Porsupah Ree
A binky is a playful and happy expression made by a rabbit in which it jumps in the air and twists its body around in a convulsive fashion. Also known as the "Happy Bunny Dance".
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Binkying Bunnies
Porsupah Ree
A binky is a playful and happy expression made by a rabbit in which it jumps in the air and twists its body around in a convulsive fashion. Also known as the "Happy Bunny Dance".
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Here Comes 'The World's Angriest Robot'
It's almost a religious question: in whose image are we making robots?
Will we only make clever, efficient robots who will do what they're told -- built, naturally, in the image of your average middle management functionary?
Or will we attempt to build monsters -- just because we like to put our fingers in the fire occasionally?
A New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group says it's building a robot that will be the worst of us.
It will be angry all the time. Angrier than a motorist trying to tolerate yet another cyclist who goes straight through a stop sign. Angrier than Kanye when he sees a paparazzo. And, yes, angrier than any Comcast customer that ever lived.
The idea, in fact, is to help organizations deal with angry customers. As the Australian Business Review reports, Touchpoint is working with a bank so that its machines can better understand why customers get angry.
Those who enjoy their Isaac Asimov might be amused (or appalled) that this project carries the name Radiant. In Asimov's work, Prime Radiant predicted how humans might behave in the future.
Some, though, might be concerned about Touchpoint's angry robot.
It is, of course, marginally hilarious that a bank might need a robot to explain that bad or opaque customer service might get humans mad. What is there to understand? Or is this, perhaps, another step for financial organizations to remove, say, employees altogether?
by Chris Matyszczyk, CNET | Read more:
Image: DJAlienPhantom/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk
Will we only make clever, efficient robots who will do what they're told -- built, naturally, in the image of your average middle management functionary?Or will we attempt to build monsters -- just because we like to put our fingers in the fire occasionally?
A New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group says it's building a robot that will be the worst of us.
It will be angry all the time. Angrier than a motorist trying to tolerate yet another cyclist who goes straight through a stop sign. Angrier than Kanye when he sees a paparazzo. And, yes, angrier than any Comcast customer that ever lived.
The idea, in fact, is to help organizations deal with angry customers. As the Australian Business Review reports, Touchpoint is working with a bank so that its machines can better understand why customers get angry.
Those who enjoy their Isaac Asimov might be amused (or appalled) that this project carries the name Radiant. In Asimov's work, Prime Radiant predicted how humans might behave in the future.
Some, though, might be concerned about Touchpoint's angry robot.
It is, of course, marginally hilarious that a bank might need a robot to explain that bad or opaque customer service might get humans mad. What is there to understand? Or is this, perhaps, another step for financial organizations to remove, say, employees altogether?
by Chris Matyszczyk, CNET | Read more:
Image: DJAlienPhantom/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk
Friday, May 22, 2015
Some People Do More Than Text While Driving
[ed. I'm guilty of this, using Google Maps while driving. The app seems designed for that purpose.]
Phones are getting smarter, drivers seemingly less so.
A survey released this morning shows that many motorists have expanded their behind-the-wheel activities beyond texting to include using Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, taking selfies and even shooting videos.
The survey was commissioned by AT&T, itself a phone company, but one that has invested heavily in discouraging distracted driving through its “It Can Wait” public service campaign. The telephone survey was conducted by Braun Research, which polled 2,067 people who own a smartphone and drive at least once a day.
The survey found that 27 percent of drivers age 16 to 65 report using Facebook, and 14 percent report using Twitter. Of those, a startling 30 percent who said they post to Twitter while driving do it “all the time.”
“One in 10 say they do video chat while driving. I don’t even have words for that,” said Lori Lee, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for global marketing.
The survey found, 17 percent take selfies, perhaps a fitting metaphor for ignoring everyone else on the road. The survey also found that texting remains the most prevalent activity, reported by 61 percent of drivers, followed by 33 percent who email and 28 percent who surf the Internet. More than 10 percent use Instagram and Snapchat. (...)
Phones are getting smarter, drivers seemingly less so.
A survey released this morning shows that many motorists have expanded their behind-the-wheel activities beyond texting to include using Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, taking selfies and even shooting videos.
The survey was commissioned by AT&T, itself a phone company, but one that has invested heavily in discouraging distracted driving through its “It Can Wait” public service campaign. The telephone survey was conducted by Braun Research, which polled 2,067 people who own a smartphone and drive at least once a day.The survey found that 27 percent of drivers age 16 to 65 report using Facebook, and 14 percent report using Twitter. Of those, a startling 30 percent who said they post to Twitter while driving do it “all the time.”
“One in 10 say they do video chat while driving. I don’t even have words for that,” said Lori Lee, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for global marketing.
