John Pack
via:
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
PGA Tour Agrees to Merge With Saudi-Backed Rival LIV Golf
The PGA Tour has agreed to merge with Saudi-backed rival LIV Golf in a deal that would see the competitors squash pending litigation and move forward as a larger golf enterprise.
The two entities signed an agreement that would combine the PGA Tour and LIV Golf’s commercial businesses and rights into a new, yet-to-be-named for-profit company. The agreement includes DP World Tour, also known as the European PGA Tour.
LIV Golf is backed by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, an entity controlled by the Saudi crown prince and has been embroiled in antitrust lawsuits with the PGA Tour in the last year. The deal announced Tuesday would end all pending litigation.
PIF is prepared to invest billions of new capital into the new entity, CNBC’S David Faber reported on Tuesday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The agreement — the second stunning sports deal in just months, following World Wrestling Entertainment’s merger with Endeavor Group’s UFC — will require the approval of the PGA Tour policy board, Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players that was obtained by CNBC.
“There is much work to do to get us from a framework agreement to a definitive agreement, but one thing is obvious: through this transformational agreement and with PIF’s collaborative investment, the immeasurable strength of the PGA Tour’s history, legacy and pro-competitive model not only remains intact, but is supercharged for the future,” he wrote in the memo. (...)
Rival lawsuits
Monahan said the tour looked at the game of golf “on a global basis,” as its seen more growth in the sport outside of the U.S.
Still, he acknowledged Tuesday on CNBC that there has been a lot of tensions between the two organizations, but said “the game of golf is better for what we’ve done today.”
The two organizations had filed a series of antitrust claims against the other in recent months. LIV Golf sued The PGA Tour alleging anti-competitive practices for banning its players. The tour countersued, claiming LIV was stifling competition. Disputes ensued regarding the discovery process for evidence.
The lawsuits were spurred as the upstart league had lured multiple high-profile players, such as Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson, from the PGA Tour after the tour had banned the players from competing in LIV’s events.
On Tuesday, Mickelson tweeted, “Awesome day today” as part of a post sharing the news of the merger.
The deal comes soon after LIV golfer Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship, one of four major titles in men’s golf.
As part of the agreement, the groups will establish “a fair and objective process for any players who want to re-apply for membership with the PGA Tour or DP World Tour” following the end of the 2023 season, according to a release.
Global golf
LIV didn’t see its matches distributed on TV in the U.S. until a few months ago, when the league signed a deal with CW Network as the exclusive U.S. broadcast partner. The CW had agreed to air 14 global events, which began in February. Terms of the multiyear deal had not been disclosed. (...)
by Lillian Rizzo, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Charles Laberge | LIV Golf | Getty Images[ed. Wow. Wow. Wow. Historic. But nowhere do you hear clearly what this means for players that have already accepted (or rejected!) LIV money (some in the hundreds of millions of dollars), or formally resigned from the PGA Tour. Some very hard feelings for sure. Wonder if there's a clawback option? And how does this affect the LPGA Women's Tour (if at all)? Or US Anti-trust laws and policies? Stay tuned. See also: Phil Mickelson sent exactly the tweet you'd think upon news of the PGA Tour-LIV merger (GD).]
The two entities signed an agreement that would combine the PGA Tour and LIV Golf’s commercial businesses and rights into a new, yet-to-be-named for-profit company. The agreement includes DP World Tour, also known as the European PGA Tour.
PIF is prepared to invest billions of new capital into the new entity, CNBC’S David Faber reported on Tuesday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The agreement — the second stunning sports deal in just months, following World Wrestling Entertainment’s merger with Endeavor Group’s UFC — will require the approval of the PGA Tour policy board, Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players that was obtained by CNBC.
“There is much work to do to get us from a framework agreement to a definitive agreement, but one thing is obvious: through this transformational agreement and with PIF’s collaborative investment, the immeasurable strength of the PGA Tour’s history, legacy and pro-competitive model not only remains intact, but is supercharged for the future,” he wrote in the memo. (...)
Rival lawsuits
Monahan said the tour looked at the game of golf “on a global basis,” as its seen more growth in the sport outside of the U.S.
Still, he acknowledged Tuesday on CNBC that there has been a lot of tensions between the two organizations, but said “the game of golf is better for what we’ve done today.”
The two organizations had filed a series of antitrust claims against the other in recent months. LIV Golf sued The PGA Tour alleging anti-competitive practices for banning its players. The tour countersued, claiming LIV was stifling competition. Disputes ensued regarding the discovery process for evidence.
The lawsuits were spurred as the upstart league had lured multiple high-profile players, such as Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson, from the PGA Tour after the tour had banned the players from competing in LIV’s events.
On Tuesday, Mickelson tweeted, “Awesome day today” as part of a post sharing the news of the merger.
The deal comes soon after LIV golfer Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship, one of four major titles in men’s golf.
As part of the agreement, the groups will establish “a fair and objective process for any players who want to re-apply for membership with the PGA Tour or DP World Tour” following the end of the 2023 season, according to a release.
Global golf
LIV didn’t see its matches distributed on TV in the U.S. until a few months ago, when the league signed a deal with CW Network as the exclusive U.S. broadcast partner. The CW had agreed to air 14 global events, which began in February. Terms of the multiyear deal had not been disclosed. (...)
LIV Golf, which launched in 2022 and has been spending top dollar to lure golfers, has also been the subject of controversy, criticism and political intrigue in the U.S. PIF has reportedly invested $2 billion into LIV already, and had aspirations of creating franchises and teams that could one day be sold.
Critics of LIV have also accused PIF of “sportswashing” by using the league to distract from the kingdom’s history of human rights violations.
Critics of LIV have also accused PIF of “sportswashing” by using the league to distract from the kingdom’s history of human rights violations.
by Lillian Rizzo, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Charles Laberge | LIV Golf | Getty Images
Monday, June 5, 2023
Fast Fashion's Dumping Ground
‘It’s like a death pit’: how Ghana became fast fashion’s dumping ground (The Guardian)
Image: Muntaka Chasant/REX/Shutterstock
The Assisted Dying Debate Is Really About How We Treat the Living
Between December 2022 and April 2023, 184 randomly selected French citizens assembled to reflect on a central problem of the nation’s health care system: Is the current model of end-of-life care working and, if not, what changes should be introduced? On April 3, the group, known as the Citizens’ Assembly on the End of Life, presented the French president, Emmanuel Macron, with its final report. The vast majority of the Assembly, 97 percent, deemed the current model of end-of-life care in France insufficient, and more than three-quarters said they would support new measures to legalize euthanasia, assisted suicide, or both.
The French public and media have latched on to that last point, portraying the Assembly’s work as a referendum on assisted dying. In a recent issue of the French weekly news magazine L’Obs, prominent public intellectuals — including actors, filmmakers, university professors, and the mayor of Paris — penned an open letter calling on French president Emmanuel Macron and prime minister Elisabeth Borne to legalize assistance in dying. “Every year,” they wrote, “French men and women suffering from serious and incurable diseases are confronted with physical and moral suffering that treatments can no longer relieve.” The national discourse, however, misses an important point: The rising public support for assisted dying reflects our deeper failure, as a society, to adequately care for the living.
The provision of palliative care — care that seeks to maximize the quality of life for people living with serious or terminal illnesses, without hastening death — remains markedly underfunded and undersupported in France. The concept was first discussed in legislative settings in the mid-1980s, but it was not until 1999 that palliative care became a right for every French citizen. In 2005, the so-called Léonetti Law expanded these end-of-life rights to allow patients with severely life-limited prognoses the option to forego treatment — or to stop treatments that were already underway. In 2016, France introduced the Claeys-Léonetti Law, which remains the governing principle for contemporary palliative care in France. This law, presented as a specifically “French response” to a rising demand to legalize assistance in dying, permits physicians, at the request of the patient, to administer palliative sedation to people who are in the final stages of a terminal illness, or who have decided to cease treatment and face the prospect of “unbearable suffering.” With the law, France became one of the first countries in the world to make terminal sedation legal.
by Anna Magdalena Elsner & Jordan McCullough, Undark | Read more:Image: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Glad to see this (and as an adjunct, see this prior post: Fake Consensualism). As Woody Allen said: "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens." Denying a person's autonomy and forcing them to suffer needless, and frequently horrible deaths is, in my view, torture. At present, even states that allow assisted dying have made the process so convoluted as to be prohibitive. Perhaps this might account for part of it (from the comments section at NC:)
Props to the French for having what sounds like a very sober societal conversation on these issues. (...)
It’s been said that the last six months of ‘life’ dissipate the average persons life savings and wealth. And, after all, that is what we aspire to… more money, more wealth…. what’s yours is now mine.
The dysfunctional health extortion in the US is just getting more dysfunctional. Medicare does not cover skilled nursing or other long-term care. The conditions in these places, while obscenely expensive, are appalling – I have seen quite a few. I can look forward to bankruptcy, debt and a horrific end of life unless I am blessed with a quick death.
