not just manufacturing, the global slowdown is monetary

alhambrapartners |  The Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago (h/t ZeroHedge) on the status of the ongoing disruption in domestic production of long haul trucks and vehicles. In what can only be confirmation of the state of US manufacturing, the huge drop in orders for new trucks matches shippers’ perceptions of the actual economic flow in goods. While economists want that to be an isolated circumstance of only manufacturing, goods activities account for a significant proportion of services as well. And it is getting bad:

Orders for new big rigs plunged and inventories of unsold trucks soared to their highest levels since just before the financial crisis, as uncertainty about future demand and a weak market for freight transportation weighed on truck manufacturers.

About 67,000 Class 8 trucks are sitting unsold on dealer lots, after sales in March dropped 37% from a year earlier to 16,000 vehicles, according to ACT Research. Class 8 trucks are the type most commonly used on long-haul routes. Inventories haven’t been this high since early 2007, said Kenny Vieth, president of ACT.

It leaves no doubt that “something” is very wrong now in manufacturing and normal economic flow.

“Fleets are being very cautious in the current uncertain economic environment,” wrote Don Ake, a vice president with FTR Transportation Intelligence, which reported similar order numbers for March. “Freight has slowed due to the manufacturing recession, so they have sufficient trucks to meet current demand.”

Some of this reduction in 2016, as the Journal reports, is due to companies over-ordering in 2014 and 2015 based on the narrative that the economy was actually healing, or at worse would stay in its “new normal.” It raises the issue as to whether these conditions and the manufacturing recession they reflect are cyclical or structural; or both.

As I wrote yesterday, the contraction in goods and the US economy’s basis for them may or may not be heading toward recession. It is clear, however, that whatever the ultimate cycle reality there are deeper imbalances that run back several years, likely traced to decades of financialization that is now overturning, and thus really supersedes cyclical discussion. What we see in the US is not limited to the US, however; it is a global phenomenon, which can only mean one possible explanation.

the kochtopus would FUBAR the SCOTUS if it captured the #45 POTUS

WaPo |  Brian Beutler has an important piece in which he raises an unsettling question: Could the next Republican president nominate one or more Supreme Court justices who would seek to restore a pre-New Deal judicial conception of liberty of contract, with the goal of undermining much of the regulatory state that many Americans take for granted today?

Beutler reports on a movement among legal-minded libertarians to rehabilitate the Lochner decision, the notorious 1905 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a state law limiting the working hours of bakers, giving its name to the “Lochner era” of Supreme Court rulings in which economic regulations established by popularly elected officials were struck down as unconstitutional. The Lochner era is widely seen to have ended during the New Deal, when the Court upheld (among many other things) a state minimum wage law, concluding that liberty of contract is not an “absolute” right.

Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan, tells Beutler that “a full fledged return to Lochner” could ultimately undermine a whole host of economic regulations, including minimum wage, overtime, and worker safety laws and even possibly laws protecting customers from discrimination based on race.

One leading libertarian lawyer tells Beutler frankly that the goal is to invalidate much social welfare legislation “at the federal level,” though I would add that a Lochner restoration might invalidate a fair amount of it at the state level as well. Libertarians are frustrated with the Roberts court for its rulings preserving Obamacare — decisions that have been widely interpreted as a sign of Roberts’ judicial restraint and deference to the elected branches — and the hope is that a Republican president will appoint more unabashedly activist judges when it comes to placing limits on federal power to regulate the economy:

uber and airbnb are not the villains in this evolutionary struggle...,

guardian |  “Got chased by a mob of taxi drivers who threw rocks,” tweeted the singer Courtney Love from Charles de Gaulle airport. She was caught up in what is becoming a global trend: the backlash against Uber. French taxi drivers were protesting on Thursday at vehicles operated by drivers working for the Californian business, which functions like a taxi-hire company, but via smartphones and without directly employing its drivers.

The taxi drivers were protesting at seeing their livelihoods threatened: it costs more than €100,000 (£71,000) for a taxi licence in Paris. Uber drivers, though, pay nothing, using their own cars and just paying a proportion of their takings to the company for the rides they pick up. There has been similar anger, though not riots, in New York where taxi licences, called “medallions”, can cost a million dollars. And regulators, courts and police have been raising concerns around the world, too.

It’s been a tough week for Uber. The protests in France, where UberPop (as it is called locally) has been declared illegal yet still operates, came just a week after California’s Labor Commission decided that Uber drivers there were employees, not contractors – a distinction that could impose significant costs and responsibilities. Uber had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.

