Unlike conventional cannabis packaging, Miami’s Creative Partners Studio has designed a more experiential, stunning system for Mother Concentrates. The packaging introduces a vibrant color palette of orange, purple, light pink, green, and light sage hues, creating a visually dynamic line of products.

Images: MCPS

~ Mother Concentrates Comes Full Circle With Creative Partners Studio (Dieline)
[ed. Like expensive cosmetics. Weed's come a long way.]

Nuts!

Nuts!
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[ed. See also: How Actors Remember Their Lines (Nautilus)

Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. (...)

Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text. In his book Acting in Film, actor Michael Caine described this process well:

You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously. (...)

In describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory—deep understanding promotes long-lasting memories.

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Good, Cheap Dogs Buy Loyalty

Fear not, hot dog fans: Costco doesn’t plan to raise the price of its beloved franks anytime soon.

The retailer has been hawking its hot-dog-and-soda combo for a smooth $1.50 since it first hit menus in the mid-1980s.

The price tag has held steady over the years despite inflation — otherwise it would be closer to $4.40 these days.

“People like it because it's delicious and it costs a dollar fifty, which is actually very loyal to the history of what the hot dog is: a low-price food for the masses that is, ideally, good,” explains Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs.

Speculation that the cost of the famed combo might be changing began to heat up in March after Richard Galanti, the company’s then-chief financial officer, told Bloomberg that it’s “probably safe for a while” — not necessarily the guarantee that every hungry Costco member wanted to hear.

His successor, Gary Millerchip, cleared things up in his first quarterly earnings call on Thursday.

“To clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,” Millerchip said.

That sound bite has since made the rounds on social media, providing welcome relief to the chain’s many hot dog devotees.

Loftus says, "It's a good PR move for Costco to not change this price," adding that it has a humanizing effect on the company. (...)

The lore of the hot dog combo, explained

The company said earlier this year that it sold nearly 200 million hot-dog-and-soda combos in the 2023 fiscal year alone.

The low cost of Costco’s quarter-pound dogs — as well as the chain’s oft-discussed commitment to keeping it that way — has earned them a cult following over the decades, spawning memes and fan-made merch.

The tale of the Costco dog dates back to around 1984, when Hebrew National — Costco’s original hot dog supplier — sold hot dogs from a cart outside one of its stores in San Diego. (The company began operating its own hot dog factories in 2008, to cut down on supply chain costs.) (...)

Witcher says that this part of the experience has basically enabled Costco to establish its own form of consumer culture.

“No one is buying that hot dog and soda and putting it in with their grocery bags to eat tomorrow,” he said. “The quick-serve restaurant is part of the culture of adventure that Costco has created, much like you'd buy food and a drink at a movie theater, an amusement park, or a concert.”

He doesn’t see a reason why Costco would risk losing customers who partake in that tradition by “removing that cultural connection simply to make an extra fifty cents.”

by Rachel Treisman, NPR | Read more:

Image: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Everything You Need To Know About Costco Hot Dogs (Delish - first excerpt, below); and, In Costco We Trust (Dirt - second excerpt):]

The $1.50 Combo Is To Die For—Literally

The inflation-defying price point for Costco's hot dog combo was first set in 1985 by the vendor who started selling them out of a cart in Portland, Oregon. And since then, the prices haven't changed at all. Costco is committed to keeping their inventory affordable in general, but especially when it comes to the hot dog.

In fact, the price of the food court hot dog is a literal life and death situation. When W. Craig Jelinek joined the leadership team in 2010, he complained to Costco co-founder and CEO, Jim Sinegal, that the combo was losing the company money. Sinegal's response was one for the history books: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out."

The Portion Sizes Used To Be Smaller

According to the warehouse's magazine, The Costco Connection, Kirkland hot dogs are 10% heavier and longer than the original quarter pound franks. They're also made from 100 percent beef that's exclusively USDA Choice or better. And on top of that, Costco has also increased the portion size of their soda from a 12 ounce can to a 20 ounce fountain drink with free refills. ~ Everything You Need To Know About Costco Hot Dogs 

***

"Recently, I asked my dad why Costco still appeals to him after decades of shopping there. It would be more convenient to shop at the Safeway down the street. He likes the fact that it’s a no-frills operation: With Costco, what you see is what you get. The store subverts the carefully manicured “supermarket aesthetic”—a term used by the scholar Andrew G. Christensen in a paper on Don Delillo’s White Noise—where store environments are engineered with displays, lighting, and “cheery exteriors” complete with music. A trademark of the supermarket aesthetic is “a certain ambiguity that the viewer (or target market) may perceive as psychological manipulation—something almost sinister behind the cheery exterior.” Costco’s lack of decor leaves the products to speak for themselves. The boxes the shipments come in line its industrial shelves. The hum in the store comes from conversations and movement, instead of speakers. (...)