The provision of palliative care — care that seeks to maximize the quality of life for people living with serious or terminal illnesses, without hastening death — remains markedly underfunded and undersupported in France. The concept was first discussed in legislative settings in the mid-1980s, but it was not until 1999 that palliative care became a right for every French citizen. In 2005, the so-called Léonetti Law expanded these end-of-life rights to allow patients with severely life-limited prognoses the option to forego treatment — or to stop treatments that were already underway. In 2016, France introduced the Claeys-Léonetti Law, which remains the governing principle for contemporary palliative care in France. This law, presented as a specifically “French response” to a rising demand to legalize assistance in dying, permits physicians, at the request of the patient, to administer palliative sedation to people who are in the final stages of a terminal illness, or who have decided to cease treatment and face the prospect of “unbearable suffering.” With the law, France became one of the first countries in the world to make terminal sedation legal.
The rising public support for assisted dying reflects our deeper failure, as a society, to adequately care for the living.
However, palliative sedation — currently the final recourse for French palliative care physicians — is distinct from assisted dying. It is administered to alleviate suffering, not to hasten death, whereas assisted dying is an active decision, on the part of the patient and their physicians, to bring life to an end. The French terminology, “aide active à mourir,” or “active assistance in dying,” captures this well. (By contrast, francophone Canada has opted for “aide médicale à mourir ,” or “medical assistance in dying” — although the anglophone acronym, MAID, undoubtedly played a role in that choice.)
Some argue that palliative sedation does not go far enough and that current eligibility requirements for the procedure are too strict. But a more fundamental question is whether existing palliative care services receive adequate support. (...)
Some argue that palliative sedation does not go far enough and that current eligibility requirements for the procedure are too strict. But a more fundamental question is whether existing palliative care services receive adequate support. (...)
Proponents of legalizing assisted dying argue that that issue is philosophically and politically distinct from the matter of improving palliative care. But the two ideas are connected: The reasons that many French people give for wanting a change in the law are intimately related to the distressing ways in which they are seeing people die today. (...)
As sociologist Nicolas Menet recently argued, “We mustn’t reduce the question of end of life to a debate around whether or not to legalize euthanasia.” Rather, he said, “we need to discuss the financing of palliative care and value that care provision. We also need to discuss what palliative sedation really means.”
As sociologist Nicolas Menet recently argued, “We mustn’t reduce the question of end of life to a debate around whether or not to legalize euthanasia.” Rather, he said, “we need to discuss the financing of palliative care and value that care provision. We also need to discuss what palliative sedation really means.”
The reasons that many French people give for wanting a change in the law are intimately related to the distressing ways in which they are seeing people die today.In other words, improving end-of-life care in France, or anywhere for that matter, will require us to think holistically about the issues at hand, rather than look to assisted suicide and euthanasia as panaceas. (Writer and journalist Abnousse Shalmani also makes this point in a recent column for L’Express.)
by Anna Magdalena Elsner & Jordan McCullough, Undark | Read more:
[ed. Glad to see this (and as an adjunct, see this prior post: Fake Consensualism). As Woody Allen said: "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens." Denying a person's autonomy and forcing them to suffer needless, and frequently horrible deaths is, in my view, torture. At present, even states that allow assisted dying have made the process so convoluted as to be prohibitive. Perhaps this might account for part of it (from the comments section at NC:)
Props to the French for having what sounds like a very sober societal conversation on these issues. (...)
***
Every day a person’s existence persists equates to more billable hours, receivables… whether from The State, or in America, the Insurors. ...It’s been said that the last six months of ‘life’ dissipate the average persons life savings and wealth. And, after all, that is what we aspire to… more money, more wealth…. what’s yours is now mine.
***
As others have noted, the religious fundamentalists and the insurance/BigPharma extortion racket want to maintain the status-quo in the US. Health extortion is big business: 18-19% of GDP. No incentive to kill the golden goose.The dysfunctional health extortion in the US is just getting more dysfunctional. Medicare does not cover skilled nursing or other long-term care. The conditions in these places, while obscenely expensive, are appalling – I have seen quite a few. I can look forward to bankruptcy, debt and a horrific end of life unless I am blessed with a quick death.
Unauthorized Bread
Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters
The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.
“Come on.” Brrt.
She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.
Brrt.
Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”
There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.
The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?
Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.
Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.
The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.
The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.
And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.
Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.
She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.
She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.
The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked. She wasn’t the only one who had the Disher/Boulangism double whammy, either. Some poor suckers also had the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by HP-NewsCorp—fridges, toothbrushes, even sex toys—all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company’s cloud provider, Tata. While this failure was unrelated to the Disher/Boulangism doubleheader, it was pretty unfortunate timing, everyone agreed.
The twin collapse of Disher and Boulangism did have a shared cause, Salima discovered. Both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by Summerstream Funds Management, the largest hedge fund on earth, with $184 billion under management. Summerstream was an “activist shareholder” and it was very big on stock buybacks. Once it had a seat on each company’s board—both occupied by Galt Baumgardner, a junior partner at the firm, but from a very good Kansas family—they both hired the same expert consultant from Deloitte to examine the company’s accounts and recommend a buyback program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms, without gouging so deep into the companies’ operating capital as to endanger them.
It was all mathematically provable, of course. The companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders. Once this was determined, it was the board’s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it (which was handy, since they all owned fat wads of company shares) and a few billion dollars later, the companies were lean, mean, and battle ready, and didn’t even miss all that money.
Oops.
Summerstream issued a press release (often quoted in the forums Salima was now obsessively haunting) blaming the whole thing on “volatility” and “alpha” and calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” They were confident that both companies would restructure in bankruptcy, perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor, and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two.
[ed. Goes hand in hand with Right to Repair. See also: What is IoT? (Oracle); and, Internet of Things (Wikipedia).
“Come on.” Brrt.
She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.
Brrt.
There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.
The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?
Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.
Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.
The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.
The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.
And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.
Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.
She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.
She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.
The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked. She wasn’t the only one who had the Disher/Boulangism double whammy, either. Some poor suckers also had the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by HP-NewsCorp—fridges, toothbrushes, even sex toys—all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company’s cloud provider, Tata. While this failure was unrelated to the Disher/Boulangism doubleheader, it was pretty unfortunate timing, everyone agreed.
The twin collapse of Disher and Boulangism did have a shared cause, Salima discovered. Both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by Summerstream Funds Management, the largest hedge fund on earth, with $184 billion under management. Summerstream was an “activist shareholder” and it was very big on stock buybacks. Once it had a seat on each company’s board—both occupied by Galt Baumgardner, a junior partner at the firm, but from a very good Kansas family—they both hired the same expert consultant from Deloitte to examine the company’s accounts and recommend a buyback program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms, without gouging so deep into the companies’ operating capital as to endanger them.
It was all mathematically provable, of course. The companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders. Once this was determined, it was the board’s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it (which was handy, since they all owned fat wads of company shares) and a few billion dollars later, the companies were lean, mean, and battle ready, and didn’t even miss all that money.
Oops.
Summerstream issued a press release (often quoted in the forums Salima was now obsessively haunting) blaming the whole thing on “volatility” and “alpha” and calling it “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” They were confident that both companies would restructure in bankruptcy, perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor, and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two.
by Cory Doctorow, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Tor Books
The World is Ready for Rose Zhang. Is She Ready for the World?
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Let’s start with the tour, because if you can keep up with this, you can keep up with Rose Zhang. It’s moving. We’re moving. She’s five paces ahead, slipping through the Stanford campus like some sort of prodigious pontoon. Everything is fast. Moving. Talking. Walking. Her giant Nike backpack is fastened tight, holding on for the ride. She points over there. “Look at that!” She points over here. “Isn’t that amazing?”
The Stanford campus moves under our feet and you can feel it. A combination of person and place that’s damn-near intrinsic.
In what amounted to a period of deferred destiny, Rose arrived here two years ago and proceeded to win everything. All of it. Two years in college golf rewriting the NCAA record book. Teenage years spent becoming one of the greatest amateur players — male or female — ever; yes, ever. Rose, as she’ll be referred to here, because prodigies operate mononymously, became the world’s No. 1-ranked women’s amateur in September 2020 — nearly 33 months ago. Hasn’t budged since. She won the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur at 17, enrolled at Stanford, won 12 of 20 college tournaments, claimed the 2023 Augusta National Women’s Amateur, and capped things off nicely by becoming the first female golfer to win consecutive NCAA individual titles.
Yet, trekking across campus, she looks back to tell me the other kids at Stanford — the ones we’re blurring past — they’re the special ones.
“The people that I’m friends with?” she says. “I’m constantly like, you guys are incredible. I can’t even show my face here.”
There’s no known data for how many prodigies operate with an inferiority complex, but there’s at least one. Which makes this all the more tricky. Because, folks, it’s time.
With some words that will carry, Rose announced last week that she is, at last, turning professional. Her unmatched amateur career is over. She’s heading to Liberty National Golf Club this week for a news conference and her pro debut at the inaugural Mizuho Americas Open. She’ll play a course where millions of tons of clay and fill were once laid to offer better views of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Seems appropriate. She’ll arrive prepackaged, complete with millions of dollars in sponsorship contracts with Callaway, Adidas, Delta, East West Bank, Rolex, USwing, Beats by Dre and others. She’ll be billed as a generational talent with global appeal. Oh, and that swing. Everyone will swoon. Then, this summer, she’ll play in the remaining four majors and, if all goes to plan, use a series of tournament exemptions to secure her LPGA Tour card.
