#as if amazon alone is the only evil production company in the world

[heartofstanding]

WB didn't just blackmail us into changing our strike laws, they basically made it so creatives would always be contractors and therefore couldn't unionise. Freaking John Key, man

Fucking hell. It really fucked you guys over.

LBR, The Hobbit trilogy was absolutely not worth it either.

[nickgerlich]

Boxful Of Praise

There are about 132 million households in the US, from people living alone, to traditional families, single-parent families, and empty-nesters. But there is one thing that all of these disparate groups have in common, and it is a reflection of how we shop today.

I’m talking about empty Amazon boxes littering your garage, laundry room, or wherever things like these congregate.

The familiar Amazon smile is a great brand reinforcer, but it is also giving everyone from social critics to Amazon itself pause to consider how all of these boxes are just not sustainable. Sure, cardboard is recyclable and all that, but how much packaging is necessary? If the item sold already comes in packaging that could withstand being delivered by USPS, UPS, or Amazon itself, then maybe a second box is not all that necessary, even if it means that Amazon loses brand visibility along the route.

Ships In Product Packaging, or SIPP, is now in a large-scale test between Amazon and hundreds of thousands of sellers that rely on Fulfillment by Amazon. There are cost and labor savings, but the best savings come in reduced packaging. Maybe we won’t be piling up boxes like we’ve been doing all along.

The shift to e-commerce has necessarily raised some concerns over the environmental impact of packaging as well as delivery to our front door. In ye olden days, we procured the vast majority of our consumables at stores, but now we have a growing percentage of those sent to us.

In a related debate, you could also suggest that while free trade is good, our outsourcing of manufacturing to factories halfway around the world means that finite fossil fuels will be used to ship them here. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Packaging has always been a necessary evil. It is used to protect the product, but is also used for promotional purposes. Some products by their very design need packaging, such as liquids, although it’s hard to imagine a soda can not also having a corporate logo on it. In some cases, packaging is used to try to avert theft, which helps explain why it is so hard to liberate an SD card from its blister pack. Basically, packaging is important, and it is not going away.

But if Amazon’s test proves worthy, we’ll be seeing a lot less packaging. There are limits, though, at least for the moment, because it is only available in the US and Canada, and specifically for those sellers that contract with Amazon for fulfillment. Small items are also necessarily excluded, which means those vitamins you have on monthly subscription will still arrive in a box or padded bag. Furthermore, the original product package must be large enough for labels to be affixed. Weight and fragility are also considerations.

In other words, don’t expect everything to suddenly wind up on your front porch, laying there as if the vitamin fairy stopped by.

Amazon and third-party labs engage in package testing to verify if an item qualifies for the SIPP initiative. While multiple variations of an item do not need to be tested, no assumptions are made between competing items. Just because one company’s similar item passes muster does not mean yours will.

I don’t know about you, but I could do with a lot less packaging. Nothing against Amazon, because they provide me a lot of value and convenience, but I don’t know what to do with all the boxes I have in a storage shed. You see, a lot of people like me feel badly about just throwing them away, but we also don’t have convenient access to recycling. So we stash them, just like all the cords and plugs we’ve been slowly compiling over the years.

I could repurpose a couple of Amazon boxes for those items, but beyond that, I have such a random variety of sizes that there is no uniformity whatsoever. Forget stacking.

Less is more, Amazon. I’m throwing a boxful of praise in your general direction.

Dr “It’s Always Boxing Day Anymore” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[historystrainwrecks]

John D. Rockefeller’s Favorite Cheese

The richest man in the world was on the run.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s Justice Department was planning to file an antitrust suit against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company in 1906, and the states wanted to get into the action before the Attorney General did. Multiple lawsuits were filed against the directors of the company that controlled over ninety percent of oil production in the United States and had, by prevailing accounts, used unfair practices to gain its monopoly in the market. 

John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland produce merchant during the Civil War, had diversified into the nascent oil business in 1870, taking huge risks in a new industry that no one believed would endure. He took advantage of this lack of confidence, buying up failing refineries. In one six-week period between February and March of 1872, he bought 22 of the 26 refineries in the city in what was later called “The Cleveland Massacre.” In his telling of the story, Rockefeller paid a fair price for refineries that were failing, poorly run, or had inferior equipment. He could have simply waited for them to go under and then picked up the pieces, but he believed he was doing a good thing by buying them out. Some of the later gripes about his tactics derived from the refiners he bought out for cash (most refusing shares of Standard Oil stock instead) who later saw him build a massive fortune from the bones of their endeavors. A lot of them were peeved they hadn’t taken the stock, which paid out over half a billion dollars in dividends between 1882 and 1906. 

Ida Tarbell, one of America’s first and best-known investigative journalists called “muckrakers,” grew up in the oil fields of Pennsylvania during the early years of the oil boom. She saw what the oil business was like from the side of the original drillers and producers—fluctuating prices, deadly accidents, and the gradual squeezing out of small producers and refiners by Standard Oil. Her father’s refinery was put out of business by Rockefeller, she believed, because of the company’s unfair business practices, which included favorable transport rates achieved through secret collusion with the railroads. 

