Massive WA Salmon Recovery Plan Scrutinized With Latest $100M Project

PORT ANGELES — The Washington State Department of Transportation is planning a giant salmon restoration project here that could require buying out a motel owner, tearing down the building and excavating the highway culvert beneath it, at a price tag of some $100 million.

Yet even after all this work, salmon wouldn’t be able to swim up most of the stream.

As WSDOT races to replace hundreds of culverts by 2030 to meet a court deadline, lawmakers and at least one tribal leader are asking whether projects like this make sense.

 

A group of 21 tribes sued the state in the early 2000s to force the replacement of culverts that, because of their design or lack of maintenance, block salmon and steelhead trout migration. A federal judge, based on the tribes’ treaty fishing rights, ordered the state to fix or replace problem culverts running beneath state highways.

That’s how this project on White Creek landed on the state’s list. By the state’s math, the culvert replacement would open nearly 4 miles of “potential” habitat. But the court-ordered calculation doesn’t account for other problems that affect salmon, including a polluted old mill site, a partial blockage downstream on Ennis Creek and 10 more blockages upstream of the motel.

In reality, many salmon wouldn’t even be able to access White Creek, the state’s own survey shows. Near the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a city-owned concrete slab blocks fish passage under most conditions, according to the survey.

Now lawmakers and tribes are reexamining the court order, proposing new ways to target salmon restoration funds — a delicate “balancing act,” as one tribal leader put it.

The state’s culvert repair program is its largest salmon recovery effort ever, with $3.95 billion already allocated to replace salmon barriers with natural streambeds. To meet the looming deadline, WSDOT last fall asked for up to $4 billion more, prompting fresh skepticism from legislators, who’ve grown increasingly concerned that the state plans aren’t always the best way to help salmon. And just last month, the department revised the request to $5 billion to account for culverts that have structurally failed over the past year.

A Seattle Times investigation this spring highlighted how WSDOT spending is creating stranded restoration projects with limited value today because the state program doesn’t fix other problems in the same watersheds, like barriers owned by other parties. White Creek is a classic case, with its other salmon-blocking barriers upstream and downstream of the state’s culvert. And the potential spectacle of demolishing the motel has raised the question of whether other restoration projects would be more effective and a better use of taxpayer money.

“While we are fixing mistakes of the past, you do it in a more surgical way. You don’t do it with a bulldozer approach, you don’t do it with a meat cleaver,” said W. Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, whose traditional territory includes White Creek. The tribe was among those who sued the state and won the federal court order. Allen holds firmly to that victory but also sees the need for a flexible and creative approach to realize its benefits for fish.

“My view is, work out an agreement with the state and the court … let’s step back and reprioritize, figure out which ones are the ones that are the most important right now and zero in on that,” Allen said.

He said he also understands there is only so much money and that the public has many needs, as do the tribal nations. “There is that balancing act … and we don’t want to turn the public against salmon.”

Lawmakers are also saying they don’t have $5 billion more to spend now. But even if they found the money, it would be logistically impossible to finish the list by 2030, as required in the court injunction, state leaders have told the tribes.

Rep. Steve Tharinger, D-Port Townsend, said he is using the motel project, which is in his district, to call for change because “it’s a high cost with little fish return.”

“It’s the classic poster child of what we shouldn’t do,” he said. (...)

The motel

Chintu Patel, co-owner of the Olympic Inn & Suites, didn’t even know there was a stream or a culvert under his motel until WSDOT told him about it. Maple trees block the view to the south, where the creek flows through a ravine 30 feet below and into the concrete tunnel in question. To the north, an RV dealership and trees obscure any hint of water, as the stream transitions into lowland vegetation.

Patel and his business partner bought the rundown property in 2020 for $6.25 million and soon started fixing it up. They ripped out carpet, remodeled bathrooms and repainted the 115-room motel tan with burgundy accents. “We’ve completely renovated the property,” said Patel, who employs roughly 20 full- and part-time employees at this motel and has ownership interest in 15 other hotels or motels in the state.

After he received a letter from WSDOT two years ago, he was surprised to learn about the plans to replace the culvert. If he had known, “We wouldn’t have put in all the renovations,” he said.

Patel said WSDOT hasn’t yet broached the subject of eminent domain, the state’s legal power to seize property. But the agency has taken private property to replace culverts and compensated the landowners. He’s concerned an appraisal wouldn’t capture the property’s potential value. (...)

WSDOT may pursue the project anyway, despite the high cost and the stream’s other habitat problems. Otherwise, it would have to replace multiple culverts elsewhere to hit its 2030 target, at potentially even greater cost, WSDOT fish passage manager Kim Rydholm said.

White Creek has “little production potential” for salmon because of its many culverts, according to the management plan by the area’s official watershed planning group. The 10 upstream obstructions are owned by private parties or local governments. Technically, any barrier to potential salmon migration violates state law, but the Department of Fish and Wildlife generally doesn’t require owners to remove them. The department is working on new enforcement rules.

WSDOT asks for $5 billion more

Like stormwater rushing into a swollen creek, revelations about problems in WSDOT’s fish passage program kept pouring in over the past year.

In November, WSDOT unveiled its massive budget request to lawmakers. Then The Times investigation spotlighted some culvert projects, costing tens of millions apiece, that are essentially useless without further, big investments. This summer, Inslee and WSDOT leaders told tribes they were probably not going to hit the 2030 deadline. And now the cost estimates are even higher. (...)

They are rethinking how the state fulfills the court order while still honoring tribal treaty rights and the intent of the federal judge’s ruling. All that while navigating intratribal politics, in which each of the 21 sovereign tribal nations that are a party to the federal case can stake their own position.

U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez in 2013 ordered WSDOT to identify its Western Washington culverts blocking 200 meters or more of potential upstream habitat. Then, by 2030, WSDOT is required to open up 90% of the habitat above those culverts.

But the calculation ignored other culverts and similar barriers on those same streams, including blockages owned by cities, counties and private parties.

Tharinger, the Port Angeles-area state representative, said he recently realized that WSDOT’s list of culverts wasn’t well-vetted, causing him to reconsider the funding and strategy. (...)

“We don’t have the money,” said Tharinger, chair of the House Capital Budget Committee. For what the state does allocate, he sees it in simple terms: “How do we spend the money to recover the most fish, to create the most habitat for fish? That’s really the question — not what the court tells us.”

Instead of plowing ahead according to the court order, Tharinger hopes the tribes and state can agree on a strategy to open up the most actual habitat, taking into account the other barriers on the streams. And he wouldn’t limit it to just culvert replacements. Larger projects, such as entire flood plain restorations, should be on the table, he said.

by Mike Reicher and Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Fiona Martin, Mark Nowlin; uncredited

[ed. Gotta love it. How could a massive program like this ever get started without these types of issues being anticipated and resolved from the very beginning? It's beyond belief. Any halfway competent fish biologist would tell you: there's no one-size fits all solution for culverts that are everywhere, beneath buildings and roads, in various stages of disrepair, and blocked in countless ways . Which brings up the US Supreme Court's recent decision re: the so-called Chevron Deference (NRDC):

"The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo dealt a severe blow to the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs by ending the 40-year-old precedent of “Chevron deference.” Instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language in laws pertaining to their work, federal judges now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves. As a result, despite not being accountable to the people, judges will now be able to expand their role into the realm of policymaking." 