This has all felt so inevitable for so long. The same way the NBA is waiting for Victor Wembanyama, and the NFL is waiting for Caleb Williams, golf has been waiting for Rose Zhang.
But here, she stops. No, Rose says. She is not like them. She’s just like everyone else. “I don’t think players on tour know who I am,” she tells me. “I’m just going to be a newbie out there.”
Maybe that’s what she needs to tell herself. Rose has had to figure out a lot in her life — how to embrace her talent, how to be coached, how to handle the contours of a father-daughter relationship, how to be the star of a superteam at Stanford, how to turn pro, how to find some control, how to be … normal.
That, truth be told, is why she’s pushed this off for so long. But now, “There’s not a lot of ambition left for, like, where my career is right now. Because I basically won the events that there are to win.” (...)
CS106A: Programming Methodologies.The teacher’s aide leading the lecture is barely older than the students. He’s wearing a Patagonia hat and answering correct responses with: “Yes, sick,” “That’s chill,” and, when one student is unsure of a solution, responds, “Super valid question.”
Rose is behind a MacBook Pro, following along. The TA reads out a formula while scribbling on a whiteboard, “… equals, input, parenthesis, input, parenthesis, enter third number, colon, space, parenthesis …”
Fifty incalculably boring minutes of computer coding.
Class wraps up around 5 p.m. and we’re off. Stanford is a place that often feels staged, like some AI-generated postcard of Gen Z college life, packed with polymaths and geniuses, with virtuoso artists and future billionaire computer programmers. An odd mix of chaos and academic pedigree. We see visiting high school students and Rose says they look so young. A rogue student a cappella group assembles from nowhere and starts performing in front of the bookstore. We watch for a moment. Rose is thrilled by the randomness of it all.
But Rose laments. She was warned not to take that coding class. Especially not in-season. “It’s too much.” She’s regretting it, just as she regretted taking 21 units last quarter. “The dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” When we spoke in March, she had a five-page paper due on the causes of the Cold War (“Which is ridiculous,” she said. “How can you write that in five pages?”) and a 4,000-word paper due on integrating discipline into children’s books. On top of all this, Rose is regularly taking Mandarin. She’s fluent, but cannot read or write. This is common. There are over 5,000 characters to memorize.
“I find Chinese to be very interesting,” she says. “It’s a very beautiful language. Especially when you learn to write. It’s very pretty — the characters. But it is very hard, requires a lot of brain work. You have to be proactive in your learning or you’ll forget everything. It’s like math, except I hate math.”
The catch is, none of this is necessary. Future Millionaire Golfer Rose Zhang does not need to take computer programming or learn about the Cold War.
“Literally,” she stresses, smiling, “And I’m here suffering, learning to code.”
So, why? There’s no moral hand-wringing over golfers or tennis players or soccer players ditching high school to pursue professional sports. Rose could’ve made the jump years ago. Her parents wouldn’t have stopped her and her talent was without question. She played in the 2019 U.S. Women’s Open as a 16-year-old and made the cut. That week, on a patio at the Country Club of Charleston (S.C.), Haibin suggested it might be time for his daughter to make the leap then. “She’ll know when she’s ready,” George responded.
by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic/NYT | Read more:
The Stanford campus moves under our feet and you can feel it. A combination of person and place that’s damn-near intrinsic.
In what amounted to a period of deferred destiny, Rose arrived here two years ago and proceeded to win everything. All of it. Two years in college golf rewriting the NCAA record book. Teenage years spent becoming one of the greatest amateur players — male or female — ever; yes, ever. Rose, as she’ll be referred to here, because prodigies operate mononymously, became the world’s No. 1-ranked women’s amateur in September 2020 — nearly 33 months ago. Hasn’t budged since. She won the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur at 17, enrolled at Stanford, won 12 of 20 college tournaments, claimed the 2023 Augusta National Women’s Amateur, and capped things off nicely by becoming the first female golfer to win consecutive NCAA individual titles.
“The people that I’m friends with?” she says. “I’m constantly like, you guys are incredible. I can’t even show my face here.”
There’s no known data for how many prodigies operate with an inferiority complex, but there’s at least one. Which makes this all the more tricky. Because, folks, it’s time.
With some words that will carry, Rose announced last week that she is, at last, turning professional. Her unmatched amateur career is over. She’s heading to Liberty National Golf Club this week for a news conference and her pro debut at the inaugural Mizuho Americas Open. She’ll play a course where millions of tons of clay and fill were once laid to offer better views of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Seems appropriate. She’ll arrive prepackaged, complete with millions of dollars in sponsorship contracts with Callaway, Adidas, Delta, East West Bank, Rolex, USwing, Beats by Dre and others. She’ll be billed as a generational talent with global appeal. Oh, and that swing. Everyone will swoon. Then, this summer, she’ll play in the remaining four majors and, if all goes to plan, use a series of tournament exemptions to secure her LPGA Tour card.
This has all felt so inevitable for so long. The same way the NBA is waiting for Victor Wembanyama, and the NFL is waiting for Caleb Williams, golf has been waiting for Rose Zhang.
But here, she stops. No, Rose says. She is not like them. She’s just like everyone else. “I don’t think players on tour know who I am,” she tells me. “I’m just going to be a newbie out there.”
Maybe that’s what she needs to tell herself. Rose has had to figure out a lot in her life — how to embrace her talent, how to be coached, how to handle the contours of a father-daughter relationship, how to be the star of a superteam at Stanford, how to turn pro, how to find some control, how to be … normal.
That, truth be told, is why she’s pushed this off for so long. But now, “There’s not a lot of ambition left for, like, where my career is right now. Because I basically won the events that there are to win.” (...)
CS106A: Programming Methodologies.The teacher’s aide leading the lecture is barely older than the students. He’s wearing a Patagonia hat and answering correct responses with: “Yes, sick,” “That’s chill,” and, when one student is unsure of a solution, responds, “Super valid question.”
Rose is behind a MacBook Pro, following along. The TA reads out a formula while scribbling on a whiteboard, “… equals, input, parenthesis, input, parenthesis, enter third number, colon, space, parenthesis …”
Fifty incalculably boring minutes of computer coding.
Class wraps up around 5 p.m. and we’re off. Stanford is a place that often feels staged, like some AI-generated postcard of Gen Z college life, packed with polymaths and geniuses, with virtuoso artists and future billionaire computer programmers. An odd mix of chaos and academic pedigree. We see visiting high school students and Rose says they look so young. A rogue student a cappella group assembles from nowhere and starts performing in front of the bookstore. We watch for a moment. Rose is thrilled by the randomness of it all.
But Rose laments. She was warned not to take that coding class. Especially not in-season. “It’s too much.” She’s regretting it, just as she regretted taking 21 units last quarter. “The dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” When we spoke in March, she had a five-page paper due on the causes of the Cold War (“Which is ridiculous,” she said. “How can you write that in five pages?”) and a 4,000-word paper due on integrating discipline into children’s books. On top of all this, Rose is regularly taking Mandarin. She’s fluent, but cannot read or write. This is common. There are over 5,000 characters to memorize.
“I find Chinese to be very interesting,” she says. “It’s a very beautiful language. Especially when you learn to write. It’s very pretty — the characters. But it is very hard, requires a lot of brain work. You have to be proactive in your learning or you’ll forget everything. It’s like math, except I hate math.”
The catch is, none of this is necessary. Future Millionaire Golfer Rose Zhang does not need to take computer programming or learn about the Cold War.
“Literally,” she stresses, smiling, “And I’m here suffering, learning to code.”
So, why? There’s no moral hand-wringing over golfers or tennis players or soccer players ditching high school to pursue professional sports. Rose could’ve made the jump years ago. Her parents wouldn’t have stopped her and her talent was without question. She played in the 2019 U.S. Women’s Open as a 16-year-old and made the cut. That week, on a patio at the Country Club of Charleston (S.C.), Haibin suggested it might be time for his daughter to make the leap then. “She’ll know when she’s ready,” George responded.
by Brendan Quinn, The Athletic/NYT | Read more:
Image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Justin Tafoya / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
[ed. From last week. Is she ready? - we all know the answer now ($412,500 of them). See also: Rose Zhang makes history, wins LPGA debut, matching feat last accomplished 72 years ago (Golf Digest):]
"Where Rose Zhang walks, history follows. Her celebrated golf journey continued Sunday at the LPGA's Mizuho Americas Open while surviving a slog at Liberty National, shooting a closing 74 that was good enough to get into a playoff and beat Jennifer Kupcho on the second extra hole.
Zhang, 20, became only the second player to win her professional debut on the LPGA, joining Beverly Hanson, winner at the 1951 Eastern Open in the second year of the tour's existence. (...)
The full Rose Zhang experience of humility can be encapsulated by the fact her only goal to start the week was to play on the weekend."