Uber’s troubles signal a troubled birth for a 21st-century concept: the sharing economy. In this brave new world, untapped capacity – such as idle cars and rooms – is made available for hire, increases efficiency and lowers the price of those goods and services. 

It is not just Uber that is facing resistance over the sharing phenomenon. Paris is also the scene of another collision between a company from the sharing economy and the authorities: about 2% of all apartment units in the city are available for rent through AirBnB, which connects apartment owners and short-term renters. With 40,000 listings at the start of April, it’s the company’s largest market in Europe, ahead of London with just under 25,000 and Barcelona with 16,600.

status-seeking within prestige hierarchies the antithesis of competence culture...,

physicstoday |  “The case against science,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal the Lancet, “is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” Horton’s April commentary appeared weeks before news broke about Science magazine’s now widely analyzed retraction of a psychology paper about attitudes towards gay marriage. Much in the current media analysis, whether or not citing Horton specifically, aligns with his judgment—sometimes without much of the hopefulness he framed within this harshness.

Consider, for example, Charles Seife’s Los Angeles Times op-ed. The science journalist and New York University journalism professor discerns “a weakness at the heart of the scientific establishment,” which a “steady drip-drip-drip of falsification, exaggeration and outright fabrication [is] eroding.”

Science itself eroding? Horton leveled general accusations:

Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.… The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours.

But in some ways—not always matched in the popular media—Horton placed hopefulness alongside the harshness. “The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously,” he wrote, though the “bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.” He described possible hopeful steps, including one inspired by physicists:

One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profile errors, the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle physics, significance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10^–7 or 1 in 3.5 million (if the result is not true, this is the probability that the data would have been as extreme as they are).

Other scientists have also given the popular media cues for generalizing harshly about science overall from specific failings like the retracted Science paper. At Nature, Richard Van Noorden borrowed phrasing from Seife in reporting that delegates to the recent World Conference on Research Integrity in Rio de Janeiro saw in the retracted study only more of the “steady drip-drip of research misconduct.” In December 2013, the American Journal of Neuroradiology published a paper with a powerfully loaded title: “The fraud and retraction epidemic.” Last month at The Conversation, Laureate Professor of Mathematics Jonathan Borwein of the University of Newcastle published a piece called “The ‘train wreck’ continues: Another social science retraction.” The train-wreck analogy comes from 2012, when Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called on psychologists to tighten up replicability in “social priming” research, as reported in Nature. Two years ago, Borwein coauthored a Huffington Post essay arguing that the “scientific world is suffering through a rash of examples of the sad consequences of the ‘hype now, hide later’ approach to scientific news.”

rotflmbao..., wattles and their "family research" council...,

alternet |  Mega-family superstar, Josh Duggar, has resigned his position as lobbyist for the Family Research Council after In Touch Magazine published a police report confirming that JimBob and Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” fame’s oldest son confessed to molesting several female minors in 2002 - 2003.

According to the 2006 police report, Duggar family patriarch, JimBob actively covered up Josh’s confession and neglected to notify authorities or provide professional help for Josh and/or his victims. To make matters worse, Josh’s pregnant wife, Anna Duggar, believes her husband is a changed man and continues - along with the couple’s three young children - to live with an admitted child sex offender. And to top it all off, the Duggar family publicly declared that God used the tragic situation to draw their family closer to Him.

Jesus Friggin’ Christ, what a mess! As a former Quiverfull believer, I recognize in this Duggar family debacle several essential beliefs which are widely held amongst fundamentalist Christians which shackle True Believer’s™ common sense to an outdated and irrelevant god-myth and seriously impair their ability to make sound moral choices.

JimBob and Michelle Duggar live in a fantasy world of their own making, and they believe that, just like in the fairy tales, they all will live happily ever after. While confessing to not being a perfect family, and admitting their family faces challenges and struggles every day, the Duggars are convinced “that dark and difficult time caused [the family] to seek God like never before,” which in their minds, means the molestation really wasn’t so bad, and in fact, has turned out to be a kind of blessing in disguise since each one of them “drew closer to God,” as a result of “something so terrible.”

According to the “eternally happy ending” story which the Duggars are telling themselves, the little girls whom Josh allegedly groped and fondled are not victims or even survivors of sexual abuse, but are instead equated with the “highly favored” Old Testament Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery: What Satan meant for evil, God used for good.