Lange described Costco as the pinnacle of American consumerism—a big-box store that’s keeping customers satisfied. Forbes reported that Costco’s total sales in 2022 hit a record high of $227 billion, a 17 percent increase from 2021. “With the reputation that it has for how it treats its employees and the quality of what it’s achieved—to do that at the scale that it’s done is almost unthinkable in any other model,” Lange said. “Capitalism and consumerism produce a lot of crap, or a lot of luxury. But to find something in the middle that has the mass appeal that Costco has, and to do it as well as Costco has done it, few people walk away from that experience unhappy.” ~ In Costco We Trust

Robert Adams | Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968.

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How Influencer Cartels Manipulate Social Media: Fraudulent Behaviour Hidden in Plain Sight

Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing budgets worldwide. This column examines a problem within this rapidly expanding advertising market – influencer cartels, in which groups of influencers collude to increase advertising revenue by inflating each other’s engagement numbers. Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand social media engagement to the target audience, but reduce welfare if they divert engagement to less relevant audiences. Rewarding engagement quantity encourages harmful collusion. Instead, the authors suggest, influencers should be compensated based on the actual value they provide. (...)

Distorted Incentives and Fraudulent Behaviour in Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become a key part of modern advertising. In 2023, spending on influencer marketing reached $31 billion, already rivalling the entirety of print newspaper advertising. Influencer marketing allows advertisers fine targeting based on consumer interests by choosing a good product-influencer-consumer match.

Many non-celebrity influencers are not paid based on the success of their marketing campaigns. In fact, less than 20% of companies track the sales induced by their influencer marketing campaigns. Instead, influencers’ pay is based on impact measures such as the number of followers and engagement (likes and comments), furnishing an incentive for fraudulent behaviour – for inflating their influence. Inflating influence is a form of advertising fraud that causes market inefficiencies by directing ads to the wrong audience. An estimated 15% of influencer marketing spending is misused due to exaggerated influence. To address this issue, the US Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule in 2023 to ban the sale and purchase of false indicators of social media influence. Cartels provide a way of obtaining fake engagement that does not fall directly under the proposed rule – because no money changes hands – but is still in the same spirit. While there is substantial literature on fake consumer reviews (Mayzlin et al. 2014, Luca and Zervas 2016) and other forms of advertising fraud (Zinman and Zitzewitz 2016), the literature on influencer marketing has focused mostly on advertising disclosure (Ershov and Mitchell 2023, Pei and Mayzlin 2022, Mitchell 2021, Fainmesser and Galeotti 2021), leaving the fraudulent behaviour unstudied.

How Do Instagram Cartels Work?

An influencer cartel is a group of influencers who collude to boost their advertising fees by inflating engagement metrics. As in traditional industries (Steen et al. 2013), influencer cartels involve a formal agreement to manipulate the market for the members’ benefit. The cartels operate in online chatrooms. The screenshots below show how one such cartel operates in practice. The image on the left is from an online chat room, where cartel members submit links to their content for extra engagement. Before submitting a link, they must reciprocate by liking and commenting on other members’ posts. An algorithm enforces these rules. The image on the right shows these cartel-induced comments on Instagram. The cartel history and rules make it possible to observe which engagement (comments) originate from the cartel.

Figure 1 Left panel shows posts in online chatroom submitted for cartel engagement; right panel shows Instagram comments originating from the cartel

Source: Left panel is a screenshot of a Telegram group; right panel is a screenshot from Instagram. To preserve anonymity, account identifiers are blurred and the photo is replaced with an analogous photo by an AI image generator.

What Distinguishes ‘Bad’ from ‘Not-So-Bad’ Cartels?

Our theoretical model formalises the main trade-offs in this setting, in the spirit of the imaginary citation group discussed earlier. The model focuses on strategic engagement, a decision that affects social media content distribution and consumption (Aridor et al. 2024) but has been underexplored (with the exception of Filippas et al. 2023, who studied attention bartering in Twitter). Engaging with other influencers’ content has a positive externality, leading to too little engagement in equilibrium. Forming a cartel to reciprocally engage with each other’s content can internalise this externality and might be socially desirable. However, it can also result in low-value engagement, especially when advertisers pay based on quantity rather than quality.

The key dimension to differentiating ‘bad’ from ‘not-so-bad’ cartels is the quality of cartel engagement. By ‘high quality’, we mean engagement coming from influencers with similar interests. The idea is that influencers provide value to advertisers by promoting a product among the target audience: people with similar interests, such as vegan burgers to vegans. If a cartel generates engagement from influencers with other interests (meat lovers), this hurts consumers and advertisers. It hurts consumers because the platform will show them irrelevant content, and advertisers are hurt because their ads are shown to the wrong audience. Whether or not a particular cartel is welfare-reducing or welfare-improving is an empirical question.

by Marit Hinnosaar and Toomas Hinnosaar, VoxEU |  Read more:

Image: VoxEU

Touch-Me-Not

The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), also known as the spotted touch-me-not. When the seeds mature enough to start a new generation, their pods develop a nastic response and explode, dispersing the seeds in the environment. When the time comes, the cells of the seedpod accumulate and store mechanical energy based on their hydration level. Any external stimuli then overloads the system and the walls separate and quickly coil up on themselves, transferring energy to the seeds and launching them outwards. | Journal of Experimental Biology

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[ed. Seen this before but never fails to impress.]

