You Good?

Do not under any circumstances give me a hug

Recently, I came across a version of a post that tends to be written and shared with some regularity by people with either poor manners or a vastly inflated sense of self-regard: The "I-comforted-a-sad-stranger-in-the-big-city" post. In this particular instance, a person riding the uptown 6 one evening sat next to a crying woman. Recalling a time the author themselves had been crying on the subway, the protagonist removed their headphones and asked if they could give the woman—who, as it turned out, had an aunt die recently—a hug. The pair embraced; some comforting words were exchanged. “This woman needed help, and I was here for her, stranger to stranger,” the author wrote. “Ny proud, people, this is what we do.”

 

As the weather turns grim, daylight barely lasts the length of a work day, and a chain of winter holidays promises to agitate even the most stable New Yorker's nerves, the number of people crying on the subway or on a park bench or while shuffling down the street is likely to increase—and I’d like to remind the people of New York City that this hugging and chatting business is usually not, in fact, what we do.

One of the truest and most sublime rights we possess in a trash-strewn city of 8.5 million is to cry in public unbothered, ideally next to a bottle of piss or over the bone-crunching sound of an elevated train. It’s a ritual to be respected—in most cases, the perfect collective anonymity of the city offers a more private weeping experience than in an apartment or office, where you might encounter a person who feels compelled to ask how they might help. In extreme cases, when it’s possible someone is experiencing such a wave of preventable agitation or grief you feel moved to alleviate it in some way there is only one course of action: You ask that person, briefly and politely, if they’re good.

It is my personal opinion that if you encounter a crying person on the train, your sole responsibility as a New Yorker is to do something sort of psycho in their general vicinity in order to compound the weepers’ sorrow and make a great story later on. There’s something poetic and deeply affirming about having a bad time surrounded by weirdos and/or filth. On one occasion, I cried next to an insufferable bachelor party in Midtown as men in mirrored sunglasses detailed last night's grotesque exploits. A friend of mine cried into a plate of mozzarella sticks at the Applebees in Downtown Brooklyn at 11:00 in the morning to a Fiona Apple song. No one asked for a hug because it would have been obscene, an aberration in the therapeutic practice of feeling sad and sorry for yourself in a place that will continue churning at a rapid clip no matter how you, an insignificant speck, happen to feel.

by Molly Osberg, Hell Gate |  Read more:

Image: Zhivko Minkov/Unsplash

[ed. Sensible advice.]

It's Official: Golf Ball Distances To Be Restricted (and Drivers Might Be Next)

It’s official. Golf, but shorter.

The USGA and the R&A formally announced Wednesday their intention to roll back the distance golf balls can travel. The rollback goes into effect January 2028 for elite competitions and for everybody come January 2030. The decision, part of the governing bodies’ Distance Insights Project, comes after some three years of “Notice and Comment” in which the USGA and R&A accepted feedback from golf’s stakeholders.

“Governance is hard. And while thousands will claim that we did too much, there will be just as many who said we didn’t do enough to protect the game long-term,” said Mike Whan, CEO of the USGA. “But from the very beginning, we’ve been driven to do what is right for the game, without bias. As we’ve said, doing nothing is not an option—and we would be failing in our responsibility to protect the game’s future if we didn’t take appropriate action now.”

The specifics, first reported by Golf Digest, involve the test for the Overall Distance Standard. The governing bodies are increasing the swing speed at which golf balls are tested from the current standard of 120 mph to 125 mph without changing the distance limit of 317 yards (plus a three-yard tolerance) with a launch angle of 11 degrees and 2,200 rpm of spin. In layman’s terms, according to the USGA and R&A, the effect could be a distance loss of nine to 11 yards at the PGA Tour or DP World Tour level, five to seven yards for the LPGA/LET and between five yards or less for everyday players.

All golf balls submitted to the USGA for conformance during or after October 2027 will be evaluated using the new protocol. In other words, if everyday golfers want to continue using longer golf balls in 2028 and 2029, they will be older-model balls. There was no mention in the Notice of Decision how one would be able to tell what is an old conforming ball and what is a new conforming ball other than comparing it to the conforming list. However, John Spitzer, the USGA's managing director of equipment standards, said approximately one-third of balls currently on the conforming list would still be conforming under the new protocol, primarily two- and-three piece balls with ionomer covers.

The change in speed and the fact it affects all golfers are significant departures from the governing bodies previous stance. In 2022, the speed being looked at was 125 mph but that was amended in March 2023 to 127. However, also at that time the proposal was stated as a Model Local Rule impacting elite professional golfers only. Said Whan at the time, “We don’t see recreational golf obsoleting golf courses any time soon."

So why the change to include everybody? The governing bodies say the move to a universal rollback was the result of feedback during the Notice and Comment period triggered in March after the announcement of the proposed MLR. In a note to all industry stakeholders, the USGA and R&A conveyed that, “While we previously proposed a targeted change to only elite golf, we have incorporated feedback from a broad range of stakeholders/players who stressed the importance of unification in the game of golf, mainly the importance of maintaining a single set of playing rules and a single set of equipment standards. This feedback clearly indicated that an across-the-game solution with deferred implementation is the preferred solution.” (...)

"It's five yards at most and likely limited to your driver," Pagel said. "I don't want to minimize people's feelings or concerns about losing even a yard. We all have those concerns. We all want that extra yard or two. But just put this in the practical senses of this would mean, you know, 222 yards instead of 225. And you do have the ability to move tees up. You do have the ability to play forward tees. I would just say trust in the process. Over the next six years, I think we'll find that the sky hasn't fallen, the game is still going to be healthy.”

Perhaps just as important as the decision on golf balls, it appears the governing bodies are not quite done putting a governor on distance. Included in the note to stakeholders were two additional areas being looked at. The first is expanding testing of submitted drivers to keep tabs on “CT Creep,” which is drivers getting springier over time due to use, leading to the possibility of a conforming club becoming non-conforming. This is not a change, per se, and does not impact everyday players.