Suffering in this life is insignificant - even trifling - compared to the faith-strengthening and soul-saving purpose of trials which will be richly rewarded with eternal life in Heaven … so praise the fucking Lord for whatever misery He sends to you and your children.

needs a payday loan and a tattoo parlor....,

why the "body of 'stupid conservatives" is a problem for every u.s. citizen and every nation around the globe

truthdig |  Although the United States, in the words of columnist Nicholas Kristof, is “the most powerful colossus in the history of the world,” it lags significantly in quality of life for its citizens. In the Social Progress Index 2015 the U.S. does not make the top 10, or even top 15. The global study measured “basic human needs,” “foundations of wellbeing” and opportunity. 

Overall, the U.S comes in at 16th, and some indices are particularly startling.

As Kristof writes in The New York Times: “The index ranks the United States 30th in life expectancy, 38th in saving children’s lives, and a humiliating 55th in women surviving childbirth. O.K., we know that we have a high homicide rate, but we’re at risk in other ways as well. We have higher traffic fatality rates than 37 other countries, and higher suicide rates than 80. We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.”

The top countries in the study are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, New Zealand and Canada. Of the 133 countries rated, Central African Republic comes in last, right after Chad and Afghanistan.

“One way of looking at the index,” says Kristof, “is to learn from countries that outperform by having social indicators better than their income levels. By that standard, the biggest stars are Costa Rica and Uruguay, with New Zealand and Rwanda also outperforming.” 

In a time of ever-greater economic inequality, it’s worth remembering that everything isn’t just dandy if some Americans are doing extremely well. What counts is how we are doing as a people.

africa's opium is the religion of others...,

mail&guardian |  For much of this week, our roads will overflow with cars, buses and minibuses full of pilgrims en route to African Zions and Jerusalems. Many local rivers will become Jordans in which the recently converted will be born again. Country valleys will echo with songs of gratitude from wretched souls singing: “Jo, ke mohlolo ha ke ratwa le nna [what a miracle it is for someone like me to be loved].”

Innocent villagers will be battered with amplified sermons on loudspeakers in all manner of fake American accents. With their stomping feet, the dancing masses will convert ordinary mountains and hills into sacred spaces. And the goats will catch hell on several fronts – they will be slaughtered either in celebration or in libation.

For more than 170 years, Karl Marx’s brief reference to religion as the opium of the people has proved hard to forget and harder to forgive. He probably did not have Africa in mind when he made the statement, but nowhere is this Marxist “dictum” in sharper focus. This is the continent whose people respected scholar and academic John Mbiti’s described as “notoriously religious”.

Nothing captures the tragedy and the wonder of the African continent better than the coexistence of poverty and religiosity, both in their most extreme forms imaginable. The question is whether the coincidence is merely casual or causal – and in which direction. Are Africans poor because they are religious, religious because they are poor, or religious in spite of being poor?

dominance/prestige: our nature our future...,

cluborlov |  Once upon a time—and a fairly long time it was—most of the thickly settled parts of the world had something called feudalism. It was a way of organizing society hierarchically. Typically, at the very top there was a sovereign (king, prince, emperor, pharaoh, along with some high priests). Below the sovereign were several ranks of noblemen, with hereditary titles. Below the noblemen were commoners, who likewise inherited their stations in life, be it by being bound to a piece of land upon which they toiled, or by being granted the right to engage in a certain type of production or trade, in case of craftsmen and merchants. Everybody was locked into position through permanent relationships of allegiance, tribute and customary duties: tribute and customary duties flowed up through the ranks, while favors, privileges and protection flowed down.

It was a remarkably resilient, self-perpetuating system, based largely on the use of land and other renewable resources, all ultimately powered by sunlight. Wealth was primarily derived from land and the various uses of land. Here is a simplified org chart showing the pecking order of a medieval society.

Feudalism was essentially a steady-state system. Population pressures were relieved primarily through emigration, war, pestilence and, failing all of the above, periodic famine. Wars of conquest sometimes opened up temporary new venues for economic growth, but since land and sunlight are finite, this amounted to a zero-sum game.