The survey found, 17 percent take selfies, perhaps a fitting metaphor for ignoring everyone else on the road. The survey also found that texting remains the most prevalent activity, reported by 61 percent of drivers, followed by 33 percent who email and 28 percent who surf the Internet. More than 10 percent use Instagram and Snapchat. (...)
Curiously, more drivers are aware of the risks. In the 2014 AAA survey, 84.4 percent of those surveyed said it was “completely unacceptable” to text and drive.
What might explain the disconnect?
Over the years covering this issue, I’ve heard a handful of explanations from scientists and policy experts that get at potential reasons.
First, policy and safety efforts to discourage distracted driving are flying in the face of strong social pressure to stay connected. It’s also flying in the face of market forces and new technology that encourage constant connectedness. That’s summed up in the auto industry’s idea du jour: touch-screen Infotainment.
And our devices can feel irresistible. In the new AT&T survey, 22 percent of the respondents who access social media while driving said that they did so because they felt addicted. A growing body of evidence suggests that heavy use of phones is, if not actually addictive, at least extremely habit-forming.
Drivers also overestimate their abilities to multitask while driving even as they criticize others for doing it.
What might explain the disconnect?
Over the years covering this issue, I’ve heard a handful of explanations from scientists and policy experts that get at potential reasons.
First, policy and safety efforts to discourage distracted driving are flying in the face of strong social pressure to stay connected. It’s also flying in the face of market forces and new technology that encourage constant connectedness. That’s summed up in the auto industry’s idea du jour: touch-screen Infotainment.
And our devices can feel irresistible. In the new AT&T survey, 22 percent of the respondents who access social media while driving said that they did so because they felt addicted. A growing body of evidence suggests that heavy use of phones is, if not actually addictive, at least extremely habit-forming.
Drivers also overestimate their abilities to multitask while driving even as they criticize others for doing it.
by Matt Richtel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: LM Otero/Associated Press
Everyone I Know is Brokenhearted
It didn’t used to be like this when I was a kid. I’m not getting nostalgic here, or pretending that my adolescence and my twenties were some kind of soft-focused Golden Age. Life sucked when I was young. I was unhappy then too. But there was always the sense that it was just a temporary thing, that if I stuck it out eventually the world was going to get better — become awesome, in fact.But the reality is that the three generations who ended the 20th century, the Boomers, their Generation X children, and Generation Y, have architected a Western civilization that’s kind of a shit show. Being born in 1978, I fall at either the tail end of Gen X or the beginning of Gen Y, depending on how you look at it. I became an adolescent at the time Nirvana was ushering in a decade of “slacker” ideology, as the pundits liked to put it. But the reality is that I didn’t know a whole lot of actual slackers in the 1990s. I did know a lot of people who found themselves disillusioned with the materialism of the 1980s and what we saw as the failed rhetoric of the Sixties generation, who were all about peace and love right until the time they put on suits and ties and figured out how to divide up the world. I knew a lot of people who weren’t very interested in that path.
The joke, of course, is that every generation kills the thing they love. The hippies became yuppies; Gen X talked a lot about the revolution, and then went and got themselves some venture capital and started laying into place the oversaturated, paranoid world we live in now. A lot of them tried to tell themselves they were still punk as fuck, but it’s hard to morally reconcile the thing where you listen to Fugazi on the way to your job where you help find new ways to trick people into giving up their data to advertisers. Most people don’t even bother. They just compartmentalize.
And I’m not blaming them. The world came apart at the end of the 90s, when the World Trade Center did. My buddy Brent and I were talking about this one night last year — about how the end of the 90s looked like revolution. Everybody was talking about Naomi Klein and anti-consumerism and people in Seattle were rioting over the WTO. Hell, a major motion picture company put out Fight Club, which is about as unsubtle an attack on consumer corporate capitalism as you can get. We were poised on the brink of something. You could feel it.
And then the World Trade Center went down. And all of a sudden calling yourself an “anticapitalist terrorist” was no longer a cool posture to psych yourself up for protest. It became something you might go to jail for — or worse, to one of the Black Camps on some shithole island somewhere. Corporate capitalism became conflated somehow with patriotism. And the idea that the things you own end up defining you became quaint, as ridiculous spoken aloud as “tune in, turn on, drop out”. In fact, it became a positive: if you bought the right laptop, the right smartphone, the right backpack, exciting strangers would want to have sex with you!
It’s no wonder that Gen X began seeking the largely mythological stability of their forebearers; to stop fucking around and eating mushrooms at the Rage Against The Machine show, and to try and root yourself. Get a decent car — something you can pass off as utilitarian — and a solid career. Put your babies in Black Flag onesies, but make sure their stroller is more high tech than anything mankind ever took to the Moon, because that wolf is always at the door. And buy yourself a house, because property is always valuable. Even if you don’t have the credit, because there’s this thing called a “subprime mortgage” you can get now!