See also: Removing WA salmon barriers surges to $1M a day, but results are murky (Seattle Times).]

The Surfers

[ed. Omg. Forgot this old song till I heard it again today.]

Laurent Ballesta, 700 Sharks

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The Rapid Descent of Southwest Airlines

The storm’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

In late December of 2022, an “extratropical cyclone” brought all manner of menacing winter conditions to two-thirds of the U.S., including the entire Eastern Seaboard and parts of Canada. Wind-chill warnings, whiteouts, and extraordinary snowfall complicated travel for millions.

Flight cancellations from what was unofficially dubbed Winter Storm Elliott were inevitable, creating chaos at most airlines for a day. But for Southwest Airlines and its outdated crew-scheduling software, the madness dragged on for over 72 hours as the carrier canceled more than 16,000 flights. An undisclosed number of people were forced to sleep in airports or improvise road trips with strangers to salvage their holidays. The meltdown was so bad that Southwest was pilloried by Saturday Night Live.

The company eventually got back to business as usual, until this year, when a barrage of attacks from another Elliott—this one an activist hedge fund—led to a high-profile reckoning and major leadership shakeup.

The battle alarmed Southwest’s loyal flyers, who are legion. Over 50 years, the Texas-based company has built a cult-favorite brand on a combination of economy-class-only flights, free bag checks and flight changes, and often self-deprecating humor. Flight attendants are known for bookending their safety procedure announcements with comedy bits and dad jokes.

But some investors say Southwest’s foundational practices haven’t aged well as industry operating costs have risen. Since the pandemic, Southwest has lagged competitors in financial performance, and its share price is down 50% compared to 2021.

Seeing a turnaround opportunity, Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund with an 11% stake in the $18 billion airline, launched an aggressive campaign earlier this year to push out CEO Bob Jordan, as well as chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly, and replace half of Southwest’s board. Elliott asserted that the company’s leadership is too entrenched in the airline’s existing operating and pricing model to make changes to boost revenue. “Southwest’s rigid commitment to a decades-old approach has inhibited its ability to compete in the modern airline industry,” the hedge fund said in its opening salvo. (...)

Not long ago, such activist drama at Southwest would have been unthinkable. The airline’s remarkable growth story from startup to a top-four U.S. airline—along with American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines—made it a business-school case-study favorite. And before the pandemic, Southwest was profitable for 47 straight years. No other domestic or global airline can claim the same profitability streak. In fact, all three of Southwest’s main U.S. competitors have gone bankrupt at least once in the past half-century.

But the same unique traits that made Southwest soar—its egalitarian seating and anti-fee stance—have paradoxically weighed it down, says Donald Sull, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor of business practice and author of Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Can Remake Them.

Sull, who has followed Southwest’s story for years, tells Fortune that the airline’s current crisis is reminiscent of companies like Blockbuster and Compaq. In short, Southwest has been responding to changes in the business landscape by doubling down on its existing strategy.

“Business history is littered with the corpses of companies that have fallen prey to active inertia,” he adds. (...)

As a result of the shift in consumer tastes and increased competition for budget travelers, not to mention higher labor and fuel costs, Southwest has been struggling in the post-pandemic environment. This year, Boeing’s own struggles and its expectation of slower production also impacted the company, which was forced to cut its capacity.

Winter Storm Elliott was also a blow, and one that could have been avoided had the company prioritized an update of its crew-scheduling system. The software had no way of automatically reassigning crews to planes following cancellations, and instead required staffers to manually find and schedule crew members. That was a manageable issue when relatively few flights were canceled, but a logistical nightmare when it came to thousands. In an internal report, the company also identified “insufficient winter infrastructure and equipment in key airport locations” as a root cause of the crisis.

CEO Jordan apologized for the chaos, saying in a video message that “we know even our deepest apologies—to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption—only go so far.” The airline vowed to refund customers, later spending $600 million to do so.

No frills and few fees

Herbert Kelleher cofounded Southwest more than 50 years ago as a local, low-cost airline serving Texan cities. As the airline grew, it took a radically different approach to air travel than its competitors. In addition to creating a no-frills, few-fees experience, Southwest adopted a point-to-point routing system, allowing passengers to fly between cities without transferring, rather than the hub-and-spoke model, which requires fliers to stop over in another city. Southwest also used only one type of plane, a Boeing 737, to standardize operations. And most famously, the startup embraced an open seating plan and, until 2007, a first-come, first serve policy.

Over time, Kelleher became known as much for his business prowess as his sense of humor. In a 1994 profile, Fortune called him “the airline industry's jokemeister, the High Priest of Ha-Ha, a man who has appeared in public dressed as Elvis and the Easter Bunny, who has carved an antic public persona out of his affection for cigarettes, bourbon, and bawdy stories.” But he was revered as a strategist too. After Kelleher died in 2019, management guru Roger Martin paid tribute to the founder, writing that he was one of a few who understood that “the only path to distinctive results is with distinctive choices.”

At the time, those choices had been working for decades. There was little deviation, aside from a tweak to its seating policy following increased security requirements after 9/11. And 2015 to 2019 was a particularly heady time for the U.S. airline industry in general, characterized by strong demand and profitability, Nicolas Owens, airline analyst at research firm Morningstar, tells Fortune. Low oil prices were the key tailwinds at the time, Owens argues, since airlines tend to pass on fuel costs to passengers when oil is expensive, and chop ticket prices when fuel costs drop.

But the pandemic and temporary plane groundings brought an abrupt halt to this period. “COVID comes along and totally disrupts the industry,” says Owens. “Planes aren't flying, people aren't flying, etc etera.”

The pandemic briefly sent airline valuations into a free fall. But another change came as the pandemic eased and airlines began ramping up again. Customer preferences shifted, and more Americans chose to fly internationally or revenge-spend on premium services, while taking fewer same-day business trips between U.S. cities. 

The airlines weren’t ready for the surge in demand, Owens explains. Just finding pilots was challenging; many of those who hadn’t been furloughed had retired. However, other than Southwest, the large U.S. airlines were prepared to meet the flying public’s new inclinations, having the right travel networks and products in place to take advantage of pent-up demand for Paris getaways or adventures in Tokyo. Before the pandemic, they had built up their capacity through mergers, and given themselves many levers to pull to respond to the marketplace. For example, they had three or more levels of passenger service to sell, along with airport lounge access. They could charge passengers for extra leg room or faster boarding privileges. With their international routes or airline partnerships, they were prepared to serve globe-trotters, vacationers, short-haul business travelers, and anyone else. “You had really strong financial results in general, where you had airlines reporting record revenue compared to 2019,” even with fewer flights, Owens says.

Southwest’s competitors have also been introducing basic economy seats, cutting into its no-frills strategy and “flooding the price-conscious-traveler space with additional seats within their existing networks,” says David Vernon, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. In short, major airlines have been innovative with their fare-segmentation strategies in a way that Southwest has not.

“The Elliott criticism that the Southwest experience hasn't changed much is fair,” he adds.

As a result of the shift in consumer tastes and increased competition for budget travelers, not to mention higher labor and fuel costs, Southwest has been struggling in the post-pandemic environment. This year, Boeing’s own struggles and its expectation of slower production also impacted the company, which was forced to cut its capacity.