The next item, however, is to continue its research into the forgiveness of drivers at the elite level, which could lead to reductions in moment of inertia (which mitigates distance loss on mis-hits), driver-head size or both. Although the language was aimed solely at elite players, as we have seen with the ball rollback decision, things have a way of changing.

by E. Michael Johnson, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Distance is overrated (for most of us). Just get better with all your clubs (especially around greens). I imagine (as with previous restrictions on driver size, COR, anchored 'broomstick' putters, etc.) this will blow over soon enough. Rory McIlroy had the best response, I think (see here); but there were opposing perspectives too (see here). Nearly everyone agrees something had to be done - you can't just keep increasing the length of golf courses, and it's no fun watching the game reduced to simple bomb and gounge driver/wedge shots. It's up to the engineers to figure it all out now. More on the rollback here (SI).]

Isaiah Collier

[ed. See also: Open the Door.]

Joan Mitchell, 1961
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Ali Solomon, November 2023
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The Cocktail Revolution

If you’ve sidled up to bars over the past decade or two, you’ve probably noticed a change. Gone are the days of boat-sized, vaguely fruity concoctions listed out on a menu of x-tinis; of haphazardly made Old-Fashioneds topped with club soda and what might as well be a complete fruit salad. Sour mix is out, and fresh juice and homemade syrups are in.

Bars – especially those billing themselves as cocktail bars, but also restaurants with what we now call ‘cocktail programs’ – are taking time with their drinks, carefully measuring ingredients, making syrups and infusions in-house. They painstakingly press and strain fresh juice (or construct acid-adjusted simulacra of the same), reconstruct long-forgotten classics and obscurities, and build novel drinks out of an ever-expanding array of unusual, unexpected, and – even to sophisticated drinkers – largely unknown ingredients. If you want a Manhattan variation made with Fey Anmè – a forest liqueur inspired by Haitian botanicals and made from hibiscus buds, dandelion, and bitter melon . . . well, some enterprising bartender probably has you covered. And if not, with a little bit of effort, you can probably stir one up at home.

This is a far cry from the simplistic, slapdash, thoughtlessly boozy drinking culture that ruled from the 1970s through the 1990s. It’s fussy, precise, thoughtful – at times almost overeducated – and it has resulted in a rapid improvement in the quality and creativity of craft cocktails since the turn of the century. This period of improvement has been called the cocktail renaissance.

The question of how, exactly, modern cocktails achieved such significant quality gains in such a short period of time has been answered in book-length form by multiple authors, including but not limited to cocktail writer Robert Simonson (A Proper Drink), bartender and drinks expert Derek Brown (Spirits Sugar Water Bitters), and cocktail historian David Wondrich (Imbibe!). Many factors contributed to the boom, including the role of the internet in information sharing, the long tail of the culinary revolution that began in the 1970s, the evolution of craft beer and the elevated expectations of educated drinkers that went along with it, and a renewed emphasis on rigorous bartending technique.

But as much as anything, the revitalization of the cocktail has been built on an obsession with ingredient quality and variety, and a pursuant explosion in product availability. Put simply, cocktails are better and more interesting because what we put in them is better and more interesting, thanks to a combination of demand from knowledgeable practitioners and supply from importers and entrepreneurs delivering products to meet that demand.

As modern cocktails continue to evolve, so will the revolution in ingredients, as ever more sophisticated customized creations become part of the tool kit for both top-flight bars and home bartenders. Indeed, you can already see the seeds of the next stage of the renaissance beginning to flower, as modern cocktail wizards apply increasingly abstruse culinary techniques to both classic drinks and novel creations.

------

To understand the role that ingredient availability has played in the cocktail renaissance, consider the Aviation.

The Aviation is a shaken gin-based cocktail with a distinctive lavender hue; conceptually, it’s best understood as a tailored variation of the sour – a broad cocktail category that, in its most basic form, involves a spirit, citrus juice, and some sort of sugar or other sweetener.

The first known appearance of the classic recipe came in Hugo R. Ensslin’s pre-Prohibition cocktail guide, Recipes for Mixed Drinks. In Ensslin’s formulation, the drink calls for four ingredients, as follows:

• ⅓ lemon juice
• ⅔ El-Bart gin
• 2 dashes maraschino
• 2 dashes crème de violette

Readers are then instructed to shake these ingredients with ice before straining into a glass.

Modern readers might notice a few historical quirks about the recipe. For one thing, there are no units of measurement specified – no ounces, no teaspoons, just ratios and ‘dashes’. The book was published in 1916, before today’s standardized measurements were in use.

For another, the listing of ‘maraschino’ would have referred to some form of maraschino-flavored liqueur. Today, there are multiple brands available in many parts of the country, and even if a recipe writer did not specify a brand, he or she would probably have noted the fact that it’s a liqueur in order to differentiate it from the thick, sugary, nonalcoholic syrup one finds in a bottle of preserved maraschino cherries.

And then there is that final ingredient: crème de violette. Crème de violette is exactly what it sounds like – a ‘crème’ or sweet liqueur flavored with, among other things, flowers. It’s purplish in tint, and it can give the cocktail a distinctive lavender hue. Arguably, it’s the cocktail’s signature ingredient, the element that piques a drinker’s interest both in terms of how it looks and how it tastes.

Flash forward to the turn of century, however, and the ingredient had disappeared. New York Times cocktail scribe William Grimes once reportedly told cocktail enthusiast and author Ted Haigh that the Aviation was his favorite forgotten cocktail. But in Straight Up or On the Rocks, Grimes’s groundbreaking 2001 book of cocktail history and recipes, a recipe for the Aviation appears without any mention of crème de violette. Other highly regarded, thoroughly researched cocktail books from around the same time followed suit: Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails prints an Aviation recipe without the flower liqueur, as does legendary bartender Dale DeGroff’s book The Essential Cocktail.

Both Haigh and DeGroff are modern legends in the cocktail world, known for their thorough research and exacting cocktail preparation methods. Both would have been aware of Ensslin’s original, historic formulation. So why the omission?