But the world changed again. And kept changing. So now you’ve got this degree that’s worth fuck-all, a house that’s worth more as scrap lumber than as a substantial investment, and you’re either going to lose your job or have to do the work of two people, because there’s a recession on. Except they keep saying the recession ended, so why are you still working twice as hard for the same amount of money? (...)
So you’re haunted, and you’re outraged, and you go on Twitter and you go on Facebook and you change your avatar or your profile picture to a slogan somebody thoughtfully made for you, so that you can show the world that you’re watching, that you care, that it matters. But if you’re at all observant, you begin to realize after a while that it doesn’t matter; that your opinion matters for very little in the world. You voted for Obama, because Obama was about hope and change; except he seems to be mostly about hope and change for rich people, and not about hope at all for the people who are killed by American drones or who are locked away without trial in American internment camps or who are prosecuted because they stand up and tell the truth about their employers. There does seem to be a lot of hope and change in Fort Meade and Langley, though, where the NSA and CIA are given more and more leeway to spy on everyone in the world, including American citizens, not for what they’ve done but what they might do.
And the rest of the world? They keep making more dead children. They slaughter each other in the streets of Baghdad and Libya and Gaza and Tel Aviv; they slaughter each other in the hills of Syria; and, increasingly, they slaughter each other in American schools and movie theaters and college campuses.
And when you speak up about that — when you write to your Congressperson to say that you believe in, say, stricter control on the purchase of assault weapons, or limiting the rights of corporations to do astonishing environmental damage, or not sending billions of dollars to the kind of people who think it’s funny to launch missiles filled with flechette rounds into the middle of schools where children huddle together — you’re told that, no, you’re the fascist: that people have the right to defend themselves and make money, and that those rights trump your right to not be killed by some fucking lunatic when you’re waiting in line at Chipotle to grab a chicken burrito, and your right to not be able to light your tapwater on fire with a Zippo because of the chemicals in it, or not to end up in a grainy YouTube video while some demented religious fanatic hacks your head off with a rusty bayonet because your country — not you, but who’s counting — is the Great Satan.
And the music sucks. Dear God, the music sucks. Witless, vapid bullshit that makes the worst airheaded wannabe profundities of the grunge era look like the collected works of Thomas Locke. Half the songs on the radio aren’t anything more than a looped 808 beat and some dude grunting and occasionally talking about how he likes to fuck bitches in the ass. The other half are grown-ass adults singing about their stunted, adolescent romantic ideals and playing a goddamn washtub while dressed like extras from The Waltons.
by Joshua Ellis, Zenarchery | Read more:
Image: via:
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6
#6 E——— on “How and Why I Have Come to be Totally Devoted to S——— and Have Made Her the Linchpin and Plinth of My Entire Emotional Existence”
And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.
Q.
Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.
Q.
Neither would I. Who would, now, in an era when every—when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but yet rest assured it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least in the naïveté—
Q.
Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—
Q.
A large outdoor concert-slash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her prototypical Cruncher morphology was evident at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women there—it is a less uncommon typology among young educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was extraordinarily pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on her blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.
Q.
That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it exceedingly hard to take them seriously or to end up not feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.
Q.
Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes. As someone who worked himself through both college and two years now of postgraduate school I have to confess to an almost blanket—these rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid is to boycott South African pot. Silverglade called them the Inward Bound. The smug naïveté, the condescension in the quote compassion they feel for those quote unquote trapped or imprisoned in orthodox American lifestyle choices. So on and so forth. The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it’s the probity and thrift of the re— to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity—or the irony that the blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution—all the same. And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.
Q.
You would be surprised.
Q.
All right and the near-contempt here specifically in the way you can glide casually over and bend down next to her blanket to initiate conversation and idly play with the blanket’s fringe and create the sense of affinity and connection that will allow you to pick her up and somehow almost resent that it’s so goddamn easy to make the conversation flow toward a sense of connection, how exploitative you feel when it is so easy to get this type to regard you as a kindred soul—you almost know what’s going to be said next without her having even to open her pretty mouth. Tad said that she was like some kind of smooth blank perfect piece of pseudo-art you want to buy so you can take it home and sm—
Q.
No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor. The moment enough of a mood of conversational intimacy had been established to make a quote confession seem even remotely plausible I deployed a sensitive-slash-pained expression and quote confessed that I’d in fact not just been passing her blanket and even though we didn’t know each other had felt a mysterious but overwhelming urge just to lean down and say hi but no something about her that made it unimaginable to deploy anything less than total honesty forced me to confess that I had in fact deliberately approached her blanket and initiated conversation because I had seen her from across the bandstand and had felt some mysterious but overwhelmingly sensual energy seeming to emanate from her very being and had been helplessly drawn to it and had leaned down and introduced myself and started a conversation with her because I wanted to connect and make mutually nurturing and exquisite love with her, and had been ashamed of admitting this natural desire and so had fibbed at first in explaining my approach, though now some mysterious gentleness and generosity of soul I could intuit about her was allowing me to feel safe enough to confess that I had, formerly, fibbed. Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual—she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no? A refill? It’s refill time, yes? No?