Winter Storm Elliott was also a blow, and one that could have been avoided had the company prioritized an update of its crew-scheduling system. The software had no way of automatically reassigning crews to planes following cancellations, and instead required staffers to manually find and schedule crew members. That was a manageable issue when relatively few flights were canceled, but a logistical nightmare when it came to thousands. In an internal report, the company also identified “insufficient winter infrastructure and equipment in key airport locations” as a root cause of the crisis.

CEO Jordan apologized for the chaos, saying in a video message that “we know even our deepest apologies—to our customers, to our employees, and to all affected through this disruption—only go so far.” The airline vowed to refund customers, later spending $600 million to do so.

A cultural blindness

The 2022 meltdown left Southwest with a $140 million fine from the Department of Transportation and temporarily stained the brand. It was also a damning sign of Southwest’s cultural insularity, according to Rob Britton, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a former American Airlines executive.

Like Sull, he argues that Southwest leaders created and presided over a culture that relied too heavily on past success, and failed to prioritize innovation. To his mind, that’s what led to its failure to invest adequately in technology. Even in its heyday, the company was too satisfied with its own strategies, for example rejecting Wall Street suggestions that it charge for bags as other airlines have done for more than a decade, says Britton. For context, American and United earned $1 billion each in bag fees last year. (Southwest recently shared customer research showing the airline would lose $300 million annually if it charged for bags, based on the number of consumers who would stop flying Southwest.)

Making changes

To escape “active inertia,” according to Sull’s research, companies do need to make drastic changes, but not necessarily by embracing an outsider CEO. Instead, they should look to insider-outside leaders, or executives from the company who have institutional knowledge but also enough distance to see the company’s predicament. That person might run an international business, for example, or a non-core division. Think Jack Welch at GE, who ran the company’s plastics business before taking over, says Sull.

Vernon, the Bernstein analyst, suggests that Southwest’s leadership might not have been burying their heads in the sand as much as “hoping that things would go back to the way they were”—that is, with more people taking cheap, high-frequency, short-haul flights.

by Lila MacLellan, Yahoo News/Fortune | Read more:
Image: Fortune · Bob Jordan:Christopher Goodney/Bloombe'rg-Getty Images, Southwest airplane:Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto-Getty Images; Clouds; Jason Hosking-Getty Images
[ ed. Guess they didn't get the 'rip off the consumer' memo and are now being schooled by some merciless hedge fund who knows exactly how to do that.]

Fall in New England 🍁

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Douglas Flores
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What’s Missing in Our Sex Lives in 2024

Esther Perel’s trajectory from private-practice psychotherapist to internationally renowned relationship expert is deeply entwined with technology.  (...)

But the same technological forces that have helped Perel’s ideas reach the masses also have begun to mold and meddle with modern-day relationships: We swipe to oblivion on soul-sucking dating apps, disappear like ghosts from our romantic interests’ lives and are lured from our partners by our smartphones at crucial moments for connection. (...)

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How do you think technology has shifted the romantic landscape since you began writing about it?

The predictive technologies that are promising to unburden us of the inconveniences of life are also creating a situation where we are gradually more anxious, not less anxious. Because we don’t get to practice the things that actually make us less anxious: experimentation, meeting with the unknown, dealing with uncertainty, the unexpected, dealing with the lessons that you learn from bad choices. That’s what makes you less anxious, not an algorithmic perfection.

If you spend so much time with algorithmic perfections, you begin to experience and create warped expectations, and you carry those expectations for perfection into your relationships with other people, and you become less able to deal with conflict, friction, difference.

Many studies say that Gen Z is having less sex, with fewer partners. A UCLA survey from 2023 said that a little more than 47% of people between the ages of 13 and 24 feel most TV shows and movie plots don’t need sexual content, and want more focus on platonic relationships. What do you make of this?

It’s symptomatic of something that is happening in society, in our changing culture. Technology being one piece of it. Relationships are imperfect and unpredictable. So is sex. And you’re vulnerable and you’re exposed, even. And, by the way, sex is never just sex. Even if you hook up.

So you’re less prepared for the vulnerability, for the unknown, for the consequences, for the challenges of communication that sex demands. If everything needs to be negotiated, as things are today, in relationships, and there is no longer a major religious or social hierarchy that tells you how to think, you have to make your own choices and decisions yourself.

Then in order to negotiate everything, you need to be able to communicate, and those very communication skills — the ability to deal with uncertainty and the unexpected — are the very skills that are weakening in the digital age. Sex is the messiness of human life, the bumps, the smells, the caring.

This, to me, is one of the central questions for the future: How are we going to manage the messiness of human life? That’s the opposite of an algorithmic perfection.

But the point is not that Gen Z wants less sex. They want less sex because they’re more isolated to begin with. They have less friends. They don’t go out, they work alone the whole day. You can go on an app, you can hook up, and after a while that gets a little boring for some. So it’s not the sex, it’s everything that sex is interwoven with.

Do you think it’s possible to foster that kind of intimacy you’re describing on digital platforms?

Yes and no. For a lot of people, it allows them to meet in ways they could never have met. But I do think that this is emotional capitalism, in which you have 1,000 choices at your fingertips, in which you partake in a frenzy of romantic consumerism, in which you are afraid to commit to the good because you fear that you’re going to miss out on the perfect.

We find ourselves evaluating ourselves like products, and that commodification is soulless. Do people meet on dating apps? Absolutely. I think 60% of people these days meet online. But I think there’s going to be a generational shift. There’s more and more attempts by people who are done with the apps to meet in person, even if it’s speed dating, even if it’s meeting in other circumstances, or even if it’s coming to my show.

My most important message in response to this is: Don’t go on a date in a bar, in a restaurant, at a table face to face, that resembles a job interview where you’re asking each other a set of stale questions that tell you nothing while you’re waiting to see if you’re getting butterflies.

Go do something with your friends and bring your date along. Integrate the dating into your life. You will have 1,000 data points by just seeing how this person interacts with people, how they answer questions or how they make comments. But primarily, you’re not isolating yourself, cutting yourself off from your life to go play the lottery, to then lose, and to then have to come back with your shame, to your life, to your friends, to tell them it didn’t work. We can do better.

You’ve talked about how, once you walk into the bedroom, you should throw political correctness out the window. But these days we see a lot of online shaming related to that very thing. How do conversations about sexual politics on social media influence our personal intimate lives?

There’s two questions in what you’re asking. One is: Is there a new type of moralizing that is occurring? And then the second one is: What is the nature of erotic desire?

I see sexuality as a coded language, as a window into the self, into a relationship that demands deep listening, and that listening is that actually sexuality is a coded language for our deepest, emotional needs, wishes, fears, aspirations, wounds. That’s why I always say: Sex is never just sex. Even when you think it’s hit-and-run and it’s supposed to not mean anything, the effort not to make it mean something is meaningful.

In that sense, it is irrational. Why we like certain things, we don’t fully know. We don’t fully know why what I like, you find disgusting. We don’t fully know why this memory turned into a fantasy. We don’t fully know the inner workings of the erotic mind. The brain is a black box as it is, but this adds a whole other layer to its sexual fantasies. It’s a uniquely human production that makes no sense sometimes, because it defies our values. It defies our perception of reality. It defies our perception of who we are as good citizens.

Nobody wants some of these things in real life, but turned into play they can become highly arousing, exciting and satisfying. And it goes even further when you go into the world of kink. The erotic mind is often politically incorrect, meaning it doesn’t abide by the rules of good citizenship that you yourself abide by in the rest of your life. (...)