One reason is that more than a decade after Ensslin’s book appeared, British bartender Harry Craddock published The Savoy Cocktail Book, which compiled drinks served at the Savoy Hotel in London. It has since become a sacred text for bartenders, and Craddock’s version of the Aviation did not include any crème de violette. (Haigh also writes that the original had both maraschino and either crème de violette or Crème Yvette, a proprietary violet petal liqueur, and notes that substituting either Yvette or crème de violette for maraschino results in a different cocktail: the Blue Moon.)

Another reason, however, is availability. Even as recently as the 2000s, crème de violette was all but impossible to obtain in the United States.

Crème de violette was produced in Europe, and Prohibition’s near-total restriction on alcohol sales and purchases shut down legal trade in spirits through the 1920s and early 1930s. Meanwhile, according to Dinah Sanders’s entry in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, European interest in crème de violette faded around the same time, in part because some felt the flowery spirit tasted a bit too much like soap.

So even though Prohibition ended in 1933, crème de violette did not return to American bars and liquor stores. The unique floral booze was gone from domestic distribution, and while one could still obtain a bottle in France, even there it was relatively obscure. Thus, Ensslin’s Aviation became a thing of legend.

At least, that is, until the late 2000s. Credit for the return of crème de violette goes to spirits and wine importer Eric Seed. In 2005, Seed founded Haus Alpenz, initially to distribute a relatively obscure Australian pine liqueur, Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps, which he marketed to upscale bars at ski resorts, according to a 2009 Atlantic article on Seed’s importing business.

But Seed was also aware of growing interest in other arcane ingredients, including some liqueurs mentioned in historical cocktail recipe books that could no longer be found in American liquor stores. So in 2007, Sanders writes, Haus Alpenz responded to ‘a small but persistent demand from modern mixologists’ by bringing crème de violette back to the US via the Rothman & Winter brand. Its primary intended use was as a cocktail ingredient for the nascent cocktail revival.

At first, it was difficult to find, as many liquor stores didn’t see the need to stock something so strange and obscure. But a small number of dedicated craft cocktail bartenders began to put the Aviation on their menus or make them off-menu for friends, and within several years, crème de violette became one of Seed’s top sellers. By the early 2010s, the drink became a sort of secret handshake between discerning drinkers and barkeeps – a wink and a nod between those who knew.

Today, you can order or make at home any number of purple-hued drinks that use the stuff. Some, like the Purple Reign 75, a riff on the French 75, are modern riffs on historical cocktails. Others are wholly modern creations like the Stormy Morning, which combines one flower ingredient with another – elderflower liqueur. If you’ve ever seen a lilac-colored cocktail served at a bar, there’s a good chance that it was made with crème de violette.

And Rothman & Winter is no longer the only brand that produces it; there are now at least a half dozen brands available. I currently possess three different bottles, each with its own subtly different character – one is a little sweeter, one is a little more floral, one is a little more earthy. They all work in an Aviation cocktail, but the drink’s flavor profile differs subtly depending on which bottle you employ.

The story of the Aviation, then, is the story of the entire cocktail renaissance – a story of rediscovery and revitalization, with novel ingredients coming back to the bar. 

by Peter Suderman, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Image: The Spruce Eats/Cara Cormack via

A Simple Theory of Cancel Culture

Now that everyone’s tired of talking about cancel culture, it seems about the right time for us academics to weigh in. I recently read with interest Eve Ng’s Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis, which isn’t really all that critical but does provide a useful history of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it does not offer a clear definition or explanation of what has been going on, merely a profusion of examples. My goal here is to correct that deficiency, by providing a simple theory of cancel culture, based on an analysis of the underlying social dynamics.

In order to get going on the discussion, the first thing that needs to be made clear is that the origins of cancel culture are neither political nor cultural. Cancel culture arises from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media. This is reflected in the fact that its basic features (manifest in what Ng refers to as cancellation practices) have been observed in countries all over the world and have been mobilized by individuals with a wide range of different political orientations.

In the United States, criticism of cancel culture has been deeply interwoven with controversies over “woke” politics, but as many commentators have noted, the internal dynamics of the Republican party exhibit many of the same characteristics. Fear of being labelled a RINO or cuck has had a disciplining effect on speech among conservatives that closely resembles the tyranny of speech codes on the left. So there is nothing intrinsically left-wing or woke about cancel culture. Furthermore, it is not a consequence of political polarization in the U.S., since cancellation has become an enormous issue in China as well, in this case with nationalist mobs policing online speech for minor slights, then extracting groveling confessions and apologies from celebrities.

Just this morning, I read an article about a Chinese chef who is being cancelled for posting a fried rice recipe on Weibo. (“As a chef, I will never make egg fried rice again,” Wang Gang, a celebrity chef with more than 10 million online fans, pledged in a video message on Monday. Wang’s “solemn apology” attempted to tame a frothing torrent of criticism about the video… ”) Sound familiar?

Reading this, any sensible person should be able to see there’s something going on that is new, weird, concerning, and much bigger and more important than our petty domestic political disputes. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that some people are still hold-outs, claiming that there is no such thing as cancel culture, that it’s just consequence culture, and so on. In my experience, this is a defensive reaction among those who enjoy participating in cancellation practices, most of whom seem to have a bad case of the “are we the baddies?” problem:

To put it simply, if you still don’t think that cancel culture is a problem, it’s probably because you’re a part of the problem.

On the other hand, apologists for cancel culture are correct to point out that there is nothing new about the reactions that certain forms of online speech are eliciting. That is, the social dynamics involved in cancel culture are not novel, they have been a feature of human social interaction for as long as we know. The difference is that certain strategies that individuals employ to manage interpersonal conflict have been potentiated by social media, generating mass phenomena that pose a new set of challenges.

Put succinctly, social media have dramatically expanded the power to individuals to recruit third parties to conflict. Human beings are distinctive in a variety of different ways, but one of the most important is that otherwise uninvolved third parties will often intervene in conflicts that erupt between strangers. In some cases this involves enforcement of the normative order. (...)

