Two Decades of Prison Did Not Prepare Me for the Horrors of County Jail

When I was 22 years old, I committed robbery and murder. I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years, of which I have so far served two decades. During that time, I’ve experienced the squalor and dangerous conditions of various state prisons. I’ve lived in a crumbling penitentiary built in the 1800s. I’ve been put in isolation for weeks on end because of Covid exposure and infection. Still, I was not prepared for what I found when I was transferred to a county jail for two weeks last December.

Along with people serving short sentences for relatively minor offenses, jails house people who are awaiting trial and either didn’t get bail or simply couldn’t pay it — people, that is, who have not been convicted of any crime.

Despite that fact, conditions in these facilities are often worse, and sometimes much worse, than those in the prisons where people who are convicted of the worst crimes are confined. Jails throw people together in overcrowded units that may be controlled by the most violent people in the room. Like prisons, jails house a disproportionate number of people experiencing addiction or chronic health conditions but jails lack the resources to treat them and adequate staffing overall. Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton University who focuses on policing and criminal justice reform, told me that jails “regularly rely on even harsher conditions of confinement” than prisons do.

As a prison writer, journalist and criminal justice activist, I try to communicate to anyone who will listen that the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return to their communities. The trauma they suffer on the inside comes with them. Just as a very short time in solitary confinement can cause lasting harm, weeks or months in county jail can have a huge negative impact on people’s lives, even after they are released. What happens in jails doesn’t stay in jails.

Ethan Frenchman, a lawyer in Washington who advocates on behalf of people with disabilities in jails, told me that while the nation’s roughly 1,500 state prisons are operated or overseen by 50 states, the 3,000 or so jails “are operated by who knows how many hundreds or thousands of different jurisdictions,” making it extremely hard to get reliable information about what goes on there, or to enforce any kind of accountability.

One data point is unmistakable: suicide rates. Suicides are the leading cause of death in jails, where they occur at a much higher rate than in prisons. Big city jails, like the complex on Rikers Island, are infamous for violence, neglect and overcrowding, but they are not outliers. In fact, research by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that suicide rates in the nation’s smallest jails were more than six times as high as those in the largest. (...)

Conditions in county jails are bad not just for people suffering from mental illnesses. Prisoners there are often given so little food that they are hungry all the time and must buy more in the commissary. My meals in prison consist of larger portions and far more fruits and vegetables than my meals in jail. To my surprise, I even found myself missing the flavors and variety of prison food. A prisoner in Maine summed up a typical meal in a county jail well when he asked a reporter to “consider eating ground-up gym mat with a little bit of seasoning.” But jail commissaries are so expensive that many people who can’t afford bail also can’t afford anything sold in them. In jail, I saw people beat each other up over commissary food.

Twenty-four packets of Top Ramen noodles that cost $6 on Amazon and just under $8 in my Washington State prison cost $26.40 in the Pierce County Jail’s commissary while I was incarcerated there. A small bag of freeze-dried coffee that costs $3.34 in state prison costs almost $13 in the county jail.

Phone calls to our loved ones, which cost just over a dollar for 20 minutes at a Washington State prison, cost nearly $4 from the county jail. An investigation by the Prison Policy Initiative found that in 20 states, phone calls from jails were at least three times as expensive as calls from state prisons. The calls I made from state prison and the county jail are managed by the same company, Securus Technologies, and I see no legitimate reason they should be three times as expensive at one facility. 

by Christopher Blackwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Gumpert/Redux

via:

Netflix Might Ruin Password Sharing For Everyone

Netflix is betting that a password-sharing crackdown will reverse its dwindling revenue and wavering subscriber count. The company has historically never enforced its policy of one account per household. Now, by making members pay to share their subscriptions with people who live in other homes, Netflix will cash in on all those users they’ve been missing out on for all these years, right?

Well, it might not be that simple.

Netflix — where co-founder and now-former CEO Reed Hastings once said “password sharing is something you have to learn to live with” — told investors last year that password sharing contributed to the streamer’s first loss in subscribers in over a decade. After months of testing throughout Latin and Central America, Netflix finally brought paid sharing to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, and now, the US. Under its new rules, Netflix wants users to pay an extra $7.99 per month to let just one person outside their household access their subscription.

Many questions remain about how Netflix will actually implement this — and whether it will actually help increase the company’s bottom line. Netflix has warned its investors of a “cancel reaction” several times in the past when talking about paid sharing, meaning that some people will cancel their subscriptions in response to the rollout in their locations. It has already seen that kind of reaction in Spain, where data from the analytics group Kantar found that the streamer lost 1 million users following the crackdown.

But to Netflix execs, the “improved overall revenue” will ultimately outweigh those lost subscriptions. (...)

While Netflix’s $15.49 per month Standard plan lets you watch Netflix on two devices at a time, the $19.99 per month Premium plan allows up to four simultaneous viewers. The shift toward password sharing could mean that some users will opt to go for the $9.99 per month Basic plan instead of canceling their subscription, which allows users to watch Netflix on just one device at a time. This potential trend could deal a blow to Netflix’s average revenue per user (ARPU), which sat at $16.18 in its last earnings report. “The cancellations will hurt, but the downgrades will hurt as well because Netflix can’t make that up in advertising,” Rayburn explains.

Whether or not paid sharing ends up hurting Netflix’s balance sheet, it could have huge implications for the entire streaming industry. Other companies, like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount, are likely looking to see how consumers respond to Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown. If all goes well, other services might want to follow suit, similar to the way we saw several streamers hop on the price hike bandwagon last year.

by Emma Roth, The Verge |  Read more:
Image: Nick Barclay/The Verge

[ed. Seems like a desperation move. The current streaming system is unsustainable and will probably go the way of most big business these days - consolidation around a few major players.] 

There Is No A.I.

There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.

If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. (...)

Many of the uses of A.I. that I like rest on advantages we gain when computers get less rigid. Digital stuff as we have known it has a brittle quality that forces people to conform to it, rather than assess it. We’ve all endured the agony of watching some poor soul at a doctor’s office struggle to do the expected thing on a front-desk screen. The face contorts; humanity is undermined. The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.

Still, despite these possible upsides, it’s more than reasonable to worry that the new technology will push us around in ways we don’t like or understand. Recently, some friends of mine circulated a petition asking for a pause on the most ambitious A.I. development. The idea was that we’d work on policy during the pause. The petition was signed by some in our community but not others. I found the notion too hazy—what level of progress would mean that the pause could end? Every week, I receive new but always vague mission statements from organizations seeking to initiate processes to set A.I. policy.

These efforts are well intentioned, but they seem hopeless to me. For years, I worked on the E.U.’s privacy policies, and I came to realize that we don’t know what privacy is. It’s a term we use every day, and it can make sense in context, but we can’t nail it down well enough to generalize. The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” but that seems quaint in an age when we are constantly dependent on digital services. In the context of A.I., “the right to not be manipulated by computation” seems almost correct, but doesn’t quite say everything we’d like it to.