Operation Bottleneck: DEA versus FDA in a Regulatory War

A record number of drugs are in shortage across the United States. In any particular case, it’s difficult to trace out the exact causes of the shortage but health care is the US’s most highly regulated, socialist industry and shortages are endemic under socialism so the pattern fits. The shortage of Adderall and other ADHD medications is a case in point. Adderall is a Schedule II controlled substance which means that in addition to the FDA and other health agencies the production of Adderall is also regulated, monitored and controlled by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The DEA aims to “combat criminal drug networks that bring harm, violence, overdoses, and poisonings to the United States.” Its homepage displays stories of record drug seizures, pictures of “most wanted” criminal fugitives, and heroic armed agents conducting drug raids. With this culture, do you think the DEA is the right agency to ensure that Americans are also well supplied with legally prescribed amphetamines?

Indeed, there is a large factory in the United States capable of producing 600 million doses of Adderall annually that has been shut down by the DEA for over a year because of trivial paperwork violations. The New York Magazine article on the DEA created shortage has to be read to be believed.

Inside Ascent’s 320,000-square-foot factory in Central Islip, a labyrinth of sterile white hallways connects 105 manufacturing rooms, some of them containing large, intricate machines capable of producing 400,000 tablets per hour. In one of these rooms, Ascent’s founder and CEO — Sudhakar Vidiyala, Meghana’s father — points to a hulking unit that he says is worth $1.5 million. It’s used to produce time-release Concerta tablets with three colored layers, each dispensing the drug’s active ingredient at a different point in the tablet’s journey through the body. “About 25 percent of the generic market would pass through this machine,” he says. “But we didn’t make a single pill in 2023.” (...)

The causes of the DEA’s crackdown appears to be precisely the contradiction in its dueling missions. Ascent also produces opioids and the DEA crackdown was part of what it calls Operation Bottleneck, a series of raids on a variety of companies to demand that they account for every pill produced.

To be sure, the opioid epidemic is a problem but the big, multi-national plants are not responsible for fentanyl on the streets and even in the early years the opioid epidemic was a prescription problem (with some theft from pharmacies) not a factory theft problem (see figure at left). Maybe you think Adderall is overprescribed. Could be but the DEA is supposed to be enforcing laws not making drug policy. The one thing one can say for certain is that Operation Bottleneck has surely been a success in creating shortages of Adderall.

The DEA’s contradictory role in both combating the illegal drug trade and regulating the supply of legal, prescription drugs is highlighted by the fact that at the same as the DEA was raiding and shutting down Ascent, the FDA was pleading with them to increase production!

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution | Read more:
Image: Ascent drug vault. Thomas Prior

Maxime Guyon/Aircraft:The New Anatomy, 2020
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[ed. Fyi: there's a Reddit specifically dedicated to design porn.]

Valerie Chiang, Collage | Metamorphosis
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Same Old Story

Tuco (Breaking Bad)

Image:via

"I see the show downs, slow downs, lost and found, turn arounds. 

The boys in the military shirts. 

I keep my eyes on the prize, on the long fallen skies. 

And I don't let my friends get hurt. 

All you back room schemers, small trip dreamers. 

Better find something new to say. 

Cause you're the same old story. 

It's the same old crime. 

And you got some heavy dues to pay."

~ Steve Miller, Space Cowboy

Yvonne Späne, Scare Tactics | Spiny Flower Mantis (Pseudocreobotra wahlbergii); Tomas Orban, Ocean Life
via: here and here

Welcome to the Millennial Midlife Crisis

In the movies and TV I grew up watching, a midlife crisis was born out of a complacent sense of security; life was maybe going too well, and people just wanted a chance to flex their youth one more time. They bought a sports car, pierced something, got a weird tattoo. In the extreme, maybe they ditched their entire old lives and started fresh, did something that their kids are still in therapy about now.

For most millennials, the old material markers of midlife, like owning a home or spending 20-plus years at one job, are a nostalgic fantasy. Something we miss but never had. Even as we negotiate gray hairs, crow’s-feet, and a changing body, for many of us, little has changed in our career, home, and money prospects. Growing up, even though our family didn’t have a lot of money — my parents were refugees who moved from Pakistan to Canada without college degrees and drove taxis, waited tables, sold cars, and did whatever else they could to give us what little they could — things felt relatively fine. My parents always managed to clothe and feed us, we went out for dinner a few times a month, we always had a pretty decent roof over our heads; hell, they even managed to buy a house at one point. They had jobs, they left jobs, they got new jobs. They lived paycheck to paycheck, but they also weren’t worried about where that next check came from. I can’t imagine buying a house in downtown Toronto today on one income with less than $10,000 saved for a down payment. I actually want to cry just thinking about the prospect. Same with their ability to get a job when they needed one. I have 20 years of experience in my field at this point, and the majority of the time when I apply for a job, I never hear back.