It’s not difficult to see how the internet generates massive amplification of people’s ability to solicit allies. Everyday conflicts that would traditionally have come and gone without notice to anyone but the parties involved can now be publicly prosecuted. People need only shoot some video, or take a picture, post it online, and invite others to take their side. It is often not difficult to find thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes even millions, who are happy to oblige. Consider this rather quotidian post to the /mildlyinfuriating subbreddit, which received over 4,400 upvotes and 176 comments, promoting it to the front page (“This is how my husband loads the dishwasher”):

This is the world we now live in. You can come home from work one day to find out, not just that your wife is mad at you, but that she has literally thousands of people on her side.

Of course, the idea that a minor domestic conflict of this sort should be a private matter, to be resolved among those directly affected, is a relatively recent one. As the institution of the charivari makes clear, people in medieval European societies took a keen interest in one another’s domestic affairs. Private life, as most of us understand it, is an 18th century innovation. The important point is not that society is reverting to an older set of norms, but that the scale of third-party intervention is vastly greater. This has dramatically enhanced people’s ability to escalate conflict, which has two notable effects. First, it has resulted in many minor conflicts, such as routine violations of etiquette, becoming much more severely contested and sanctioned. Second, it has made it possible to intimidate individuals and institutions in ways that had previously not been possible.

All of the talk about “social justice” has obscured many of these dynamics – the appropriate lens through which to understand the phenomenon of cancel culture is that of conflict theory. Indeed, one of the most frustrating things about contemporary “victimhood culture” is that so many complaints are lodged in a way that is self-evidently a form of relational aggression. This explains also why criticisms of cancel culture are likely to be ineffective at making it go away. The underlying human propensity to recruit third parties to conflict is unlikely to change, and the technological amplification of this capacity is clearly irreversible. Thus cancellation practices are not going to disappear. The only productive question is whether the way that people respond to these practices is likely to change. 

by Joseph Heath, In Due Course |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Just Stop Making Official Statements About the News. A simple answer for every CEO, school president, and City Council (Intelligencer); Interesting site. See also, The futility of arguing against identity politics (IDC); and, Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks:]

"In this context, what distinguishes Banks’ work is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has also driven changes in the social structure, such that the social and political challenges people confront are new. Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having bothered to think carefully about the social and political consequences of technological development. For example, once a society has semi-intelligent drones that can be assigned to supervise individuals at all times, what need is there for a criminal justice system? Thus in the Culture, an individual who commits a sufficiently serious crime is assigned – involuntarily – a “slap drone,” who simply prevents that person from committing any crime again. Not only does this reduce recidivism to zero, the prospect of being supervised by a drone for the rest of one’s life also serves as a powerful deterrent to crime.

This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance, once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints – and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking. (...)

Societies with strong institutions become wealthier, more powerful militarily, or some combination of the two. These are the ones whose culture reproduces, either because it is imitated, or because it is imposed on others. And yet the dominant trend in human societies, over the past century, has been significant convergence with respect to institutional structure. Most importantly, there has been practically universal acceptance of the need for a market economy and a bureaucratic state as the only desirable social structure at the national level. One can think of this as the basic blueprint of a “successful” society. This has led to an incredible narrowing of cultural possibilities, as cultures that are functionally incompatible with capitalism or bureaucracy are slowly extinguished.

This winnowing down of cultural possibilities is what constitutes the trend that is often falsely described as “Westernization.” Much of it is actually just a process of adaptation that any society must undergo, in order to bring its culture into alignment with the functional requirements of capitalism and bureaucracy. It is not that other cultures are becoming more “Western,” it is that all cultures, including Western ones, are converging around a small number of variants."

Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution

The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.

Huang is a patient monopolist. He drafted the paperwork for Nvidia with two other people at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, in 1993, and has run it ever since. At sixty, he is sarcastic and self-deprecating, with a Teddy-bear face and wispy gray hair. Nvidia’s main product is its graphics-processing unit, a circuit board with a powerful microchip at its core. In the beginning, Nvidia sold these G.P.U.s to video gamers, but in 2006 Huang began marketing them to the supercomputing community as well. Then, in 2013, on the basis of promising research from the academic computer-science community, Huang bet Nvidia’s future on artificial intelligence. A.I. had disappointed investors for decades, and Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s lead deep-learning researcher at the time, had doubts. “I didn’t want him to fall into the same trap that the A.I. industry has had in the past,” Catanzaro told me. “But, ten years plus down the road, he was right.”

In the near future, A.I. is projected to generate movies on demand, provide tutelage to children, and teach cars to drive themselves. All of these advances will occur on Nvidia G.P.U.s, and Huang’s stake in the company is now worth more than forty billion dollars.

In September, I met Huang for breakfast at the Denny’s where Nvidia was started. (The C.E.O. of Denny’s was giving him a plaque, and a TV crew was in attendance.) Huang keeps up a semi-comic deadpan patter at all times. Chatting with our waitress, he ordered seven items, including a Super Bird sandwich and a chicken-fried steak. “You know, I used to be a dishwasher here,” he told her. “But I worked hard! Like, really hard. So I got to be a busboy.”

Huang has a practical mind-set, dislikes speculation, and has never read a science-fiction novel. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow. “I do everything I can not to go out of business,” he said at breakfast. “I do everything I can not to fail.” Huang believes that the basic architecture of digital computing, little changed since it was introduced by I.B.M. in the early nineteen-sixties, is now being reconceptualized. “Deep learning is not an algorithm,” he said recently. “Deep learning is a method. It’s a new way of developing software.” The evening before our breakfast, I’d watched a video in which a robot, running this new kind of software, stared at its hands in seeming recognition, then sorted a collection of colored blocks. The video had given me chills; the obsolescence of my species seemed near. Huang, rolling a pancake around a sausage with his fingers, dismissed my concerns. “I know how it works, so there’s nothing there,” he said. “It’s no different than how microwaves work.” I pressed Huang—an autonomous robot surely presents risks that a microwave oven does not. He responded that he has never worried about the technology, not once. “All it’s doing is processing data,” he said. “There are so many other things to worry about.”