[ed. From last week. Is she ready? - we all know the answer now ($412,500 of them). See also: Rose Zhang makes history, wins LPGA debut, matching feat last accomplished 72 years ago (Golf Digest):]
"Where Rose Zhang walks, history follows. Her celebrated golf journey continued Sunday at the LPGA's Mizuho Americas Open while surviving a slog at Liberty National, shooting a closing 74 that was good enough to get into a playoff and beat Jennifer Kupcho on the second extra hole.
Zhang, 20, became only the second player to win her professional debut on the LPGA, joining Beverly Hanson, winner at the 1951 Eastern Open in the second year of the tour's existence. (...)
The full Rose Zhang experience of humility can be encapsulated by the fact her only goal to start the week was to play on the weekend."
Saturday, June 3, 2023
How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party
A private, as it’s known in the music business, is any performance off limits to the public; the term applies to a vast spectrum of gigs, from suburban Sweet Sixteens and Upper East Side charity galas to command performances in the Persian Gulf. For years, the world of privates was dominated by aging crooners, a category known delicately as “nostalgia performers.” Jacqueline Sabec, an entertainment lawyer in San Francisco, who has negotiated many private-gig contracts, told me, “Artists used to say no to these all the time, because they just weren’t cool.”
If you have a few million dollars to spare, you can hire Drake for your bar mitzvah or the Rolling Stones for your birthday party. Robert Norman, who heads the private-events department at the talent agency C.A.A., recalls that when he joined the firm, a quarter century ago, “we were booking one or two hundred private dates a year, for middle-of-the-road artists that you’d typically suspect would play these kinds of events—conventions and things like that.” Since then, privates have ballooned in frequency, price, and genre. “Last year, we booked almost six hundred dates, and we’ve got a team of people here who are dedicated just to private events,” Norman said. An agent at another big firm told me, “A lot of people will say, ‘Hey, can you send me your private/corporate roster?’ And I’m, like, ‘Just look at our whole roster, because everybody’s pretty much willing to consider an offer.’ ”
The willingness extends to icons who might seem beyond mortal reach, including three Englishmen honored by Her Late Majesty: Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Sir Rod Stewart. “We just did Rod Stewart for $1.25 million here in Las Vegas,” Glenn Richardson, an event producer, told me. It was a corporate gig for Kia, the car company. “He’ll do those now, because Rod’s not doing as many things as in his heyday,” Richardson added. A random selection of other acts who do privates (Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Diana Ross, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, OneRepublic, Katy Perry, Eric Clapton) far exceeds the list of those who are known for saying no (Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and, for reasons that nobody can quite clarify, AC/DC).
Occasionally, the music press notes a new extreme of the private market, like hits on the charts. Billboard reported that the Eagles received six million dollars from an unnamed client in New York for a single performance of “Hotel California,” and Rolling Stone reported that Springsteen declined a quarter of a million to ride motorcycles with a fan. But privates typically are enveloped in secrecy, with both artists and clients demanding nondisclosure agreements and prohibitions on photos and social-media posts. Sabec told me, “They don’t want anybody to know how much they paid the artist, for example, or the details of the party. And the musician might not necessarily want it to be discussed, either.” (After the news of Beyoncé’s fee leaked, Adam Harrison, a veteran manager, told me, “That is my nightmare.” Then he reconsidered the effect on Beyoncé’s operation: “It probably raises their rates.”)
Until recently, the stigma extended beyond style. A prominent music executive said, “There was a phase where artists would take a private show—a cancer benefit—and somebody would find out that they’re getting paid to perform, and then they look like complete cocks in the media, because they took money and some child was dying of cancer. There was risk in the money.”(...)
The opprobrium dissipated before long. In 2015, when critics urged Nicki Minaj to forsake a reported fee of two million dollars for a concert sponsored by a company linked to Angola’s dictator, she dismissed them with a tweet: “every tongue that rises up against me in judgement shall be condemned.” The music executive told me that there is even a sense of commercial competition among stars, who now measure themselves as entrepreneurs. “If you’re Kevin Durant, and you don’t have five businesses, you’re a schmuck,” he said. “ ‘I made twenty-five million dollars playing ten birthday parties.’ That used to be seen as ‘You fucking piece-of-shit sellout.’ Now it’s ‘How do I get me some of those?’ ”
At bottom, the boom in private gigs reflects two contrasting trends. One has to do with the music industry. For more than a century after sound was first captured on wax cylinders, in the eighteen-eighties, the money came mostly from selling recordings. But that business peaked in 1999, and, as CDs vanished, revenue sank by more than fifty per cent. It has recovered on digital subscriptions, but the new giants—Spotify, Apple, YouTube—pay artists only a fraction of what physical sales once delivered.
The other trend is the birth of a new aristocracy, which since 2000 has tripled the number of American billionaires and produced legions of the merely very rich. As musicians have faced an increasingly uncertain market, another slice of humanity has prospered: the limited partners and angel investors and ciphers of senior management who used to splurge on front-row seats at an arena show. Ruggiero, the drummer, told me, “People didn’t use to do this, because they couldn’t afford to have, like, the Foo Fighters come to their back yard. But now they can. They’re, like, ‘I can blow a hundred and fifty grand on a Thursday.’ ” (...)
Despite all the luxuries, “corporate events can be sort of soul-destroying,” Viecelli said. “It’s not really an audience. It’s a convention or a party, and you just happen to be making noise at one end of it.” When musicians are uncertain, he has some reliable tools to help them decide: “If you can say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go have a bad time for an afternoon, but it’s going to pay for my kid’s entire college education,’ then that’s a trade-off I think most responsible adults will make.” But these days he has less persuading to do. “If you talk to a twenty-year-old in the music business now, and you bring up this idea of the weirdness of doing corporate events, they’ll just stare at you, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ You might as well say, ‘Don’t you feel guilty for eating pizza?’ ” (...)
Even as streaming has diminished the returns on recording, social media has created an expectation of accessibility. Fans no longer assume that their favorite artists are remote figures. Viecelli told me, “I’ll get e-mails from people saying, ‘I live in Philadelphia, and I see that they’re coming to town, and my daughter is a big, big fan. Could you stop off at our house to play a few songs?’ ” He laughed. “It’s, like, ‘Are you nuts?’ But if that person says, ‘And I’d be happy to pay five hundred thousand dollars for the privilege,’ well, then, actually it begins to change.”
But misgivings have receded dramatically. In January, Beyoncé did her first show in more than four years—not in a stadium of screaming fans but at a new hotel in Dubai, earning a reported twenty-four million dollars for an hour-long set. More than a few Beyoncé fans winced; after dedicating a recent album to pioneers of queer culture, she was plumping for a hotel owned by the government of Dubai, which criminalizes homosexuality. (As a popular tweet put it, “I get it, everyone wants their coin, but when you’re THAT rich, is it THAT worth it?”) Artists, by and large, did not join the critics. Charles Ruggiero, a drummer in Los Angeles who is active in jazz and rock, told me, “The way musicians look at it, generally speaking, is: It’s a fucking gig. And a gig is a gig is a gig.”
The willingness extends to icons who might seem beyond mortal reach, including three Englishmen honored by Her Late Majesty: Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Sir Rod Stewart. “We just did Rod Stewart for $1.25 million here in Las Vegas,” Glenn Richardson, an event producer, told me. It was a corporate gig for Kia, the car company. “He’ll do those now, because Rod’s not doing as many things as in his heyday,” Richardson added. A random selection of other acts who do privates (Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Diana Ross, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, OneRepublic, Katy Perry, Eric Clapton) far exceeds the list of those who are known for saying no (Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and, for reasons that nobody can quite clarify, AC/DC).
Occasionally, the music press notes a new extreme of the private market, like hits on the charts. Billboard reported that the Eagles received six million dollars from an unnamed client in New York for a single performance of “Hotel California,” and Rolling Stone reported that Springsteen declined a quarter of a million to ride motorcycles with a fan. But privates typically are enveloped in secrecy, with both artists and clients demanding nondisclosure agreements and prohibitions on photos and social-media posts. Sabec told me, “They don’t want anybody to know how much they paid the artist, for example, or the details of the party. And the musician might not necessarily want it to be discussed, either.” (After the news of Beyoncé’s fee leaked, Adam Harrison, a veteran manager, told me, “That is my nightmare.” Then he reconsidered the effect on Beyoncé’s operation: “It probably raises their rates.”)
Until recently, the stigma extended beyond style. A prominent music executive said, “There was a phase where artists would take a private show—a cancer benefit—and somebody would find out that they’re getting paid to perform, and then they look like complete cocks in the media, because they took money and some child was dying of cancer. There was risk in the money.”(...)
The opprobrium dissipated before long. In 2015, when critics urged Nicki Minaj to forsake a reported fee of two million dollars for a concert sponsored by a company linked to Angola’s dictator, she dismissed them with a tweet: “every tongue that rises up against me in judgement shall be condemned.” The music executive told me that there is even a sense of commercial competition among stars, who now measure themselves as entrepreneurs. “If you’re Kevin Durant, and you don’t have five businesses, you’re a schmuck,” he said. “ ‘I made twenty-five million dollars playing ten birthday parties.’ That used to be seen as ‘You fucking piece-of-shit sellout.’ Now it’s ‘How do I get me some of those?’ ”
At bottom, the boom in private gigs reflects two contrasting trends. One has to do with the music industry. For more than a century after sound was first captured on wax cylinders, in the eighteen-eighties, the money came mostly from selling recordings. But that business peaked in 1999, and, as CDs vanished, revenue sank by more than fifty per cent. It has recovered on digital subscriptions, but the new giants—Spotify, Apple, YouTube—pay artists only a fraction of what physical sales once delivered.