Q.
And that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the essentially unconsidered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote mainstream women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, and views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, id est the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic energies and desires uncommunicated. Not to mention, to make your indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure, the fact that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with the idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected. I doubt I need to point out that this is nothing but a particular female variant of the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings. I can tell by your expression what you think of brutal candor. The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that. And she did indeed turn out to be straight out of Central Granola-Cruncher Casting, I should stress. She had some kind of monomaniacal hatred for the American timber industry, and professed membership in one of these apostrophe-heavy near-Eastern religions that I would defy anyone to pronounce correctly, and believed strongly in the superior value of vitamins and minerals in colloidal suspension rather than tablet form, et cetera, and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances, she was going on about her imported denomination’s views vis-à-vis energy fields and souls and connections between souls via what she kept calling quote focus, and using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical overdeployment become compromised and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least, and I suppose I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which all but a very small and cynical minority always want to. I.e. exchange numbers. A fellow in Tad’s torts study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation home just outside town and are never there, with a phone but no machine or service, so when someone you’ve given the special number calls the special number it simply rings and rings, so for a few days it’s usually not evident to the girl that what you’ve given her isn’t your true number but for a few days allows her to imagine that you’ve just been extremely busy and scarce and that this is also perhaps why you haven’t called her either. Which obviates the chance of hurt feelings and is therefore, I submit, good, though I can well im—
Q.
The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.
And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and raped and very nearly killed.
Q.
Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.
Q.
Neither would I. Who would, now, in an era when every—when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but yet rest assured it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least in the naïveté—
Q.
Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—
Q.
A large outdoor concert-slash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her prototypical Cruncher morphology was evident at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women there—it is a less uncommon typology among young educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was extraordinarily pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on her blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.
Q.
That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it exceedingly hard to take them seriously or to end up not feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.
Q.
Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes. As someone who worked himself through both college and two years now of postgraduate school I have to confess to an almost blanket—these rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid is to boycott South African pot. Silverglade called them the Inward Bound. The smug naïveté, the condescension in the quote compassion they feel for those quote unquote trapped or imprisoned in orthodox American lifestyle choices. So on and so forth. The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it’s the probity and thrift of the re— to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity—or the irony that the blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution—all the same. And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.
Q.
You would be surprised.
Q.
All right and the near-contempt here specifically in the way you can glide casually over and bend down next to her blanket to initiate conversation and idly play with the blanket’s fringe and create the sense of affinity and connection that will allow you to pick her up and somehow almost resent that it’s so goddamn easy to make the conversation flow toward a sense of connection, how exploitative you feel when it is so easy to get this type to regard you as a kindred soul—you almost know what’s going to be said next without her having even to open her pretty mouth. Tad said that she was like some kind of smooth blank perfect piece of pseudo-art you want to buy so you can take it home and sm—
Q.
No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor. The moment enough of a mood of conversational intimacy had been established to make a quote confession seem even remotely plausible I deployed a sensitive-slash-pained expression and quote confessed that I’d in fact not just been passing her blanket and even though we didn’t know each other had felt a mysterious but overwhelming urge just to lean down and say hi but no something about her that made it unimaginable to deploy anything less than total honesty forced me to confess that I had in fact deliberately approached her blanket and initiated conversation because I had seen her from across the bandstand and had felt some mysterious but overwhelmingly sensual energy seeming to emanate from her very being and had been helplessly drawn to it and had leaned down and introduced myself and started a conversation with her because I wanted to connect and make mutually nurturing and exquisite love with her, and had been ashamed of admitting this natural desire and so had fibbed at first in explaining my approach, though now some mysterious gentleness and generosity of soul I could intuit about her was allowing me to feel safe enough to confess that I had, formerly, fibbed. Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual—she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no? A refill? It’s refill time, yes? No?
Q.
And that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the essentially unconsidered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote mainstream women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, and views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, id est the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic energies and desires uncommunicated. Not to mention, to make your indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure, the fact that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with the idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected. I doubt I need to point out that this is nothing but a particular female variant of the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings. I can tell by your expression what you think of brutal candor. The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that. And she did indeed turn out to be straight out of Central Granola-Cruncher Casting, I should stress. She had some kind of monomaniacal hatred for the American timber industry, and professed membership in one of these apostrophe-heavy near-Eastern religions that I would defy anyone to pronounce correctly, and believed strongly in the superior value of vitamins and minerals in colloidal suspension rather than tablet form, et cetera, and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances, she was going on about her imported denomination’s views vis-à-vis energy fields and souls and connections between souls via what she kept calling quote focus, and using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical overdeployment become compromised and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least, and I suppose I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which all but a very small and cynical minority always want to. I.e. exchange numbers. A fellow in Tad’s torts study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation home just outside town and are never there, with a phone but no machine or service, so when someone you’ve given the special number calls the special number it simply rings and rings, so for a few days it’s usually not evident to the girl that what you’ve given her isn’t your true number but for a few days allows her to imagine that you’ve just been extremely busy and scarce and that this is also perhaps why you haven’t called her either. Which obviates the chance of hurt feelings and is therefore, I submit, good, though I can well im—
Q.