In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finished eating, I expressed my concerns that, someday soon, I would feed my notes from our conversation into an intelligence engine, then watch as it produced structured, superior prose. Huang didn’t dismiss this possibility, but he assured me that I had a few years before my John Henry moment. “It will come for the fiction writers first,” he said. Then he tipped the waitress a thousand dollars, and stood up to accept his award.

by Stephen Witt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Javier Jaén

Mary Spender: How YouTube Monetization Works

How Much YouTube Paid Me For 4,700,000 Views and why... (YouTube)

[ed. It seems to me a lot of work and commitment for relatively little compensation. But, there are spillover benefits, and you get to be a minor celebrity of sorts, too. I guess? A lot of people are doing it.]

Kelly Bets On Civilization (and More)

Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development:

Here’s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I’ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and radioactive waste poisoning the water and soil and causing three-eyed fish. They were saving the world. Of course the greedy nuclear executives, the C. Montgomery Burnses, claimed that their good atom-smashing was different from the bad atom-smashing, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?

We now know that, by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn’t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren’t saving the human future; they were destroying it. Their certainty, in opposing the march of a particular scary-looking technology, was as misplaced as it’s possible to be. Our descendants will suffer the consequences.

Read carefully, he and I don’t disagree. He’s not scoffing at doomsday predictions, he’s more arguing against people who say that AIs should be banned because they might spread misinformation or gaslight people or whatever.

Still, I think about this argument a lot. I agree he’s right about nuclear power. When it comes out in a few months, I’ll be reviewing a book that makes this same point about institutional review boards: that our fear of a tiny handful of deaths from unethical science has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from delaying ethical and life-saving medical progress. The YIMBY movement makes a similar point about housing: we hoped to prevent harm by subjecting all new construction to a host of different reviews - environmental, cultural, equity-related - and instead we caused vast harm by creating an epidemic of homelessness and forcing the middle classes to spend increasingly unaffordable sums on rent. This pattern typifies the modern age; any attempt to restore our rightful utopian flying-car future will have to start with rejecting it as vigorously as possible.

So how can I object when Aaronson turns the same lens on AI?

First, you are allowed to use Inside View. If Osama bin Laden is starting a supervirus lab, and objects that you shouldn’t shut him down because “in the past, shutting down progress out of exaggerated fear of potential harm has killed far more people than the progress itself ever could”, you are permitted to respond “yes, but you are Osama bin Laden, and this is a supervirus lab.” You don’t have to give every company trying to build the Torment Nexus a free pass just because they can figure out a way to place their work in a reference class which is usually good. All other technologies fail in predictable and limited ways. If a buggy AI exploded, that would be no worse than a buggy airplane or nuclear plant. The concern is that a buggy AI will pretend to work well, bide its time, and plot how to cause maximum damage while undetected. Also it’s smarter than you. Also this might work so well that nobody realizes they’re all buggy until there are millions of them.

But maybe opponents of every technology have some particular story why theirs is a special case. So let me try one more argument, which I think is closer to my true objection.

There’s a concept in finance called Kelly betting. It briefly gained some fame last year as a thing that FTX failed at, before people realized FTX had failed at many more fundamental things. It works like this (warning - I am bad at math and may have gotten some of this wrong): suppose you start with $1000. You’re at a casino with one game: you can, once per day, bet however much you want on a coin flip, double-or-nothing. You’re slightly psychic, so you have a 75% chance of guessing the coin flip right. That means that on average, you’ll increase your money by 50% each time you bet. Clearly this is a great opportunity. But how much do you bet per day?

Tempting but wrong answer: bet all of it each time. After all, on average you gain money each flip - each $1 invested in the coin flip game becomes $1.50. If you bet everything, then after five coin flips you’ll have (on average) $7,500. But if you just bet $1 each time , then (on average), you’ll only have $1,008. So obviously bet as much as possible, right?

But after five coin flips of $1000, there’s an 76% chance that you’ve lost all your money. Increase to 50 coin flips, and there’s a 99.999999….% chance that you’ve lost all your money. So although technically this has the highest “average utility”, all of this is coming from one super-amazing sliver of probability-space where you own more money than exists in the entire world. In every other timeline, you’re broke.

So how much should you bet? $1 is too little. These flips do, on average, increase your money by 50%; it would take forever to get anywhere betting $1 at a time. You want something that’s high enough to increase your wealth quickly, but not so high that it’s devastating and you can’t come back from it on the rare occasions when you lose.

In this case, if I understand the Kelly math right, you should bet half each time. But the lesson I take from this isn’t just the exact math. It’s: even if you know a really good bet, don’t bet everything at once.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex/ACX |  Read more:

Image: Hansueli Krapf/Wikipedia
[ed. See also: We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus (Charlie Stross/Charlie's Diary):]

"Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer: I have about thirty novels in print, translated into a dozen languages, I've won a few awards, and I've been around long enough that my wikipedia page is a mess of mangled edits.

And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

Obviously, I'm talking about Elon Musk. (He named SpaceX's drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead). But he's not the only one. There's Peter Thiel (who funds research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. when he's not getting blood transfusions from 18 year olds in hope of living forever). Marc Andreesen of Venture Capitalists Andreesen Horowitz recently published a self-proclaimed "techno-optimist manifesto" promoting the bizarre accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land, among other weirdos, and hyping the current grifter's fantasy of large language models as "artificial intelligence". Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is another. He's another space colonization enthusiast like Elon Musk, but while Musk wants to homestead Mars, Bezos is a fan of Gerard K. O'Neill's 1970s plan to build giant orbital habitat cylinders at the Earth-Moon L5 libration point. And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, only for it to turn out that his ambitious commercial virtual reality environment had no legs.

(That was a deliberate pun.)

It'd be amusing if these guys didn't have a combined net worth somewhere in the region of half a trillion euros and the desire to change the human universe, along with a load of unexamined prejudices and a bunch of half-baked politics they absorbed from the predominantly American SF stories they read in their teens. I grew up reading the same stuff but as I also write the modern version of the same stuff for a living I've spent a lot of time lifting up the rocks in the garden of SF to look at what's squirming underneath.

