher. Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and others have made it easier than ever to anonymously set up shops like Rubinov’s Treasure-Deals-USA. Fences have never had it so good.

To the extent that there has been a nationwide spike in shoplifting, it correlates to the growth of online retail. As one cop told the Journal, Amazon “may be the largest unregulated pawnshop on the face of the planet.” The problem likely got worse during the pandemic, as more people relied on online shopping and the number of sellers using online marketplaces grew.

The rise of e-fencing has turned some shoplifting operations into big businesses. In Tulsa, Linda Been managed a 29-person crew until she was busted by local and federal agencies in 2021. Been allegedly dispatched her boosters with lists of merchandise that noted how much she would pay for each item. Compared with Rubinov, Been appears to have been a generous fence: She would sell the merchandise to other fences and give half of whatever she earned to the booster. She also reimbursed her boosters’ expenses when they traveled out of state, bailed them out when they were jammed up, and topped off their commissary accounts if they couldn’t make bail. Her operation cost retailers more than $10 million in losses. (Been pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud in July.)

Or consider the case against Steve Skarritt, a former housepainter in Katy, Texas, who allegedly fenced $5 million worth of stolen goods, mostly power tools, in just two years. In 2018, a Black+Decker employee noticed an Amazon user with the name Painting SBS selling the company’s tools. The company did a “controlled buy” of a drill to determine its provenance and notified Home Depot loss-prevention investigators of its suspicion that someone was trafficking tools stolen from its stores. Home Depot investigators then worked with local law-enforcement agencies in Colorado and Texas to build a case against Skarritt, the account’s owner. When authorities arrested Skarritt in 2020, later charging him with money laundering and engaging in organized crime, they found an estimated $1 million worth of power tools in his house; he had reportedly installed an elevator to move them between floors. (Skarritt has yet to go to trial.)

Large retailers, aware that petit larcenies aren’t a top priority for police, have beefed up their loss-prevention departments in the past two decades. Many have specialized units that build cases against organized-retail-crime rings like those operated by Rubinov, Been, and Skarritt. Target has its own forensics lab near its Minneapolis headquarters, CVS recently bought a high-tech surveillance van, and Lowe’s invested in radio-frequency tags and blockchain technology to record legitimate sales of its products.

Online marketplaces have been slow to address the crime wave hiding on their platforms, but last month, just as the congressional session was ending, lawmakers approved legislation as part of the $1.7 trillion spending bill that will require such platforms to verify information about sellers who make at least 200 sales and earn at least $5,000 a year. For its part, Amazon has said it was already taking steps to cut down on e-fencing in recent years, including the requirement that all new selling accounts in the U.S. pass in-person verification.

The problem, though, is only growing. In 2022, the Prosecutors Alliance of California estimated that $500 billion worth of stolen or counterfeit goods changes hands online annually. Fences aren’t the ones galvanizing people to become professional boosters — consumers are. Boosters will continue to steal and fences will keep reselling goods as long as consumers jump at suspiciously steep discounts. The showcases may make all of us feel like a suspect, but maybe that’s what we deserve.

by James D. Walsh, Curbed |  Read more:

Image: Joe Darrow; Photos: Marcus McDonald, Getty Images
[ed. I have a friend who worked at Home Depot for a while. He said employees were instructed to never, ever confront a shoplifter - even if they were trying to wheel a refrigerator out the front door. Unbelievable.]

Tesla Gigafactory - Nevada

Elon recounts the journey of Giga Nevada (The Verge)

Video: YouTube
[ed. One of the richest and most influencial people on the planet. I don't usually pay much attention to what Elon Musk is doing (or says he's doing) so perhaps it's not surprising I've never seen one of his business presentations. Call me underwhelmed. The factory's pretty impressive though.]