Today, the real crisis isn’t about mortality; it’s that our lives and stations are unchanged from when we were 30 — or, hell, even 20. It’s about a distinct lack of comfort, of resources. My dad was trying to escape the doldrums of midlife with blond hair; meanwhile, I have friends who can’t even escape a bad marriage because they can’t afford the rent in a new place by themselves, especially if they want to keep their kids in the same school.

For as long as there have been “trend stories” about millennials loving pricey avocado toast, there have been actual millennials sounding the alarm bell about how crippling student-loan debt, a punishing job market, and rapidly rising housing costs have diminished our ability to get a secure footing in our lives and actually start to plan for our futures. And now, we’re not exactly staring out the window of our country house fondly remembering our salad days. We’re still grinding it out, perennially worried about losing it all.

Any single change in our jobs, homes, or health could upend our entire lives in ways that are just financially impossible.

Two years ago, I wrote about losing my ambition, about reshaping my priorities and putting the focus back on what I really want to do. I don’t need new highlights or a sports car; I just want the ability to plan for a secure future, to have optimism about my career prospects ten or even five years from now, to be able to afford to care for my family without the constant threat of layoffs, hunger, or eviction. I want time with my kids while I’m still healthy and aware, and I want to do work that is fulfilling and meaningful. And despite divorcing myself from a specific model of success in the process of leaving ambition behind, I do work hard. I work harder than ever, because I’m terrified of what happens if I don’t. I’ve spent the last year looking into what getting a real-estate license would entail, looking up how to become a plumber’s apprentice, and Googling “best graduate degrees if you want to get a steady job that pays good and will let you retire one day with dignity.” It’s a midlife crisis, no doubt, but it’s not born out of restlessness or a rosy remembrance of things past; it’s panic that this is as good as it’s going to get and what lies ahead could be worse.

I’m not just worried about myself — I have young kids, and my parents are getting old. Can I care for everyone and myself? I have a parent who will likely require some financial assistance as they age, and I don’t know if I have those funds. (A third of Americans happen to feel the same way, and just over half plan to assist their parents financially in their retirement years. For me and many of my friends, our current retirement plan is to drop dead at work.)

Almost all of my friends are in the middle of a job crisis, either looking for work or trying to figure out how to pivot to something else. I have a friend in her late 30s who has not been unemployed a day in her adult life. She’s the most organized, impressively career-focused person I know — she just got laid off from her job at a big tech company. Her most generous assessment of the landscape is that she probably won’t find another job for a year and may have to reconsider her career path entirely and start from scratch. She and her partner were seemingly financially secure and debating whether it makes sense to have a baby, but this has thrown everything off. Another friend in his mid-40s is worried it’s too late for him to have a baby and is also reconsidering what it is he should do with his life, but has no idea where to start. He’s been a steadily working creative who was one of the lucky ones to have bought a house 15 years ago, but he just sold it to give himself some wiggle room as he starts looking for steadier employment.

I keep waiting for the dam to break for something to happen that fixes the housing bubble, our debt crisis, or the job market, but that alarm’s been ringing and no one who can do anything about it seems to be interested in answering.

by Amil Niazi, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: The Cut; Photos: Getty

Playing Out of Divots

Whether you're new to the game or have been playing it for years, you've probably experienced the deflating feeling of hitting a great drive that splits the fairway only to find once you’ve gotten to your ball that it's sitting in a hole created by someone else's shot. Although not impossible to play out of—you can read Butch Harmon's advice on how to do it here—it's still a frustrating situation. You did everything right, yet it feels like you're being unjustly penalized.

It's at those moments when you might wonder why the Rules of Golf doesn't allow you to take free relief. After all, Rule 16.3 allows you to remove an embedded ball anywhere in the general area of the course without penalty. How is this any different, you might wonder?

Let's have Craig Winter, Senior Director of Rules of Golf and Amateur Status for the USGA, explain:

"It's fundamental to golf to play the ball as it lies," he says. "And you don't always get a good lie."

Although the USGA and R&A, golf's governing bodies, have considered on various occasions handling divot holes in another manner, there is no "practical solution" other than to leave it as just a part of the game, Winter says. If you think about it beyond the moment you're in one, how often does it happen to you in any golf season? Probably not a lot. Furthermore, if the rules makers were to treat divot holes as, say, ground under repair, think of how many spots on the fairway would then fall into that category? They're all over the place. They take a long time to heal, and they typically are not a focus of normal golf-course maintenance.

For these reasons, don't expect the "play it as it lies" fundamental to change anytime soon, if ever. Winter says new members of the rules committee want to discuss it from time to time, but it doesn't go beyond that.

"Philosophically, it's hard to think of a different way we'd want to go," he says.