But all of that changed when feudalism was replaced with capitalism. What made the change possible was the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, the most important of which was energy from burning fossilized hydrocarbons: first peat and coal, then oil and natural gas. Suddenly, productive capacity was decoupled from the availability of land and sunlight, and could be ramped up almost, but not quite, ad infinitum, simply by burning more hydrocarbons. Energy use, industry and population all started going up exponentially. A new system of economic relations was brought into being, based on money that could be generated at will, in the form of debt, which could be repaid with interest using the products of ever-increasing future production. Compared with the previous, steady-state system, the change amounted to a new assumption: that the future will always be bigger and richer—rich enough to afford to pay back both principal and interest.
 

how conformism creates ethnicity creates conformism - there's no solving stupid

hirhome |  In this essay I will explore the important connection between conformism as an adaptive psychological strategy, and the emergence of the phenomenon of ethnicity. My argument will be that it makes sense that nature made us conformists. And once humans acquired this adaptive strategy, I will argue further, the development of ethnic organization was inevitable. Understanding the adaptive origins of conformism, as we shall see, is perhaps the most useful way to shed light on what ethnicity is—at least when examined from the functional point of view, which is to say from the point of view of the adaptive problems that ethnicity solves. I shall begin with a few words about our final destination.

Ethnicity is a phenomenon that rightly occupies much attention in lay and scholarly circles alike, because it is relevant to almost everything that humans do. What is it? From the descriptive point of view, ethnicity is normative culture. That is to say, an ethnie is a collection of human beings who more or less agree on how a human life should be lived: which foods should be avoided, which eaten, and how the latter should be prepared; what sorts of behaviors are funny, shameful, offensive (and which aren't); by what specific ritual displays should politeness be expressed in a million different contexts; what forms of dress and cosmetic enhancement are appropriate for members of either sex; etc. Ethnicity is a collection of 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that get passed down more or less as a package along with the associated social label inherited from one's parents; "I am an X." In some academic circles, the question "Which ethnie has figured out the right way to live?" will immediately be met with the following retort:

"Why, the premise is absurd! Why should there be one best way to live a human life?" Perhaps. But this cosmopolitan multiculturalist complaint belongs to a clear minority. To the same question, most human beings all around the world have a ready answer, and it is always the same; "My ethnie lives life the way a human should." Consequently, members of ethnie A can easily amuse, offend, or shock members of ethnie B merely in the act of conforming to the 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that As feel obligated to pass down from one generation to the next.

Such haughty or offended reactions are usually labeled 'ethnocentrism', or, depending on their intensity and negativity, 'prejudice' and 'racism'. Many academics consider ethnocentrism a "bad" thing in any of its forms. But is it? Yes, it is a bad thing, very much so. The values of science require that we root out from our observational methods any source of consistent, distorting bias; and believing that cultural difference implies error makes it well-nigh impossible for the social scientist to make much progress in the study of cultural variation. Even more important, by my lights at least, is that so long as we are not cosmopolitan and therefore tolerant and compassionate with respect to the ways of our neighbors, we are still moral failures.

Norm-conformism is an adaptive strategy that maximizes the number of potential interactants in the conformist's local population. It makes sense to lament and oppose specific outcomes of particular conformist processes, such as some silent majorities, and ethnic prejudice. But to treat "conformism" and its consequences as a generalized evil in the abstract would spill a narrowly applicable moral evaluation into domains where not only does morality not apply, but where even a non-moral interpretation of the negative judgment "bad" will also not fit, given that norm-conformism does a lot of useful work helping humans navigate their social world. As always, it is best to put our moral goals in charge of conduct directed towards our fellow human beings. If we turn them instead into axiomatic priors of a scientific analysis, we saddle our attempt to understand human perception and behavior with epistemological baggage that makes it harder to understand why people do the things they do. Such ignorance can lead us to hurt people when we meant to help, and it follows directly that this is ethically undesirable. Therefore, if we have a compassion-based obligation to, first, do no harm, then we have a moral imperative to be honest about what causes human behavior, even if we would prefer to have been designed differently. Wishful thinking will not heal a troubled world, but an improved understanding of it just may.

Technological progress in a market economy is therefore self-terminating, and ends in collapse

The Archdruid Report | Now of course there are plenty of arguments that could be deployed against this modest proposal. For example, it could be argued that progress doesn't have to generate a rising tide of externalities. The difficulty with this argument is that externalization of costs isn't an accidental side effect of technology but an essential aspect—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Every technology is a means of externalizing some cost that would otherwise be borne by a human body. Even something as simple as a hammer takes the wear and tear that would otherwise affect the heel of your hand, let’s say, and transfers it to something else: directly, to the hammer; indirectly, to the biosphere, by way of the trees that had to be cut down to make the charcoal to smelt the iron, the plants that were shoveled aside to get the ore, and so on.