The other trend is the birth of a new aristocracy, which since 2000 has tripled the number of American billionaires and produced legions of the merely very rich. As musicians have faced an increasingly uncertain market, another slice of humanity has prospered: the limited partners and angel investors and ciphers of senior management who used to splurge on front-row seats at an arena show. Ruggiero, the drummer, told me, “People didn’t use to do this, because they couldn’t afford to have, like, the Foo Fighters come to their back yard. But now they can. They’re, like, ‘I can blow a hundred and fifty grand on a Thursday.’ ” (...)
Even as streaming has diminished the returns on recording, social media has created an expectation of accessibility. Fans no longer assume that their favorite artists are remote figures. Viecelli told me, “I’ll get e-mails from people saying, ‘I live in Philadelphia, and I see that they’re coming to town, and my daughter is a big, big fan. Could you stop off at our house to play a few songs?’ ” He laughed. “It’s, like, ‘Are you nuts?’ But if that person says, ‘And I’d be happy to pay five hundred thousand dollars for the privilege,’ well, then, actually it begins to change.”
Swingless Golf Club
[ed. A buddy told me about this (re: handicapped players). I have mixed feelings. If it helps someone get out and socialize with friends (and that's the most important thing to them) then great. But golf is fundamentally about refining and controlling your swing. That's what makes it challenging.]
The War We’re Finally Allowed to See
Mogelson shows us the war a few independent journalists have written of but a war we have not heretofore read about in mainstream media. This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is.
Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kiev regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting — who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service. (...)
What is different now?
This is hard to say. But the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places —among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media — that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality.
The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference. There is more talk now about the conditions necessary to begin negotiations. NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the West joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.
Mogelson’s intent, surely, was to do good work, full stop, and he has. But read in this larger context, its publication looks to me the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.
by Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News | Read more:
Image: Maxim DondyukUkrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)[ed. Definitely check out the original source material: Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine (New Yorker). Some of the best (and most vivid) war reporting/photography to date.]
Friday, June 2, 2023
The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington
A little while ago I found myself interested to read a frustrated Glenn Greenwald argue that, given the context of the “enormous” $858 billion U.S. defense budget recently passed by Congress along with an additional $44 billion in military aid for Ukraine, the only thing anyone can now inevitably rely on from Washington D.C. is that “the U.S. budget for military and intelligence agencies will increase every year no matter what.”
I felt this merited some reflection. Greenwald’s explanation for why perpetual growth of the defense budget is an inevitability (which it basically is), and for why American foreign policy is relentlessly hawkish more broadly, is a popular one: that the American arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. The big defense contractors bribe the politicians with large donations and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shoveling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers. This, Greenwald says, is precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned our country to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.
Eisenhower was, I must point out, attempting to draw attention to an even broader issue, i.e. the rise of an unaccountable technocratic administrative state, which accelerated in the wake of the technological-managerial revolution produced by WWII, and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” The influence of this transformation of American republican governance, of which a military-industrial complex was but one part, was likely, he predicted, to be “economic, political, even spiritual” in scope, and threaten to change “the very structure of our society.” But I will leave all that aside for the time being, as “military-industrial complex” is the phrase that stuck in public memory, along with the narrower, more common understanding of what Eisenhower was warning about that Greenwald is using in this case.
I felt this merited some reflection. Greenwald’s explanation for why perpetual growth of the defense budget is an inevitability (which it basically is), and for why American foreign policy is relentlessly hawkish more broadly, is a popular one: that the American arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. The big defense contractors bribe the politicians with large donations and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shoveling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers. This, Greenwald says, is precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned our country to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.
As described above, this understanding of the military-industrial complex – and a common understanding of how politics in Washington works in general – is essentially conspiratorial. Its primary mechanism is individuals, or groups of individuals, cynically manipulating the procedures of the state to advance their material self-interests. Thus Washington has turned into a “multi-tentacle war machine,” Greenwald says, because “No matter what is going on in the world, they always find – or concoct – reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is.” (Emphasis mine.)
Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. Applying Lenin’s maxim – “who benefits?” – appears to provide players (the “they”) and the motive. Combine that motive with the means and opportunity produced by systems of collusion, and you seem to have a straightforward explanation for most of the policy that comes out of Washington: it’s all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become common to the disaffected right instead.
Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also actually a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to do, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system, etc. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to reevaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.
True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions – and why it’s still always a good bet to invest in Lockheed Martin.
First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact all of these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.
The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model. I.e. they don’t think “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” – even the people with seats on the boards of defense contractors. The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.
What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story. Let me try to explain.
There is a useful saying in Washington, which is: “Where you sit is where you stand.” This refers to how individuals’ interests, and even their values, almost inevitably come to be determined by their position within and among bureaucracies. Whatever motivations they may enter with, they soon find themselves defending and advocating for whatever will most benefit the bureaucracy of which they have become a part. It is a relatively common phenomenon for even loyal top-level political appointees, dispatched by a new president to head a particular department or agency specifically so as to bring it into line with the president’s policy goals, to quickly be coopted into acting against that president’s wishes and working to advance their bureaucracy’s self-interests instead. Even those who enter and discover the truth that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as Oscar Wilde memorably quipped, find they desire nothing so much as to help it do so. Their own interests and incentives have been subsumed by the bureaucracy’s interests and incentives.
How does this happen? And what is a bureaucracy, really? How is it that, as the critic Brooks Atkinson once wrote, bureaucracies are organizations “designed to perform public business,” but seemingly “as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy”?
Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. Applying Lenin’s maxim – “who benefits?” – appears to provide players (the “they”) and the motive. Combine that motive with the means and opportunity produced by systems of collusion, and you seem to have a straightforward explanation for most of the policy that comes out of Washington: it’s all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become common to the disaffected right instead.
Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also actually a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to do, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system, etc. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to reevaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.
True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions – and why it’s still always a good bet to invest in Lockheed Martin.
First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact all of these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.
The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model. I.e. they don’t think “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” – even the people with seats on the boards of defense contractors. The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.
What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story. Let me try to explain.
There is a useful saying in Washington, which is: “Where you sit is where you stand.” This refers to how individuals’ interests, and even their values, almost inevitably come to be determined by their position within and among bureaucracies. Whatever motivations they may enter with, they soon find themselves defending and advocating for whatever will most benefit the bureaucracy of which they have become a part. It is a relatively common phenomenon for even loyal top-level political appointees, dispatched by a new president to head a particular department or agency specifically so as to bring it into line with the president’s policy goals, to quickly be coopted into acting against that president’s wishes and working to advance their bureaucracy’s self-interests instead. Even those who enter and discover the truth that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as Oscar Wilde memorably quipped, find they desire nothing so much as to help it do so. Their own interests and incentives have been subsumed by the bureaucracy’s interests and incentives.
How does this happen? And what is a bureaucracy, really? How is it that, as the critic Brooks Atkinson once wrote, bureaucracies are organizations “designed to perform public business,” but seemingly “as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy”?
by N.S. Lyons, The Upheaval | Read more (with Trial):
Image: uncredited
[ed. Paywalled unfortunately, but even this much helps.]
Thursday, June 1, 2023
Our Disappearing Shoreline
The cycle of land erosion
It makes sense that every time sea level goes higher, the shoreline is going to move inland. But the ratio is surprising. For each foot of rise, the average global shoreline moves inland about 300 feet — the length of a football field.Keep that ratio in mind. To answer our original question, one foot of sea level rise moves the shoreline inland by something like 300 feet, or more if you live in a low coastal zone like most of Florida. (...)
When Will We Start?
So no, we’re not safe during “modest” sea level rise. A rising sea level shouldn’t be counted in vertical inches and feet, but in horizontal feet, yards and miles, measured from the previous shoreline to where our towns and cities will be safe for the next 100 years or so.
How long will it take to effectively move New York City? Mumbai? Jakarta? Shanghai? San Diego? Forever, if the planning never starts.
So no, we’re not safe during “modest” sea level rise. A rising sea level shouldn’t be counted in vertical inches and feet, but in horizontal feet, yards and miles, measured from the previous shoreline to where our towns and cities will be safe for the next 100 years or so.
How long will it take to effectively move New York City? Mumbai? Jakarta? Shanghai? San Diego? Forever, if the planning never starts.
by Thomas Neuburger, God's Spies | Read more:
Image: Life cycle of a landslide on a bluff composed of sediment (modified from Kelley and others, 1989) via:
The Newest College Admissions Ploy
Paying to Make Your Teen a “Peer-Reviewed” Author
On a family trip to the Jersey Shore in the summer of 2021, Sophia’s go-to meal was the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. The buns were toasty, the chicken was crispy and the fries didn’t spill from the bag.