And remember the next time you're in one, things could be worse. Just ask Jordan Spieth about his Sunday round at the Sentry Tournament of Champions in January. He found his ball in a divot crater on three consecutive holes down the stretch!

"The [divots] were certainly tough breaks because they were balls that hit in the fairway and funneled into them," Spieth said. "Out here, balls funnel into the same spots a lot. It’s not uncommon to be in divots. It kind of stunk that it was three holes in a row, but I still played [them] just fine."

by  Ron Kaspriske, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Ross Kinnaird
[ed. BS. Expect this rule to be changed in the not too distant future. If you can tamp down spike marks on greens and are awarded relief from sprinkler heads, why not this? The reasoning itself is contradictory. As noted in the article, divots are everywhere, but how often do you actually have to play out of one? Not often. That's why you also have so-called "winter rules" allowances during certain portions of the year, and lift-clean-and-place exceptions during especially rainy/water soaked conditions - simply efforts to apply consistency when inconsistent conditions exist. So, wtf?]

Steve Miller

Steve Miller Shares the Stories Behind His Greatest Hits (Parade)

Image: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

[ed. Quite a musical life, right there at the ascendance of the Chicago blues scene and widely respected by Muddy Waters, Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf, Charlie Musselwhite, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, et al. See also: Born In Chicago (NYT).]

Five decades ago, in the summer of 1973, a nervous Steve Miller entered the studio to record an album he thought might very well bring his career to a close. By that point he had released seven worthy albums that only attracted a cult audience. “I definitely felt this record was my last shot,” Miller said by phone the other day, before a show on his current sold-out tour. “I was at the end of my recording contract, and I wasn’t hearing anything from the label. If this didn’t work, I thought I might be teaching high school English the next year.”

Instead, he wound up giving the world a master class in how to make a smash hit. The first song he recorded, “The Joker,” was the ‘70s equivalent of a viral sensation, taking off at radio stations around the country on impact, eventually soaring to No. 1. That turned out to be just the beginning. Over the next decade, Miller and The Steve Miller Band racked up a string of ingeniously upbeat singles like “Rock’n Me” (another No. 1 score), “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Jungle Love” and “Abracadabra” (a chart-topper in 1983).

To mark the start of his dramatic turnaround 50 years ago, Miller has just released J50: The Evolution of The Joker, a collection that marries the album’s original tracks to 27 previously unreleased recordings from the same sessions. To Miller, the secret to his late-breaking success had to do both with having nothing to lose and with finally gaining control over the recording process. While his earlier work had been produced by others, on “The Joker” he called all the shots. “Just going in with the band and doing it on my own was so much less cumbersome,” he said. “The whole process of making the album was 17 days, start to finish.”

Another key element was his eagerness to learn how to hone hits. “I had always enjoyed the art of making singles, but the more I did it, the more I learned,” he said. “I felt that you need at least five hooks in a single. And the first ten notes have to make people go, ‘What’s that?’ It’s quite a puzzle to put all that together.”

With a boyish enthusiasm that belies his 79 years, Miller told Parade the stories behind the key songs that have made him one of America’s biggest hit-makers.

"The Joker" (1973)

In Miller’s first No. 1 score, nearly every sound you hear is a hook, from the lazy bass to the loopy guitar to the quirky vocal. “I wasn’t consciously going for all that,” Miller said. “Everything just came together quickly and naturally. The song had a great chorus. It had this slide guitar. It had a different-sounding, lazy groove. It’s only in hindsight where you go, ‘well, that was brilliant!’”

For another draw, Miller quoted a racy line from an old hit by the vocal group The Clovers—“really love your peaches/wanna shake your tree.” He didn’t realize, however, that this would mean sharing the publishing royalties with its authors. “I thought it was just a tip of the hat,” he said. Despite the sexiness of the line, and a drug reference elsewhere in the lyrics, Miller said “nobody at radio questioned it. I think every kid that heard it got it, but no adult knew what it was about.” One thing that did get everyone’s attention was a line that later became famous in which Miller preached “the pompatus of love.”

“It sorta sounded like pompous,” the singer said of the nonsensical word he made up. “I get letters from lawyers all the time asking me to define it because lawyers always want to know what things mean. To me, it’s just funny.”

“Fly Like an Eagle” (1976)

One of Miller’s biggest hits was also the first to feature a new instrument—the ARP synthesizer—which he used to create a spacey sound that undulates throughout the song. “I was a huge electronic music fan, going back to Stockhausen in the early ‘60s,” Miller said. “The electronics I used back on the [earlier FM-radio hit] ‘Space Cowboy’ sounded like somebody turning over a car carburetor under water. But the new ARP was so much easier. It was a natural to become a pop hook.”