Science fiction influences everything this century, both our media and our physical environment. Media first: about 30% of the big budget movies coming out of the US film industry these days are science fiction or fantasy blockbusters, a massive shift since the 1970s. Computer games are wall-to-wall fantasy and SF—probably a majority of the field, outside of sports and simulation games. (Written fiction is another matter, and SF/F combined amount to something in the range 5-10% of books sold. But reading novels is a minority recreation this century, having to compete with the other media I just named. The golden age of written fiction was roughly 1850 to 1950, give or take a few decades: I make my living in an ageing field, kind of like being a classical music composer or an 8-bit games programmer today.)

Meanwhile the influence of science fiction on our environment seems to have been gathering pace throughout my entire life. The future is a marketing tool. Back in the early 20th century it was anything associated with speed—recall the fad for streamlining everything from railway locomotives to toasters, or putting fins on cars. Since about 1970 it becme more tightly associated with communication and computers.

For an example of the latter trend: a decade or two ago there was a fad for cellular phones designed to resemble the original Star Trek communicator. The communicator was movie visual shorthand for "a military two-way radio, but make it impossibly small". But it turns out that enough people wanted an impossibly small clamshell telephone that once semiconductor and battery technology got good enough to make one, they made the Motorola Razr a runaway bestseller.

It's becoming increasingly unusual to read a report of a new technology or scientific discovery that doesn't breathlessly use the phrase "it seems like science fiction". The news cycle is currently dominated by hype about artificial intelligence (a gross mis-characterisation of machine learning algorithms and large language models). A couple of years ago it was breathless hype about cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies—which turned out to be a financial services bubble that drained a lot of small investors' savings accounts into the pockets of people like convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

It's also driving politics and law. (...)

Now I've shouted as passing clouds for a bit—or dangerous marketing fads based on popular entertainment of decades past—I'd like to talk about something that I personally find much more worrying: a political ideology common among silicon valley billionaires of a certain age—known by the acronym TESCREAL—that is built on top of a shaky set of assumptions about the future of humanity. It comes straight out of an uncritical reading of the bad science fiction of decades past, and it's really dangerous.

TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism." It was identified by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specialising in existential threats to humanity." [Read more:]

[ed. And, if you're feeling extra gloomy lately and would love nothing more than immersing yourself in more AI speculation, See also: Nick Bostrom: Will AI lead to tyranny? (Undark); and, Thoughts on responsible scaling policies and regulation (Less Wrong).]

Great Heirloom Transfer

Everyone is talking about the Great Wealth Transfer but what’s already underway is the Great Heirloom Transfer (via)

via: ScarletAstrorum (X/Formerly Twitter)

Images: uncredited

[ed. I just helped a buddy move a heavy old rolltop desk and a few other items last weekend. Not exactly his design scheme, but I think his parents really didn't want them to be sold. My mom used to collect china, how often do you see that pulled out these days? And, where do you store it?]

Minnesota Designs a New State Flag

There are 67 circles, 19 stars, at least six colors, three dates, a bunch of flowers, one French phrase, and between three and seven pine trees, depending who you ask.

As far as flags go, Minnesota’s state flag … has a lot going on. It’s a branding nightmare, critics say.

And then there’s the naked Indian, spear in hand, riding bareback on a horse toward the setting sun, under the gaze of a white farmer plowing his field, his rifle and powderhorn within reach. Some say that’s downright offensive, a diminution and glorification of a history that we now see differently than we did around 1858, when Minnesota and the nation waged war on Native Americans, and when the image was adopted as the state seal. (via: Twin Cities/Pioneer Press)

***

State Emblems Redesign Commission:

Develop and adopt a new design for the official state flag and the official state seal no later than January 1, 2024.

The Commission shall develop and adopt a new design for the official state seal and a new design for the official state flag. The designs must accurately and respectfully reflect Minnesota's shared history, resources, and diverse cultural communities. Symbols, emblems, or likenesses that represent only a single community or person, regardless of whether real or stylized, may not be included in a design. The Commission may solicit and secure the voluntary service and aid of vexillologists and other persons who have either technical or artistic skill in flag construction and design, or the design of official seals, to assist in the work. The Commission must also solicit public feedback and suggestions to inform its work. The Commission shall certify its adopted designs in a report to the legislature and governor no later than January 1, 2024. The Commission's report must describe the symbols and other meanings incorporated in the design. (State of Minnesota)

[ed. Examples above. All flag design submissions (2,127) can be viewed here.]

Images: Dave Orrick / Pioneer Press; various submissions State of Minnesota

Vexillologists - the study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags or, by extension, any interest in flags in general. A person who studies flags is a vexillologist, one who designs flags is a vexillographer, and the art of designing flags is called vexillography. One who is a hobbyist or general admirer of flags is a vexillophile. (Wikipedia).

Clooney's 'Boys In the Boat' Out in December

UW pulling for ripple effect from Clooney’s ‘Boys in the Boat’ film (Seattle Times)

The first time author Daniel James Brown saw the inside of the University of Washington Shell House, he’d sneaked through an unlocked back door with Judy Rantz, the daughter of a crew member he’d later feature in his bestselling book “The Boys in the Boat.” And he felt like he’d just walked into a cathedral.

Here, the eight-oar UW crew team learned the art of rowing and prepared for the 1936 Olympics. Above them, in a second-story loft, legendary boat maker George Pocock built by hand the fastest wooden crew shells in the world — lightweight, expertly designed, lightning-fast.

If the Shell House was like a cathedral, “that space upstairs is the holiest of holiest for me,” Brown said.

The Shell House will play a starring role in the adaptation of “The Boys in the Boat,” directed by George Clooney. The movie, out Dec. 25, tells the story of the underdog UW crew team, which rowed to victory over the elite colleges of the East Coast, then went on to earn Olympic gold for the U.S. in the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin.

Brown, who was a special guest of Clooney’s for a preview in Los Angeles in August, called it a “feel-good, slightly old-fashioned” movie, just as he had hoped. And “it’s very UW-centric,” he said.