A.I.-policy conversations are dominated by terms like “alignment” (is what an A.I. “wants” aligned with what humans want?), “safety” (can we foresee guardrails that will foil a bad A.I.?), and “fairness” (can we forestall all the ways a program might treat certain people with disfavor?). The community has certainly accomplished much good by pursuing these ideas, but that hasn’t quelled our fears. We end up motivating people to try to circumvent the vague protections we set up. Even though the protections do help, the whole thing becomes a game—like trying to outwit a sneaky genie. The result is that the A.I.-research community communicates the warning that their creations might still kill all of humanity soon, while proposing ever more urgent, but turgid, deliberative processes.

Recently, I tried an informal experiment, calling colleagues and asking them if there’s anything specific on which we can all seem to agree. I’ve found that there is a foundation of agreement. We all seem to agree that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well. We also agree that these labels should come with actions that can be taken. People should be able to understand what they’re seeing, and should have reasonable choices in return.

How can all this be done? There is also near-unanimity, I find, that the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end. The systems must be made more transparent. We need to get better at saying what is going on inside them and why. This won’t be easy. The problem is that the large-model A.I. systems we are talking about aren’t made of explicit ideas. There is no definite representation of what the system “wants,” no label for when it is doing a particular thing, like manipulating a person. There is only a giant ocean of jello—a vast mathematical mixing. A writers’-rights group has proposed that real human authors be paid in full when tools like GPT are used in the scriptwriting process; after all, the system is drawing on scripts that real people have made. But when we use A.I. to produce film clips, and potentially whole movies, there won’t necessarily be a screenwriting phase. A movie might be produced that appears to have a script, soundtrack, and so on, but it will have been calculated into existence as a whole. Similarly, no sketch precedes the generation of a painting from an illustration A.I. Attempting to open the black box by making a system spit out otherwise unnecessary items like scripts, sketches, or intentions will involve building another black box to interpret the first—an infinite regress.

At the same time, it’s not true that the interior of a big model has to be a trackless wilderness. We may not know what an “idea” is from a formal, computational point of view, but there could be tracks made not of ideas but of people. At some point in the past, a real person created an illustration that was input as data into the model, and, in combination with contributions from other people, this was transformed into a fresh image. Big-model A.I. is made of people—and the way to open the black box is to reveal them.

This concept, which I’ve contributed to developing, is usually called “data dignity.” It appeared, long before the rise of big-model “A.I.,” as an alternative to the familiar arrangement in which people give their data for free in exchange for free services, such as internet searches or social networking. Data dignity is sometimes known as “data as labor” or “plurality research.” The familiar arrangement has turned out to have a dark side: because of “network effects,” a few platforms take over, eliminating smaller players, like local newspapers. Worse, since the immediate online experience is supposed to be free, the only remaining business is the hawking of influence. Users experience what seems to be a communitarian paradise, but they are targeted by stealthy and addictive algorithms that make people vain, irritable, and paranoid.

In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create, even when it is filtered and recombined through big models, and tech hubs would earn fees for facilitating things that people want to do. Some people are horrified by the idea of capitalism online, but this would be a more honest capitalism. The familiar “free” arrangement has been a disaster.

One of the reasons the tech community worries that A.I. could be an existential threat is that it could be used to toy with people, just as the previous wave of digital technologies have been. Given the power and potential reach of these new systems, it’s not unreasonable to fear extinction as a possible result. Since that danger is widely recognized, the arrival of big-model A.I. could be an occasion to reformat the tech industry for the better.

by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker
[ed. Perhaps, but with the CIA, Pentagon and other international defense agencies deeply involved (and charging full speed ahead) I'm not too optimistic. See also: Whose Planet Are We On? (TomDispatch):

"Still, let’s not forget that AI was created by those of us with LTAI [ed. less than artificial intelligence]. If now left to its own devices (with, of course, a helping hand from the powers that be), it seems reasonable to assume that it will, in some way, essentially repeat the human experience. In fact, consider that a guarantee of sorts. That means it will create beauty and wonder and — yes! — horror beyond compare (and perhaps even more efficiently so). Lest you doubt that, just consider which part of humanity already seems the most intent on pushing artificial intelligence to its limits.

Yes, across the planet, departments of “defense” are pouring money into AI research and development, especially the creation of unmanned autonomous vehicles (think: killer robots) and weapons systems of various kinds, as Michael Klare pointed out recently at TomDispatch when it comes to the Pentagon. In fact, it shouldn’t shock you to know that five years ago (yes, five whole years!), the Pentagon was significantly ahead of the game in creating a Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to, as the New York Times put it, “explore the use of artificial intelligence in combat.” There, it might, in the end — and “end” is certainly an operative word here — speed up battlefield action in such a way that we could truly be entering unknown territory. We could, in fact, be entering a realm in which human intelligence in wartime decision-making becomes, at best, a sideline activity. (...)

The Pentagon, however, instantly responded to that call this way, as David Sanger reported in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials, speaking at technology forums, said they thought the idea of a six-month pause in developing the next generations of ChatGPT and similar software was a bad idea: The Chinese won’t wait, and neither will the Russians.” So, full-speed ahead and skip any international attempts to slow down or control the development of the most devastating aspects of AI!"

[ed. Last quote is a winner. After thousands of years of war, nuanced reasoning still isn't one of humanity's strong points.]

The Cowsills

[ed. Once really popular. See also: The Cowsills: The Heartbreaking Reason Why They Suddenly Disappeared (ed. hint: bad dad manager).

Glen Campbell

[ed. See also: Why THIS Is The Greatest Country Song; and, Wichita Lineman | The greatest song ever? | Guitar Lesson (YouTube).]

Hibernation Artificially Triggered in Breakthrough

In science fiction, space crews are often spared the boredom and inconvenience of long-distance space travel by being placed into a state of suspended animation. Now this goal may have come a step closer after scientists showed that hibernation can be artificially triggered in rodents using ultrasonic pulses.

The advance is seen as significant because the technique was effective in rats – animals that do not naturally hibernate. This raises the prospect that humans may also retain a vestigial hibernation circuit in the brain that could be artificially reactivated.

“If this proves feasible in humans, we could envision astronauts wearing a helmet-like device designed to target the hypothalamus region for inducing a hypothermia and hypometabolism state,” said Hong Chen, an associate professor at Washington University in St Louis, who led the work.

The team first identified a specific group of neurons in a deep brain region called the hypothalamus preoptic area, which were found to be involved in regulating body temperature and metabolism during hibernation. They showed that, in mice, these neurons could be artificially activated using ultrasound, delivered non-invasively through a helmet.

When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3C for about one hour. The mice’s metabolism also shifted from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature.

The scientists also developed an automatic closed-loop feedback system that delivered an ultrasound pulse to keep the mice in the induced torpor if they showed signs of warming up. This allowed the mice to be kept at 33C in the hibernation-like state for 24 hours. When the ultrasound system was switched off, they woke up again.

The experiments, described in the journal Nature Metabolism, showed that the same device worked in rats, which had a 1C drop in core body temperature when the same brain region was targeted. Chen said the result was “surprising and fascinating” and the team planned to test the technique in larger animals.

by Hannah Devlin, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

[ed. Amazing it's so straightforward and non-invasive.]

The Strange and Fascinating World of r/meth

R/meth has 144,000 followers now, far more than r/StopSpeeding, a subreddit with 28,000 members dedicated to helping people get off meth. In the pinned post, the mod thanks his fellow tweakers for the laughs, late nights, and camaraderie — and tells them they’re in good hands with the new moderator. (...)