For reasons that are ultimately thermodynamic in nature, the more complex a technology becomes, the more costs it generates. In order to outcompete a simpler technology, each more complex technology has to externalize a significant proportion of its additional costs, in order to compete against the simpler technology. In the case of such contemporary hypercomplex technosystems as the internet, the process of externalizing costs has gone so far, through so many tangled interrelationships, that it’s remarkably difficult to figure out exactly who’s paying for how much of the gargantuan inputs needed to keep the thing running. This lack of transparency feeds the illusion that large systems are cheaper than small ones, by making externalities of scale look like economies of scale.

It might be argued instead that a sufficiently stringent regulatory environment, forcing economic actors to absorb all the costs of their activities instead of externalizing them onto others, would be able to stop the degradation of whole systems while still allowing technological progress to continue. The difficulty here is that increased externalization of costs is what makes progress profitable. As just noted, all other things being equal, a complex technology will on average be more expensive in real terms than a simpler technology, for the simple fact that each additional increment of complexity has to be paid for by an investment of energy and other forms of real capital.

Strip complex technologies of the subsidies that transfer some of their costs to the government, the perverse regulations that transfer some of their costs to the rest of the economy, the bad habits of environmental abuse and neglect that transfer some of their costs to the biosphere, and so on, and pretty soon you’re looking at hard economic limits to technological complexity, as people forced to pay the full sticker price for complex technologies maximize their benefits by choosing simpler, more affordable options instead. A regulatory environment sufficiently strict to keep technology from accelerating to collapse would thus bring technological progress to a halt by making it unprofitable.

when the unintelligent are in charge...,

WaPo |  There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.

Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

Mandrake: “Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.”

Ripper: “Well, do you know what it is?”

Mandrake: “No. No, I don’t know what it is, no.”

Ripper: “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?” 

The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established and anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. Yet half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013, citizens in Portland, Ore., one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking-water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay — a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brushers or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing anti-fluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

sock-puppets don't need no edumackation...,

WaPo |  Walker had decided to challenge Gwen Moore (D), an African American woman who represented a partly white and deeply Democratic state assembly district that surrounded Marquette, Hiller said.

Republican leaders welcomed Walker’s bid. He wouldn’t win, but he would still force Moore to spend money and time defending the seat. (Walker later moved to suburban Wauwatosa, and it was there that he won his seat in 1993.)

In 1990, the 22-year-old Walker spent days knocking on doors in the district, preaching a get-tough message. He wanted 200 more cops on the street and stronger mandatory sentences for drug dealers.

“The number one fear is crime,” he wrote in a letter to Marquette students, asking them, again, to vote for him. “For too long, we have ignored this issue and now it is time to do something about it.”

Moore, who is now a member of Congress, said: “His campaign was one big dog whistle.” She believed that Walker’s anti-crime message was a way to speak to white voters’ fears of blacks without saying them aloud. “He had sort of insinuated sort of the worst stereotypes about black people [and] innate criminality.”

Hiller, Walker’s campaign treasurer, said that Moore was entirely wrong about Walker’s message. “There was no racial angle,” he said. “It never crossed our minds.”

On election night, Walker’s chances looked so terrible that Walker and Hiller left the district and the city of Milwaukee behind. They started driving to Madison, the state capital, to attend parties for other Republicans who had a chance.

Then, for a minute, something strange happened.

“We’re listening to election returns on the radio, and the guy comes on: ‘In a surprise in the [7th District], Scott Walker is ahead of Gwen Moore,’ ” Hiller said. “Literally, I pulled off the road.”

The two young men sat there on the shoulder, blindsided by the idea that Walker — a politician who hadn’t won anything he really wanted — might be about to win.  Fist tap Vic.

evolution of collaborative ability creates conditions for subsequent evolution

royalsocietypublishing |  Humans are unique both in their cognitive abilities and in the extent of cooperation in large groups of unrelated individuals. How our species evolved high intelligence in spite of various costs of having a large brain is perplexing. Equally puzzling is how our ancestors managed to overcome the collective action problem and evolve strong innate preferences for cooperative behaviour. Here, I theoretically study the evolution of social-cognitive competencies as driven by selection emerging from the need to produce public goods in games against nature or in direct competition with other groups. I use collaborative ability in collective actions as a proxy for social-cognitive competencies. My results suggest that collaborative ability is more likely to evolve first by between-group conflicts and then later be utilized and improved in games against nature. If collaborative abilities remain low, the species is predicted to become genetically dimorphic with a small proportion of individuals contributing to public goods and the rest free-riding. Evolution of collaborative ability creates conditions for the subsequent evolution of collaborative communication and cultural learning.

does couch potato 2.0 see these interwebs as "zillion channel" teevee?

guardian |  Earlier this year engineer Dr Craig Labovitz testified before the US House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee on regulatory reform, commercial and antitrust law. Labovitz is co-founder and chief executive of Deepfield, an outfit that sells software to enable companies to compile detailed analytics on traffic within their computer networks. The hearing was on the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable and the impact it was likely to have on competition in the video and broadband market. In the landscape of dysfunctional, viciously partisan US politics, this hearing was the equivalent of rustling in the undergrowth, and yet in the course of his testimony Labovitz said something that laid bare the new realities of our networked world.

“Whereas internet traffic was once broadly distributed across thousands of companies,” he told the subcommittee, “we found that by 2009 half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies. By May of 2014, this number had dropped by a factor of five. Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all internet traffic in the United States during prime-time hours.”

To those of us who were accustomed to thinking of the internet as a glorious, distributed, anarchic, many-to-many communication network in which anyone could become a global publisher, corporate gatekeepers had lost their power and peer-to-peer sharing was becoming the liberating norm, Labovitz’s brusque summary comes as a rude shock. Why? Because what he was really saying is that the internet is well on its way to being captured by giant corporations – just as the Columbia law professor Tim Wu speculated it might be in The Master Switch, his magisterial history of 20th-century communications technologies.

In that book, Wu recounted the history of telephone, movie, radio and TV technologies in the US. All of them had started out as creative, anarchic, open and innovative technologies but over time each had been captured by corporate interests. In some cases (eg the telephone) this happened with the co-operation of the state, but in most cases it happened because visionary entrepreneurs offered consumers propositions that they found irresistible. But the result was always the same: corporate capture of the technology and the medium. And the most insidious thing, Wu wrote, was that this process of closure doesn’t involve any kind of authoritarian takeover. It comes, not as a bitter pill, but as a “sweet pill, as a tabloid, easy to swallow”. Most of the corporate masters of 20th-century media delivered a consumer product that was better than what went before – which is what consumers went for and what led these industries towards closure.

At the end of his book, Wu posed the 64-trillion-dollar question: would the internet also fall victim to this cycle? For years, many of us thought that it wouldn’t: it was too decentralised, too empowering of ordinary people, too anarchic and creative to succumb to that kind of control.

Labovitz’s testimony suggests that we were wrong.

u.s. hospitals weigh withholding care to ebola patients...,

reuters |  The Ebola crisis is forcing the American healthcare system to consider the previously unthinkable: withholding some medical interventions because they are too dangerous to doctors and nurses and unlikely to help a patient.

U.S. hospitals have over the years come under criticism for undertaking measures that prolong dying rather than improve patients' quality of life.

But the care of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, who received dialysis and intubation and infected two nurses caring for him, is spurring hospitals and medical associations to develop the first guidelines for what can reasonably be done and what should be withheld.

Officials from at least three hospital systems interviewed by Reuters said they were considering whether to withhold individual procedures or leave it up to individual doctors to determine whether an intervention would be performed.

Ethics experts say they are also fielding more calls from doctors asking what their professional obligations are to patients if healthcare workers could be at risk.

U.S. health officials meanwhile are trying to establish a network of about 20 hospitals nationwide that would be fully equipped to handle all aspects of Ebola care.

Their concern is that poorly trained or poorly equipped hospitals that perform invasive procedures will expose staff to bodily fluids of a patient when they are most infectious. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working with kidney specialists on clinical guidelines for delivering dialysis to Ebola patients. The recommendations could come as early as this week.   
The possibility of withholding care represents a departure from the "do everything" philosophy in most American hospitals and a return to a view that held sway a century ago, when doctors were at greater risk of becoming infected by treating dying patients.

"This is another example of how this 21st century viral threat has pulled us back into the 19th century," said medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan.

the great nunquisition: why the vatican is cracking down on sisters

Time |  Today's generation of nuns are progressive women, two things the Church isn't used to

Nuns are an endangered species. They are dying and not being replaced.

If you think the news is bad now, a world without nuns would be a far worse place. The nuns that I know are much too humble to tout their achievements and all of the good they contribute to society, but make no mistake, they are an integral part of the fabric that holds our civilization together.

In 2014 there were just 49,883 religious Catholic sisters in the United States, down 13% percent from 2010 according to figures from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. To put it in greater perspective, that is a 72% decline since 1965.

Because nuns don’t brag about all of the good that they do or hashtag how awesome they are on Facebook, many people have no idea about the things they accomplish on a daily basis.

You probably haven’t heard about Sister Joan Dawber. Sister Joan, a Sister of Charity of Halifax, runs a safe house in Queens for victims of human trafficking—former sex and labor slaves. She takes these women in when they have no one else to protect them and risks her life to help them rebuild theirs.

About 20 minutes away by car from Sister Joan’s safe house, Sister Tesa Fitzgerald works tirelessly to raise the children of mothers who are incarcerated. When those women get out of prison Sister Tesa helps them get clothes, jobs and an apartment. Those women credit Tesa with nothing less than saving their lives.

Most people don’t know about Sister Nora Nash, a Franciscan Sister who lives just outside of Philadelphia. As her order’s Director of Corporate Social Responsibility, Sister Nora wakes up every single morning determined to make corporations more responsible to the human race. Sister Nora and her assistant director, Tom McCaney have taken to task the grocery store chain Kroger over the rights of farm workers, Hershey’s chocolate company over child labor, McDonald’s over childhood obesity, Walmart on raising their minimum wage and Wells Fargo over predatory lending practices. Nash wakes up every single morning determined to make corporations more responsible to the human race. Then she follows through on it.

For more than four decades Sister Jeannine Gramick has been tireless in her fight for gay rights through her organization New Ways, despite coming under intense scrutiny from the Vatican.

Sister Dianna Ortiz made headlines in 1989 when she was abducted, tortured and raped while working as a teacher in Guatemala. After living through that horror, instead of allowing herself to sink into a terrible depression, she headed up an organization to help thousands of torture survivors around the globe find the will to keep living.

It’s a problem that you haven’t heard about these women. You would think that, during a time when the Church has suffered from great criticism and weathered very public scandals, it would be celebrating these incredible achievements. Think again.

talking overseers, poverty, militarization and mindset

usatoday |  Often, if you wait long enough, an idea comes around. Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for Popular Mechanics on how the federal government's transfer of surplus military equipment to local police departments -- sometimes in very small towns -- was leading to "SWAT overkill."

My complaints didn't get much traction with either the Bush or the Obama administrations. But now, in the wake of what many consider to be an overly militarized police response in Ferguson, Mo., President Obama has ordered a review of federal programs -- in the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security -- to arm local police with military weapons.

Lawmakers -- from Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who quoted my 2006 piece in an op-ed in Time Magazine -- are looking at legislation to limit transfers. This is good. There's a role for SWAT teams in limited circumstances, but they've been overused in recent years, deployed for absurd things such as raids on sellers of raw milk. The problem is, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you have cool military equipment, there's a strong temptation to use it, just because, well, it's cool. (Federal regulatory agencies have succumbed to SWAT Fever too.)

I don't entirely blame the police. If somebody gave me a Bradley fighting vehicle, or an Apache helicopter, I'd take it.

But blurring the lines between civilian policing and military action is dangerous, because soldiers and police have fundamentally different roles. Soldiers aim outward, at the nation's external enemies. Civil rights and due process don't matter much, because enemies in wartime aren't entitled to those. Nor are soldiers expected to be politically accountable to the people they shoot.

But police turn their attention inward. The people they are policing aren't enemy combatants, but their fellow citizens -- and, even more significantly, their employers. A combat-like mindset on the part of police turns fellow-citizens into enemies, with predictable results.

I sometimes think the turning point was marked by the old cop show Hill Street Blues. Each episode opened with a daily briefing before the officers went out on patrol. In the early seasons, Sergeant Phil Esterhaus concluded every briefing with "Let's be careful out there." In the later episodes, his replacement, Sergeant Stan Jablonski, replaced that with "Let's do it to them before they do it to us." The latter attitude is appropriate for a war zone, but not for a civilized society.

suburbs will die: the most spectacular future time orientation failure in human history...,

Time |  The way suburban development usually works is that a town lays the pipes, plumbing, and infrastructure for housing development—often getting big loans from the government to do so—and soon after a developer appears and offers to build homes on it. Developers usually fund most of the cost of the infrastructure because they make their money back from the sale of the homes. The short-term cost to the city or town, therefore, is very low: it gets a cash infusion from whichever entity fronted the costs, and the city gets to keep all the revenue from property taxes. The thinking is that either taxes will cover the maintenance costs, or the city will keep growing and generate enough future cash flow to cover the obligations. But the tax revenue at low suburban densities isn’t nearly enough to pay the bills; in Marohn’s estimation, property taxes at suburban densities bring in anywhere from 4 cents to 65 cents for every dollar of liability. Most suburban municipalities, he says, are therefore unable to pay the maintenance costs of their infrastructure, let alone replace things when they inevitably wear out after twenty to twenty-five years. The only way to survive is to keep growing or take on more debt, or both. “It is a ridiculously unproductive system,” he says.

Marohn points out that while this has been an issue as long as there have been suburbs, the problem has become more acute with each additional “life cycle” of suburban infrastructure (the point at which the systems need to be replaced—funded by debt, more growth, or both). Most U.S. suburbs are now on their third life cycle, and infrastructure systems have only become more bloated, inefficient, and costly. “When people say we’re living beyond our means, they’re usually talking about a forty-inch TV instead of a twenty-inch TV,” he says. “This is like pennies compared to the dollars we’ve spent on the way we’ve arranged ourselves across the landscape.”

Marohn and his friends are not the only ones warning about the fix we’ve put ourselves in. In 2010 the financial analyst Meredith Whitney wrote a now-famous report called The Tragedy of the Commons, whose title was taken from the economic principle that individuals will act on their own self-interest and deplete a shared resource for their own benefit, even if that goes against the long-term common good. In her report, Whitney said states and municipalities were on the verge of collapse thanks in part to irresponsible spending on growth. Likening the municipalities’ finances and spending patterns to those of the banks leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, Whitney explained how spending has far outpaced revenues—some states had spent two or three times their tax receipts on everything from infrastructure to teacher salaries to libraries—all financed by borrowing from future dollars.

Marohn, too, claims we’ve tilled our land in inefficient ways we can’t afford (Whitney is one of Marohn’s personal heroes). The “suburban experiment,” as he calls it, has been a fiscal failure. On top of the issues of low-density tax collection, sprawling development is more expensive to build. Roads are wider and require more paving. Water and sewage service costs are higher. It costs more to maintain emergency services since more fire stations and police stations are needed per capita to keep response times down. Children need to be bused farther distances to school. One study by the Denver Regional Council of Governments found that conventional suburban development would cost local governments $4.3 billion more in infrastructure costs than compact, “smart” growth through 2020, only counting capital construction costs for sewer, water, and road infrastructure. A 2008 report by the University of Utah’s Arthur C. Nelson estimated that municipal service costs in low-density, sprawling locations can be as much as 2.5 times those in compact, higher-density locations.

Marohn thinks this is all just too gluttonous. “The fact that I can drive to work on paved roads where I can drive fifty-five miles an hour the minute I leave my driveway despite the fact that I won’t see another car for five miles,” he says, “is living beyond our means on a grand, grand scale.”

u.s. network infrastructure under attack: subversion of future time orientation failure?

pcworld |  Early one morning in April last year, someone accessed an underground vault just south of San Jose, California, and cut through fiber-optic cables there. The incident blacked out phone, Internet and 911 service for thousands of people in Silicon Valley.

Such incidents, often caused by vandals, seem fairly common, but exactly how often do they occur? Since 2007, the U.S. telecom infrastructure has been targeted by more than a thousand malicious acts that resulted in severe outages, according to data obtained by IDG from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FCC requires carriers to submit reports when an outage affects at least 900,000 minutes of user calls, or when it impacts 911 service, major military installations, key government facilities, nuclear power plants or major airports.

The reports themselves are confidential for national security and commercial reasons, but aggregate data provided by the FCC shows there were 1,248 incidents resulting in major outages over the last seven years.

While the data shows no clear overall trend, the years with the highest number of incidents were recent—222 outages reported in both 2011 and 2013.

For the last three years, vandalism was the single biggest cause of outages identified, accounting for just over a third of the incidents in each year.

Gun shots accounted for 9 percent of the outages in 2013, 7 percent in 2012 and 4 percent in 2011. Cable theft accounted for roughly similar levels—4 percent of outages in 2013, 8 percent in 2012 and 7 percent in 2011. The FCC didn’t list all the causes.

Two of the outages over the seven-year period were related to terrorism. Both came as a result of the Boston marathon bombing in April 2013 and apparently refer to widespread cellular outages in the hours after the attacks.

The FCC didn’t respond to several requests for comment on the data. Telecom carriers and their industry association also didn’t respond or declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

Telecom isn’t the only infrastructure area to be targeted. Indeed, minutes after the fiber cables were cut in San Jose last year, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation in an attack some believe was terrorist-related.

Most of the incidents in the FCC’s telecom data likely have more mundane causes, such as copper cable theft, a problem carriers have discussed in the past. In 2013, Verizon twice offered rewards of $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of cable thieves who caused numerous outages in the Pittsburgh area. Carriers have been pushing state legislators to make cable theft a federal crime.