The catchy riff in “Eagle” had actually appeared in another Miller song, “My Dark Hour,” seven years earlier. That track featured none other than Paul McCartney on drums, bass and backing vocal, though few knew it. The improbable Miller-Beatles connection came about because his producer, Glyn Johns, was the audio engineer on “Let It Be.” In 1969, when Miller was in London to record with Johns, the producer introduced him to the Fab Four. “They were meant to record some tracks one day, but John and Ringo didn’t show,” Miller said. “I’d never seen guys not show up to a booked recording session before. That was unbelievably wasteful.”

To make use of the session time, Johns suggested Paul and Miller jam, resulting in “My Dark Hour.” “It was like we’d been playing together forever,” Miller said. “Anything Paul played was just right.”

Miller felt disappointed, though, when the Beatle only allowed himself to be pseudonymously credited on the song as “Paul Ramon.” Regardless, Miller thought this was “going to be the biggest single of my life! Instead, it was like it was dropped down the mail chute of the Empire State Building straight into hell.”

To compensate, Miller said the riff he repurposed for “Fly Like an Eagle” was “so much better.” It was so good, in fact, that the song went platinum and inspired a cover by Seal in 1996. “He didn’t do anything different with it,” Miller said. “So, I wasn’t impressed.”

by Jim Farber, Parade |  Read more:

Image: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Wikipedia
[ed. From the video comments re: "My Dark Hour"]

"This was recorded at Olympic Studios, Barnes, on the night of the 9th May 1969, when the four Beatles had an enormous bust-up about Allen Klein becoming their manager; they were all at the studios, when producer/engineer Glyn Johns, detecting an impending argument, left the room, and the conversation turned from music to business - the contract for Klein to manage them had been signed by John, George and Ringo, but Paul - who had been warned by Mick Jagger about Klein and didn't trust or like him - baulked at the 20% Klein was demanding, saying to the other Beatles that Klein should be offered 15%, because "we're a big band" and refused to sign. The other three thought it was another example of Paul stalling and derailing the contract negotiations, and a huge argument ensued, with them all verbally laying into Paul, and basically storming out while all individually telling him to 'fuck off'. He was sat alone in the studio, feeling pretty beaten up and isolated, betrayed by his three best mates and sorry for himself, when Steve Miller breezed in, looking for some studio time - Paul knew Steve and asked if he could play on the track, so did drums (which he'd previously done on several Beatles' tracks when Ringo had walked out of the White Album sessions for a week; most notably 'Back in the USSR'), bass, some guitar and backing vocals. The other three Beatles went ahead with assigning Klein as manager, and although John Lennon was the driving force in appointing Klein, years later he admitted Paul was right to be suspicious. He appeared on this track as 'Paul Ramon', which was first used as a stage name by Paul when the 'Silver Beetles' (then still with Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and Tommy Moore as a stand-in drummer) toured Scotland in May 1960, as the backing band to a Larry Parnes' act, Johnny Gentle (real name John Askew). John Lennon was 'Long John', George was 'Carl Harrison' (after his hero Carl Perkins) and Stuart was Stuart de Stael (after French-Russian artist Nicolas de Stael)."

Ninety-Five Theses on AI

Ninety-five theses on AI (Samuel Hammon/Second Best)

Image: uncredited

[ed. A lot to unpack here re: all things AI, from the micro-to-macro with broad insights and predictions concerning the technology, industry, issues, debates, politics, and other "theses" surrounding AI now and going forward (with many good links, as well). Highly recommended. Excerpts:]

Most proposed “AI regulations” are ill-conceived or premature

1. There is a substantial premium on discretion and autonomy in government policymaking whenever events are fast moving and uncertain, as with AI.

2. It is unwise to craft comprehensive statutory regulation at a technological inflection point, as the basic ontology of what is being regulated is in flux.

3. The optimal policy response to AI likely combines targeted regulation with comprehensive deregulation across most sectors.

4. Regulations codify rules, standards and processes fit for a particular mode of production and industry structure, and are liable to obsolesce in periods of rapid technological change.

5. The benefits of deregulation come less from static efficiency gains than from the greater capacity of markets and governments to adapt to innovation.

6. The main regulatory barriers to the commercial adoption of AI are within legacy laws and regulations, mostly not prospective AI-specific laws.

7. The shorter the timeline to AGI, the sooner policymaker and organizations should switch focus to “bracing for impact.”

8. The most robust forms of AI governance will involve the infrastructure and hardware layers.

9. Existing laws and regulations are calibrated with the expectation of imperfect enforcement.

10. To the extent AI greatly reduces monitoring and enforcement costs, the de facto stringency of all existing laws and regulations will greatly increase absent a broader liberalization.

11. States should focus on public sector modernization and regulatory sandboxes and avoid creating an incompatible patchwork of AI safety regulations.

AI progress is accelerating, not plateauing

1. The last 12 months of AI progress were the slowest they’ll be for the foreseeable future.

2. Scaling LLMs still has a long way to go, but will not result in superintelligence on its own, as minimizing cross-entropy loss over human-generated data converges to human-level intelligence.

3. Exceeding human-level reasoning will require training methods beyond next token prediction, such as reinforcement learning and self-play, that (once working) will reap immediate benefits from scale.