Sophia was entering her sophomore year in prep school, but her parents were already thinking ahead to college. They paid to enroll her in an online service called Scholar Launch, whose programs start at $3,500. Scholar Launch, which started in 2019, connects high school students with mentors who work with them on research papers that can be published and enhance their college applications.
Publication “is the objective,” Scholar Launch says on its website. “We have numerous publication partners, all are peer-reviewed journals.”
The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”
Sophia said she chose marketing as her field because it “sounded interesting.” She attended weekly group sessions with a Scholar Launch mentor, a marketing executive who also taught at an Ivy League business school, before working one-on-one with a teaching assistant. Assigned to analyze a company’s marketing strategy, she selected Chick-fil-A.
Sophia’s paper offered a glowing assessment. She credited Chick-fil-A as “responsible for the popularity of the chicken sandwich,” praised its fare as healthier than fast-food burgers, saluted its “humorous yet honest” slogan (a cow saying, “Eat mor chikin”) and admired its “family-friendly” attitude and “traditional beliefs,” exemplified by closing its restaurants on Sundays. Parts of her paper sounded like a customer endorsement (and she acknowledged to ProPublica that her marketing analysis could’ve been stronger). Neither too dry nor too juicy, the company’s signature sandwich “is the perfect blend to have me wanting more after every bite,” she wrote. “Just from the taste,” Chick-fil-A “is destined for success.”
Her heartfelt tribute to the chicken chain appeared on the website of a new online journal for high school research, the Scholarly Review. The publication touts its “thorough process of review” by “highly accomplished professors and academics,” but it also displays what are known as preprints. They aren’t publications “in the traditional sense” and aren’t vetted by Scholarly Review’s editorial board, according to Roger Worthington, its chair.
That preprint platform is where Sophia’s paper appeared. Now a 17-year-old high school junior, she said she wasn’t aware of the difference between the journal and the preprint platform, and she didn’t think the less prestigious placement would hurt her college chances: “It’s just important that there’s a link out there.”
On a family trip to the Jersey Shore in the summer of 2021, Sophia’s go-to meal was the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. The buns were toasty, the chicken was crispy and the fries didn’t spill from the bag.
Sophia was entering her sophomore year in prep school, but her parents were already thinking ahead to college. They paid to enroll her in an online service called Scholar Launch, whose programs start at $3,500. Scholar Launch, which started in 2019, connects high school students with mentors who work with them on research papers that can be published and enhance their college applications.
The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”
Sophia said she chose marketing as her field because it “sounded interesting.” She attended weekly group sessions with a Scholar Launch mentor, a marketing executive who also taught at an Ivy League business school, before working one-on-one with a teaching assistant. Assigned to analyze a company’s marketing strategy, she selected Chick-fil-A.
Sophia’s paper offered a glowing assessment. She credited Chick-fil-A as “responsible for the popularity of the chicken sandwich,” praised its fare as healthier than fast-food burgers, saluted its “humorous yet honest” slogan (a cow saying, “Eat mor chikin”) and admired its “family-friendly” attitude and “traditional beliefs,” exemplified by closing its restaurants on Sundays. Parts of her paper sounded like a customer endorsement (and she acknowledged to ProPublica that her marketing analysis could’ve been stronger). Neither too dry nor too juicy, the company’s signature sandwich “is the perfect blend to have me wanting more after every bite,” she wrote. “Just from the taste,” Chick-fil-A “is destined for success.”
Her heartfelt tribute to the chicken chain appeared on the website of a new online journal for high school research, the Scholarly Review. The publication touts its “thorough process of review” by “highly accomplished professors and academics,” but it also displays what are known as preprints. They aren’t publications “in the traditional sense” and aren’t vetted by Scholarly Review’s editorial board, according to Roger Worthington, its chair.
That preprint platform is where Sophia’s paper appeared. Now a 17-year-old high school junior, she said she wasn’t aware of the difference between the journal and the preprint platform, and she didn’t think the less prestigious placement would hurt her college chances: “It’s just important that there’s a link out there.”
Sophia is preparing to apply to college at a time when the criteria for gaining entry are in flux. The Supreme Court appears poised to curtail race-conscious affirmative action. Grade inflation makes it harder to pick students based on GPA, since so many have A averages. And the SAT and ACT tests, long criticized for favoring white and wealthy students, have fallen out of fashion at many universities, which have made them optional or dropped them entirely.
As these differentiators recede and the number of applications soars, colleges are grappling with the latest pay-to-play maneuver that gives the rich an edge: published research papers. A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential. (...)
Online research services are an offshoot of the booming college-admissions-advising industry. They draw many of their students from the same affluent population that hires private counselors. Many families that are already paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for advice on essay writing and extracurricular activities pay thousands more for research help. Scholar Launch charges $3,500 for “junior” research programs and between $4,500 and $8,800 for advanced research, according to its website. (...)
Then there’s the question of credentials. Lumiere Education’s website has routinely identified mentors as Ph.D.s even when they don’t have a doctorate and described itself as “founded by Oxford and Harvard PhDs,” even though its founders, Dhruva Bhat and Stephen Turban, are pursuing doctorates. It’s “shorthand,” Turban said. “We’re not trying to deceive anyone.” After ProPublica questioned the practice, Lumiere changed mentors’ credentials on its website from “PhD” to “PhD student.”
Paid “mentors,” who are frequently doctoral students, play key roles in the process of generating papers by high schoolers. The job is “one of the most lucrative side hustles for graduate students,” as one Columbia Ph.D. candidate in political science put it. Another Ph.D. candidate, who mentored for two services, said that one paid her $200 an hour, and the other paid $150 — far more than the $25 an hour she earned as a teaching assistant in an Ivy League graduate course.
In some instances, the mentors seem to function as something more than advisers. Since high schoolers generally don’t arrive with a research topic, the mentor helps them choose it, and then may pitch in with writing, editing and scientific analysis.
by Daniel Golden, and Kunal Purohit, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Rose Wong for ProPublica
As these differentiators recede and the number of applications soars, colleges are grappling with the latest pay-to-play maneuver that gives the rich an edge: published research papers. A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential. (...)
The programs serve at least 12,000 students a year worldwide. Most families are paying between $2,500 and $10,000 to improve their odds of getting into U.S. universities that accept as few as 1 in every 25 applicants. Some of the biggest services are located in China, and international students abound even in several U.S.-based programs.
The services pair high schoolers with academic mentors for 10-15 weeks to produce research papers. Online services typically shape the topic, direction and duration of the project, and urge students to complete and publish a paper regardless of how fruitful the exploration has been. “Publication specialists” then help steer the papers into a dizzying array of online journals and preprint platforms. Almost any high school paper can find an outlet. Alongside hardcore science papers are ones with titles like “The Willingness of Humans to Settle on Mars, and the Factors that Affect it,” “Social Media; Blessing Or Curse” and “Is Bitcoin A Blessing Or A Curse?”
“You’re teaching students to be cynical about research,” said Kent Anderson, past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and former publishing director of the New England Journal of Medicine. “That’s the really corrosive part. ‘I can hire someone to do it. We can get it done, we can get it published, what’s the big deal?’” (...)
The services pair high schoolers with academic mentors for 10-15 weeks to produce research papers. Online services typically shape the topic, direction and duration of the project, and urge students to complete and publish a paper regardless of how fruitful the exploration has been. “Publication specialists” then help steer the papers into a dizzying array of online journals and preprint platforms. Almost any high school paper can find an outlet. Alongside hardcore science papers are ones with titles like “The Willingness of Humans to Settle on Mars, and the Factors that Affect it,” “Social Media; Blessing Or Curse” and “Is Bitcoin A Blessing Or A Curse?”
“You’re teaching students to be cynical about research,” said Kent Anderson, past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and former publishing director of the New England Journal of Medicine. “That’s the really corrosive part. ‘I can hire someone to do it. We can get it done, we can get it published, what’s the big deal?’” (...)
Online research services are an offshoot of the booming college-admissions-advising industry. They draw many of their students from the same affluent population that hires private counselors. Many families that are already paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for advice on essay writing and extracurricular activities pay thousands more for research help. Scholar Launch charges $3,500 for “junior” research programs and between $4,500 and $8,800 for advanced research, according to its website. (...)
Then there’s the question of credentials. Lumiere Education’s website has routinely identified mentors as Ph.D.s even when they don’t have a doctorate and described itself as “founded by Oxford and Harvard PhDs,” even though its founders, Dhruva Bhat and Stephen Turban, are pursuing doctorates. It’s “shorthand,” Turban said. “We’re not trying to deceive anyone.” After ProPublica questioned the practice, Lumiere changed mentors’ credentials on its website from “PhD” to “PhD student.”
Paid “mentors,” who are frequently doctoral students, play key roles in the process of generating papers by high schoolers. The job is “one of the most lucrative side hustles for graduate students,” as one Columbia Ph.D. candidate in political science put it. Another Ph.D. candidate, who mentored for two services, said that one paid her $200 an hour, and the other paid $150 — far more than the $25 an hour she earned as a teaching assistant in an Ivy League graduate course.