I talked to one of them. He’s a 32-year-old-software engineer who calls himself WilliamWegman, after the artist who takes surreal photographs of his Weimaraners dressed up like people. He said when he found the subreddit he became “obsessed and in love,” but also “disgusted, concerned, and humored.”

“Sometimes I can’t look at it. Sometimes I can’t look away,” he told me. “There is this incredible lawlessness about it, and this almost indescribable atmosphere that I more often find worrisome.”

Wegman seems to take his newfound job as a moderator pretty seriously. He tries to be helpful. In one recent post, he replied to a user who complained about vomiting up “yellow stuff,” telling the guy the “yellow stuff” is bile and that he needs to put his phone down and eat. Nobody bothered responding. Unlike some other users, Wegman stresses quitting when possible. He recently wrote a long post titled “if your here because you're new to meth,” encouraging new users to stop before they become hopelessly addicted.

For Wegman, this is personal. A ten-year addict, he’s been sober for two years, but relapsed about two months ago and became a r/meth moderator soon after. During those two years, he told me, he went from making minimum wage sorting recycled electronics to making six figures as a software engineer. “I went to school, I worked nights and weekends and studied all day. I was a machine. Kicking ass at everything. I had never been completely sober before. This is who I actually was. I did not expect this. People who use drugs can’t imagine the kind of success they could have if they were absolutely sober.” He continued:

If you want to make sacrifices of all kinds so that you can maintain a somewhat normal life and use at the same time then do that, and I hope you get high as fuck.

The problem is most people do not have the will power, maturity, or support to use methamphetamine in a somewhat responsible way and wind up getting hurt.

At r/meth I see it like we are all running this marathon together. Drinking copious amounts of water, taking vitamins, staying awake until we hallucinate, having sex for 16 hours straight, taking a break to eat, have a cigarette and go right back to it.

So when I see someone laying on the side of the road saying their heart hurts I stop and say, 'Hey I think it's time to get some help.' I stay with them for a while and tell them everything I can think to encourage them to stop, then I turn around and keep running. I keep running because I can't stop running, most of us can't stop running.

So it is harm reduction, not sobriety, which seems to be r/meth’s official raison d’etre. That said, it's mostly just posts reminding people to drink water and use lube. “There is an absolutely titanic knowledge deficit about true harm reduction,” Wegman said. “So what is commonly known and passed around is always the same stuff. Magnesium, vitamins, electrolytes, food, water, sleeping every couple days, and how to ‘wash’ or remove some of the ‘cut’ from your meth with paint thinner.”

The harm reduction content accounts for a small percentage of posts on r/meth. As a whole, the subreddit is a community built around the shared experience of doing meth, and not much more or less than that. The back and forth in comment sections can get pretty long because, well, everybody’s on meth. But nobody pretends otherwise. There’s no pretense here, no personas. It might be one of the last places on the internet where people know exactly who they are, and are honest with themselves and everybody else about it. They post pictures and videos of themselves, shitpost, ask for advice, and commiserate over their shared experiences on the drug — encounters with the so-called “shadow people” being one of the most interesting. (...)

Unlike the mysterious shadow people, many r/meth users are more than willing to show people exactly who they are. Although depictions of intravenous use are banned, videos of users smoking meth aren’t, and such videos are ubiquitous. The people posting videos of themselves don’t bother concealing their faces, and they could look like anybody. Some of them are young, some old, every race, men and women. I asked Wegman whether or not he thought all these videos might trigger relapse in people trying to quit, or possibly encourage them to smoke more. He said that if people were looking up a drug they used to abuse online, it was only a matter of time before they relapsed again.

“If you’re trying to stay clean and you do anything related to the drug you’re abstaining from, you are starting to relapse. Period.”

As for the videos encouraging people to use more, Wegman was skeptical. He admitted that a lot of addicts are sexually aroused by seeing other people use, and that this might “excite someone to take a few more hits,” but nothing more than that. According to Wegman:

The thing that encourages you to do more meth is the meth itself. You take a hit, it feels so good immediately you want another and take it. The higher you get the more you want it until you are literally screaming inside your head “fucking give me more yes!!!” And you are not rationally deciding to take more, you're giving in to the insanely powerful urge the drug creates. You are aware of this and you find it absolutely captivating and you love letting the drug tell you what to do. Really what it is, is you lose control over your rational thoughts, of your conscience. You are still aware of your rational self and are aware you are parting ways with it. That your willpower is being unassigned to operate through the moral conscious, and is being put on standby so your high self can take over. Once this happens, and it happens every single time, the real fun begins. Meth highs are about losing control to what the meth wants you to do.

Some of the content is extremely concerning. Here, a user asks if he’s having an overdose. A year ago he was posting pictures of his cat and talking about video games and music. He’s 14. I asked Wegman if he thought that people were better or worse for r/meth existing at all. He said:

The bad are already bad and getting worse without reddit. The good are good and also getting worse without reddit, but the good’s stronger rationale and moral compass digs its claws in deeper into the slippery incline, so it's a slower descent into complete debauchery and self-destruction. Note the claws can be forced, with great willpower, deep enough into the slippery meth incline that the user is able to stay at one altitude, but the strain is very great, and the position awkward.

Methamphetamine is a complicated and cumbersome drug that requires a lot of time and effort to manage somewhat, or even to just stay alive. It is a high maintenance drug par excellence. Like owning a dragster or something. It needs maintenance (your body) after every race or it falls apart.

Then he gave me a list of pros and cons.

by River Page, Pirate Wires |  Read more:

Image: r/meth

via:

The United States of Bed Bath & Beyond

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is the story of grown men, rapacious men, whose nature is to bust-out the weak men as cruelly and certainly as possible, over and over again.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is our story, the story of the United States here in the fin de siecle of The Long Now, where our entire country has been busted out and stripped for parts by grown men, rapacious men, different from Tony Soprano only in that they plunder legally within a system of courts and laws and regulatory agencies.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is a story of loss and sadness.

The story of Bed Bath & Beyond is the story of what happens when Story ends, when the reality of the bust-out — crappy stores and crappy management and overwhelming debt — finally swamps the narratives of Stock Buybacks!TM and Turnaround!TM and Short Squeeze!TM.

And maybe a story of hope.

Hope how?

Hope that the reality of the American bust-out — crappy institutions and crappy leaders and overwhelming debt — will begin to swamp the narratives of Yay, Stock Market! and Yay, College! and Boo, MAGA! and Boo, Wokeism!.

Hope that the assignment of losses here at the end of an age will force us to call things by their proper names, to identify weakness as weakness and rapaciousness as rapaciousness and narrative as narrative. Hope that we will have the courage to reject them all. Hope that we will choose to be more clear-eyed and more full-hearted as we move forward with resolve to Make/Protect/Teach in the world beyond bust-out.

So here is the story of the weak and the rapacious and the narrative-driven. Here is the story of Bed Bath & Beyond. Not for shame or schadenfreude, but for hope.

***

There are at least three distinct phases of the Bed Bath & Beyond bust-out.

Bust Out 1 was orchestrated by the original founders and management of the company. This is where most of the money was sucked out of the company, and by the time the original founders and management were deposed in May 2019, the company was already dead.