Here’s one thing I say in the tour, and I say it in the courses too: Relationships are stories. What I would like to invite you to do is to consider your stories with a new curiosity, with more nuance and ambiguity. I want you to think about what are the parts of your story, relational and sexual story, that you want to keep and develop further, and what are the parts of your relational story that you want to leave behind or change? That’s my invitation.

by Alyssa Bereznak, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Maggie Chiang / For The Times

What It’s Like to Work on a Megayacht

Working on a yacht, you’re in a very intimate space with these extremely wealthy people. What is that like?

You’re a fly on the wall, but it’s very one-sided. You learn so much about the owners and guests, and they’re not learning anything about you. As a stewardess, I was doing food service and housekeeping and going through people’s personal belongings, folding their underwear and putting it away. I would overhear conversations, on the phone or in person. This is kind of graphic, but you even learn stuff like how frequently they poop. In yachting, anytime somebody washes their hands, the stewardess dries out the sink afterward. If they put something in the trash, you empty it right away. Every time you go check the bathroom, you make it look untouched. So you learn all their habits. With my previous boss, I would get a sense, like, “oh, he hasn’t eaten in a few hours. He probably wants a snack.” And I would put together a snack for him, and he’d come out and say, “Oh, I was just about to ask you for this.”

How did you get into the industry?

I met a friend of a friend who was on a yacht crew. At the time, I was one year out of college, working a miserable office job and paying student loans. I had always played it really safe, and I was itching to break out of my shell. I thought, I have 40 years to work at a desk job. I’ll give this a try for a little bit. Then, I ended up doing it off and on for 12 years.

I started in Fort Lauderdale, which is the U.S. capital of yachting, and I rented a bed in what’s called a crew house. It’s like a hostel for yacht crew, and people stay there when they’re between jobs. You typically pay by the week. I took a weeklong course called the STCW, which teaches things like basic firefighting, basic first aid, sea survival. When you complete it, you can start looking for work. At the time, I think the course cost about $1,000, and you have to take a refresher every five years. I also took an additional course that teaches about how to handle pirates.

What was your first job?

I didn’t know what I was walking into. I worked for a bachelor who had multiple boats and used them exclusively to throw parties. It was wild. In most cases, we were just tied up to the dock, because then you can have more people onboard. The guests were typically girls in their early 20s, blonde, skinny. They would all say they were models. Then, there would be a small handful of 45-ish-year-old men, lots of vodka and diet Red Bulls. We were always hiring bathroom attendants to try to limit drug use on board. The captain had to have talks with the owner about it, too, because his license would be impacted if anything were to happen. One morning, I woke up, went upstairs, and saw a girl giving a guy a blowjob on the deck. Nobody saw me, so I just turned around and walked back down. I never saw anything that seemed involuntary. I think the girls were aware that they weren’t going to find the love of their lives there.

I never had any issues with how people treated me on that job. I’m not that tall — no one is going to mistake me for a model — and I was wearing a uniform. The problem was that it was just messy. Most yachts have white carpets and white couches and white bath towels, and here were all these girls with self-tanner rubbing off on everything, spilling drinks, and leaving half-drunk cups everywhere. At a certain point that felt almost disrespectful. We had to schedule crew to be awake 24 hours because there was usually some straggler up until dawn. One morning, I was cleaning up this huge mess, and I remember looking out over the water and thinking, What am I doing with my life? Why did I leave my friends and family behind to work on this boat, cleaning up after people who don’t even know my name? We were working all the time, constantly on call. If the owner wasn’t around, he’d tell his friends to use his boat. When I left, I swore I would never do parties like that again — I just wanted to work with families.

My next job was working for a really old guy, over 85. Older owners are very different. Unless they have grandkids, they don’t use water toys, like inflatables and Jet Skis. And you wouldn’t believe how much time it takes to set up water toys, take them down, clean them, and maintain them. Inflatable slides are the worst. Yacht crews hate them. They’re very heavy and they take a long time to put up. And, of course, you’ll spend all this time setting it up, and then the owner or principal guest will say, “You know what? I don’t like the spot. Let’s move the boat.” And you have to take it all down again.

The older guy I worked for, he was very routine and polite. But he was also very flirtatious with me, even when his wife was around. I was 25 at the time, and he said to me on multiple occasions, “You can come down to my cabin after you’re done tonight.” I never felt threatened by it, and the captain was aware of it. But there’s no doubt that I was sexually harassed for the year I worked for him. It was mostly just annoying — the awkward smile, nervous laughter. But aside from that, he was great to work for.

Sometimes, the wives can feel threatened by pretty stewardesses. But I think I’m just unattractive enough that no wife is going to be threatened by me. You do see some interesting marital setups, though. I’ve worked for more than one couple with separate master rooms. There’s one boat in particular where the owner, who is pretty well known, had a long-term mistress. When he would use the boat with his family, they’d have family photos out and all the wife’s things in the closet. And then when the mistress came, the crew would have to put away the family stuff and replace the wife’s things with hers. They were always flip-flopping.

What about privacy? Did you ever work with celebrities who were worried about paparazzi?

Most yachts are very private, and even the outdoor areas have some level of privacy. The bigger issue is on land. Paparazzi will hang out at the private airports or near certain restaurants. But not that many celebrities own yachts, actually. Their net worth aren’t high enough. Yacht-owning money is next level. Yachts are so expensive that most of the owners are just businessmen you’ve never heard of. You couldn’t tell them apart from some other grandpa. I definitely had celebrity guests from time to time, but they were always friends of the owner or charter guests.

Did you always live onboard?

Yes, almost always. The free housing was important to me. Most crew cabins are set up with a bunk bed. About half the time, I was sharing with another crew member, and half the time, I wasn’t. The cabins have very little storage, so I barely had any stuff — just the bag that I lived out of, the uniforms I wore. I was fine with it. Some crew members get a storage unit, but I just kept a couple of things at my parents’ house, like a nice pair of leather boots and a long winter coat that I obviously didn’t need on the boat.

The last boat I worked on was really small; it was for weekend travel, and the crew cabins weren’t set up to be truly livable. So we all stayed ashore in the Hamptons. That’s actually quite common out there; a lot of people have smaller boats, and they rent housing for the crew. But the housing in the Hamptons is absurd. One of the places they rented for us was a two-bed, one-bath apartment with no air-conditioning, and it was $12,000 a month. It was covered by my employer, but paying for my half would have wiped out my salary. Another house where we stayed was listed at $75,000 for the summer.

What were your hours like?

When you don’t have guests onboard, a typical day is 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. A lot of people don’t realize how much time you spend at the dock or anchored with no guests. These yachts are full of equipment that needs repairs all the time. Things need to be taken apart and cleaned and maintained. You have to wash the whole boat regularly.

Then, when you do have guests on, you’re typically working 16-hour days, every day, for the duration of the trip, which could be three weeks or longer. I often worked from 5 or 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. I’m a morning person, so if there was another stewardess, I’d take the early shift and she would do nights. You have a stewardess available at every hour that guests are awake. Sometimes, you have certain guests who get up early and others who stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. having drinks. If you’re a solo stewardess, you might not get a break. (...)

What kind of salary did you make?