In some instances, the mentors seem to function as something more than advisers. Since high schoolers generally don’t arrive with a research topic, the mentor helps them choose it, and then may pitch in with writing, editing and scientific analysis.
by Daniel Golden, and Kunal Purohit, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Rose Wong for ProPublica
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
A Big El Niño is Looming
How warm water in the Pacific shapes storms, droughts, and record heat around the world.
El Niño is the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, and this year’s El Niño is poised to be a big one, sending shock waves into weather patterns around the world. It’s likely to set new heat records, energize rainfall in South America, fuel drought in Africa, and disrupt the global economy. It may already have helped fuel early-season heat waves in Asia this year.
“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement earlier this month. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. (...)
How does El Niño work?
Fishers off the coast of Ecuador and Peru coined the term El Niño in the 19th century to describe a warm water current that regularly built up along the west coast of South America around Christmas (“El Niño” means “the boy,” a reference to the Christ child.)
The warm water turned out to be part of a much larger complicated system connecting seas and skies all over the world. Scientists now know that the Pacific Ocean cycles between warm, neutral, and cool phases roughly every two to seven years, inducing changes in the ocean and in the atmosphere. This back-and-forth is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s “the strongest fluctuation of the climate system on the planet,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (You can read a more detailed explanation of El Niño’s mechanics here.)
The key thing to understand is that the Pacific Ocean is huge. Huuuuge. Huuuuuuuuge. And that’s just the surface area; the Pacific averages 13,000 feet in depth but can dip as low as 36,000 feet. Water isn’t just moving north, south, east, and west, but up and down. These currents are driven by wind as well as temperature and salt gradients.
Earth’s oceans also act as a giant thermal battery. They’ve absorbed upward of 90 percent of the warming humans have induced from burning fossil fuels, and the Pacific, at least, appears to be warming particularly fast.
All this adds up to a world-changing amount of energy packed into one big ocean.
During ENSO’s neutral phase, wind pushes warm water in the Pacific around the equator from east to west. This lets warm water pool near Indonesia and raises sea levels there by 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) above normal compared to the coast of South America. The warmer water near Asia evaporates more readily and fuels rainstorms there. And as surface waters get pushed away from South America, water from deeper in the ocean rises, bringing with it valuable nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. This phenomenon is called upwelling, and it’s critical for nourishing sea life. About half the fish in the world are caught in upwelling zones.
When El Niño starts picking up, this engine shifts gears. The trade winds slow down and the warm water near Asia starts sloshing back eastward across the Pacific, reaching the coast of South America. The drift in warm water also moves evaporation and rain such that southeast Asia and Australia tend to get drier while Peru and Ecuador typically see more precipitation.
“It creates a lot of convection and a lot of thunderstorms in a part of the world that doesn’t always have that activity,” said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA. “You release a lot of energy and a lot of heat into the atmosphere and this creates waves that propagate in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere symmetrically.”
These perturbations can then deflect weather patterns across the world. For instance, in the US, El Niño typically leads to less rainfall in the Pacific Northwest and more in the Southwest. But it’s one of several factors that influences the weather, making it tricky to anticipate just how it will play out in a given year. “It’s not always a one-to-one relationship,” Amaya said. (...)
This engine can also shift into reverse. Tradewinds blowing east to west across the Pacific get stronger, cooling the region around the equator, a phenomenon known as a La Niña. This tends to have a cooling effect over the whole planet.
What can we expect this year?
El Niño typically picks up over the summer and shows its strongest effects over the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Right now, forecasts drawing on ocean buoys, sensors, satellite measurements, and computer models show that a strong one is brewing as the eastern Pacific Ocean steadily warms up just below its surface.
“The vast majority ... are assuming that we’re going to have a big El Niño this winter,” said Amaya. “I think we’re definitely expecting to break global temperature records this year.”
Part of what’s making this so jarring is that ENSO is coming out of an unusually long La Niña phase. They typically last one to two years, but the world has been in one since 2020. “There’s only been three triple-dip La Niñas in the last 50 years: One in 1973 to 76, one from 1998 to 2001, and then this one,” said McPhaden. That has allowed more heat energy to accumulate in the ocean and may have helped cushion some of the warming due to climate change. However, the World Meteorological Organization noted that the past eight years were still the hottest on record.
by Umair Irfan , Vox | Read more:
Image: NOAA
“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement earlier this month. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. (...)
How does El Niño work?
Fishers off the coast of Ecuador and Peru coined the term El Niño in the 19th century to describe a warm water current that regularly built up along the west coast of South America around Christmas (“El Niño” means “the boy,” a reference to the Christ child.)
The warm water turned out to be part of a much larger complicated system connecting seas and skies all over the world. Scientists now know that the Pacific Ocean cycles between warm, neutral, and cool phases roughly every two to seven years, inducing changes in the ocean and in the atmosphere. This back-and-forth is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s “the strongest fluctuation of the climate system on the planet,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (You can read a more detailed explanation of El Niño’s mechanics here.)
The key thing to understand is that the Pacific Ocean is huge. Huuuuge. Huuuuuuuuge. And that’s just the surface area; the Pacific averages 13,000 feet in depth but can dip as low as 36,000 feet. Water isn’t just moving north, south, east, and west, but up and down. These currents are driven by wind as well as temperature and salt gradients.
Earth’s oceans also act as a giant thermal battery. They’ve absorbed upward of 90 percent of the warming humans have induced from burning fossil fuels, and the Pacific, at least, appears to be warming particularly fast.
All this adds up to a world-changing amount of energy packed into one big ocean.
During ENSO’s neutral phase, wind pushes warm water in the Pacific around the equator from east to west. This lets warm water pool near Indonesia and raises sea levels there by 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) above normal compared to the coast of South America. The warmer water near Asia evaporates more readily and fuels rainstorms there. And as surface waters get pushed away from South America, water from deeper in the ocean rises, bringing with it valuable nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. This phenomenon is called upwelling, and it’s critical for nourishing sea life. About half the fish in the world are caught in upwelling zones.
When El Niño starts picking up, this engine shifts gears. The trade winds slow down and the warm water near Asia starts sloshing back eastward across the Pacific, reaching the coast of South America. The drift in warm water also moves evaporation and rain such that southeast Asia and Australia tend to get drier while Peru and Ecuador typically see more precipitation.
“It creates a lot of convection and a lot of thunderstorms in a part of the world that doesn’t always have that activity,” said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA. “You release a lot of energy and a lot of heat into the atmosphere and this creates waves that propagate in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere symmetrically.”
These perturbations can then deflect weather patterns across the world. For instance, in the US, El Niño typically leads to less rainfall in the Pacific Northwest and more in the Southwest. But it’s one of several factors that influences the weather, making it tricky to anticipate just how it will play out in a given year. “It’s not always a one-to-one relationship,” Amaya said. (...)
This engine can also shift into reverse. Tradewinds blowing east to west across the Pacific get stronger, cooling the region around the equator, a phenomenon known as a La Niña. This tends to have a cooling effect over the whole planet.
What can we expect this year?
El Niño typically picks up over the summer and shows its strongest effects over the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Right now, forecasts drawing on ocean buoys, sensors, satellite measurements, and computer models show that a strong one is brewing as the eastern Pacific Ocean steadily warms up just below its surface.
“The vast majority ... are assuming that we’re going to have a big El Niño this winter,” said Amaya. “I think we’re definitely expecting to break global temperature records this year.”
Part of what’s making this so jarring is that ENSO is coming out of an unusually long La Niña phase. They typically last one to two years, but the world has been in one since 2020. “There’s only been three triple-dip La Niñas in the last 50 years: One in 1973 to 76, one from 1998 to 2001, and then this one,” said McPhaden. That has allowed more heat energy to accumulate in the ocean and may have helped cushion some of the warming due to climate change. However, the World Meteorological Organization noted that the past eight years were still the hottest on record.
by Umair Irfan , Vox | Read more:
Image: NOAA
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Joe Walsh & Barnstorm
[ed. Why he ever hooked up with those loser Eagles, I'll never know. See also: Joe the guitar perfectionist: StarLicks Master Sessions with Joe Walsh.]
The Average American Millennial
"There's no way around it: The average American millennial is financially behind.
Faced with a high cost of living, staggering student-loan debt, and the fallout of the Great Recession, American millennials are trying to make ends meet in the midst of The Great American Affordability Crisis."
* Meet the average American millennial, who's a parent and homeowner with a net worth of $128,000 and hoping for student-debt relief
"Millennials are growing up.
The oldest of the generation, which includes anyone born between 1981 and 1996, is now past the age of 40. In recent years, many have checked off major life milestones including buying a home and having children, and some could even be on the verge of a midlife crisis. (...)
Despite these obstacles, the average millennial is faring better financially than they have in the past. And while some of this may simply be a byproduct of getting older — people tend to earn more over the course of their careers — some experts have argued that even compared to past generations, millennials are doing pretty well financially these days."
[ed. Those millennials are sure amazing. They've turned it all around in just three years! Both articles from Business Insider - March, 2020 and May, 2023. (h/t via: Twitter)]
In a Gift to Polluting Industries, Supreme Court Rolls Back Clean Water Act Protections
The vast majority of wetlands in the United States — more than 100 million acres — are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Sackett v. EPA. Wetlands are critically important to clean drinking water and flood mitigation; they’re also effective at sequestering carbon and a boon to drought resilience, storing water during dry periods. But in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court brushed off peer-reviewed science and plain old common sense that you can’t protect the water downstream, which even the majority agreed is covered by the law, if you’re polluting it upstream.