The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
The Myth of American Meritocracy
Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam. Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.”
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.
During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent. This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges. On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.
The Battle for Elite College Admissions
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League. Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard. Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.
But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.
Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.When we consider that Harvard’s existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university’s honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible today, as even America’s most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America’s richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent. This situation, sometimes described as a “winner take all society,” leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their children will reach the winners’ circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges. On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas are handed out.
The Battle for Elite College Admissions
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League. Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program, seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard. Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.
But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even while our national economy has stagnated.
Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price of Admission, a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability, hard-working students who lack any special hook. In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.When we consider that Harvard’s existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university’s honor for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars in cash.
The Wife Bonus
[ed. See also: Poor Little Rich Women]
Women are notoriously bad at asking for bonuses. Which is why I did my homework and created – as BusinessInsider.com suggested – “a master plan”. I waited “the appropriate amount of time” (in my case, five years), made sure the big boss was in a good mood and took him out to lunch (“somewhere intimate, where there will be no interruptions”). I eschewed any usage of the word “need” (stinking, as it does, of desperation) in my pitch – which was “backed up with reports, charts and documentation of my positive performance” – and I tried to “remain respectful” as he stared slack-jawed back at me, before throwing his head back and roaring with laughter.
Asking my own husband for a bonus simply for being his wife was never going to be anything less than preposterous. Yet according to an author of the forthcoming memoir, Primates of Park Avenue, this is what a glittering tribe of crispy-haired Upper East Side Manhattan wives do every year – depending, of course, on how well they have managed the domestic budget, socialised, upheld a variety-filled performance in the bedroom… and succeeded in getting the kids into a ‘Big Ten’ school.
Wednesday Martin, a social researcher who has been immersing herself in the lives of “Park Lane Primates” for over a decade, explains how the “wife bonus”, as she has called it, works in practice.
“It might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done, but her own performance — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn, these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.”
So far, so laughable. Only Martin’s book isn’t a pastiche, but a serious, anthropomorphic study.
And it’s all true. I’ve lived on the Upper East Side – I know. I’ve watched this brittle brigade tirelessly work through their exhaustive body admin schedules and three Flywheel classes a day – not to mention the intensive labour that comes with being what Martin calls “the Glam SAHMs”, glamorous stay-at-home-moms. The mothers run their home lives as domestic CEOs, outsourcing and managing the nanny, the housekeeper, sleep trainer, thumb-sucking guru and child etiquette expert on her hands-free has become their full-time job.
“These women are anxious and hypervigilant about being perfect wives and mothers,” Martin tells me. “Whereas middle-class mothers are more likely to be working and come from a common-sense tradition when it comes to parenting, the more educated and privileged mothers tend to work from a script called ‘intensive motherhood’. While their husbands make millions, the privileged women who I met tend to give away the skills they honed in graduate school and their professions — organising galas, editing newsletters, running the library and bake sales — free of charge. It is also an act of extravagance, a brag: ‘I used to work. I can, but I don’t need to.’”
But under this arrangement, women are still dependent on their men. Add in the real stressers of intensive motherhood – exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure – and Martin believes it all combines to make these women feel frustrated, anxious, on edge…” And angry? “Yes,” she laughs, “very, very angry.”
Women are notoriously bad at asking for bonuses. Which is why I did my homework and created – as BusinessInsider.com suggested – “a master plan”. I waited “the appropriate amount of time” (in my case, five years), made sure the big boss was in a good mood and took him out to lunch (“somewhere intimate, where there will be no interruptions”). I eschewed any usage of the word “need” (stinking, as it does, of desperation) in my pitch – which was “backed up with reports, charts and documentation of my positive performance” – and I tried to “remain respectful” as he stared slack-jawed back at me, before throwing his head back and roaring with laughter.
Asking my own husband for a bonus simply for being his wife was never going to be anything less than preposterous. Yet according to an author of the forthcoming memoir, Primates of Park Avenue, this is what a glittering tribe of crispy-haired Upper East Side Manhattan wives do every year – depending, of course, on how well they have managed the domestic budget, socialised, upheld a variety-filled performance in the bedroom… and succeeded in getting the kids into a ‘Big Ten’ school.Wednesday Martin, a social researcher who has been immersing herself in the lives of “Park Lane Primates” for over a decade, explains how the “wife bonus”, as she has called it, works in practice.