Bust Out 2 was orchestrated by the management team that replaced the Bust Out 1 team, together with an external investor, Ryan Cohen.

Bust Out 3 is so outrageous – a self-proclaimed functionally bankrupt company selling self-proclaimed worthless equity to meme investors, degenerate gamblers all – that I just call it the lulz period.

Both Bust Out 2 and the lulz period were quite speedy looting operations, so I’ve zoomed in on the past 12 months to show the stock price moves more clearly. In particular, the exit spike for Ryan Cohen’s Bust Out 2 sale was so fast that his exit price of $22+ per share doesn’t even register on the long-term chart above!

In general, I think this is a common factor in all bust-out processes, whether of a company or a country, that the individual bust-out episodes become shorter, sharper and more ridiculous as there’s less and less juice to squeeze out of the orange. (...)

Bust Out 1 was orchestrated by CEO Steve Temares and company founders Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg after the disastrous 2013 Christmas shopping season. (...)

In response, Temares and the board announced a Strategic Plan! TM to reinvigorate the company, complete with a $1.5 billion bond offering, the first debt in company history. What was at the core of this grand plan, you ask? Well of course there were words like “building a leading e-commerce presence” and “targeted acquisitions” and “commitment to excellence”, but the main plank of the 2014 strategic plan and the only thing management actually executed on was simply this: Stock Buybacks! TM. (...)

Over the 6-year period of Bust Out 1, the board and management of Bed Bath & Beyond spent $4.4 billion buying back their own stock on total free cash flow of $3.6 billion. As their stores deteriorated and their margins collapsed, this company spent ALL of their free cash flow and then $800 million MORE buying back stock.

Now that’s a bust-out!

How did this personally benefit Temares, Feinstein and Weisenberg? Well, I compiled the 100+ SEC filings from these gentlemen to find out.

Steve Temares is a real estate lawyer who was hired by the company as their general counsel in 1992 and worked his way up the ranks. He’s not a founder. He’s not an entrepreneur. He’s a real estate lawyer who went from general counsel to executive VP to COO to CEO in 2004. I do not think it was an accident that Bed Bath & Beyond also instituted their stock buyback plan when Temares was named CEO.

As CEO, Temares was granted a total of 5.2 million shares of stock over his tenure, either as options that he immediately sold on exercise or as stock grants at no cost. He never bought a single share of Bed Bath & Beyond on the open market, but was reloaded by the board of directors every few years.

As CEO, Temares sold 4.3 million shares of stock for $148.4 million. This is net of all option exercise costs. This is in addition to his cash salary, bonuses and benefits, which averaged more than $4 million per year during the Bust Out 1 period. This is solely in connection with his personal holdings and is separate from the dozens of transactions associated with the family trust he established to exercise and sell additional BBBY options. After being fired as CEO, Temares sold an additional 900,000 shares for an estimated $18 million. This is in addition to his cash severance package of $36 million. In sum, Steve Temares received well in excess of $200 million in cash from Bed Bath & Beyond shareholders, the majority of this during or after Bust Out 1.

As for co-founders Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg, after the stock buyback program was introduced they each sold more than 10 million shares for an estimated $300 million. Each. This is in addition to the CEO-level salaries, bonuses and benefits they received as Co-Chairmen of the Board (my fave benefit was $230,000 in car service allowances per year; I mean, how is that possible?). This is in addition to the millions spent to make all-cash acquisitions of retail operations started by their sons, most famously $86 million in cash to acquire buybuy Baby from Leonard Feinstein’s son, including the retirement of $19 million in debt owed to the Feinstein family.

Honestly I don’t get as worked up over founders taking huge amounts of money out of a company as I do over managers, and if Bed Bath & Beyond had remained a private company that the founders decided to suck dry and leave to their kids … more power to ’em. But that wasn’t what Feinstein and Eisenberg did. They took the company public, dominated the board with Steve Temares, and used stock buybacks to prop up the stock price and sell tens of millions of shares into the open market. Feinstein and Eisenberg were old school merchants! You’ll never convince me that they didn’t understand exactly what was happening with the accelerated operational decline of the company from 2014 forward and exactly what were the consequences of spending 122% of free cash flow on stock buybacks.

It’s no wonder that Temares, Feinstein and Eisenberg were all kicked out of the company in 2019, but by then the fatal damage was already done.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilontheory |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. More American capitalism TM at its finest.]

An Anthropologist of Filth

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32.

By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with significant experience: he had spent three years of his adolescence in a reformatory for armed robbery; been a boxer and a janitor; worked in an automobile factory and an ammunition plant; trained as a hair stylist and a beautician; been married for nearly seven years; and been industrious and canny enough to purchase a pretty three-room house for himself and his wife, Themetta, known as Toddy. He had one existence chalked up, and was headed out toward several more.

“Maybellene” is classic Chuck Berry: a boy driving a Ford V-8 is chasing a girl in a Cadillac DeVille, the two cars potent symbols for sexual jockeying and pursuit. A rhythm of negotiated feint, never crossing into anything too obvious or vulgar—bumper-to-bumper, side to side, until finally the man-machine gives up the ghost. “The Ford got hot and wouldn’t do no more.” But then he suddenly revives and catches Maybellene “at the top of the hill.” Crest, cusp, plateau. The world spread out before him, waiting to be embraced.

This revving, frisky 45 is a logbook containing the codes and call signs of the postwar dispensation. As RJ Smith puts it in his new biography, Chuck Berry: An American Life, the artist “invented images and they came alive in the world.” He would be adored and imitated by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and countless others. The world of teenage desire had found its poet laureate—and he was not young or white or innocent. (...)

Berry never claimed that he invented rock and roll, and was always quite happy to point out where he’d gotten his inspiration: from the great hinterland and invisible college of rhythm and blues. He happily fessed up to his influences, such as Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker. There was a lot of guilt-free recycling involved—transplanting a riff or a lick, a line or a trope, into fresh new settings. (Jordan’s guitarist Carl Hogan was the source for the famous opening guitar riff of “Johnny B. Goode.”) Even the execrable (but insanely popular) late hit “My Ding-A-Ling” was a virtual xerox of a roiling 1952 R & B side by the marvelous Dave Bartholomew. He tinkered, customized, and retooled songs as if giving an old car a new coat of paint, adding horsepower, then taking them back out on the open road again.

What he did do, indisputably, was visualize a whole new postwar landscape, and provide a soundtrack for its leisure time: a hybrid somewhere between white pop and black R & B. Smith has a lovely phrase for this: “Scraps and rags and things given away for free were pulled together and made into a brand new flag.” Rhythm and blues had always referenced highways and trains (even that dark Faust of the Delta blues, Robert Johnson, name-checks Greyhound buses and Terraplane cars), but Berry was the first person to give it a pop art twist. “Up to the corner and ’round the bend / Right to the juke joint, you go in / Drop the coin right into the slot / You gotta hear something that’s really hot.” All the fetishes of the emerging teenage culture of ready consumption appear in the mind’s eye: car radios, bright milkshakes, sizzling burgers, blaring jukeboxes. Dating and driving and disposable income. There is far more clamor about travel and consumer goods in Berry’s music than there is about sex and/or love. Also notable: the number of songs that reference marriage. (If he were a book, he’d, improbably, be Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties.) He doesn’t really write what you would call love songs—beautiful souls, pining hearts—rather, his songs are about things pursued, purchased, possessed. Various makes of cars. A “hi-fi phono.” High-heeled shoes. Skyscrapers. A TWA flight. “A model on the cover of a magazine.” Berry understood that technology would change everything, would shape the very nature of desire. “She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call / ’Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.” Sharp and punchy and streamlined, his songs are like episodes of a TV series that had yet to be made by anyone.