4. RL-based threat models have been discounted prematurely.

5. Future AI breakthroughs could be fairly discontinuous, particularly with respect to agents.

6. AGI may cause a speed-up in R&D and quickly go superhuman, but is unlikely to “foom” into a god-like ASI given compute bottlenecks and the irreducibility of high dimensional vector spaces, i.e. Ray Kurzweil is underrated.

7. Recursive self-improvement and meta-learning may nonetheless give rise to dangerously powerful AI systems within the bounds of existing hardware.

8. Slow take-offs eventually become hard.

A Beginner’s Guide to Sociopolitical Collapse - Or, How (Not) to End Up in the Ash Heap of History

“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes,’ but always dies from suicide or murder—and nearly always from the former.” — D. C. Somervell.

À propos of nothing, I have found myself wondering recently what it would be like to live through a collapse. Would I see it coming? What would be the signs?

A number of times in human history, a society has gone from a relatively high level of sociopolitical complexity to a much lower one—rapidly, within the span of a few decades. This is what we will call collapse. Collapse manifests as a lower degree of social differentiation and economic specialization, less centralized control, less behavioral control, less investment in art and monuments, a lower flow of information within society, less sharing and trading of resources, a lower degree of social coordination and organization, and territorially smaller political units. And a lot of people probably starve, if they don’t meet more violent ends.

Collapse is a fate that befell at least the Western Zhou empire; the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley; medieval Mesopotamia in parts of the Abbasid caliphate, including the Anarchy at Samarra; the Egyptian Old Kingdom; the Hittites; the Minoans; the Mycenaeans; the Western Roman empire; the Olmecs; the Lowland Classic Maya; Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, and Tula in the Mesoamerican highlands; Casas Grandes in northern Mexico; the Chacoans in what is today New Mexico; the Hohokam in southern Arizona; the Eastern Woodlands civilization, including the Mississippians centered on Cahokia in today’s East St. Louis; the Huari and Tiahuanaco in Peru; the Kachin of highland Myanmar, who oscillated between complex and egalitarian social forms as described by James C. Scott; and the Ik of northern Uganda, who have simplified society to such an extent that they allegedly reject familial bonds, although this has been disputed.

Collapse has happened often enough that it is not likely to be a series of flukes, but a general feature of human social organization. Not every society eventually suddenly collapses; it may be the case that when one does it is because some particular conditions obtain. What are those conditions? Can we come up with a general explanation? And while the subject is interesting as a pure matter of social science, we all want to know: could it happen here?

The GOAT on the topic of collapse is archeologist Joseph Tainter. His 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies weaves together historical and prehistorical fact, an insistence on explaining the cross-sectional variation, rigorous theorizing including an embrace of marginal analysis, and generally great social scientific judgment. It is a tour de force. If you want to understand why it has lived rent-free in my head for the last few months, as several friends can attest, read on.

Why complexity?

If we’re going to understand why societies sometimes spontaneously simplify, we must first have a solid theory about why they become complex in the first place. In both a historical and analytical sense, simple human societies arise first. These simple societies are highly egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Why do they move toward greater hierarchy, stratification, inequality, and complexity?

There are broadly two views on this question. One view is dominated by class conflict. The state reflects domination and exploitation based on divided interests. A ruling class coercively subjugates the population out of greed and selfishness. Marxists are not the only exponents of this view, but they are perhaps the most vehement, viewing society as sharply divided between workers who engage in social production and elites who appropriate the output. Of course, subjugation of subpopulations happens—American slavery is a gruesome example. The pure class conflict view is that subjugation explains the entirety of society, which is composed of ruling elites and subject populations.

At the other end of the spectrum are integrationist or functionalist views, which are based on shared interests between members of society. Even an egalitarian society is going to face problems, and many of these problems are most readily addressed by creating some form of hierarchy and social division of labor. For example, limited water resources may require the creation and maintenance of an irrigation system, including the need to mobilize and direct labor. The threat of invasion may require the establishment of military defense, including a command and control system. In general, society faces some problem, which requires the creation of public goods, which requires the creation of administrators, who are rewarded for realizing the benefits of centralization. Complexity solves social problems and serves population-wide needs.

Tainter adopts a moderate position, one that leans integrationist but also includes a role for class conflict. Complexity in society does exist to solve problems and provide benefits to the populace. And yet, “compensation of elites does not always match their contribution to society, and throughout their history, elites have probably been overcompensated relative to performance more often than the reverse.” Public choice considerations mean that even if complexity arises to solve broad-based social problems, the ultimate distribution of the benefits can be influenced by greed and power. “Integration theory is better able to account for distribution of the necessities of life, conflict theory for surpluses.”

Although the distribution of the social surplus is not always fair, in what follows, the role of complexity in society as a problem-solving mechanism is what is most important. Without this foundation, collapse is no big deal, or good, or perhaps it is even the ascension of society to a Marxist anarcho-primitivist Utopia. We can sympathize with this view when true subjugation is occurring, while recognizing that, in the general case, complex society exists to solve social problems.