You’re salaried by the month, typically. Pay is largely influenced by the size of the boat and your experience level. Starting salaries for stewardesses are between $2,500 and $3,500 a month. I got lucky in my first job and was making $4,000 out of the gate with no experience. I was paid up to $7,500 or $8,500 by the end of my career, especially if I was working on a bigger boat. And your housing and food are covered, because you’re living on the boat. You also get health insurance. My take-home pay could vary a lot. I think the most I ever made was maybe $120,000 a year. Which, especially in your 20s, not paying rent, is good money. It’s also pretty common to get an annual bonus, sometimes one month’s salary. (...)

Was it crazy to watch how some of these people spent money?

I worked on a 47-meter boat that chartered for $250,000 a week. And that just covers use of the boat and crew; it doesn’t include fuel, food, or other fees. So, you could see how these numbers add up very quickly, especially if people are taking a private jet to and from the boat, which they often are.

I worked for one family who was incredibly cheap. They drank off-brand soda, like the grocery-store brand. They would also steal towels from resorts. If they ever went to a beach, they would come back with the towel from the lounge chair. Other people weren’t intentionally cheap — they were just no frills. I worked for a family from the Midwest who, if you saw them, you wouldn’t know that they were multimillionaires. They’re just meat-and-potatoes, vanilla-ice-cream kind of people. Their kids shop at H&M. At one point, we needed a new welcome mat on the boat, so I asked the owner’s wife if I could buy one, and she just went to Kmart and bought one herself.

Another owner was an elaborate spender. He always wanted to outdo his friends. He would have these hugely over-the-top birthdays. One year, he spent more than $50,000 just on a fireworks show. He wanted the premium version of every water toy, the fastest Jet Ski with the most features. He would go to a restaurant and order everything on the whole menu, even if it was just two people at the table and they were going to throw most of the food away.

Did it ever affect the way that you spent money, to see how these people were living?

I was always careful with my money. But some crew members aren’t. Part of the problem is that the places where yachts go are very expensive, so as soon as you get off the boat, you’re spending a lot. A gallon of milk in the Bahamas is like $11. If you take a taxi ride, it’s easily $100. Then, some people get caught up in the lifestyle. For guys, it was always about the watch. The owner’s got a nice watch; the captain has a nice watch; they want to get a nice watch too. Which is fine for them, but it wasn’t something I cared about. Who am I going to impress? Not the owners; they have millions of dollars and $100,000 Rolexes. The area where I spent money was travel. I’d work for a couple of seasons and then take a break. I backpacked around the South Pacific and in Asia several times. And I was a budget traveler, so I was able to stretch my money really far.

Were you able to save money?

Yes, quite a bit. When I left, I had over $100,000 in cash and over $350,000 invested. It’s good money, but there are so many sacrifices that come with it. When you break it down to an hourly rate, the pay is not great. And you don’t have control over when you’re working. That was a big reason why I finally left; your whole life is very much dependent on another person’s movement. And they always want to have their options open. I knew someone who had to quit a job because the owner wouldn’t let her take time off to go to her best friend’s wedding. I knew another guy who missed his brother’s wedding. The owner was like, “You need to be here,” and then he didn’t even end up using the boat that day.

by Charlotte Cowles, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

Main Character Syndrome

Driving on one of New York’s poorly maintained and crowded roads, I found myself in a situation one can more safely observe through numerous YouTube ‘bad driver’ videos: a driver for whom all other traffic apparently ceased to exist confidently pulled into a lane I already happened to occupy. After a quick manoeuvre that probably spared me a role in one of the aforementioned videos, I said, perhaps louder than was necessary, to nobody in particular: ‘Is this [deleted] aware of anything but his own [deleted]?’

Because I am a philosopher, and thus tend to be rather bad at letting go of ideas – especially ideas without good answers – my close brush with YouTube fame led me to consider other instances of what has come to be called ‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.

You have probably heard of MC behaviour – or perhaps even witnessed it online or in person. A TikToker and her followers physically push aside those inconvenient extras ‘ruining’ their selfies – and then post their grievances on social media. A man on a crowded subway watches a loud sports broadcast without headphones while ignoring other commuters’ requests to turn it down a bit. This is no mere rudeness: in the narrowly circumscribed world of main characters, the rest of us are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces. Akin to chess pieces, or perhaps to animatronic figures, we have agency only in the development of the MC’s story. In current parlance, we are non-player characters (or NPCs) – a term that originated in traditional tabletop games to describe characters not controlled by a player but rather by the ‘dungeon master’. In video games, NPCs are characters with a predetermined (or algorithmically determined) set of behaviours controlled by the computer. Rather than agents with a will and intent, NPCs are there to help the MC in his quest, to intersect with the MC in preset ways, or to simply remain silent – a kind of prop, or perhaps human-shaped furniture, a part of the scenery. Another way to view NPCs is to imagine what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, a being that, while physically identical to a normal human being, does not have conscious experience. If a p-zombie laughs, it’s not because it finds anything funny – its behaviour is purely imitative of the real (main character!) individual. For someone convinced of their MC identity, the rest of us are, perhaps, just so many zombies. (...)

As a philosopher and a narrativist, I am an unabashed supporter of the view that selves are something that we create together, through shared stories. What is a narrative? In short, anything that can be read, spoken, heard, written, viewed or otherwise expressed – and this certainly includes social media. In telling stories, we create and reveal who we think we are; in listening to the stories of others, we help to mould and sustain them as persons. Stories are thus foundational to how we view the world and our place in it, and through them we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others. (...)

MCS offers the wrong kinds of stories: harmful, isolating, solipsistic, amoral. And it begins, in large part, with the assumed superiority of the main character’s self-conception.... Daily, social media denizens are sold the idea that becoming the heroes of their lives is the only thing that matters. (...)

Absorbing these messages and mimicking the voiceovers of lead characters in films and other media, we also try to narrate our lives – often, directly into our smart phones – and share with the world all the ways in which our paths, our storylines, our perspectives, are the ones that matter, the ones worth paying attention to; our voices the voices that are worth hearing. We demand from others, both directly and indirectly: ‘Stop everything, and watch me – the hero!’

But isn’t it a bit too easy to blame media for our growing obsession with our own importance? Long before the internet, let alone social media, people have shared their narratives in diaries, autobiographies, poems and so on, bringing their lives to centre stage. Generations of Americans have been taught to pursue happiness – individual, personal happiness – above all else. There have always been solipsists, narcissists, sociopaths and simple attention-seekers – social media did not invent the me-first typology.

And yet, can we help ourselves in this time of global access to others, and to ourselves? Can we – well, some of us, anyway – resist demanding an audience when one is always there, ready to be engaged? Perhaps not. As the clinical psychologist Michael G Wetter said in a Newsweek interview in 2021, main character syndrome is:

the inevitable consequence of the natural human desire to be recognized and validated merging with the rapidly evolving technology that allows for immediate and widespread self-promotion … Those who exhibit characteristics consistent with the experience of main character syndrome tend to want to create a narrative that is dependent on an audience to validate their story. What good is a story or movie if there is no audience?

Media, social and otherwise, has made it easier, cheaper and, importantly, more socially acceptable to act out our MC monomyths. We can upload photos, videos, entire films about ourselves – and we can choose how we are perceived through clever tricks of light and angles, apps and filters that tell exactly the stories we want told. All this because we want to get noticed, we want to be seen – and seen as someone who matters, as the main someone who matters. As the influencer Ashley Ward noted on TikTok in 2020:

You have to start romanticising your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because, if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.