“It might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done, but her own performance — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn, these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.”
So far, so laughable. Only Martin’s book isn’t a pastiche, but a serious, anthropomorphic study.
And it’s all true. I’ve lived on the Upper East Side – I know. I’ve watched this brittle brigade tirelessly work through their exhaustive body admin schedules and three Flywheel classes a day – not to mention the intensive labour that comes with being what Martin calls “the Glam SAHMs”, glamorous stay-at-home-moms. The mothers run their home lives as domestic CEOs, outsourcing and managing the nanny, the housekeeper, sleep trainer, thumb-sucking guru and child etiquette expert on her hands-free has become their full-time job.
“These women are anxious and hypervigilant about being perfect wives and mothers,” Martin tells me. “Whereas middle-class mothers are more likely to be working and come from a common-sense tradition when it comes to parenting, the more educated and privileged mothers tend to work from a script called ‘intensive motherhood’. While their husbands make millions, the privileged women who I met tend to give away the skills they honed in graduate school and their professions — organising galas, editing newsletters, running the library and bake sales — free of charge. It is also an act of extravagance, a brag: ‘I used to work. I can, but I don’t need to.’”
But under this arrangement, women are still dependent on their men. Add in the real stressers of intensive motherhood – exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure – and Martin believes it all combines to make these women feel frustrated, anxious, on edge…” And angry? “Yes,” she laughs, “very, very angry.”
by Celia Walden, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Stepford Wives
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
From Mega-Machines to Mega-Algorithms
While they are composed of humans, mega-machines are fundamentally antihuman, in both their means and ends. “Under the pretext of saving labour,” Mumford writes, “the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.” There’s a reason he used the Kremlin, the Pentagon, and General Motors as examples of mega-machines. From their vantage point, the human-cogs have little knowledge of how their actions are incorporated into the functioning of the whole system, let alone choice in the matter. They are treated like automatons or “servomechanisms” who can be kept on a need-to-know basis while work is squeezed out of them.
Now, in the time of networked computing, “smart” technologies, and digital platforms, the image of society as mega-machine is being supplanted by the mega-algorithm—with people acting not merely as cogs but as information nodes, inputs, and outputs incorporated into a calculus of control simply by existing on the network. To accommodate the mega-algorithm, people are atomized by digital technologies and blown apart into streams of data; they are given a unique identity and all their actions—every piece of content generated, every action capable of being tracked—is fed into processors.
Whereas the mega-machine operated by violent means—forcibly divorcing the human-cogs of identity and absorbing their productive and creative energies through wage or slave labor—the mega-algorithm doubles back and promises you reunification with this alienated self through “authentic” (or “creative” or “social”) work completed on your own time. We are sold a desirable narrative about the wealth of networks, decentralized production, cognitive surplus, collaborative consumption, social engagement, and instant convenience. The techno-utopic discourses of emancipation and community that surround the technologies and sociopolitics that make up the mega-algorithm serve as an effective ideological veil, which shrouds the practices of exploitation and control. Don’t think of yourself as an overworked, underpaid laborer trying to hustle for a paycheck. No, you’re actually an entrepreneurial individual, building your personal brand and finding (or making) your niche in the marketplace.
We have escaped the violence of the mega-machine, so the story goes. But the mega-machine and mega-algorithm have more in common than many commentators believe. They are not the same, but nor are they separate; both exist in the same familial lineage, like father and son. As Astra Taylor writes in The People’s Platform, “Many of the problems that plagued our media system before the Internet was widely adopted have carried over into the digital domain—consolidation, centralization, and commercialism—and will continue to shape it.” With both the mega-algorithm and the mega-machine, humans are subsumed into a feedback-driven, information-processing system to which they are at once essential and incidental. The system can’t run without people serving as cogs or nodes, yet in each case, the judgment of those serving the system is rendered superfluous. With the mega-algorithm, functions once assigned to people are assigned to code that becomes one (or many) steps removed from its programmers. The very question of where agency ultimately resides becomes fuzzy, since it is unevenly distributed across different people and times.
The mega-algorithm is powered by a particular idea of how technology fits into political economy: Algorithms serve to hide or obscure the actual human labor involved in business operations. This contributes to a large-scale reshaping of the economics of labor. That is, paying people for the goods and services they produce stops being part of the way business is done and finding jobs that come with security, longevity, and a paycheck becomes more difficult.
Unlike with the mega-machine, it’s not always clear when we’ve been assimilated as a human-node in the mega-algorithm. The systems—like social networks we use to connect with various platforms while hundreds of trackers hoover every piece of (meta)data that can be brokered for the purpose of rating and targeting us—are so interrelated that it appears there’s no escape. It functions rhizomatically: like the roots and shoots of a persistent, massive set of plants, it seems to pop up everywhere. And it is extremely flexible, able to derive value from people in ways that are not obviously exploitative or controlling.
This flexibility, this ability to reconfigure and appropriate additional parts of life extends the mega-algorithm’s power further than that of the mega-machine. The technologies of the mega-algorithm disguise human labor by hiding it in plain sight. Every action has the potential to be labor, if it can be processed in the right way. Even the sanctity of our home is not safe from intrusion. As design critic Justin McGuirk argues in an essay on the “smart home,” “the proliferation of smart, connected products will turn the home into a prime data collection node. It is estimated that there will be 50 billion wi-fi-connected devices by 2020, and all of them will collect data that is transmitted to and stored by their manufacturers. In short, the home is becoming a data factory.” This shift makes complete sense in light of the operational logic of the mega-algorithm. Excluding the home from data harvest and monetization would be a foolishly inefficient waste of exploitable labor.
by Janathan Sadowski, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Things Fall Apart
When Nike Honcho Phil Knight commissions his swoosh-stripe Mount Rushmore somewhere in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, the Air Max 95 will be one of the shoes that will be carved into the Precambrian granite outcropping. The Air Max 95 isn’t the best Nike runner ever made, it’s arguably (sorry Air Jordan junkies) the best Nike shoe ever made, an object burrowed deeply into the popular culture. Collectors flocked to it, kickstarting what would become a $75 billion global industry fueled by hype beasts, sneakerheads, and enough aspirational consumers to fill the Mariana Trench several times over. Since it’s 1995 debut, the Air Max 95 has remained a perennial bestseller. Nike churns out several new versions every year. The number of colorways is staggering: over 150 and counting. Such ubiquity has done nothing to diminish the shoe’s cachet. It continues to be been worn by artists, actors, pop stars, criminals and, yes, even actual athletes.Nagomo Oji knew he was stepping into history when he laced up a pair of Air Max 95s last month in Saitama City, Japan, a commuter sprawl 10 miles north of central Tokyo. What made Oji’s shoes so special was their pedigree. Anybody can walk into Foot Locker and buy a pair of Air Maxes for 160 bucks. Oji’s shoes were something quite different. To use the sneakerhead vernacular, they were “DS” (dead stock), a discontinued model that’s new, unworn, and unboxed. Even better, they were “OG. Not “original gangster,” just “original.” In other words, these vintage kicks were highly collectable, a pristine example of the very first Air Maxes that dropped two decades ago.
But something insidious has been happening to those shoes, and every other pair like them, over the years. They’ve been crumbling away to nothing as they sit tucked in boxes or hidden in closets. The materials used to make them degrade over time, causing the shoes to fall apart, rendering them worthless.
Untouched specimens like Oji’s are as rare as Siamese hermaphrodites and can fetch over $2,000. But Oji had no interest in selling his Air Max 95s. For him, the shoebox was a time capsule that conjured fleeting images of lost youth and harkened to a forgotten period when collecting kicks was a hobby, not an investment. Besides, how could you put a price on old-school details like midsole “BWs” (big windows) that contained the encapsulated nitrogen bubbles, or the PSI specs stamped on the sole from toe to heel (“20, 25, 5,”), like an Enigma code?
Much had happened since Oji purchased these Nike runners. He no longer defined himself by the shoes he wore. Vanity had been undermined by adulthood and responsibilities. He was a grown man now, a father of 2-year-old twins. As he appraised his newly shod feet, a smile creased his lips. It might not be possible to relive the past, he thought. But this was the closest thing to it.
As soon as he planted his feet, Oji sensed something was terribly wrong. The midsoles flattened, and his footing became strangely unstable. He didn’t realize it at the time, but the polyurethane (PU), that squishy, shock-absorbing material sandwiched between the upper and the outer sole, was more than ten years past its projected lifespan.
After just one step, the hardened PU foam fractured and collapsed, like arid soil crumbling beneath the boots of a Dust Bowl Okie. Oji looked down in disbelief. With the inner soles completely detached from the uppers, his feet were actually touching the ground. His beloved Air Maxes had just morphed into Fred Flintstone shoes.
by Rene Chun, Wired | Read more:
Image: Nagomo Oji
Family Raised $187M For Cancer, Spent It On Themselves
[ed. And they got away with it. So how is this a deterrent to anyone, exactly?]
A Tennessee man and his family used much of the $187 million it collected for cancer patients to buy themselves cars, gym memberships and take luxury cruise vacations, pay for college tuition and employ family members with six-figure salaries, federal officials alleged Tuesday in one of the largest charity fraud cases ever, involving all 50 states.
The joint action by the Federal Trade Commission and the states says James T. Reynolds Sr., his ex-wife and son raised the money through their various charities: The Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and its affiliated Cancer Support Services; The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona; and the Children's Cancer Fund of America in Powell, Tennessee. (...)