The case was filed by a wealthy Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who were annoyed that they were required to get a special permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to build on their land because of its proximity to Priest Lake. The Sacketts’ land contains wetlands, but because the wetlands are separated from the lake by a road, they argued the permit was unnecessary. It’s almost certain they would have gotten the permit had they applied, but they opted to sue instead. The court took the Sacketts’ case as an opportunity to open up a broader discussion about what exactly the Clean Water Act is meant to protect, changing the law completely and removing protections from any wetland not immediately connected to a body of water.
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with his conservative colleagues, accused the majority of having effectively “rewritten” the Clean Water Act, which was originally passed in 1972 and updated in 1977.
“Since 1977, when Congress explicitly included ‘adjacent’ wetlands within the act’s coverage, the Army Corps has adopted a variety of interpretations of its authority over those wetlands — some more expansive and others less expansive,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But throughout those 45 years and across all eight presidential administrations, the Army Corps has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”
In the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court applied a new interpretation of the word “adjacent,” removing protections for any wetlands that are not immediately adjoining lakes, streams, rivers, or oceans, which will have a profound impact on coastal communities around the country. “Wetlands are essential for protecting disadvantaged communities, which are often in low-lying areas, from flooding,” Nick Torrey, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said. Torrey added that wetlands are also critical to the many fishing businesses in the southeast, where he practices. “We have a saying: No wetlands, no seafood,” he said.
“The court’s approach today was to disregard several decades’ worth of precedent interpreting the Clean Water Act,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, said. For the past 40 years, the court has interpreted the word “adjacent” to mean what it does to everyone else; in this ruling, five justices said “well actually” adjacent means adjoining, so if there is anything in between a wetland and the water, that wetland doesn’t need to be protected.
It’s not a decision underpinned by science, but rather a legal invention known as the “clear statement rule,” a term the justices use when they want to assert their power to ignore Congress’s wishes and interpret the law solely as written. “The court is increasingly using the clear statement rule to narrow laws written years ago by Congresses that sought to create environmental protections like the Clean Water Act,” Sankar said.
by Amy Westervelt, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. This is a huge deal - one that a variety of industries and special interest groups have been pushing for decades. Environmental destruction to follow (thanks again, Alito).]
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with his conservative colleagues, accused the majority of having effectively “rewritten” the Clean Water Act, which was originally passed in 1972 and updated in 1977.
“Since 1977, when Congress explicitly included ‘adjacent’ wetlands within the act’s coverage, the Army Corps has adopted a variety of interpretations of its authority over those wetlands — some more expansive and others less expansive,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But throughout those 45 years and across all eight presidential administrations, the Army Corps has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”
In the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court applied a new interpretation of the word “adjacent,” removing protections for any wetlands that are not immediately adjoining lakes, streams, rivers, or oceans, which will have a profound impact on coastal communities around the country. “Wetlands are essential for protecting disadvantaged communities, which are often in low-lying areas, from flooding,” Nick Torrey, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said. Torrey added that wetlands are also critical to the many fishing businesses in the southeast, where he practices. “We have a saying: No wetlands, no seafood,” he said.
“The court’s approach today was to disregard several decades’ worth of precedent interpreting the Clean Water Act,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, said. For the past 40 years, the court has interpreted the word “adjacent” to mean what it does to everyone else; in this ruling, five justices said “well actually” adjacent means adjoining, so if there is anything in between a wetland and the water, that wetland doesn’t need to be protected.
It’s not a decision underpinned by science, but rather a legal invention known as the “clear statement rule,” a term the justices use when they want to assert their power to ignore Congress’s wishes and interpret the law solely as written. “The court is increasingly using the clear statement rule to narrow laws written years ago by Congresses that sought to create environmental protections like the Clean Water Act,” Sankar said.
by Amy Westervelt, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. This is a huge deal - one that a variety of industries and special interest groups have been pushing for decades. Environmental destruction to follow (thanks again, Alito).]
Monday, May 29, 2023
Is Cybersecurity an Unsolvable Problem?
In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made a grievous error, setting his reinfection rate much too high. The worm spread so rapidly that it brought down the entire computer network at Cornell University, crippled those at several other universities, and even infiltrated the computers at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories.
Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham, among other accomplishments.
The "Morris Worm" is just one of five hacking cases that Scott Shapiro highlights in his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Shapiro is a legal philosopher at Yale University, but as a child, his mathematician father—who worked at Bell Labs—sparked an interest in computing by bringing home various components, like microchips, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and breadboards. Their father/son outings included annual attendance at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers convention in New York City. Then, a classmate in Shapiro's high school biology class introduced him to programming on the school's TRS-80, and Shapiro was hooked. He moved on to working on an Apple II and majored in computer science in college but lost interest afterward and went to law school instead.
With his Yale colleague Oona Hathaway, Shapiro co-authored a book called The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, a sweeping historical analysis of the laws of war that spans from Hugo Grotius, the early 17th century father of international law, all the way to 2014. That experience raised numerous questions about the future of warfare—namely, cyberwar and whether the same "rules" would apply. The topic seemed like a natural choice for his next book, particularly given Shapiro's background in computer science and coding.
Despite that background, "I honestly had no idea what to say about it," Shapiro told Ars. "I just found it all extremely confusing." He was then asked to co-teach a special course, "The Law and Technology of Cyber Conflict," with Hathaway and Yale's computer science department. But the equal mix of law students and computer science students trying to learn about two very different highly technical fields proved to be a challenging combination. "It was the worst class I've ever taught in my career," said Shapiro. "At any given time, half the class was bored and the other half was confused. I learned nothing from it, and nor did any of the students."
That experience goaded Shapiro to spend the next few years trying to crack that particular nut. He brushed up on C, x86 assembly code, and Linux and immersed himself in the history of hacking, achieving his first hack at the age of 52. But he also approached the issue from his field of expertise. "I'm a philosopher, so I like to go to first principles," he said. "But computer science is only a century old, and hacking, or cybersecurity, is maybe a few decades old. It's a very young field, and part of the problem is that people haven't thought it through from first principles." The result was Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.
The book is a lively, engaging read filled with fascinating stories and colorful characters: the infamous Bulgarian hacker known as Dark Avenger, whose identity is still unknown; Cameron LaCroix, a 16-year-old from south Boston notorious for hacking into Paris Hilton's Sidekick II in 2005; Paras Jha, a Rutgers student who designed the "Mirai botnet"—apparently to get out of a calculus exam—and nearly destroyed the Internet in 2016 when he hacked Minecraft; and of course, the titular Fancy Bear hack by Russian military intelligence that was so central to the 2016 presidential election. (Fun fact: Shapiro notes that John von Neumann "built a self-reproducing automaton in 1949, decades before any other hacker... [and] he wrote it without a computer.")
But Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'"
by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica | Read more:[ed. Personal privacy died a long time ago.]
Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham, among other accomplishments.
With his Yale colleague Oona Hathaway, Shapiro co-authored a book called The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, a sweeping historical analysis of the laws of war that spans from Hugo Grotius, the early 17th century father of international law, all the way to 2014. That experience raised numerous questions about the future of warfare—namely, cyberwar and whether the same "rules" would apply. The topic seemed like a natural choice for his next book, particularly given Shapiro's background in computer science and coding.
Despite that background, "I honestly had no idea what to say about it," Shapiro told Ars. "I just found it all extremely confusing." He was then asked to co-teach a special course, "The Law and Technology of Cyber Conflict," with Hathaway and Yale's computer science department. But the equal mix of law students and computer science students trying to learn about two very different highly technical fields proved to be a challenging combination. "It was the worst class I've ever taught in my career," said Shapiro. "At any given time, half the class was bored and the other half was confused. I learned nothing from it, and nor did any of the students."
That experience goaded Shapiro to spend the next few years trying to crack that particular nut. He brushed up on C, x86 assembly code, and Linux and immersed himself in the history of hacking, achieving his first hack at the age of 52. But he also approached the issue from his field of expertise. "I'm a philosopher, so I like to go to first principles," he said. "But computer science is only a century old, and hacking, or cybersecurity, is maybe a few decades old. It's a very young field, and part of the problem is that people haven't thought it through from first principles." The result was Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.
The book is a lively, engaging read filled with fascinating stories and colorful characters: the infamous Bulgarian hacker known as Dark Avenger, whose identity is still unknown; Cameron LaCroix, a 16-year-old from south Boston notorious for hacking into Paris Hilton's Sidekick II in 2005; Paras Jha, a Rutgers student who designed the "Mirai botnet"—apparently to get out of a calculus exam—and nearly destroyed the Internet in 2016 when he hacked Minecraft; and of course, the titular Fancy Bear hack by Russian military intelligence that was so central to the 2016 presidential election. (Fun fact: Shapiro notes that John von Neumann "built a self-reproducing automaton in 1949, decades before any other hacker... [and] he wrote it without a computer.")
But Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'"
by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sunday, May 28, 2023
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