Not being seen, not being noticed as someone who matters means relegating oneself to NPC-dom – a nobody, a nothing, a mannequin without a personal story or agency, going through a prewritten script of a grey, insignificant life. To be seen, on the other hand, is to be happy. This happiness requires making sure that others know that one is happy, successful, better than those NPCs – in other words, it calls for constant curation of one’s image, one’s narrative, one’s self. If one is not the MC, someone else surely will be. This is, for many, simply an intolerable fate.

Of course, blaming all media, or only social media, for MCS would be inaccurate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, main characters have emerged in places where psychopathy and narcissism have always reigned: in politics, academia and other public-facing institutions. From a US president who claims that ‘I alone can fix’ the nation’s many crises, to news and manipulative media personalities who insist that they and only they are telling the truth, to politicians who cannot – or do not wish to – tell the difference between being famous and being effective, MCS is becoming the norm.

There are worse offenders still. As an academic, I would be remiss if I did not include those within academia, or those solipsistic enough to call themselves ‘social leaders’ or, even worse, ‘thought leaders’. (...)

I take self-creating narratives to be fundamental to who we are – by telling and hearing stories about ourselves, about others and about the world, we come to understand who, why and how we might be. Yet the kind of main-character storytelling that is presently ascendant does very little to form mutually constructed identities and, instead, reduces the complexity of human relationships to simplistic binaries of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’. Instead of co-creators and co-authors of each other’s selves, what remains is an anxiety-producing, shallow, consumerist competition for the ring of the one true self, the one true main character. We thus become rivals, competitors and players in what looks like a zero-sum game of winners and losers. 

by Anna Gotlib, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: xkcd.com

[ed. More than just another term for narcissism (a subset of the type). What's particularly galling is that this behavior is constantly rewarded - with fauning accolades for celebrities, sports stars, musicians, CEOs/billionaires, and anyone else who somehow manages to grab a momentary piece of public attention (an important value metric - along with money. Lots of money).]

Olomana

[ed. One of the most beloved of contemporary Hawaiian songs.]

Itoshi Rin

[ed. Yikes. Email from character.ai. You may recall my earlier conversation with Librarian Linda (book recommendations). See also: Teen, 14, Dies by Suicide After Falling in 'Love' with AI Chatbot. Now His Mom Is Suing (People).]

Microsoft Has an OpenAI Problem

In pure organizational terms, OpenAI is a weird entity. It started as a nonprofit, raising more than $100 million dollars to spend on foundational AI research, before morphing into a “capped profit” corporation governed by a nonprofit and “legally bound” to pursue the nonprofit’s mission. In 2015, that mission was ” to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In 2024, OpenAI says its “mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work — benefits all of humanity.”

This was, in hindsight, a pretty good deal for OpenAI, which has burned through billions of dollars building, training, and operating AI models. First, it got to raise a lot of money without normal pressure to pay it back. Then, as a for-profit firm wrapped in a non-profit, it raised huge amounts of money from Microsoft without the risk of control by or absorption into the nearly 50-year-old company. In the process of raising its next round of funding, which values the startup at more than $150 billion, the company has told investors it will transition to a for-profit structure within two years, or they get their money back.

If you take Sam Altman at his word, this process wasn’t inevitable, but it turned out to be necessary: As OpenAI’s research progressed, its leadership realized that its costs would be higher than non-profit funding could possibly support, so it turned to private sector giants. If, like many of OpenAI’s co-founders, early researchers, former board members, and high-ranking executives, you’re not 100 percent convinced of Sam Altman’s candor, you might look back at this sequence of events as opportunistic or strategic. If you’re in charge of Microsoft, it would be irresponsible not to at least entertain the possibility that you’re being taken for a ride. According to the Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI and Microsoft MSFT 0.14%increase; green up pointing triangle are facing off in a high-stakes negotiation over an unprecedented question: How should a nearly $14 billion investment in a nonprofit translate to equity in a for-profit company?

Both companies have reportedly hired investment banks to help manage the process, suggesting that this path wasn’t fully sketched out in previous agreements. (Oops!) Before the funding round, the firms’ relationship has reportedly become strained. “Over the last year, OpenAI has been trying to renegotiate the deal to help it secure more computing power and reduce crushing expenses while Microsoft executives have grown concerned that their A.I. work is too dependent on OpenAI,” according to the New York Times. “Mr. Nadella has said privately that Mr. Altman’s firing in November shocked and concerned him, according to five people with knowledge of his comments.”

Microsoft is joining in the latest investment round but not leading it; meanwhile, it’s hired staff from OpenAI competitors, hedging its bet on the company and preparing for a world in which it no longer has preferential access to its technology. OpenAI, in addition to broadening its funding and compute sources, is pushing to commercialize its technology on its own, separately from Microsoft. This is the sort of situation companies prepare for, of course: Both sides will have attempted to anticipate, in writing, some of the risks of this unusual partnership. Once again, though, OpenAI might think it has a chance to quite literally alter the terms of its arrangement. From the Times:

The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies. The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

One problem with the conversation around AGI is that people disagree on what it means, exactly, for a machine to “match” the human brain, and how to assess such abilities in the first place. This is the subject of lively, good-faith debate in AI research and beyond. Another problem is that some of the people who talk about it most, or at least most visibly, are motivated by other factors: dominating their competitors; attracting investment; supporting a larger narrative about the inevitability of AI and their own success within it.

That Microsoft might have agreed to such an AGI loophole could suggest that the company takes the prospect a bit less seriously than its executives tend to indicate — that it sees human-level intelligence emerging from LLMs as implausible and such a concession as low-risk. Alternatively, it could indicate that the company believed in the durability of OpenAI’s non-profit arrangement and that its board would responsibly or at least predictably assess the firm’s technology well after Microsoft had made its money back with near AGI; now, of course, the board has been purged and replaced with people loyal to Sam Altman.

This brings about the possibility that Microsoft simply misunderstood or underestimated what partner it had in OpenAI. 

by John Herrman, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

[ed. See also: Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age (Intelligencer).]

Mr. Everywhere

Why Snoop Dogg Fits In Anywhere, Even the Olympics (AdWeek)

Images: via; and Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

[ed. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been wondering why Snoop keeps turning up everywhere these days. See also: Should We Get Angry When Artists Sell Out? (includes some fun links - HB). ]

Kool & The Gang

[ed. Newest inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. About time.]

Auto Show Dispatch

The Buick display at this year’s New York International Auto Show was located in the far back corner of the Javits Center’s third-floor main exhibition hall, the kind of dim and lonely zone where you might stumble upon unused sound equipment from the 2016 Hillary Clinton victory party. What I found instead was a solitary, sickly orange Buick Envista, a crossover SUV presumably named to match its sisters, Encore, Envision, and Enclave. Except of course that encore, envision, and enclave are real words.