He also hopes the story speaks to the value of public higher education, at a time when some question the value of a college degree. “It is one of the things I care about,” said Brown (who, for the record, went to the University of California, Berkeley, and to UCLA). “Anything that lifts the boat, lifts the tide of higher education, is a good thing.” (...)

Both the book and movie center on student Joe Rantz, who as a teen was abandoned by his father and stepmother and grew up in an unfinished house in Sequim. Rantz eventually moved to Seattle, graduated from Roosevelt High, and used college as a way out of poverty.

He and several other crew members earned engineering degrees at the UW and went on to successful careers at Boeing. The UW was a springboard for opportunity, Brown said — “it’s one of the through lines in the movie.” 

by Katherine Long, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images: Luke Johnson/The Seattle Times; MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, 1986.5.15874.1
[ed. Enjoyed the book, hoping the movie's just as good.]

via: On Baseball

Image: uncredited

America is Going to Need a Lot More Electricians

To cut greenhouse gas emissions on pace with the best available science, the United States must prepare for a monumental increase in electricity use. Burning fossil fuels to heat homes and get around isn’t compatible with keeping the planet at a livable temperature. Appliances that can be powered by clean electricity already exist to meet all of these needs.

The race to “electrify everything” is picking up. President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed in August, contains billions of dollars to help Americans electrify their homes, buy electric vehicles, and install solar panels. Meanwhile, cities all over the country, including New York, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco are requiring that new buildings run only on electricity, after the city of Berkeley, California, pioneered the legislation in 2019.

The problem is, most houses aren’t wired to handle the load from electric heating, cooking, and clothes dryers, along with solar panels and vehicle chargers. Rewiring America, a nonprofit that conducts research and advocacy on electrification, estimates that some 60 to 70 percent of single-family homes will need to upgrade to bigger or more modern electrical panels to accommodate a fully electrified house.

“It’s going to be the electrification worker, the electricians that are going to see a real surge in demand,” said Panama Bartholomy, executive director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a national nonprofit working to get fossil fuels out of homes.

But in the Bay Area, arguably the birthplace of the movement to “electrify everything,” homeowners are struggling to find technicians to upgrade their electrical panels or install electric heat pumps, let alone for everyday repairs. Residential electrical contractors are swamped with calls and struggling to find experienced people to hire. The schools tasked with training the next generation of electricians are tight on funds and short on teachers. It’s a story that’s playing out across the country. And what might be inconvenient today could soon hamstring attempts to cut carbon emissions even as these efforts become more urgent.

“It is hard to imagine tens of millions of households in the U.S. individually undertaking the sort of time consuming, expensive process that I experienced,” wrote Andrew Campbell in a blog post chronicling his experience.

The contractor Campbell ended up working with was Boyes Electric, a small company based in Oakland owned by Borin Reyes.

Reyes, who’s 28, moved to California from Guatemala when he was 16 and got introduced to electrical work in high school. His dad was a general contractor and would take him out in the field during summer break. On one job, there was an electrical subcontractor who needed an extra set of hands, and Borin started working for him from time to time. He liked the work — but more so he liked the money he was making. After graduating from high school, he saw electrical work as a path to moving out of his parents’ house, so he enrolled in a training program at a now-shuttered for-profit technical school in Oakland to get more experience.

After graduating in 2013, Reyes spent several years working for a larger company before starting his own. Today, he loves the job. “You really have to be focused, because of safety,” he said. “You have to be hands-on most of the time and solving problems. That’s one of the things that I like best — solving problems.”

Reyes’ company has always focused on rewiring homes undergoing renovations rather than new construction. But at the beginning of 2022, he added a new specialty when his business partnered with a company called Qmerit, a middleman between electric vehicle dealerships and electricians. Dealerships send new car owners to Qmerit to get help finding qualified technicians to install EV chargers, and Qmerit connects them with local businesses like Boyes Electric.

Electric vehicles make up less than 1 percent of cars on the road, but that’s changing fast as sales soar. The number of electric vehicles registered in the U.S. jumped nearly 43 percent between 2020 and 2021, according to the Department of Energy. Government incentives are sure to give the market another boost: The Inflation Reduction Act offers as much as $7,500 in rebates for new EVs and $4,000 for used EVs. In California, Washington state, and New York, you won’t even be able to buy a new model with an internal combustion engine after 2035. The number of public charging stations is also growing, so EV owners don’t necessarily need to install their own charging equipment at home, though many do. It’s convenient, and can also turn a car into a backup power source when the lights go out.

Before Boyes Electric partnered with QMerit, Reyes was installing around one EV charger every week; now it’s up to about five each week. “That’s huge for a small business,” he said. Reyes wants the company to expand into solar installations, too — just not yet.

Boyes Electric employs 12 technicians, and these days Reyes spends most of his time in the office taking calls and coordinating jobs. His electricians are usually booked up about three weeks to a month out.

“Customers are literally looking for electricians every single day,” he said. “We’re not taking emergency calls anymore because we don’t have the manpower. All of our current technicians are out on the field, they’re busy trying to get jobs done.”

Reyes would like to hire more electricians, but he said there just aren’t any experienced people looking for work; they’re already hired. “It is a problem finding people right now,” he said. “Most of the electrical companies, you can ask around, all of them are busy.”

In 2021, the website Angi, which helps homeowners find services, surveyed 2,400 contractors across different trades. Half reported that they couldn’t fill open positions, and 68 percent said it was a struggle to hire skilled workers. In a recent survey of 661 building contractors by the Associated General Contractors of America, 72 percent reported having open, salaried positions. The number one reason for all the openings: “Available candidates are not qualified to work in the industry.”

In the past, Reyes recruited workers out of high school and trained them up. But he’s reluctant to do it again. It costs his technicians time, it costs him money, and there’s no guarantee that the people he invests in will stick around because the job market is so competitive.