Collapse theory

There are many non-general or underspecified theories of collapse. Tainter goes through these exhaustively, but I’ll run through a few of them that deserve special mention.

1. Depletion of a vital resource. These explanations are popular with environmentalists, and feature strongly in books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse (which came out 16 years after Tainter’s). Tainter has contempt for depletion arguments as a causal mechanism, because, as we have just discussed, the complexity of society exists to solve problems including resource depletion. What about all the times that resources are effectively stewarded? Is it not true that for most resource/society/time period combinations, societies do just fine in not collapsing due to resource depletion? Depletion arguments don’t explain the cross-sectional variation, why sometimes societies effectively manage resources and other times they don’t. “If a society cannot deal with resource depletion (which all societies are to some degree designed to do) then the truly interesting questions revolve around the society, not the resource. What structural, political, ideological, or economic factors in a society prevented an appropriate response?”

2. Insufficient response to circumstances. Suppose a society is faced with a problem, perhaps depletion of a vital resource. Not responding to the problem can lead to collapse. But why does this insufficient response occur? Often, historians have argued that a society is a lumbering dinosaur, a runaway train, or a house of cards—static, incapable of changing directions, or fragile. While these theories rightly recognize that collapse depends more on the characteristics of a society than on its stresses, they too do not explain the cross-sectional variation. After all, societies sometimes do respond to serious problems in dynamic, agile, and robust ways. What explains why they would suddenly stop doing that?

3. Elite mismanagement. To some extent, exploitation and misadministration is a normal feature of hierarchical societies. Even if we take a class conflict view, shouldn’t elites, if they are even slightly rational, view the support population as a vital resource? If so, then the problem becomes the same as in the “vital resource” explanation given above. If we blame elite greed and self-aggrandizement, why should we assume that this is variable, and if it is variable, how can we explain it? Again, allegations of mere elite mismanagement do not explain the cross-sectional variation.

Tainter discusses many other theories, and holds particular contempt for decadence theories of collapse, which are common in the literature, but which he considers mystical and non-scientific. They too do not explain the cross-sectional variation.

So what does explain the cross-sectional variation? Tainter develops a theory based on diminishing marginal returns. Diminishing marginal returns are ubiquitous in economic analysis and indeed in life. The first bite of a pecan pie is sublime; the 20th may be cloying. The same principle operates in countless domains. The exceptions are usually temporary, yielding increasing returns to scale over some range, but eventually succumbing to diminishing returns. Tainter argues that there are diminishing returns to complexity itself.

Society adds complexity to address problems and stresses. In an American context, this is easy to understand. When drugs are unsafe, we increase the stringency of FDA review. When federal projects are too polluting, we pass the National Environmental Policy Act. When there is an oil shock, we create a federal Department of Energy. Terrorist attack? Department of Homeland Security. Financial crisis? CFPB.

This added complexity accumulates. As it does so, it requires resources—Tainter emphasizes energy and fiscal resources—to maintain. Often, the resource demands of one piece of complexity necessitate more complexity, as when a higher tax rate necessitates new resources to be put into legitimization and coercion. The complexity accumulates as a system. At first, the cost-benefit ratio of this added complexity is very favorable, and the marginal benefits are high. As more complexity is added, the marginal benefits diminish, then go to zero, before turning negative.

A society that is past complexity level C2 on the graph above is in a very precarious position. Many members of a society at C3 would rather be at C1, although there is no direct path there because, as just noted, the complexity itself behaves as a system. As Tainter puts it, “when the marginal cost of participating in a complex society becomes too high, productive units across the economic spectrum increase resistance (passive or active) to the demands of the hierarchy, or overtly attempt to break away.” He emphasizes that this can be equally true across the income spectrum; everyone from the peasants to the merchant class to the nobility will be tempted to defect from the current system. “A common strategy is the development of apathy to the well-being of the polity.”

The situation can spiral out of control quickly. An overtaxed peasantry may put up little resistance to invaders. Increasing costs can make public services unsustainable. An increasing share of resources may have to be devoted to legitimation and control. The economy weakens. The ability or desire to meet new challenges evaporates. Collapse is only one new problem away.

According to Tainter, collapse can temporarily be prevented by the acquisition of a new technological capability or energy subsidy. With the additional resources afforded by the technology or subsidy, societies can support a higher degree of complexity. I think Tainter’s graphical representation of this point gets it wrong, but the image below from Ben Reinhardt accurately captures how I envision it.

Even this possibility, however, does not change the logic that the returns to complexity eventually diminish and go negative. If a society keeps increasing its level of complexity, it will inevitably get to a point at which the population would prefer less complexity.

by Eli Dourado |  Read more:

Images: Carole Raddato; Ben Reinhardt

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Translation: Yakiton (grilled pork skewers)
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Miguel Carbonell Selva, Death of Sappho, 1881 
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