From an early age, Berry loved to tinker: junior handyman, hipster bricoleur. “Taking things apart explained the way the world worked far better than a sermon,” Smith writes. Berry comes to see everything, including learning the guitar, as a matter of mathematics. Radios, guitars; he wants to see the nuts and bolts behind the magical sound. Central to his development were what he called the “magic boxes,” the family piano and the Victrola record player. There was nothing he liked to do more than take something apart and put it back together again—which is just what he did with his music. He took the reigning spirit of R & B—raucous, gritty, nasty, alternately melancholy and murderous—and toned down its saturnine aspects while buffing up and emphasizing its Saturday-night shine.

If his scientific bent was one thing that marked him out, the other crucial difference between Berry and his musical contemporaries is that he wrote his own songs. Most performers at the time relied for their material on managers, publishing companies, pals of pals, or pals of heavy guys in fedoras. Berry wanted to rely on no one but himself. Even if you’re not a big Chuck Berry fan, there’s no arguing with his back catalogue. To list just the best-known songs from his impeccable run between 1955 and 1964 is to survey an unparalleled achievement: “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “School Day,” “Rock And Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Carol,” “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” “Let It Rock,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Promised Land.” (...)

Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee sang as if they had something trapped inside of them that was so combustible it could only escape as a staggered hiss of stutters, moans, and squeals. When Berry sings, he enunciates crisply, as if he is still reciting poetry in his mother’s parlor. He never smears or elides his words, everything is clear and precise, milk teeth in the mouth of a cartoon character, pebbles in a stream. As an exercise, try reading out the lyrics of “Promised Land” yourself—even slowly, never mind at Berry’s kind of clip. The song communicates a feeling of travel as a breathless rush—and yet every name vibrates, every word rings like a bell. He’s a vaudeville comic who makes sure the whole audience, right to the back of the hall, registers every last hint, wink, and syllable.

Watch TV clips of Berry from his pomp (my favorite is a black-and-white one from Belgian TV, circa 1965, in which a sharp-suited Berry seems to be playing with a full-on jazz combo), and you realize that he was more of a natural all-round entertainer than most of his contemporaries. He managed to transfer the spirit of the traveling tent show into the compressed television age. He had an innate sense of what was required—something cool in both the jazz and the McLuhanite sense. He acts out his songs, using his exceptionally mobile face and beanpole body and cheese straw limbs. There is something almost unreal about him, like a zoot-suited roué out of a Tex Avery production. The country cousin and the city slicker in one and the same body. A walking contradiction. (...)

There was a paradox in the way the blues was framed by its early white enthusiasts: in order to be considered “authentic,” bluesmen had to remain bowed down, angry, bereft, defeated by the miseries of black life under American capitalism. Its practitioners, however, saw playing music precisely as a way out of that cul-de-sac. They wanted all the available spoils: shiny weekend suits, not tattered dungarees. Berry’s “poor boy” is no longer cooling his heels down on the farm, he’s being served food and drinks by an air hostess. There was no blues or church in Berry. His music may have been dashboard light to the crossroads darkness of the blues, but this wasn’t a sanctified light. It was more like a neon sign on a night out. It’s impossible to imagine him ever singing anything like Howlin’ Wolf’s “When I Laid Down I Was Troubled.”

Berry’s peers had a sense of sin and damnation in common, to the degree that their music might be taken for a form of speaking in tongues. Songs such as “Lucille” and “Great Balls of Fire” are metabolic eruptions; Berry’s music lacked any comparable sense of imminent demise. What it did convey was his own feeling of “ridin’ along in my automobile”: the roll and sway of a big car on an open road on a sunny day. One hand—or maybe just a pinkie—on the wheel. Not creeping along in a traffic jam to work, but driving for the sheer pleasure of it, without a destination, taking in the scenery. This is a man at ease.

Did anyone else write songs that were quite so visual? “They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale / The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” Elvis might sing about being down at the end of lonely street, but Berry would give you directions to the hotel parking lot, the bellhop’s name, and the color of the lobby carpet. His songs might almost be the memory-jog notes of someone scouting locations or pitching a sharp new road movie. They seem less like the cinema of the late Fifties and early Sixties than like advertisements or MTV-era music videos. Deft cuts from scene to scene. Traveling shots and bright flashbulb edits. “Promised Land” traverses the continent in two minutes and twenty-four seconds, via Greyhound bus, train, and plane. Berry’s motto is not “I’m a soul man,” but “I am a camera.”

It was his cousin Harry who introduced him, as a teenager, to the joys of photography (and much more besides: chemistry, rockets, astronomy, hypnotism). Harry “provided a conduit of science and rational thought to Chuck, plus also plenty of dirty pictures.” At this point we hear an ominous organ note on the soundtrack: “Over the years, Berry would amass a vast collection of cameras, video monitors, darkroom technology, and assorted recording devices.” Even after the success of “Maybellene,” his personal business cards read CHARLES BERRY, PHOTOGRAPHER. In tandem, Berry developed what might be termed an interest in, shall we say, the wilder shores of love. You get the impression that music was never really the place where he lost, found, or explored himself and his deepest desires. That place existed in the center of a Venn diagram whose twin cheeks were sex and tech.

This was consonant with his long-term taste for DIY, and just a different form of tinkering, of seeing things from all angles. An anthropologist of filth, Berry was fascinated by bodily waste, fore and aft. Boundary fetish: a moment between inside and outside. Berry owned and maintained several properties in the Hollywood Hills, and by the late Eighties visitors to one house in particular might find more than they bargained for in terms of interior design:

In the living room was an exotic table. A plate of glass was spread atop a bronzed naked woman who was lying on her back, her left arm and her knees holding up the table top. Her bare breasts pointed to the ceiling. A switch when toggled sent a hot, golden oil flowing down the statue’s legs.

Remember: this was a rental property. The troubadour mythos of rock and roll posits sex as a wild adventure; Berry is far more niche. He does not invite any kind of Dionysian cult. Despite their manifold flaws—the dead wives, drug insanity, and batty religious conversions—men like Elvis and Jerry Lee retain their patina of glamour, their plinth and their worshippers. In comparison, Berry is generally viewed as beyond the pale, his predilections distinctly un-wild, un-chic, un-romantic. Berry’s appetites were widely seen as excessive—or at least, excessive in the wrong way; he sculpted his own lurid, loopy world of fantasy, but it proved way too “real” for public taste.

by Ian Penman, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Chuck Berry on the road to Mobile, Alabama, October 1964.© Jean-Marie Périer/Photo12

Chelsea Gustafsson, Mr. Shark, 2020
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Sven Kroner, Ostern, Easter 21, 2021
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The Best Metal Detector

The dream of finding buried treasure is compelling, but the reality of metal detecting is that you mostly find trash—and you spend a lot of time doing it.