Anyone who donated money to these groups shouldn't expect a refund anytime soon. While litigation against Reynolds Sr. and the Cancer Fund of America is ongoing, the settlement agreements with Reynolds' son, ex-wife and a long-time associate of the family - Kyle Effler - notes that much of the money has already been spent. The agreement bans the three from fundraising and shuttered their organizations.
"The money is mostly gone," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. Rich declined to say whether a separate criminal investigation might be underway, noting only that the regulatory agency doesn't have that authority. (...)
The settlement agreement imposed hefty judgments based on the amount of money donated to the charities between 2008 and 2012. But because of Perkins' "inability to pay," her $30 million judgment would be suspended entirely. The $65.5 million judgment against Reynolds II would be suspended after he pays $75,000.
Effler, former president of Cancer Support Services, faced a $41 million judgment that would be forgiven after paying $60,000.
Officials on Tuesday said that any money recouped under the settlements would go to state authorities, which will have the ability to distribute the money to legitimate charities. Officials cited complexities of the case to explain why the charities were allowed to continue operating even after media outlets flagged them as potentially fraudulent.
"I hope it serves as a strong warning for anyone trying to exploit the kindness and generosity of others," Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said of the investigation.
by Anne Flaherty, AP | Read more:
Image: via:
A Tennessee man and his family used much of the $187 million it collected for cancer patients to buy themselves cars, gym memberships and take luxury cruise vacations, pay for college tuition and employ family members with six-figure salaries, federal officials alleged Tuesday in one of the largest charity fraud cases ever, involving all 50 states.The joint action by the Federal Trade Commission and the states says James T. Reynolds Sr., his ex-wife and son raised the money through their various charities: The Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and its affiliated Cancer Support Services; The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona; and the Children's Cancer Fund of America in Powell, Tennessee. (...)
Anyone who donated money to these groups shouldn't expect a refund anytime soon. While litigation against Reynolds Sr. and the Cancer Fund of America is ongoing, the settlement agreements with Reynolds' son, ex-wife and a long-time associate of the family - Kyle Effler - notes that much of the money has already been spent. The agreement bans the three from fundraising and shuttered their organizations.
"The money is mostly gone," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. Rich declined to say whether a separate criminal investigation might be underway, noting only that the regulatory agency doesn't have that authority. (...)
The settlement agreement imposed hefty judgments based on the amount of money donated to the charities between 2008 and 2012. But because of Perkins' "inability to pay," her $30 million judgment would be suspended entirely. The $65.5 million judgment against Reynolds II would be suspended after he pays $75,000.
Effler, former president of Cancer Support Services, faced a $41 million judgment that would be forgiven after paying $60,000.
Officials on Tuesday said that any money recouped under the settlements would go to state authorities, which will have the ability to distribute the money to legitimate charities. Officials cited complexities of the case to explain why the charities were allowed to continue operating even after media outlets flagged them as potentially fraudulent.
"I hope it serves as a strong warning for anyone trying to exploit the kindness and generosity of others," Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said of the investigation.
by Anne Flaherty, AP | Read more:
Image: via:
Monday, May 18, 2015
$400 Yoga Pants Are Just the Beginning
[ed. Why, indeed.]
Feeding off the rise of workout gear that can be worn in or out of the gym, activewear labels have become status symbols, much like any other pricey designer clothes. Premium yoga pants, made popular amongst the masses by Lululemon, can run anywhere from $80 to $200. A horde of brands battle each other in this segment as upstarts such as Outdoor Voices, Michi, and Vie Active jostle with superpowers Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas.
Yet there's little available for women searching the racks for even more expensive, higher-end performance wear. Fear not, luxury shoppers. It won't remain like this for long.
Quietly, a smattering of new true luxury activewear labels have appeared, each with the hope that affluent shoppers are willing to shell out $300, $400, or more on a pair of pliable pants. Think about it this way: If you're a luxury shopper who buys $1,500 designer dresses, pays $250 a month for an Equinox gym membership, and totes around a $4,000 Chanel bag, why would you spend a mere $100 on the leggings that you wear to the gym, on errands, and on the weekend?
Yet there's little available for women searching the racks for even more expensive, higher-end performance wear. Fear not, luxury shoppers. It won't remain like this for long.
Quietly, a smattering of new true luxury activewear labels have appeared, each with the hope that affluent shoppers are willing to shell out $300, $400, or more on a pair of pliable pants. Think about it this way: If you're a luxury shopper who buys $1,500 designer dresses, pays $250 a month for an Equinox gym membership, and totes around a $4,000 Chanel bag, why would you spend a mere $100 on the leggings that you wear to the gym, on errands, and on the weekend?
by Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Claire Pepper via Charli Cohen
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