The workforce is also aging. Reyes said he knows of a few electricians getting ready for retirement who would like to hand over the business to their kids, but they just aren’t interested. The way he sees it, younger people are getting lured into the tech industry with the promise of big salaries and just aren’t as interested in getting dirty underneath houses.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that about 21 percent of electricians will have hit retirement age in the next 10 years. The agency estimates that demand for electricians will grow by 7 percent over the same span and that between retirements and new demand, there will be nearly 80,000 job openings in the field every year. That estimate doesn’t account for all the incentives — rebates for solar panels, electrical panels, heat pumps, stoves, cars, and clothes dryers — contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, nor does it account for the possibility that demand might soar if local governments keep pushing to electrify buildings.

Several contractors and labor experts, when asked why electricians are so hard to find, pointed to the widespread belief that the main path to adulthood runs through a four-year university, and the related decline of vocational education in high schools. According to Pew Research, 39 percent of millennials earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 29 percent of Gen Xers and 24 to 25 percent of boomers.

Even for those drawn to a career in the trades, there’s another obstacle: The technical schools built to train them are short of money and people, too.

by Emily Pontecorvo, Grist | Read more:
Image: Borin Reyes holds an electric vehicle charger. Brett Marsh/Grist
[ed. Trades are where it's at (and well compensated).]

Farewell to George Santos, the Perfect MAGA Republican

Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law and ethical principles,” said a House Ethics Committee report about Santos released last month. He’s a true child of the MAGA movement.

That movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness. (...)

Much of the MAGAverse loved it. Greene became a loyal friend. As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”

Adam Serwer famously wrote that, when it comes to Trump, “the cruelty is the point,” but maybe the criminality is as well. Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions. That’s a big part of the reason his multiple indictments appeared to only solidify his Republican support. Sure, some of his backers probably identified with his epic persecution complex, but that alone doesn’t explain the worshipful enthusiasm among some of his fans for his mug shot. (“He looks hard,” gushed the Fox News host Jesse Watters.) Rather, many people on the right thrill to displays of impunity from people who share their politics. 

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson
[ed. Not being hip enough myself I had to look up the term Based - "different but bold, agreeable but not popular". Ha. Haha. Hahahaha... yep, I'd guess that's one way of putting it. How about lying liar but shameless? Scamming grifter but good dresser? See also: House Expels George Santos From Congress in Historic Vote (NYT).]

DAS: Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records

A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality. [ed. letter here.]

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter. (...)

There is no law requiring AT&T to store decades’ worth of Americans’ call records for law enforcement purposes. Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T’s voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance.

In 2020, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement data stolen from agencies around the US. A WIRED review of the files unearths extraordinary detail regarding the processes and justifications that agencies use to monitor the call records of not only criminal suspects, but of their spouses, children, parents, and friends. (...)

First disclosed by The New York Times in September 2013 as Hemisphere, the DAS program—renamed in 2013—has since flown largely under the radar. Internal records concerning the program’s secrecy that were obtained by the newspaper at the time show that law enforcement had long been instructed to never “refer to Hemisphere in any official document.”

Following the Times’ story, former US president Barack Obama reportedly suspended funding for the Hemisphere program in 2013. And while discretionary funding was withheld over the following three years, a White House memo obtained by WIRED shows that individual law enforcement organizations across the US were permitted to continue contracting with AT&T directly in order to maintain access to its data-mining service. Funding resumed under former president Donald Trump but was halted again in 2021, according to the White House memo. Last year, under president Joe Biden, the funding resumed once more, the memo says. (...)

The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time. Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018. (...)

Orders targeting a nexus of individuals are sometimes called “community of interest” subpoenas, a phrase that among privacy advocates is synonymous with dragnet surveillance.

“The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope,” Wyden’s letter to Garland says.

The White House has provided at least $6.1 million in discretionary funding to the DAS program since 2013, according to a two-page memo authored last year by White House officials. An internal HIDTA “participant guide” reviewed by WIRED shows that HIDTA funding exceeded $280 million in 2020 alone. It remains unclear how much HIDTA funding is spent to support AT&T’s vast collection of American call records. 

It is not currently known how far back the call records accessible under DAS go. A slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that up to 10 years’ worth of records can be queried under the program, a statistic that contrasts with other internal documents that claimed AT&T could reach decades into the past. AT&T’s competitors, meanwhile, typically retain call records for no more than two years. (The necessity for phone companies to track call records for extended periods of time has gradually decreased with the disappearance of long-distance charges.)

The DAS Program echoes multiple dragnet surveillance programs dating back decades, including a Drug Enforcement Agency program launched in 1992 that forced phone companies to surrender records of virtually all calls going to and from over 100 other countries; the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program, which the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals deemed illegal in 2014; and the Call Details Records program, which suffered from “technical irregularities” leading the NSA to collect millions of calls it was “not authorized to receive.”

Unlike these past programs, which were subject to congressional oversight, DAS is not. A senior Wyden aide tells WIRED the program takes advantage of numerous “loopholes” in federal privacy law. The fact that it’s effectively run out of the White House, for example, means it is exempt from rules requiring assessments of its privacy impacts. The White House is also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, reducing the public’s overall ability to shed light on the program.

by Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Panithan Pholpanichrassamee 

[ed. A massive government spying program that takes total surveillence to a whole new level (trillions of records) allowing anyone in law enforcement to track you, your location, your calls, everyone in your phone's contact list, everyone in their contact list, and so on and so on. Who would have thought? See also: US Senator calls for the public release of AT&T ‘Hemisphere’ surveillance records (Endgadget); and, do read Senator Wyden's entire letter at the end of the article (or here - pdf).

"AT&T has kept and queries as part of the Hemisphere Project call records going back to 1987, with 4 billion new records being added every day. That slide deck was apparently disclosed by a local law enforcement agency in response to a public information request and was published by the New York Times in 2013. 

The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope. One law enforcement official described the Hemisphere Project as “AT&T's Super Search Engine” and ... "Google on Steroids,” according to emails released by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) under the Freedom of Information Act."

Isabel Oliver Cuevas — Good Meeting (from the series “The Woman”) [acrylic on canvas, 1970-1973]

via:

Rosaire Appel, Untitled
via: