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Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - 2 views

www.salon.com/...net_destroyed_the_middle_class

technology

shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.
  • This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways.
  • Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
  • But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own “You Are Not a Gadget.”
  • One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.
  • And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable.
  • So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.
  • Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.
  • And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world.
  • So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.
  • the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.
  • The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.
  • If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way.
  • And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot.
  • So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?
  • And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I think that's a worthy question considering the high-speed with which we adopt every possible technology; to hell with foresight.
  • Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.
  • I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.
  • But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.
  • And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Ha ha. Ayn Rand people don't have to admit to *anything,* trust me, dude.
  • It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.
  • But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      This makes me curious. Is he arguing that there are fewer *nodes* because the information access closes them?
  • You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      My understanding was that the U.S. heads of business got the nod to go ahead and start manufacturing things *other* than weapons, because our industrial capabilities weren't anhialated (sp?) relative to so many others.
  • There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.
  • In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.
  • Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.
  • I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media.
  • And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.
  • The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.
  • And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Quite true. She's obviously not rolling in solid gold cadillacs.
  • But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.
  • The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.
  • I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.
  • The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.
  • We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.
  • The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.
  • I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians.
  • It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.
  • You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?
  • I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.
  • The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.
  • I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
  • All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.
  • Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Group House. HAH!
  • So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria.
  • And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation.
  • I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      See, now I like this guy. This is like the political equivalent of aiming for the realist view in geopolitics. We separate what is likely from what is unlikely and aim not for "the best" situation, but a situation where the worst aspects have been mitigated. It's backwards thinking that both parties would have a hard time integrating into their (ughhh) brand.
  • Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars?
  • Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
  • I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
  • Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Again, a take I rarely encounter.
  • I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I have had this very thing happen to. I didn't get to have my moment of discovery. I think Google Glass is going to fix that. Hah. :)
  • And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.
  • I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.
  • So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.
  • Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth -- even democracy"
anonymous

Rand & Aesthetics 17 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-aesthetics-17.html

objectivism criticalthinking music

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In her haste to find a pretext for calling "modern" music non-art, Rand, in her carelessness, has once again presented a hollow argument. It may be annoying and even aesthetically viscious for avant-garde composers to introduce taped sounds of machine and street noises into their musical compositions. But that, in itself, doesn't render the musical portions of such compositions any less musical. Before one denounces a given aesthetic style, one at least has to take the trouble to understand that style. Otherwise, one comes off as prejudiced rather than insightful, as an aesthetic ignoramus rather than a knowledgable critic.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 11
     
    "Ayn Rand's most extended published take on "modern music" appears in her "Art and Cognition" essay. It features all the usual Randian intellectual vices: tendency toward over-generalization, vagueness, lack of specific examples, and condemnation via implicit suggestion and innuendo:"
anonymous

Restaurant websites: Why are they so awful? Which ones are the absolute worst? - 0 views

www.slate.com/...overdone.single.html

shared by anonymous on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online."
  • When you visit many terrible restaurant websites in succession, it becomes obvious that they're not bad because of neglect or lack of funds—these food purveyors appear to have spent a great deal of money and time to uglify their pages.
  • Masa, the exclusive New York sushi bar, presents you with a pages-long, scroll-bar-free biography of its chef, but (as far as I can tell) no warning that you'll spend $400 or more per person for dinner.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. "Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."
  • anonymous on 08 Jun 13
     
    "Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online-that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online.""
anonymous

Boomers@65 -- Not Your Father's Retirement -- AARP - 0 views

www.aarp.org/..._fathers_retirement.print.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 14 Jan 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 14 Jan 11
     
    "When my father was 65, he was still waiting for the musical colossi of his youth to make a comeback. But by then, most of them - Duke Ellington, Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller - were long gone. By contrast, people turning 65 today can go see the musical heroes that brightened their youth any day of the week, because they never really went away. Paul McCartney recently played the Apollo in Harlem. Keith Richards just released his autobiography. Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Smokey Robinson and Paul Simon are all very much alive and kicking. Well, alive."
anonymous

Rand & Aesthetics 16 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-aesthetics-16.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 16 Jun 11 - Cached
  • since few if any admirers of Beethoven find him to be malevolent, that should be enough to settle the question. Rand is merely trying to justify her dislike of a composer that even she has to admit is a "great musician."
  • This passage proves, more than any other, that when it comes to serious music, Rand was in way over her head. Classical musicians (i.e., those who are in the best position to judge) generally regard Wagner as one of the greatest composers. They would look upon Rand's criticisms of Wagner as ignorant and deeply prejudiced. Rand's avowal that she principally judges composer by their melodies would inspire deep contempt (the most important element in serious music tends to be harmony, not melody). Her assertion that most of Wagner's melodies are "street-organ" and "circus" music would yield howls of derision. And what is this comment about Wagner's "alleged virtuousity of orchestration": since when is Rand an expert on orchestration?This is, to be entirely frank, very embarrassing stuff; and the fact that Rand seems entirely oblivious as to how foolish she is coming off only makes it that much more cringe worthy.
  • anonymous on 16 Jun 11
     
    "We get the full sense of the subjective and arbitrary character of Rand's aesthetics when we glance at Rand's pronouncements about specific composers. These pronouncements are often so thin and baseless that it their basis in sheer egotistic prejudice should be obvious." at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature
anonymous

World War II and the Origins of American Unease - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ii-and-origins-american-unease

shared by anonymous on 13 May 15 - Cached
  • The first thing that leaps to mind is the manner in which World War II began for the three great powers: the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.
  • For all three, the war started with a shock that redefined their view of the world.
  • There was little doubt among American leaders that war with Japan was coming. The general public had forebodings, but not with the clarity of its leaders.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Neither the leaders nor the public thought the Japanese were nearly so competent.
  • Pearl Harbor intersected with another shock to the American psyche — the Great Depression. These two events shared common characteristics:
  • First, they seemed to come out of nowhere.
  • This introduced a new dimension into American culture.
  • The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor created a different sensibility that suspected that prosperity and security were an illusion, with disaster lurking behind them.
  • The two shocks created a dark sense of foreboding that undergirds American society to this day.
  • Catastrophe therefore might come at any moment. The American approach to the Cold War is symbolized by Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain.
  • The Americans analyzed their forced entry into World War II and identified what they took to be the root cause: the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia.
  • If the origin of World War II was the failure to take pre-emptive action against the Germans in 1938, then it followed that the Pacific War might have been prevented by more aggressive actions early on.
  • Acting early and decisively remains the foundation of U.S. foreign policy to this day. The idea that not acting in a timely and forceful fashion led to World War II underlies much American discourse on Iran or Russia.
  • Pearl Harbor (and the 1929 crash) not only led to a sense of foreboding and a distrust in the wisdom of political and military leaders, but it also replaced a strategy of mobilization after war begins, with a strategy of permanent mobilization.
  • The Soviet Union had its own Pearl Harbor on June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded in spite of the friendship treaty signed between them in 1939.
  • That treaty was struck for two reasons: First, the Russians couldn't persuade the British or French to sign an anti-Hitler pact. Second, a treaty with Hitler would allow the Soviets to move their border further west without firing a shot.
  • The Soviets made a single miscalculation: They assumed a German campaign in France would replay the previous Great War.
  • That the moment of attack was a surprise compounded the challenge, but the real problem was strategic miscalculation, not simply an intelligence or command failure.
  • The Soviet forces were not ready for an attack, and their strategy collapsed with France, so the decision for war was entirely Germany's.
  • What the Soviets took away from the June 1941 invasion was a conviction that political complexity could not substitute for a robust military. The United States ended World War II with the conviction that a core reason for that war was the failure of the United States. The Soviets ended World War II with the belief that their complex efforts at coalition building and maintaining the balance of power had left them utterly exposed by one miscalculation on France — one that defied the conventional wisdom.
  • The Warsaw Pact was less an alliance than a geopolitical reality. For the most part it consisted of states under the direct military, intelligence or political control of the Soviet Union. The military value of the block might be limited, and its room for maneuver was equally limited.
  • nuclear attack was not the Soviet's primordial fear, though the fear must not be minimized. The primordial fear in Moscow was an attack from the West. The Soviet Union's strategy was to position its own forces as far to the west as possible.
  • The Soviets were not ideologues. They were geopoliticians, and China represented a potential threat that the Soviets could not control. Ideology didn't matter. China would never serve the role that Poland had to. The Sino-Soviet relationship fell apart fairly quickly.
  • Beneath communist fervor, cynical indifference and dread of the Soviet secret police, the Russians found something new while the Americans found something old.
  • The collapse of France caused them to depend on only two things:
  • One was that the English Channel, combined with the fleet and the Royal Air Force, would hold the Germans at bay. The second was that in due course, the United States would be drawn into the war. Their two calculations proved correct.
  • The Americans did not take the British Empire. It was taken away by the shocking performance of the French. On paper, the French had an excellent army — superior to the Germans, in many ways. Yet they collapsed in weeks. If we were to summarize the British sensibility, after defiance came exhaustion and then resentment.
  • The Americans retain their dread even though World War II was in many ways good to the United States. It ended the Great Depression, and in the aftermath, between the G.I. Bill, VA loans and the Interstate Highway System, the war created the American professional middle class, with private homes for many and distance and space that could be accessed easily.
  • Rather than a Machiavellian genius, Putin is the heir to the German invasion on June 22, 1941. He seeks strategic depth controlled by his own military. And his public has rallied to him.
  • While we are celebrating the end of World War II, it is useful to examine its beginnings. So much of what constitutes the political-military culture, particularly of the Americans, was forged by the way that World War II began.
  • anonymous on 13 May 15
     
    "We are at the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. That victory did not usher in an era of universal peace. Rather, it introduced a new constellation of powers and a complex balance among them. Europe's great powers and empires declined, and the United States and the Soviet Union replaced them, performing an old dance to new musical instruments. Technology, geopolitics' companion, evolved dramatically as nuclear weapons, satellites and the microchip - among myriad wonders and horrors - changed not only the rules of war but also the circumstances under which war was possible. But one thing remained constant: Geopolitics, technology and war remained inseparable comrades."
anonymous

New Nickelodeon Research Study Finds Generation Gap Closing, Reflecting Changing Attitu... - 0 views

www.redorbit.com/...index.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 20 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 20 Dec 10
     
    "NEW YORK, Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Nickelodeon research study, titled "The Family GPS," reports that the generation gap is a thing of the past as today's increasingly multi-generational American families are united by an expanding set of values and converging tastes. Released today, the Nickelodeon study finds that new cultural attitudes, technology and the current economic climate are drawing today's American families closer together and changing how parents raise, and regard, their children compared to how their parents raised them. Nickelodeon's "The Family GPS" study was conducted as part of an ongoing partnership with Harris Interactive in which the companies will study the changing face and role of the family in the U.S. "As Millennials become parents and Baby Boomers become grandparents, today's families are different from what we've seen and come to expect from previous generations, in that staying together and playing together are the top priorities among everyone in the household," said Ron Geraci, Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon Research. "Instead of being divided by tastes and clashing over values and things like music and entertainment choices, today's parents, kids and grandparents are being drawn closer together by them, as well as embracing new value systems of tolerance and acceptance.""
anonymous

Vortex motion: Viral video showing Sun's motion through galaxy is wrong. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...n_through_galaxy_is_wrong.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • However, there’s a problem with it: It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.
  • Normally I wouldn’t bother debunking stuff like this; wacky claims are made all the time and usually disappear on their own. But in this case I’m getting a lot of people telling me about it, so clearly it's popular—probably because it seems superficially right, and it has very nice graphics. I’m also seeing it spread around by people who do understand science, but missed the parts of it that are way off. With stuff like this, it always pays to dig a little deeper.
  • Heliocentrism is the idea that the Sun is the center of the solar system, and the planets orbit around it (there are also important details, like the planets orbit on ellipses, and these orbits are tilted with respect to one another).
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  • Sadhu is claiming that heliocentrism is wrong, and that the motion of the planets around the Sun actually makes a vortex. What he actually means is a helix, not a vortex. They’re different in more than just name; they’re actually very different physical motions with different properties—you can get helical motion without the particles in it interacting, like in the solar system, but in a vortex the particles interact through drag and friction.
  • But let's not argue over semantics. Look at the video again: Sadhu shows the Sun leading the planets, ahead of them as it goes around the galaxy (he makes this even more obvious in a second video; see below). This is not just misleading, it’s completely wrong.
  • I’m not arguing some small detail here. The idea that the planets trail behind the Sun as it moves through the galaxy is fundamental to what Sadhu is saying about the helix—as I’ll explain below (in the section “Where Do All These Ideas Come From?”). But first, there’s a bit more to see.
  • Look carefully at his animation of heliocentric motion. He shows the direction of the Sun's motion around the galaxy as the same as the plane of the planets' orbits. But this is not the case. The solar system's plane is tipped with respect to the galaxy by about a 60° angle, like the way a car's windshield makes an angle with respect to the car's forward motion.
  • This is actually critical: In the helical model, he shows the planets as orbiting around the Sun perpendicular to the motion of the Sun around the galaxy; "face-on", if you like. This is wrong. Because the orbits of the planets are tipped by 60°, not 90°, they can sometimes be ahead and sometimes behind the Sun. That right there, and all by itself, shows this helical depiction is incorrect. In the real model, heliocentrism, you do get that sort of ahead-and-behind motion, exactly as we observe in the real sky.
  • If you are slightly above the disk you feel an overall pull down, toward the disk. Imagine the disk is just a huge slab of matter, and the Sun is above it. The gravity of the disk would make the Sun plunge down into it. Since stars are so far apart, the Sun would go right through the disk and out the bottom. But then the disk would be pulling it up, once again toward the disk. The Sun would slow, stop, and reverse course, plummeting into the disk once again. It gets about 200 or so light years from the midplane of the galactic disk every time its bobs; the disk is 1000 light years thick, though, so we always stay well inside it. But these oscillations would go on forever, the Sun moving up and down like a cork in the ocean.
  • Since the Sun is also orbiting the galaxy, the combined motion makes that lovely waving pattern, up-and-down as it goes around, like a horse on a carousel. So Sadhu has that part (more or less) right.
  • Mostly. But he then adds a third component, a twisting spiral around the Sun’s path he attributes to precession. That part is wrong, very wrong.
  • His video shows the Sun corkscrewing around the galaxy, sometimes closer to the galactic center and sometimes farther away over and over again. To go back to the carousel analogy, its like the horse is circling the center, moving up and down, and also left-to right. But that's not what the Sun really does. There is no left to right motion (toward and away from the galactic center multiple times per orbit). That corkscrew pattern Sadhu shows is wrong.
  • In that video and its notes Sadhu confuses coordinate systems, forces, and motions pretty often.
  • In his videos and on his page, Sadhu says that he learned all this from a man named Pallathadka Keshava Bhat.
  • Seriously, none of it makes any sense. Bhat claims heliocentrism is wrong, but then uses one fallacious idea after another to back this up. I could write pages debunking his claims, but I'll try to keep this short.
  • Also, we have multiple space probes that have visited other planets, many of them still in orbit. If heliocentrism were wrong in the way Bhat describes, then those probes never would have made it to those planets. The calculations used to send them there would've been wrong. We don't have to account for the Sun's motion around the galaxy at all when calculating these spacecraft paths, so Bhat cannot be correct.
  • The claim that the Sun is at the tip of the solar system with the planets trailing behind is also demonstrably wrong. The Sun does not really lead the solar system through the galaxy like the tip of a bullet as Bhat apparently claims (and as Sadhu’s videos show). The planets go around the Sun, and the whole shebang moves around the galaxy as a unit, tipped by that 60° angle. That means sometimes the planets are ahead of the Sun, and sometimes behind it along that galactic orbit.
  • given Sadhu's misapplication of the Earth's precession, I tried to read what Bhat had to say about it. But it's so garbled (and plain wrong; he claims the precession cycle is 225,000 years long, when it's actually 26,000 years) it's like trying to untie the Gordian knot. And there's much more.
  • And that's what Sadhu was basing his (lovely, if incorrect) videos on, mind you. I'll note that if you poke around Sadhu’s site, you’ll find links to all sorts of, um, odd conspiracy theories, from 9/11 Truthers to chemtrails to the ravings of David Icke (who claims—seriously— that reptilian aliens live under Denver airport and control the world), just to name a few. To me, that puts his other ideas into perspective.
  • It seems right, or looks cool, or appeals to some sense of how things should be. But how things should be and how they are don’t always overlap. The Universe is a pretty cool place, and works using a fairly well-regulated set of rules. We call those rules physics, they’re written in the language of math, and trying to understand all that is science.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "I've been getting lots of tweets and email from folks linking to a slick-looking video, a computer animation showing the motion of the planets around the Sun as the Sun orbits around the Milky Way Galaxy. It's a very pretty video with compelling music and well-done graphics."
anonymous

Jaron Lanier's Ignorance Of History, Basic Economics And Efficiency Is Getting Ridiculous - 1 views

www.techdirt.com/...cy-is-getting-ridiculous.shtml

shared by anonymous on 29 May 13 - Cached
  • The Kodak/Instagram comparison comes up over and over again, and it's moronic. It makes no sense. To demonstrate, let's take something else that's old and something else that's modern that sorta-kinda seems similar, and compare the two: Very, very, very few people make money "auctioning" goods via Christie's. Yet, a few years ago, eBay noted that 724,000 Americans made their primary or secondary incomes from eBay sales, with another 1.5 million supplementing their income. In the simplistic world of Jaron Lanier, this should be proof that eBay is good, and Christie's is bad, right? But, of course that's silly.
  • The fact that Instagram only employed a few people and Kodak employed a lot says nothing about the impact of technology on modern society or the economic status of the middle class.
  • First off, it didn't involve toxic chemicals that create massive amounts of waste and pollution. Second, because people don't have to buy expensive rolls of film to take pictures any more, they get to save money and put it to better use. Third, because we no longer have to worry about the expense of each photo, people are free to take many more photos and capture more memories and generally enjoy photography more. Fourth, because instagram makes the sharing of photos much easier, it enables much greater communication among family and friends, building stronger community bonds. I mean, you could go on and on and on.
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  • “At the height of its power, agriculture employed 90 percent of the population and produced output worth vastly more than half of U.S. GDP. It even invented countless plant hybrids and animal breeds. But today nearly all farms of the past have gone bankrupt (or, seeing the economic writing on the wall, were transformed to other uses). Agriculture today employs only about one percent of the workforce. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those good agricultural jobs created?”
  • Economic efficiency often shifts jobs around, but creates a much larger pie, which leads to new job creation. We can reasonably question whether the there are people who get left behind, or what kinds of skills are favored as industries become obsolete, but the idea that it destroys a middle class is just silly.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well? When did "we" make this "bargain" and, honestly, what is he talking about? There was no such bargain made. Jobs have nothing to do with whether they are "pleasant." And we didn't create jobs to avoid unemployment. We created jobs because there was demand for work, meaning there was demand for products and services, just as there still is today.
  • New jobs were created because of demand, and because new technologies create efficiencies which create and enable new jobs. It has nothing to do with "decisions" being made or "social contracts." It has to do with efficiency and new things being enabled through innovation.
  • This is the broken window fallacy exploded exponentially for a digital era. It seems to assume that the only "payment" is monetary. That is, if you do something for free online -- share a video or a photo, like a link, listen to a song -- that you're somehow getting screwed because some company gets that info and you're not getting paid.
  • But that's ridiculous. The people are getting "paid" in the form of the benefit they get: free hosting and software for hosting/streaming videos and pictures, free ability to communicate easily with friends, access to music, etc. The list goes on and on, but Lanier seems to not understand the idea that there are non-monetary benefits, which is why various online services which he seems to hate are so popular.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 May 13
       
      Whuffie!
  • A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers.
  • This is bullshit, plain and simple. Under the "old" system, you had a smaller "token few" who found success via getting a major label contract or having a publisher accept them into the club of published authors.
  • It's as if Lanier is talking about a mythical past that never existed to make some point about the future. But all of the evidence suggests that more people are now able to make use of these tools to create new incomes and new opportunities to make money, while in the past you had to wait for some gatekeeper.
  • Lanier, a beneficiary of the old gatekeepers, may like the old system, but he's confused about history, facts, reality and economics in making this ridiculous argument -- and it's a shame that those interviewing him or publishing his ridiculously misinformed screeds don't seem to ever challenge him on his claims.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 May 13
       
      Given the Gladwellian attention he's getting, this would seem prudent. If there *is* something of value in there, let's use that wacky, radical tool: science - to figure it out. :)
  • anonymous on 29 May 13
     
    "So... we'd already taken a stab at debunking Jaron Lanier's "gobbledygook economics" a few weeks back when it started appearing, but since then there's been more Lanier everywhere (obviously, in coordination with his book release), and each time it seems more ridiculous than the last. Each time, the focus is on the following economically ridiculous concepts: (1) there should be micropayments for anyone doing anything free online because someone benefits somewhere (2) modern efficiency via technology has destroyed the middle class. Both of these claims make no sense at all. "
anonymous

T-Mobile, Wireless Carriers, and the Way to Fight Oligopolies - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...gopoly-business-practices.html

shared by anonymous on 16 Apr 13 - Cached
  • T-Mobile recently broke with longstanding industry norms and abandoned termination fees, sneaky overage charges, and other unfriendly practices.
  • Although T-Mobile’s decision is welcome news for consumers, it doesn’t change the fact that the old extortions remained in place for about fifteen years, and that they remain in place for the vast majority of Americans still trapped in contracts with Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
  • If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established—just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is “competitive” and everything is fine.
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  • To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation’s oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition.
  • Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties.
  • The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled “The Return of the Monopoly,” describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries.
  • With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly—all were oligopolies.
  • Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust.
  • In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy.
  • the United States has nowadays nearly abandoned scrutiny of oligopoly behavior, leaving consumers undefended. That’s a problem, because oligopolies do an awful lot that’s troubling.
  • Consider “parallel exclusion,”
  • efforts by an entire industry to keep out would-be newcomers, a pervasive problem.
  • Over the eighties and nineties, despite “deregulation,” the established airlines like American and United managed to keep their upstart competitors out of important business routes by collectively controlling the “slots” at New York, Chicago, and Washington airports.
  • Visa and MasterCard spent the nineties trying to stop American Express from getting into the credit-card industry, by creating parallel policies (“exclusionary rules”) and blacklisting any bank that might dare deal with AmEx. It was only thanks to the happenstance that both put their exclusions in writing that the Justice Department was able to do anything about the problem
  • Here’s a simple proposal: when members of a concentrated industry act in parallel, their conduct should be treated like that of a hypothetical monopoly.
  • Meanwhile, the idea that an industry is nominally “competitive” should not provide excessive protection from regulatory oversight.
  • Consider, again, the wireless carriers. The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to insure that the carriers, who are leaseholders on public spectrum, use that resource to serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Apr 13
       
      I will continue to raise my hand at this: corporations were originally 'envisioned' (for whatever little worth that is) as protectors of public trust. THAT'S WHAT THEY GOT IN EXCHANGE FOR LEVERAGE FAR OUTSIDE WHAT NON-CORPORATE STRUCTURES COULD GET. That was the price - and the point.
  • , to quote T-Mobile, “[t]his is an industry filled with ridiculously confusing contracts, limits on how much data you can use or when you can upgrade, and monthly bills that make little sense.”
  • The F.C.C. could have done something about this years ago; the fact that it took a member of the industry to call out more than a decade’s abuse of consumers amounts to a serious failure on the part of the F.C.C.
  • Exploitation of concentrated private power is not a problem that will ever go away. In the United States, it has been a concern since the framing: the original Tea Party was actually a protest against a state-sponsored tea monopoly.
  • it’s important not to become fixated on form, but to attend to the realities that face consumers and citizens.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Apr 13
       
      Dumbed down: If the problem you have with a bunch of things, it's no different than if that bunch was one thing. The effect is the same.
  • anonymous on 16 Apr 13
     
    "If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it. For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established-just ask Microsoft or the old AT&T. But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is "competitive" and everything is fine. To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation's oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition."
anonymous

Why Choosing to Make Less Money Is Easier Than Ever - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...less-money-is-easier-than-ever

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • If innovation has become increasingly marginal, then it’s less costly to choose to be a “threshold earner,” which Tyler Cowen defines as “someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more.”
  • If wages go up, Cowen says, a threshold earner will choose to work less or, I would add, choose work that’s so personally fulfilling that it’s indistinguishable from leisure.
  • As Andy Warhol said, What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
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  • The Internet and modern media make this truer than ever. The same music, sports, movies, and HBO miniseries are available to threshold earners that are available to their high-income counterparts. The only difference might be the size of the screen they watch it on.
  • If you choose to accept a lower income than you might otherwise be able to command in order to consume more leisure, then what you are likely going to have to give up is consuming positional goods.
  • For one thing, food trucks are “in,” and so are lots of other low-cost consumption made fashionable by threshold-earning hipsters—from no-brand plastic sunglasses and thrift store clothes, to Pabst Blue Ribbon and communal living.
  • In some ways a conspicuously anti-consumerist lifestyle has become a positional good in itself.
  • Trader Joe’s is the chief example of this trend.
  • It caters not to the average American, but to a more elite set interested in organic, gourmet, and ethnic foods. Nevertheless, it offers low prices through an ingenious mix of limited selection and price discrimination (many Trader-Joe’s-branded items are the same high-end brands you’d get at Whole Foods, just repackaged.)
  • The company seems to be directly targeting educated threshold earners. One retail consultant that studied the chain has said that Trader Joe’s typical customer is a “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.” Indeed, the chain sites stores in university-dense areas brimming with bargain-hunting elites.
  • “The retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the likes of Zara. Zara’s strategy is to get as close to them as possible.” The threshold earning elite gets the high-end shopping experience and trendy clothes at low prices.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "The "great stagnation" presents us with a great opportunity. It's easier than ever to opt-out of the income-maximizing rat-race and enjoy more leisure. If innovation has become increasingly marginal, then it's less costly to choose to be a "threshold earner," which Tyler Cowen defines as "someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more." If wages go up, Cowen says, a threshold earner will choose to work less or, I would add, choose work that's so personally fulfilling that it's indistinguishable from leisure."
anonymous

Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie - 0 views

www.mensjournal.com/...print

shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Weight machines, on the other hand, are far more insidious because they appear to be a huge technological advance over free weights. But quite the opposite is true: Weight machines train individual muscles in isolation, while the rest of you sits completely inert. This works okay for physical therapy and injury rehab, and it’s passable for bodybuilding, but every serious strength-and-conditioning coach in America will tell you that muscle-isolation machines don’t create real-world strength for life and sport.
  • Most gyms do include a few token free weights, but think about where you’ll find them: around the edges of the room, like fresh fruits and vegetables in a supermarket that gives all the prime middle-of-the-store shelf space to Frosted Flakes and frozen cheesecake. Truly indispensable gear — like the good old-fashioned adjustable barbell rack, the sine qua non of any remotely serious gym — has, by contrast, become a downright rarity. As for niche but no less important equipment like an Olympic lifting platform, forget about it: The lawyers would never let it through the door.
  • Here’s the problem: If you’re in the fitness-equipment business, free weights are a loser.
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  • Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense.
  • Next up, shake hands with that nice, buff guy in the “trainer” shirt, and confess that you really don’t have a clue how to use a gym but that you’re into outdoor sports and you want to stay fit enough to have fun on weekends. He’ll nod a lot and pretend to take notes. Then he’ll measure your body fat with some high-tech-looking device and ask you lots of questions, ultimately convincing you to hire him twice a week.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Dec 11
       
      This is known as the *Chiropractor* approach.
  • these days, it’s all about “functional fitness,” a complex integration of balance and stability and strength.
  • My conversion moment came in a garage-like industrial space next to an ATV rental yard in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was lying on a concrete floor, near puking, having just humiliated myself on the king of all strength exercises, the old-school back squat. “The best thing I can do for an athlete,” coach Rob Shaul said to me as I struggled to get up, “is to make him strong. Strength is king, and you’re fucking little-girl weak.”
  • I jumped on a plane, slept in a motel, gulped a crappy coffee, drove down a lonely highway, and presented myself. Beneath the Mountain Athlete banners, I saw nothing but dumbbells, barbells, iron weight plates, braided climbing ropes hanging off the ceiling, pull-up bars, and dip bars. No mirrors, no TVs, no music, no elliptical trainers, no weight machines, and, to my annoyance, absolutely no rubber bands or stability balls.
  • He ordered us over to the barbell racks, telling us to work our way up to the heaviest squat we could do once. I realized that I had never done this particular test in my life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I’d never even done plain old squats. Wasn’t it far better to squat on a stability ball and get all that additional balance and core work?
  • The rest of the session — more barbell moves, along with push-ups, pull-ups, and dips — revealed more of the same. I was, in a word, weak. Not even middle-aged-lady weak — little-girl weak.
  • True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn’t sport-specific at all. It’s about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure. Nobody does crunches training this way, nobody watches television from the stationary bike, and 60-year-old women dead-lift 200 pounds and more.
  • And now I knew this wasn’t about a gym or about gym equipment; it was about an ethos, an understanding that nothing on Earth beats the fundamentals, a commitment to regular, measurable improvement in everything that a gym trainer won’t teach, for fear you’ll walk away bored: push-ups, pull-ups, bench presses, squats, dead lifts, and even such military-seeming tests as just how fast you can run a single mile.
  • TRUTH 3: ONCE YOU “GET IT,” YOU’LL LOVE IT.
  • Shaul’s guys out in Wyoming get massively strong and powerful on precisely three gym sessions a week, each lasting an hour and no more. Louie Simmons, the single biggest name in gorilla-style competitive power lifting, will tell you that 45 minutes is the max length of any smart training session.
  • Strength means how much you can lift once
  • Power is a more slippery term that means “speed strength,” or how much you can lift very, very quickly
  • Muscle mass can be a liability in sports like climbing, where it’s all about strength-to-weight ratio, but mass helps enormously with games like rugby and football, and it can support strength and power
  • Muscular endurance means how many times you can lift a given weight in a row without stopping
  • Down the road, if you’re like me, you’ll want to train multiple aptitudes at once: strength, power, and endurance.
  • Every serious strength-and-conditioning coach sticks to the basic barbell movements, because our bodies don’t operate as single muscles — they operate as a whole.
  • First: The human body adapts to stress. Throw us in ice-cold water every day and we’ll sprout subcutaneous fat for insulation; expose us to the desert sun and our skin will darken. What this means for getting in shape is that each week, you have to stress your body a little more than last time — lift a little heavier, run a little harder. Muscles weaken with exhaustion after a workout, but then they recover and typically, a few days later, go into what’s known as “supercompensation,” a fancy word that just means bouncing back a little stronger than before.
  • Finally, keep it simple; understand that variety is overrated. Variety does stave off boredom — it’s fun to mix in new exercises all the time — but a guy who hasn’t trained in a long time, if ever, will get stronger faster on the simplest program of squats, dead lifts, and presses, three times a week.
  • To get it just right, keep meticulous records, writing down every rep and every lift so your targets for each workout are easy to spot and your gains are easy to measure.
  • This simple formula is 90 percent of what you need to know, and you now officially know more than the buff 25-year-old doing your gym-membership orientation.
  • “Somewhere inside every man’s body,” Brown told me, lying in a La-Z-Boy, “there’s a weak link, a weak muscle waiting to fail. My job is to find that muscle and make it strong.”
  • two problems: First, if you have powerful prime movers from doing muscle-isolation machines at the gym but weak stabilizers because you rarely get to play a sport, you can’t access all your strength when you, say, bang off a mogul on a ski hill
  • Second, and worse still, the strength of the prime movers can shred your unstable joints.
  • He returned to the matters at hand, telling me that my weak knees and shoulder, my tight neck and spastic lumbar, were absolutely typical of a middle-aged recreational athlete with a desk job who spends all day slumped over and slack and then goes out and plays hard. Ignore this stuff, he said, and keep training, and I was guaranteed to get injuries that could set me back for a year. The good news, Brown told me, was that joint stability in each area could be traced to a remarkably small number of tiny stabilizer muscles. And while you could spend a fortune on physical therapists, trying to get them to tell you the same thing, you could also just start exercising those stabilizers. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” Brown told me. “This is just better-mousetrap kind of stuff.”
  • One book in particular, Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, inspired me to start with the very first of the Fundamental Four: strength. I liked the clarity of the word, and I liked the idea of keeping life simple, learning one aptitude at a time. Many pros will tell you that strength is the place to start, because once you’ve built pure strength, you’ll have no trouble adding power, size, and endurance. I decided to just follow Rippetoe’s bare-bones old-school program.
  • Before Starting Strength, I didn’t even know what a dead lift was, but my dead lift went from 135 pounds to 335. My bench press went well over my body weight. At age 42 — 6-foot-2 and gangly and 20 years into complaining about a bad back and bum knees, and right when any doctor or physical therapist would have told me it was time to embrace the low-impact elliptical — my back squat hit 275, going below parallel. My thighs got so big I couldn’t fit into most of my jeans, and I had to start shopping for new T-shirts.
  • But there’s an even better reason to build pure strength. I’ve come to believe that men don’t go to gyms just to avoid heart disease or support our weekend sports. It’s worth getting strong because we go to gyms in large part to maintain a little goddamned self-respect, and to blow off steam, and to insist, against all odds, that we do remain fiercely vital physical beings. And trust me, there’s nothing like watching your dead lift skyrocket to make you feel vital. It’s the happy exhaustion, the sense of hard work well done, with a clear purpose; it’s the rush of seeing your body change, fat turning into lean mass.
  • anonymous on 15 Dec 11
     
    Gym machines are boring, CrossFit is sadistic, and dieting sucks. Luckily, none of them is essential to being truly fit. Through years of trial and error - and humiliation at the hands of some of the world's top trainers - the author discovered the secrets to real health.
anonymous

The Case Against High-School Sports - Amanda Ripley - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309447

shared by anonymous on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.
  • Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      It does in my home.
  • When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.
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  • As states and districts continue to slash education budgets, as more kids play on traveling teams outside of school, and as the globalized economy demands that children learn higher-order skills so they can compete down the line, it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?
  • On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.
  • Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.
  • The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.
  • Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.
  • Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.
  • But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.
  • “We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      This is so absurd.
  • But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”
  • Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”
  • Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”
  • Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donations—money that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      So much awesome.
  • In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no one—not even the people in charge—realizes their actual cost.
  • When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.
  • “And it is not even a school in a district that prioritizes cheerleading,” Roza wrote. “In fact, this district’s ‘strategic plan’ has for the past three years claimed that math was the primary focus.”
  • Football is, far and away, the most expensive high-school sport.
  • Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.
  • That kind of constant, low-level distraction may be the greatest cost of all.
  • During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics.
  • Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.
  • Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice.
  • But here’s the thing: most American principals I spoke with expressed no outrage over the primacy of sports in school. In fact, they fiercely defended it. “If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have more athletic opportunities for students, not less,” Bigham, the former Tennessee principal, told me.
  • His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      "The process" equals sports, not education. Dipstick.
  • But at this moment in history, now that more than 20 countries are pulling off better high-school-graduation rates than we are, with mostly nominal athletic offerings, using sports to tempt kids into getting an education feels dangerously old-fashioned.
  • America has not found a way to dramatically improve its children’s academic performance over the past 50 years, but other countries have—and they are starting to reap the economic benefits.
  • “Our analysis suggests that the most engaging environment you can offer students is one of cognitive challenge combined with individualised pedagogical support,” he told me in an e-mail. “If you offer boring and poor math instruction and try to compensate that with interesting sport activities, you may get students interested in sports but I doubt it will do much good to their engagement with school.”
  • But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.
  • One study of 30,000 students at the University of Oregon found that the grades of men who did not play sports went down as the football team’s performance improved. Both men and women reported that the better their football team did, the less they studied and the more they partied.
  • Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.
  • Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.
  • Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.
  • “I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”
  • anonymous on 19 Sep 13
     
    "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student-unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"
  • Ed Webb on 20 Sep 13
     
    Awesome read. The whole sports thing is bizarre, at K-12 or college level. Such a distraction, such a distortion of resources & effort.
  • anonymous on 23 Sep 13
     
    It's *such* a distraction, but - dear god - don't even mention that you are entertaining such a notion, even in my ultra-liberal Seattle neighborhood. It's worst than being a baby-killer. Sports are apparantly important because of... reasons. And I though right-wing Christians were the most likely to embrace blind faith in something.
anonymous

Letter from Tangier - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...letter-tangier

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Those mountains that almost seem a stone's throw away are where a Moroccan general, Tariq ibn Ziyad, massed his troops for a conquest ordered by the sixth Umayyad caliph in the early 8th century to expand the frontier of the caliphate to the Iberian Peninsula.
  • Tangier and the Spanish-controlled city of Ceuta slightly to the east are the closest Africa gets to Europe.
  • The highlands are inhabited by Morocco's local natives, given the name Berbers by Greeks and Romans who regarded them as "barbari," Greek for "barbarians," who refused to adapt to their ways.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Unlike in many of its ill-defined neighbors to its east and south, there is a geographic logic to Morocco's boundaries that has allowed it to develop a strong identity over the centuries.
  • With Islamic power centers far away to the east in Baghdad and Damascus, Morocco was able to cultivate a much more experimental relationship with Islam.
  • This tradition of liberalism in theology continues to this day as contemporary religious-political movements in Morocco espouse a postmodern Islamist model to attract youth who are semi-fluent in Western philosophy but who, out of frustration, are searching for an alternative to the current system.
  • distance is a virtue for Morocco. Overstretched politically, financially and militarily, the Ottomans, nominal overlords from the 16th to 19th century, fell short of claiming Morocco as part of their empire
  • Distance also enabled Morocco to develop a uniquely cooperative relationship with Israel. As one older Berber man with leathery skin and kind eyes told me over mint tea, "You cannot dance to music that you cannot hear."
  • In other words, enough land lies between Morocco and Israel to insulate Morocco from the more vitriolic relationships Israel has with its Arab neighbors.
  • With no navigable rivers to facilitate inland development, Morocco has been and remains a capital-poor territory.
  • As Morocco fell more and more in debt to the Europeans, it saw its sovereignty erode, a trend that culminated in the French and Spanish protectorates of the early 20th century.
  • Morocco's vulnerability to Europe marked the foundation of its relationship with the United States. While the Europeans were busy fighting among themselves, Morocco looked eagerly across the Atlantic at 13 colonies developing along North America's eastern seaboard. Morocco was desperate for a patron and ally with enough power, strategic interest -- and enough distance from Morocco -- to effectively balance against its European neighbors, and it found one in the United States.
  • As a sign of Morocco's geopolitical foresight, the sultan ensured that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States in December 1777
  • Morocco stands out for its relative stability. As one of the last standing monarchies of the region, Morocco enjoys strong support from the Gulf Arab monarchies that are deeply unnerved by the U.S. pursuit of a strategic detente with Iran.
  • Morocco is also a country that the United States can look to as a political model for managing the stresses of the hangover from the Arab Spring.
  • Morocco's historically flexible interpretation of Islam engendered a more dynamic relationship between Moroccan rulers and their constituencies.
  • The idea that sultans were not invincible laid the groundwork for constitutional monarchy in Morocco.
  • Youth unemployment is believed to be as high as 30 percent
  • Morocco's occupation of a strategic transit point between Atlantic and Mediterranean commerce applies to the drug trade as well.
  • Morocco cannot escape its economic pressures, but it does retain the tools and legitimacy to manage them, unlike many of its neighbors.
  • King Mohammed VI will be looking for U.S. backing for Morocco's claim to Western Sahara
  • The state-owned Moroccan press is meanwhile issuing articles that allege Algerian imperialist ambitions in the region.
  • Morocco's claims to the Western Sahara do not figure into Washington's priorities for the region. Taking sides in this issue now would only complicate the U.S. relationships with Algeria and other African countries without providing any clear benefit in return.
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "Morocco rarely figures into international news headlines these days, something of a virtue in this restive part of the world. The term Maghreb, which translates as "land of the setting sun," eventually came to denote a stretch of land starting in the Western Sahara and running through the Atlas Mountains and ending before the Nile River Valley, encompassing modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. However, the Maghreb originally meant the lands that define Morocco, where the setting sun marked the Western frontier of the Islamic empire."
anonymous

Penn and Teller interview - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...Penn-and-Teller-interview.html

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work – but after 35 years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. Ahead of their first British performances for 16 years, Benjamin Secher went to Las Vegas to ask them how they do it .
  • Penn dominates the stage, pointing, spouting like an evangelist, encouraging us to see the big ideas behind the wizardry, plucking at his double bass, doing dangerous looking things with a nailgun, cracking jokes at the expense of Homeland Security or dispensing a running commentary on Teller’s sleights of hand. He also has a habit of giving away the tricks – before Teller’s red ball act, he declares “this is done with a thread!” – something he describes as “a kind of peace offering” to the audience but which some of the other magicians in Vegas see as a professional blasphemy. He couldn’t care less what they think. “I have always hated magic,” he says. “I have always hated the basic undercurrent of magic which Jerry Seinfeld put best when he said: 'All magic is “Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over”.’ I never wanted to grow up to be a magician. It was never my goal.” He would rather have been a rock star, he says, but the business seemed already saturated with extraordinarily talented people. “So my thinking was, and I will say this outright, music is full of people I absolutely love. I don’t have a chance. They are all better than me. Magic has, ooh, nobody in it that I like.” He rocks back in his chair, cackling. “This is the field for me!”
  • anonymous on 15 Jul 10
     
    "Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work - but after 35 years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. Ahead of their first British performances for 16 years, Benjamin Secher went to Las Vegas to ask them how they do it ." By Benjamin Secher at The Telegraph on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

Political Ads, Infomercials and Other Things That Discourage Critical Thinking - 0 views

critical-thinkers.com/...t-discourage-critical-thinking

quickthoughts criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Political advertisements (even the rare ones that actually refer to facts) are full of fallacies.  The appeal to emotion is clear.  The “good guy” is shown shaking hands with a diverse group of people.  He/she is fighting for justice, fairness, freedom, etc (all words that evoke positive emotion and passion.)  The “bad guy” in the ad is always shown in black-and-white or grainy film with ominous music playing in the background.  Fear tactics are clear as the opponent is charged with wanting to take away freedom, raise taxes, go to war, take away healthcare, destroy the economy, ruin the environment, free terrorists, etc.  If your emotions aren’t fully charged after a 30 second ad, you might want to check your pulse.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 10
     
    "Thank goodness for the invention of the DVR. What did we do before we had the ability to tape and easily fast forward through commercials? Each time I watch a political ad, commercial, or infomercial I wonder how many brain cells I lost." By Breanne Potter at Critical Thinkers on July 23, 2010.
anonymous

Generation X hits its midlife crisis - 0 views

www.salon.com/...genx_midlife_crisis

generations

shared by anonymous on 09 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Welcome to the age of mixed blessings, you rapidly wrinkling Janeane Garofalo wannabes!
  • "Formerly Hot," inspired by Dolgoff's epiphany that "I was no longer who I'd always been -- a pretty girl who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks," will surely strike a chord with anyone who's ever realized she's never getting comped for drinks again.
  • But it's ironic that while this is likely the greatest time in human history to be middle-aged (for which I personally thank you for blazing that trail, baby boomers) we're still torn up about it. A person over 40 is no longer immediately set out to die on an ice floe, but that leaves the question, What's left? Are we MILFs and cougars, or just haggard old "formerlies"? We flail awkwardly to finesse this new stage of life, maybe because being older ain't what it used to be. There was a time we'd just consign ourselves to looking like a Dorothea Lange photograph by the time we had the second kid, but those migrant farmworkers weren't of the generation that got Viagra and Nirvana. Can we still rock out? Wear funny T-shirts?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • On his cringe-worthily perfect series "Louie," Louis C.K. delivers the grim news to the Lloyd Dobler generation: "There's never going to be another year of my life that was better than the year before it. That's never going to happen again. I've seen my best years." And unlike those lucky enough to be able to make the wracked-with-baggage boast of being formerly hot, he says, "I've never gained from my looks at all. It's not like, oh, they're going, what am I going to do now?"
  • If I've got potentially 40 more years of living ahead, I won't spend it as the kind of woman Bowling for Soup writes songs about. In truth, like many people my age, I hated high school and my 20s sucked as much as they rocked. So while we may take the baby barrettes out of our graying hair and no longer fit the description of grrrl, my generation has been pretty busy spending the last few decades living its life, starting its zines, cranking out some great music and generally not giving much of a crap about its hotness to begin with. I'll gladly answer to "slacker," but even if it's with a wink and a self-deprecating laugh over pleather miniskirts gone by, don't call me "formerly" anything. Because I'm not ready to assume my best years are behind me. And I don't ever want to define myself by what I've been. 
  • anonymous on 09 Aug 10
     
    "An author calls for women to embrace their "formerly hot" years. Oh please: Don't call me "formerly" anything." By Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com on August 9, 2010.
anonymous

Flux=Rad - 0 views

www.slate.com/2248243

generations culture

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The Pavement reunion and the end of baby boomer cultural hegemony.
  • How will we know when baby boomers have lost control of American popular culture?
  • "Greatest. Indie-est. Band. Ever." The headline belongs to the latest issue of GQ, with apologies to The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It's such an icky boomer-like exercise, obsessing over your own demise," a pal told Shafer back in 2005, when he surveyed some of his younger friends about the potential signs of a coming cultural rebellion. True. And boomer self-satisfaction is such that we will probably have to pry the mic stand out of Mick Jagger's sinewy, scarf-draped hands before passing it to a younger generation.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 10
     
    A great article by Zach Baron about the coming eclipse of Boomer culture.
anonymous

5 Things They Never Told Us - 0 views

www.cracked.com/...5-things-they-never-told-us

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 11 - Cached
  • #5.You Don't Become An Adult, You Just Suddenly Are One
  • There's no class or test or paperwork to sign. One day you just realize you're a person who pays bills. You're a person who signs up for a club card at your local grocery store because, "Oh, I might as well, I'm there so often." You're a person who gradually is getting less and less familiar with whatever's going on in pop music. You can vote and rent a car and get married and have kids, and it's not weird, it's normal.You're an adult, and no one told you.
  • Remember when you were a kid and you saw adults as all-knowing authority figures who had shit figured out? As the people who were allowed to tell you what to do and make rules, because they were the ones who were running the world? That's what kids think when they see you, even though you're an idiot.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • #4.Almost Everything You're Doing is Absolutely Meaningless
  • The only skills you really need to learn in high school and college are how to socialize and be a functioning human in society, because that's the only thing you'll be consistently doing for the rest of your life.
  • College is important, but what you study? Not so much. Focus on learning how to be a human, and focus on networking and meeting the right people, because they are much better at hiring you than your GPA is. Professors and Deans and your parents will stress that your grades are important, but I guarantee you that, as long as they were good at their job, no one in the history of time has ever been fired because of their GPA.
  • You'll Never Have as Much Time, Energy, Or Excuses For Doing Dumb Shit Than When You're 14
  • At 14, you're not legally allowed to work in most states, school is a pointless breeze and you have nothing to be stressed about because you're not paying bills or fighting in a war and no one depends on you for anything. You just have boundless energy, and a stupid amount of free time and no accountability whatsoever.
  • anonymous on 25 Mar 11
     
    "Given the opportunity, there are probably a lot of tiny, superficial things you say to your fourteen-year-old self, (Get a haircut; Stop being a smartass; Maybe try not masturbating for, like, a night, and see what that does to the amount of free time you have). Small things you wish you'd known, because they would've made middle school, high school and whatever comes after slightly easier. There are also much bigger things, things about life and growing up that someone damn sure should've told you about."
anonymous

New Mexican President, Same Cartel War? - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...ican-president-same-cartel-war

geopolitics mexico U.S. cartel war

shared by anonymous on 16 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In any democratic election, opposition parties always criticize the policies of the incumbent. This tactic is especially true when the country is involved in a long and costly war.
  • This strategy is what we are seeing now in Mexico with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) criticizing the way the administration of Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the National Action Party (PAN), has prosecuted its war against the Mexican cartels.
  • One of the trial balloons that the opposition parties — especially the PRI — seem to be floating at present is the idea that if they are elected they will reverse Calderon’s policy of going after the cartels with a heavy hand and will instead try to reach some sort of accommodation with them.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • In effect, this stratagem would be a return of the status quo ante during the PRI administrations
  • no matter who wins the 2012 election, the new president will have little choice but to maintain the campaign against the Mexican cartels.
  • over the past decade there have been changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States.
  • much of the U.S. supply came into Florida via Caribbean routes.
  • Over the past decade, the tables turned. Now, the Mexican cartels control most of the cocaine flow and the Colombian gangs are the junior partners in the relationship.
  • they are also involved in the smuggling of South American cocaine to Europe and Australia. This expanded cocaine supply chain means that the Mexican cartels have assumed a greater risk of loss along the extended supply routes
  • black-tar heroin and methamphetamine, has also helped bring big money (and power) to the Mexican cartels. These drugs have proved to be quite lucrative for the Mexican cartels because the cartels own the entire production process. This is not the case with cocaine, which the cartels have to purchase from South American suppliers.
  • These changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States mean that the Mexican narcotics-smuggling corridors into the United States are now more lucrative than ever for the Mexican cartels, and the increasing value of these corridors has heightened the competition — and the violence — to control them.
  • Most of the violence in Mexico today is cartel-on-cartel, and the cartels have not chosen to explicitly target civilians or the government. Even the violence we do see directed against Mexican police officers or government figures is usually not due to their positions but to the perception that they are on the payroll of a competing cartel.
  • Consider this: Three and a half years ago, the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) was a part of the Sinaloa Federation. Following the arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva in January 2008, Alfredo’s brothers blamed Sinaloa chief Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, declared war on El Chapo and split from the Sinaloa Federation to form their own organization.
  • not only did the BLO leave the Sinaloa Federation, it also split twice to form three new cartels.
  • There are two main cartel groups, one centered on the Sinaloa Federation and the other on Los Zetas, but these groups are loose alliances rather than hierarchical organizations, and there are still many smaller independent players, such as CIDA, La Resistencia and the CJNG. This means that a government attempt to broker some sort of universal understanding with the cartels in order to decrease the violence would be far more challenging than it would have been a decade ago.
  • Another problem is the change that has occurred in the nature of the crimes the cartels commit. The Mexican cartels are no longer just drug cartels, and they no longer just sell narcotics to the U.S. market.
  • Up until a few months ago, it was common to hear U.S. government officials refer to the Mexican cartels using the acronym “DTOs,” or drug trafficking organizations. Today, that acronym is rarely, if ever, heard. It has been replaced by “TCO,” which stands for transnational criminal organization. This acronym recognizes that the Mexican cartels engage in many criminal enterprises, not just narcotics smuggling.
  • Mexican cartels have become involved in kidnapping, extortion, cargo theft, oil theft and diversion, arms smuggling, human smuggling, carjacking, prostitution and music and video piracy.
  • These additional lines of business are lucrative, and there is little likelihood that the cartels would abandon them even if smuggling narcotics became easier.
  • this diversification is also a factor that must be considered in discussing the legalization of narcotics and the impact that would have on the Mexican cartels.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Jun 11
       
      This would seem to be crucial, since discussion of what the U.S. can do always seems to boil (for us) down to one of decriminalization. While that may (or may not) be wise, it does not necessarily follow that it will 'fix' the problem.
  • Another way the cartels have sought to generate revenue through alternative means is to increase drug sales inside Mexico. While drugs sell for less on the street in Mexico than they do in the United States, they require less overhead, since they don’t have to cross the U.S. border.
  • There has been a view among some in Mexico that the flow of narcotics through Mexico is something that might be harmful for the United States but doesn’t really harm Mexico. Indeed, as the argument goes, the money the drug trade generates for the Mexican economy is quite beneficial. The increase in narcotics sales in Mexico belies this, and in many places, such as the greater Mexico City region, much of the violence we’ve seen involves fighting over turf for local drug sales and not necessarily fighting among the larger cartel groups
  • As the Mexican election approaches, the idea of accommodating the cartels may continue to be presented as a logical alternative to the present policies, and it might be used to gain political capital, but anyone who carefully examines the situation on the ground will see that the concept is totally untenable.
  • in the same way President Obama was forced by ground realities to follow many of the Bush administration policies he criticized as a candidate, the next Mexican president will have little choice but to follow the policies of the Calderon administration in continuing the fight against the cartels.
  • anonymous on 16 Jun 11
     
    Here's the latest from StratFor regarding the Mexican Cartel War and how the upcoming 2012 Mexican election might be impacted by the events of the last few years.
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