An auto show, like any trade show, is an assertion of hierarchy. It was obvious from the press days I attended in March that Buick — once a glorious American enterprise, more recently a middling brand with a Tiger Woods endorsement deal — is at the bottom. Like visitors to a car dealership subjected to none of the sales pressure, auto show attendees can take all the time they want examining, entering, photographing, filming, touching, and slamming the doors of the contemporary American automobile. I sat down inside the Envista and considered the market potential of a cheap-feeling crossover with the rear-seat headroom of a coupe; it struck me as limited. I had gotten the sense, walking around the Javits, that after a decade of unquestioned SUV dominance we were now in the early days of decrossoverification: small and small-adjacent SUVs seemed to be getting lower, more compact, and more sedanlike than their recent antecedents. Unlike the Envista, however, most of them were managing this transition without forcing rear-seat occupants to lean forward like visitors in a hospital waiting room, waiting to be told the bad news. Buick’s old-school crappy display featured piles of branded cowboy hats and nothing at all in the way of persuasion. “Is this the company’s first compact crossover?” I found myself asking the lone and passive sales rep with a curiosity at once feigned and totally sincere. What was I, undercover for CNET? That was a real low point for me.

Everyone has a first convention center, and Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center was mine. I attended my first auto show there in 1992 or 1993, and back then I would have seen every major brand and model on the market. This hasn’t been the case at the Javits for some time. As customers do more and more exploratory browsing online, carmakers are increasingly reluctant to allocate their marketing budgets to labor-, transportation-, and swag-intensive events. Floor space is expensive; hashtags are cheap. Stellantis had an outdoor Jeep test track but was otherwise absent at NYIAS this year — no Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, or Maserati — and two of the three major Germans (Mercedes-Benz and BMW) were entirely absent, which would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. GM didn’t bother bringing Cadillac, its most interesting brand, and Ford showed up without Lincoln, which in 2016 had a huge stand featuring its brand-new Navigator concept and its then ambassador, Matthew McConaughey. Mazda didn’t show up, which was too bad, and neither did Mitsubishi, which was unsurprising. The last time I saw the latter there, I think in 2017, their display was desultory and Buick-like, as if they were putting in a final appearance before opting out of the circuit forever.

Auto shows used to be major media events. Local and national TV networks still show up to deliver low-energy live coverage, but the automotive magazines have thinned out and newspaper car critics are an endangered species. In their absence an esoteric community of amateurs has stepped in: TikTokers, vloggers, n+1 editors. Watching the vloggers at work called to mind firefighters rescuing a single cat from a tree or PACs spending millions of dollars on a local election — instances where effort and outcome are irrevocably mismatched. Here were guys who had spent thousands on high-end cameras and microphones to record videos that would get them views in the single digits. At one point I saw a young man sprint across the floor and instinctively thought he was a mass shooter until I noticed the selfie stick. He was a vlogger, booking it toward a Toyota Land Cruiser with his camera and proceeding to bob up and down dramatically around the hood, I guess for cinematographic reasons. It was a poignant, committed performance, and there was no way anyone would watch it once it was uploaded to YouTube.

My sentient life has roughly coincided with an era of unprecedentedly high automotive quality. In the 1990s, during my early auto show–going days, the xenophobic Reagan-era freakout about Japanese imports was giving way to a near-universal great leap forward. American cars were getting better, as were German cars and Korean cars, while the Japanese econoboxes had attained an exalted realm that seemed to surpass mere questions of reliability. Today, cars are better than they have ever been — and, not unrelatedly, are more similar to one another. There are fewer major car companies, more shared parts and platforms, a stronger regulatory environment, and far less eccentricity. None of this is bad per se, but I wonder if the oft-noted decline of auto enthusiasm isn’t in large part a consequence of our high-quality epoch. It seems to me that there is an essential relationship between idiosyncrasy and fandom — the latter can’t function without the former. Fans of midcentury English cars bonded over their MGs’ and TVRs’ ghastly wiring problems and frequent breakdowns, and turn-of-the-millennium Saturn nerds had whatever it was they had at their epic gatherings in Spring Hill, Tennessee. (...)

Acura is Honda’s luxury vehicle division, a category I’ve always been suspicious of. What’s the point of paying a huge premium for a rebadged Toyota Camry with leather seats and wood trim? Without BMW, Mercedes, and Stellantis’s numerous brands, the Japanese luxury divisions had way too much space and not enough to fill it with. My main impression of their display areas was that there was a lot of carpeting, which didn’t do much to soften the Javits’s blunt-force concrete hostility. Infiniti, the upmarket Nissan, was a little more impressive than Acura or Lexus, giving over the entirety of its floor space to a semi-interactive experience dedicated to its new QX80, a beastly full-size SUV with air curtains larger than my head. The Infiniti stand featured swelling electronic strings, blue-green lava lamp illumination, elusive hors d’oeuvres, and a weird audio component showcasing the Infiniti’s Klipsch Reference Premiere Audio System — all of which seemed like the appropriate amount of effort needed to sell an SUV that costs $30,000 more than the nearly identical Nissan Armada.

Of course there’s no inherent relationship between display quality and market share. Tesla is no less powerful for not showing up, and even Matthew McConaughey couldn’t have helped Buick make its case. But if some of the heavy hitters asserted their presence via absence, a few brands did so via emphatic presence. Toyota had wheelchair basketball and a bouncy castle meant to evoke a swimming pool in honor of the company’s Paralympic and Olympic partnerships. The row of sneakers at the Nissan stand was there to promote the Kicks compact crossover, a car named after shoes and possibly also designed to resemble them. (...)

The bestselling automotive brands in America are Toyota, Ford, and Chevrolet. In 2023, the bestselling models were the Ford F-Series, the Chevy Silverado, the Ram Pickup, the Toyota RAV4, and the Tesla Model Y. The stars of the New York International Auto Show, however, were the Koreans. While Genesis held it down for the Korean luxury sector, Kia did its best as Hyundai’s somewhat lesser quasi subsidiary. Introducing its heroically ugly K4, the Kia representative talked at length about the model’s various technological innovations, including its AI capability, which allows drivers to hear about their “stocks, sports scores, and owner’s manual content.” Over and over again I heard about the width of various digital instrumental panels, possibly the saddest example of dick measuring I’ve encountered in an industry permanently committed to the practice. (The K4’s screen is thirty inches wide, if Big Display Energy is the sort of thing that gets you going.) (...)

The salespersonship at the Hyundai press conference was impressive. Introducing two lesser new models, Randy Parker, the CEO of the company’s American division, announced Hyundai’s “all-new human-centric technology”: the “return of some of those knobs and dials” that nearly every brand — other than the noble anti-touchscreen holdout Mazda — has renounced over the past few years. But these surface-level tweaks weren’t the big story. “We’re meeting customers where they are on the journey to electrification,” Parker said with great pride. If in recent years electric cars had appealed to a smallish number of early adopters, Hyundai is now working toward “what we call the early majority,” a brilliant piece of branding that feels like something Democratic consultants get paid millions of dollars to (fail to) come up with. (...)

During the Hyundai press conference discussion of Hyundai Pay, a technology that places the brand “at the nexus of the auto industry, the payments industry, and the EV charging industry,” I had the thought that the interior of a new car is the only place where one can experience the total tech dream as it’s been conceived of by its proselytizers. While driving you can turn your Klipsch Reference Premiere Audio System all the way up, suppress the outside world, and attain pure, blissful dissociation — unless a bridge collapses under you, or (more likely) you get distracted by a text and crash into a minivan.

by Mark Krotov, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Still from Trafic

Ani DiFranco

[ed. A friend mentioned the other day that they'd never heard of Ani (!)]

Lyrics: Firedoor; Gravel; Hide and Seek

Prometheus Unbound: Mary Shelley’s Admonishment About Scientism

“I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the Universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge” —C.S. Lewis

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts . . . how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature would allow.” —Victor Frankenstein

The Relevance of Prometheus

In Romantic circles of the 19th century, allusions to the Promethean allegory “abounded.” Percy Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound while Lord Byron wrote Prometheus. In response to her husband, Percy Shelley, and her father, the renowned William Godwin, Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Percy and Godwin, and to a lesser extent Mary Shelley’s own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, were cavalier provocateurs, social radicals and self-described atheists—who lived to push the envelope in their quest to “liberate” humanity from long-established social convention and hierarchies. Mary Shelley however, hearkened back to the more conservative, previous generation of Romantics, who grounded their enthusiasm for the natural world in Christianity.

In the Promethean Allegory, Prometheus is both hero and villain. In one ilk, he molded humanity (and then subsequently furnished humans with fire) out of clay to aid the titans in their struggle against the gods. While Prometheus is the benefactor and creator of humanity, his revolution against the divine order cost him dearly, as he was chained to a rock, whereby an eagle (the iconographized form of Zeus) would incessantly peck out and regurgitate his internal organs. Gruesome and grotesque was the punishment of Prometheus, though his revolution against the gods was the impetus for Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. (...)

Victor Frankenstein as Prometheus

Just as Prometheus questioned the divine order, so too did Victor Frankenstein. In true Jacobin form, Victor condemned what he deemed the unjust and cruel nature of the world which he occupied. To this end, Victor embarked upon a quest to rearrange the natural order of things in a manner that corresponded with Victor’s his own mental fancy of the way things ought to be: “I had a contempt for the very uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed.”

In the novel, Victor’s quest to conquer what he deems the injustice of death, is initially masked by altruistic notions about “helping his fellow creatures” in a cruel and ruinous world. Eventually, Victor’s “selfless” ideals dissolve, as he is consumed by his quest to animate inanimate matter through the haphazard arrangement of organic scraps, in a manner eerily similar to Prometheus—who molded man from clay as a power ploy to overthrow the divine order. Rather than acquiesce the necessity of death as the culmination of life, Victor boldly rebels against the cycle of death and re-birth, which greatly angers and emboldens him to extend the bounds of human knowledge, in a quest to extend humanity’s power over nature and its rhythms.

As the tale goes, once Victor breathed life into his creation by harnessing the power of lightning by apprehending and applying the physical laws of nature, he has an epiphany and recognizes the atrocity which he has committed. Upon this moment of cognizance, Victor decides to rest before attempting to erase his creation from existence. The rest is history: when Victor awakes, his “creature” is nowhere to be found and Victor is bewildered. Scorned by humanity for his grotesque outward appearance, the malleable creature devolves from benevolence to vengeful depravity aimed at his creator, who hated him and shirked his responsibility to inculcate just sentiments in his offspring.

Humanity at large is horrified by the creature’s ghastly outward appearance because it is apparent he is the incarnation of some unspeakable sin, and consequently reject his every attempt to garner affection. The creature’s vengeance and depravity ultimately culminates in the gruesome murder of all whom Victor holds dear.

In the novel, Victor is never fully conscious of the true gravity of his crimes against nature indicated by him chiding Walton to press on at the expense of his men to achieve “greatness” in the name of science and advancement. Victor, like many “monsters,” believes himself to be merely the malefactor of Fortune’s fickle nature: “I myself have been blasted in these hopes, yet another might succeed.” Delusionally, Victor measures his circumstances based on the effect, rather than the true cause and in doing so, absolves himself for acting upon his mistaken and corrupt ideals—ideals which Bacon himself would have been proud of. Nonetheless, Victor does realize he has been sentenced—like Prometheus—to a perpetual loop of futility as Victor conveys he is to pursue without cessation the malevolent fiend which he had created. (...)

Mary Shelley Laid the Groundwork for Thoreau, Huxley, Orwell, Lewis, and Others

Though Thoreau would later characterize modern technology as “improved means to unimproved ends” and Aldous Huxley would warn that the danger of technology is that it is but a “more efficient instrument of coercion,” Mary Shelley was perhaps the first to illuminate modernity’s insatiable appetite for temporal progress. Today perhaps greater than ever, humanity continues its quest to maximize its knowledge of the Baconian variety, in a bid to achieve a new age of heaven on earth, powered by the rule of applied science, or scientism.

A day does not pass when I do not come across an article that speaks of doing what was hitherto regarded as “disgusting and impious” such as geoengineering the climate to “save the planet” from Climate Change, as if the earth’s spawn is capable of saving that from which we arose. Likewise, genetically engineering chimeras with human and animal DNA so that their organs may be harvested for transplants is well underway, despite the fact that it reduces both life forms to “raw matter to be shaped and molded in the images of the conditioners,” like Lewis conveyed in Abolition. Similarly, it seems as though Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the great collective pursuit of our time. For what reason or purpose I do not know, as it does not seem to solve any particular problem facing humanity, though it undoubtedly introduces a multiplicity of new ones. The late Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that any tool must solve some prescribed problem, otherwise it is merely a superfluous technology and either distracts and anesthetizes, or is perhaps more even more sinister: AI seems to me the latter.

by Drew Maglio, The Great Conversation |  Read more:

Image: Frontispiece to Frankenstein, 1831 Edition

[ed. I have Ms Shelley's book waiting on my shelf... next in line.]

30 Useful Concepts (Spring 2024)

It’s that time again; a summary of interesting and useful concepts to spur your curiosity. Click the titles for more information.

1. Dopamine Culture

“Every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.” — Aldous Huxley

The delay between desire & gratification is shrinking. Pleasure is increasingly more instant & effortless. Everything is becoming a drug. What will it do to us?

2. False Consensus Effect

“Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” — George Carlin

Our model of the world assumes people are like us. We don’t just do whatever we consider normal, we also consider normal whatever we do.

3. Fredkin's Paradox

The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.

To avoid being paralyzed by meaningless choices, use decision-making heuristics.

4. Package-Deal Ethics

“If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you’re not a serious thinker.” — Chris Williamson

Being pro-choice and being pro-gun-control don’t necessarily follow from each other, yet those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don’t choose beliefs individually but subscribe to “packages” of beliefs offered by a tribe.

5. Ovsiankina Effect (aka Hemingway Effect)

We have an intrinsic need to finish what we’ve started. Exploit this by taking your breaks mid-task; the incompleteness will gnaw at you, increasing your motivation to return to work. (When writing, I end each day mid-sentence because it

6. Naxalt Fallacy

Smart people tend to use qualifiers like “generally” and “most”, and dumb people tend to ignore them.

“Most people who are pro-choice are also pro-gun-control.”
“Wrong! I’m not!”
“Men are generally taller than women.”
“False! My wife is 7 feet tall!”

(...)

9. Gambler’s Conceit

People hooked on a risky behavior (e.g. gambling, smoking) reassure themselves they’ll be able to quit while ahead (before bankruptcy, lung cancer). However, their future-self tends to act a lot like them, so if they can't quit now, they likely won't quit later when they’re even deeper in. (...)

11. Noble Cause Corruption

The greatest evils come not from people seeking to do evil, but people seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Everyone who was on the wrong side of history believed they were on the right side.

by Gurwinder, The Prism |  Read more:

Images: uncredited