This may be the sort of repetitive, mainly solitary activity you intrinsically enjoy … or it may bore you to tears.

It’s best to figure that out before dropping a not-insignificant chunk of change on a metal detector of your own. So before you buy one, try to find a local club or store that will help you go on a trial hunt or two with an experienced detectorist. If the bug catches you, you’ll know it. And at that point, we’d say the Nokta Makro Simplex+ is the absolute best metal detector for a newcomer to the sport. (...)

I am a novice detectorist myself. And this guide reflects the expertise of about a dozen sources, including company reps from Garrett, Nokta, First Texas (maker of the Bounty Hunter), specialist retailers like Kellyco and metaldetector.com, as well as input from a whole bunch of dedicated hobbyists.

This guide owes much of its authority to the generosity of Alan and Sandy Sadwin, who took me under their wing and into their world to help me understand the technology, techniques, and ethics of metal detecting. Both are passionate detectorists and longtime members of the Atlantic Treasure Club, Long Island’s oldest metal-detecting club (of which Alan is a former president). They spent hours of their time sharing their knowledge and helping me begin to get a grasp on the hobby as a whole as well as on the specific machines we selected for testing. Many other members of the club also welcomed me when I attended a monthly meeting in February 2020, and they similarly shared their advice and opinions.

Who should get this

For every story like the one about the guy who found an Anglo-Saxon hoard important enough to rewrite history, there are thousands of folks who spend years finding nothing but bottle caps. The actual process of treasure hunting is, quite frankly, time-consuming, monotonous, and rarely rewarded with truly special or valuable finds. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun. And who knows—you just might find some gold in them thar hills. But before you lay out the cash it takes to get started, you’ll want to know whether treasure hunting is right for you.

That’s why our first bit of “buying advice” isn’t about buying anything—not yet, anyway. Contact a local club or store, and ask if you can attend a meeting or be put in touch with a committed detectorist who might take you out for a trial hunt. Many clubs also hold occasional public events to encourage the curious to give detecting a try. If you’re friendly, patient, open about your interest, and willing to learn, you'll likely find someone to give you some hands-on guidance. And be honest with yourself: If the bug doesn’t grab you after a trial hunt or two, metal detecting may not be your thing. If it does grab you, you can look forward to many adventures, including specialized detecting trips—there are specialist tour operators in the US and UK who secure the rights to search farms and other private land. On the night I joined a meeting, one couple at the Atlantic Treasure Club had just returned from England, where they’d found a medieval gold coin and a silver one from the British Roman era.

It’s probably more accurate to describe detecting as a sport rather than a hobby, in that mastering it means mastering the equipment, techniques, and rules. There’s a fairly steep learning curve to the machines themselves, which are complex and fallible electronic devices. It takes time to understand how they work, where and why they can fail, and how to coax the best performance out of them. And though the techniques aren’t terribly complex, you do have to get them right to make your detector work well.

But there’s another way metal detecting is like a sport. The great writer John McPhee once wanted a synonym for the word sport and found this definition in an early-20th-century edition of Webster’s Dictionary: “a diversion of the field.” Metal detecting is certainly that.

There’s also a general mindset we witnessed when talking to happy detectorists: that they were in it as much for the act of searching as they were for finding something amazing. Alan and Sandy usually search Long Island’s Jones Beach, where not much of great monetary value ever shows up. (Though Alan did once reunite a high schooler with her lost class ring, a discovery that also busted her to her mom—she’d been strictly forbidden from going to the beach.) But instead, they regularly see porpoises, dolphins, and sharks in the waves, as well as the endangered piping plover nesting in the dunes. I loved watching sandpipers darting in and out as they followed the surf, showing intrigued youngsters what I was up to, and simply escaping my apartment’s walls. I once apologized to Alan for taking up so much of his time, and he said, “Don’t. You’re my excuse to get out there and have fun.” No matter what you find—or whether you find anything, period—enjoying the outdoors is an intrinsic pleasure of metal detecting, and not one to discount.

by Tim Heffernan, Wirecutter | Read more:
Image: Sarah Kobos

How to Raise $89 Million in Small Donations, and Make It Disappear

A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits.

The phone rings. The caller knows your name, and opens with a dad joke.

“Carla? Finally, it’s good to hear a kind voice. That last call was tougher on me than my mother-in-law’s meatloaf. (chuckles) I’m only kidding.”

He is asking for donations, for a group that helps the police.

“This is Frank Wallace calling for the American Police Officers Alliance. Very quickly, we’re mailing out the envelopes to help fight for our officers who protect our nation’s citizens, just like yourself. Once you receive your card in the mail, you can send back whatever you think is fair this time. That’s all.”

This is not a policeman. This is not even a human. This is a computer, making thousands of robocalls with the same folksy voice.

And like “Frank Wallace,” the American Police Officers Alliance is not what it seems.

In theory, it is a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting.

In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system.

Since 2014, the five groups have pulled in $89 million from small-dollar donors who were pitched on building political support for police officers, veterans and firefighters.

But just 1 percent of the money they raised was used to help candidates via donations, ads or targeted get-out-the-vote messages, according to an analysis by The Times of the groups’ public filings.

About 90 percent of the money the groups raised was simply sent back to their fund-raising contractors, to feed a self-consuming loop where donations went to find more donors to give money to find more donors. They had no significant operations other than fund-raising, and along the way became one of America’s biggest sources of robocalls.

It is not clear why the groups plowed so much of what they raised back into more fund-raising calls; compared with other political nonprofits, their fund-raising expenditures were extraordinarily high.

But one other set of expenditures was especially notable: The groups also paid $2.8 million, or 3 percent of the money raised, to three Republican political consultants from Wisconsin who were the hidden force behind all five nonprofits, according to people who worked for the groups and who in some cases were kept in the dark by the consultants about the finances of the operations.

Those three consultants helped organize the nonprofits, the people said, then billed them — through shell companies that obscured the connection.

The campaign-finance system is built to police who puts money into politics, legal experts say. These groups embodied a flaw: The system is poorly prepared to stop those who raise money and channel it somewhere other than candidates and causes.

By minimizing their aid to candidates, the consultants who helped set up the five nonprofits avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs, and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, their spending records were posted not on the F.E.C.’s easily searchable site, but on a byzantine I.R.S. page written in bureaucratic jargon.

To understand what these groups did with their $89 million, The Times analyzed 15,851 pages of their financial reports, including 135,843 separate expenditures, searched corporate records in 10 states, and interviewed the nonprofits’ leaders and vendors.

Four of the five nonprofits remain active. In statements, they said they had not sought to avoid oversight, enrich insiders or deceive donors.

Instead, the groups said, they simply believed in helping politicians indirectly — not by giving them money or buying them ads or mentioning their names, but by obliquely raising issues that could shift voters their way.

To that end, the groups said, even fund-raising calls from “Frank Wallace” were part of their mission. Since they mentioned policing — a topic voters might care about — the calls were not a means to an end in the work of influencing elections. They were the work itself. (...)

“I do this to help people without a voice organize, raise money and design a platform,” Mr. Connors said in a statement. He confirmed his company’s ownership of Voter Mobilization LLC. “Yes I am paid for what I do (everybody is) but my real compensation is the satisfaction of Americans getting involved in the system,” he said. (...)

The organizations’ calls were recorded by Nomorobo, a company that collects robocalls so it can help customers block them. The company’s founder, Aaron Foss, said it had recorded tens of thousands of calls from just these four groups — putting them among the most prolific and longest-running robocallers his network has ever tracked.

The calls captured by Nomorobo were made using a powerful new technology, a “soundboard,” according to a spokesman for the groups’ largest vendor for fund-raising calls, New Jersey-based Residential Programs, Inc.

A soundboard is a computer program, preloaded with snippets of recorded dialogue, down to uh-huhs, thank-yous and mother-in-law jokes. By clicking buttons, an operator anywhere in the world can “speak” to donors in colloquial English without saying a word.

“One, it keeps everybody on script. Two, you don’t hear the foreign accent. And three, you don’t hear the call center noise,” Mr. Foss said.

“If you say, ‘Are you a robot?’,” Mr. Foss said, “there’s a button that says, ‘No.’”

The calls worked. The groups have reported bringing in more than 18,000 donations. More than 92 percent were for amounts smaller than $200.

“They say this will help with fallen officers, and this will help in a political way with getting new uniforms for the firemen. But in a political way, not a direct way,” said Louise McConkey, 72, a retiree in Puyallup, Wash., who has made 35 donations to the five groups.

But Ms. McConkey said that her donations, totaling $3,650, left her with less to give to other causes she believes in, like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She said she was surprised to learn how little money went to directly supporting candidates.

“I’m pretty upset,” she said. “I think they owe people the money back.”

by David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Marquette Tribune
[ed. Republican "consultants" scamming their own donor base. Is anyone surprised? American capitalism at its finest, exploiting loopholes for profit.]

Circuit Diagram

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Katherina Olschbaur, The Rebel Angels, 2020.

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Guilt-Based Revenue Enhancement

POS Tip Demands Are Driving Inflation Higher

I have a new thesis I have been noodling around with: All of those Square credit card processing machines you use to pay for coffee or sandwiches or small retail purchases are driving inflation higher. Demands for worker tips in non-tipping industries are having a meaningful impact on prices and CPI.

Has the Bureau of Labor Statistics fully unpacked how to deal with this “innovation”? I am unsure how hip the FOMC or BLS is to this issue. But this much is clear: This tech-psych guilt trip has consumers spending more on services than they ordinarily would or should.

Note: This is not a new phenomenon; it was referenced way back in 2013 as a source of guilt-based revenue enhancement. In 2013, Fast Company noted that Square’s merchant partners generated more than $70 million in cumulative tips in a quarter; this represented a 133% year-over-year increase. Some merchants back in 2013 noted that Square’s tipping UI increased tips company-wide between 40% to 45%.

And that was a decade ago, before Square was as ubiquitous as it is today and during a deflationary decade. It slipped by more or less unnoticed. Today’s Pandemic-era inflation makes the Guilt-Tip demand a much more significant element when considering total price increases.

If you leave a few singles in a jar by the register, you assume the recipients are the staff who work there. We have no idea where the Square POS tips go. Recall Doordash and other weasels pocketing driver tips during the pandemic (we should make sure that’s not happening here). All POS tip demands should be mandated to show a disclosure as to where the money goes — and both Square and the retailer should be on hook if it does not go where advertised.

Before we go further, let’s discuss tipping: I worked as a waiter in college, and (like every other ex-waiter) now always leave at least 20%, typically in cash. During the lockdown, we wildly over-tipped on takeout and deliveries. I keep Fivers in my pocket for even modestly decent service (e.g., assembling a brunch’s worth of appetizing and bagels to go). Waitstaff, bartenders, cab drivers should be well comped for their efforts. Historically, they were often unpaid; the post-Civil War history of tipping is not pretty.

But that is not what this is about: Instead, it’s what has happened through companies using software UI as an opaque way to shift labor costs – and profits – to the consumer. I am not naïve; we all understand consumers of goods pay for labor, rent, costs of goods and profit. The issue here is obviously not that but rather, a sleazy way to trick people into paying more for goods and services than the actual price of those items.

I had been kicking the idea around, when a specific reveal brought it all suddenly into sharp focus:

Self-checkout machines now ask for tips in latest squeeze on customers

I read this as evidence the entire set-up is gaming consumer psychology to extract more dollars from every transaction. Or, you could just call it a fraud.

by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I have zero qualms about ignoring these things and, from my experience, the only ones who notice (if anyone) are the managers.]

Fake Consensualism

BETA-MEALRs

Dear friend, have you considered banning health care?

Several studies agree that sick people are often treated against their preferences and sometimes against their explicit requests. 51% of patients who request Do Not Resuscitate orders never get them. Among those who get them, 75% of their doctors don’t know about it. And among doctors who do know about it, 65% don’t feel a need to follow them if it conflicts with their own opinions.

So it should come as little surprise that 22% of people who sign forms saying they don’t want to be hospitalized get hospitalized and 31% of people who sign forms saying they don’t want CPR get CPR.

Or that patients who prefer to limit life-prolonging treatment get an amount of life-prolonging treatment that is statistically indistinguishable from everyone else.

Or that even though 80% of Americans say they want to avoid hospitalizations and intensive care as they are dying, in fact about 50% of Americans die in hospital and intensive care.

But in fact, the situation is far more dire than this. These studies only count people who have legally, explicitly spelled out a desire not to receive health care. What of people who sign off on all the dotted lines, but only under emotional blackmail that can hardly be called consensual?

The cancer patient who gets told she is “brave” and “a fighter” if and only if she accepts all the interventions modern medicine has to offer, but otherwise gets given “pep talks” on how she can’t “give up” on her family and friends.

The heart disease patient whose family constantly implies that if he really cares about them he’d “push on” as long as he could.

The elderly Muslim who consents to a massive and hopeless surgery only because she doesn’t want her community to remember her as a sinner who rejected God’s gift of life and who is burning in Hell for all eternity.

So although health care produces more than its share of obvious and legally binding consent violations, we have every reason to think this is only the tip of the iceberg, that countless millions of people who don’t want health care are pressured and bullied into accepting it and undergoing unnecessary suffering against their deepest wishes.

And the obvious solution, dear friend, is to ban health care. If there is no health care, no one can be coerced into receiving health care against their wishes. We tried having a health care system that operated on the principle of informed consent, it failed terribly, and now we must pass laws imprisoning anyone who provides any form of medication, surgery, or any other treatment attempting to alleviate disease or prolong life. While doctors, nurses, et cetera may be well-meaning, the real (and indeed realized) risk of nonconsensual treatment is far too dire to allow this so-called “humane” practice to continue.

Now you may think to yourself: this seems like it would be politically unpalatable. If the Republicans obstructed President Obama at every turn merely because he wanted to slightly modify the health system, what would they think of a law that would dismantle the health system entirely, and indeed threaten large fines and jail time to anyone trying to assume its functions?

This would indeed be a significant complication if not for the fact that the Republican Party must in any case very soon be eliminated forever. (...)

Yes, we want to ban health care, but we’re about so much more than that! We also oppose gay marriage, and straight marriage to boot. We are against prostitution but also all other forms of employment and all other sex (but especially BDSM). Also religion, vasectomies, all social gatherings, gender roles and breaking out of gender roles, gift-giving, telephones…(...)

II.

Even though most people dislike libertarians, their basic insight – that you can get a lot of the way to morality by saying things that people consent to are okay and things people don’t consent to are bad – holds a pretty eminent place in moral discourse, especially on the Left. This is with good reason. In a country where no one really agrees on what exactly morality is, consent is a useful semi-neutral principle that allows everyone to go off and do their own thing.

I’ve written a bit before about fake consequentialism, where people who have nonconsequentialist reasons for what they believe make up consequentialist ones so they can appeal to the general populace. I don’t think anyone has ever been convinced gay marriage is wrong because of sincere concern about the fate of children adopted by gay couples, but that argument keeps getting trotted out again and again because it’s one of the few anti-gay-marriage arguments that sounds remotely consequentialist. Or people who dislike porn claiming it will encourage viewers to rape people, even though as far as anyone can tell exactly the opposite is true.

And where there is fake consequentialism, not far behind you will find fake consensualism. Suppose there’s something you don’t like, but every time you argue against it, people say “Well, it’s all consensual and it doesn’t harm anyone except the people who have agreed to it, so mind your own business.” You can come back with “Yes, but how can we be sure the people involved in it really consented? Deep down? I bet they didn’t!” Or even “I bet this would lead to something nonconsensual happening somewhere else down the line!” Consensual BDSM? Just going to glorify abuse and lead to more nonconsensual abusing, right?

I used to automatically steelman BETA-MEALRs (ed. Ban Everything That Anyone Might Experience And Later Regret) into proper utilitarian arguments. “Well, euthanasia produces a gain of utility, by allowing people who want to die to do so. But it also produces a loss in utility, because it might unfortunately result in some people who didn’t want to die doing so. Who could possibly ever know which of these would be greater? So I guess all we can do is play it safe, right?”

But at some point, I started wondering how likely it was – even in cases where we genuinely have good reasons to worry about mistakes or pressure – that allowing people to choose whatever they preferred would result in fewer people getting what they want than banning all choices except one.

I mean, okay. You say we have to ban euthanasia, because if it’s not banned, some people who don’t want to die might have to. Okay. I come back and say “But if we ban euthanasia, some people who don’t want to live might have to. Except wait, no, not some people. All people. And not might have to. Definitely will have to. Required by law.” You say “Get the hell out of my office.” (...)

III.

According to Philip Tetlock’s dichotomy, a sacred value is a value in Far Mode, one that has big flashing signs saying “MORALITY!” around it. A secular value is one that is nice but not morally important, like saving money or increasing productivity.

A taboo tradeoff is when someone asks you to trade a secular value off against a sacred value, and tends to get people morally up in arms.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

[ed. Seems widely applicable - from 'culture war' eruptions to abortion. See also: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided (Less Wrong).]

Why Is The Academic Job Market So Weird?

Bret Devereaux writes here about the oddities of the academic job market.

His piece is comprehensive, and you should read it, but short version: professors are split into tenure-track (30%, good pay and benefits) and adjunct (50%, bad pay and benefits). Another 20% are “teaching-track”, somewhere in between.

Everyone wants a tenure-track job. But colleges hiring new tenure-track faculty prefer newly-minted PhDs to even veteran teaching-trackers or adjuncts. And even if they do hire a veteran teaching-tracker or adjunct, it’s practically never one of their own. If a teaching-tracker or adjunct makes a breakthrough, they apply for a tenure-track job somewhere else. Devereaux describes this as “a hiring system where experience manifestly hurts applicants” and displays this graph:

Number of professors hired for tenure-track positions by how long it’s been since the candidate has gotten their PhD.

He focuses on the moral question: is this good (no), and how can it be stopped (activism). I appreciate his commentary but I found myself wondering about the economic question: why did the system end up like this?

Remember, “greed” isn’t an answer. Greed can explain why management pays some people low salaries, but not why it pays other people high salaries. What process carves off 30% of professors to get good pay and benefits, but passes over the rest? Also, given that some people will get good salaries, why shouldn’t it be the more experienced people?

Maybe this is all so obvious to Devereaux that he didn’t feel it needed explaining, but it’s not obvious to me. And I can’t find any existing discussion, so I’ll make a guess to start the conversation, and people who know more can tell me if I’m wrong.

Colleges want two things from their professors. First, they need them to teach classes. Second, they need them to do good research, raise the college’s reputation, and look prestigious.

Colleges want to pretend to students that the same people are doing both these jobs, because students like the idea of being taught by prestigious thought leaders. But they don’t want to actually have the same people do both jobs, because the most valuable use of prestigious thought leaders’ time is doing research or promoting their ideas. Every hour Einstein spends in the classroom is an hour he’s not spending in the lab making discoveries that will rain down honors upon himself and his institution. And there’s no guarantee Einstein is even a good teacher.

Solution: hire for two different positions, but give them the same job title to make things maximally confusing for students. Have them occasionally do each others’ jobs, so students get even more confused. You very conspicuously hire Einstein, and hold out the carrot of being taught by Einstein. But Einstein actually only teaches one 400-level seminar a year, and every other class is taught by the cheapest person able to teach at all.

The cheapest person able to teach at all is very cheap. The status draw of academia ensures qualified people will keep barrelling into it even if the expected pay and conditions are poor. So there will be a glut of qualified instructors, and colleges can hire them for peanuts.

But Einstein is expensive. In teaching, colleges just want to meet a bar of “able to do this at all”. But in research, colleges want to beat other colleges to hire the most prestigious people. That means if you’re the top PhD in your field, colleges will enter a bidding war to get you. And once someone has you, so on to the second-best PhD, etc. So here demand exceeds supply, and salaries stay high.

This could explain the tenure/adjunct distinction. Adjuncts are selling their ability to teach, tenured professors are selling their prestige, and colleges have decided they only need a certain amount of prestige before they stop caring and fill the other teaching positions with warm bodies. But they obscure all of this with similar job titles to trick students into thinking they’ll get taught by prestigious people.

But then why do they only hire inexperienced people? Why only people from outside their own institution? Here I’m even more confused, but a few guesses:

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. The above referenced Deveraux article here: Collections: Academic Ranks Explained Or What On Earth Is an Adjunct? (ACUP). See also: the Comments section for more interesting/personal perspectives:]

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"I'm an academic and I can point out a few factual clarifications:

1. There's R1 (e.g., Ivy+, Stanford, MIT, ...) and not-R1 (typically liberal arts) institutions. Tenure-track professors at R1 institutions are hired to do research and the teaching is incidental. It's flipped at not-R1 institutions. I _believe_ tenure-track professors teaching at R1 institutions is mostly a historical accident that got cemented into every part of the tenure/promotion/grant process so it's basically impossible to change at this point.

2. There's also STEM/not-STEM. As a concrete example, the top-4 CS programs don't hire adjuncts in the way you think about them (e.g., Andrew Ng is adjunct at Stanford but this is just to keep him affiliated with the University). This dynamic is very different in non-STEM.

3. In STEM, the University puts in substantial resources to grow tenure-track faculty (startup packages go from $500k and way up).

4. Poaching does happen a decent amount. You just don't really hear about it much because tenured professors have it very nice and there's no need to complain about the processing."