In 1904, Tarbell wrote the bestselling “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which laid bare the worst of Standard Oil’s monopolistic practices. She found evidence of strong-arm tactics, price manipulation that drove the sale price of oil below the costs of production, and collusion with the railroads that gave Standard a significant competitive advantage. And this was not merely history; at the time of her investigation, she was able to procure documents from Standard’s headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York that showed the company was still up to its usual monopolistic shenanigans.

John D. Rockefeller was portrayed as the evil mastermind behind the “Octopus,” as Standard Oil was derisively known, even though he had been retired from the business since 1895. Management of the company had been left in the hands of his mercurial and combative successor John D. Archbold, but Rockefeller remained its largest shareholder. His income from dividends in 1902 alone was $58 million. This massive fortune already made him a target, but once Standard Oil’s shady practices became known, Rockefeller became the poster child for everything that was wrong with big business in America. 

President Roosevelt, having established a reputation as a trust-buster, could not ignore Standard Oil after Tarbell’s expose. He did believe that large and efficient companies were essentially good for the country, creating jobs and lowering the cost of items that most Americans had to buy or use on a regular basis like kerosene and oil byproducts, meat, sugar, and railway transportation. But Roosevelt owed a large part of his political success to mastering the press and its capacity to influence public opinion. Once Tarbell’s scathing indictment of the Octopus came out and outraged the country, the President was hoist with his own petard. The Standard Oil antitrust suit offered a shot at both the world’s largest oil monopoly and the unfair practices of American railroads. 

He could not let this one get away. 

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Once the floodgates of lawsuits against Standard Oil opened, the focus landed on the company’s origins and rise to power, which meant the testimony of the company’s founder was essential. And of course, having the richest man in the world dragged into your courtroom was a pretty big deal. 

Process servers with court orders and subpoenas (along with legions of reporters) went on the hunt for Rockefeller, whose testimony was sought in cases in Missouri, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and others. He went on the lam, moving furtively between his estates, living the life of a fugitive. Rumors spread that he was hiding on a yacht off the coast of Puerto Rico, or at his business partner Henry Flagler’s estate in Key West. Rockefeller asked his wife not to call him on the telephone, believing the line was tapped. He didn’t put return addresses on his letters. He hired detectives to guard his estates and turn away process servers. He told Standard Oil headquarters to send his correspondence in plain white envelopes, so that no one would get any sense that he was involved in the operations of the company (which he wasn’t). 

Rockefeller went by boat from Tarrytown, New York to a fortress he had set up in Lakewood, New Jersey, complete with guards, floodlights, and thorough inspections of all incoming vehicles. Newspapers reported that Rockefeller was unable to visit his first grandson, born in 1906, because the process servers would get him. The New York World put out a headline, “Grandson Born to John D. Rockefeller and He, Mewed Up in His Lakewood Fort, Could Only Rejoice by Phone.” Rockefeller cut his correspondence by seventy percent and asked relatives to keep his location a secret: “Confidentially,” he told his brother-in-law, “I prefer not to have it known where I am. It often saves me much annoyance.”

Rockefeller was fond of understatement. 

Long retired from the company, he dictated a letter in 1906 resigning as president of Standard Oil and asking the board of directors to approve it quickly. With the directors facing their own subpoenas, they stalled. John Archbold and Henry Rogers, who were running Standard Oil, “told him he had to keep the title of president.” They said, “these cases against us were pending in the courts; and we told him that if any of us had to go to jail, he would have to go with us!”Despite all these many precautions, John D. Rockefeller was ultimately undone by cheese.

A modest and plain Baptist for most of his life, Rockefeller studiously avoided vice and ostentation. He made his children (and his business partners) pledge to abstain from alcohol (on one memorable occasion asking his daughter Edith to promise to never serve alcohol in her house on the day before her wedding) and metered out small allowances to them in exchange for household chores. He and his wife lived plainly, often using the furniture that was left behind in the houses they bought instead of buying new. His wife Cettie was horrified when she learned one of her daughters wanted to buy silk underwear. John, beset with digestive ailments, ate plain and simple food.

Cheese was both his luxury and his weakness. To teach his children restraint when they were young, Rockefeller restricted them to one piece of cheese each day. His daughter Alta one day tattled on her sister Edith for having two pieces of cheese. “Rockefeller professed shock at this indulgence,” and for the rest of the day, whenever the offender was within earshot, he would say, “Edith was greedy” and “Edith was selfish.”

Rockefeller’s chickens came home to roost, as it were, while he was on the run from various state governments. He had his favorite cheese shipped to him daily. While holed up in his Pocantico estate in New York, the New York Central railroad delivered his cheese to the station, where hack drivers would take it the rest of the way. One of these drivers, Henry Cooge, told the press (with ominous gravity) that “suspicious cheeses were again entering Pocantico.” This was irrefutable evidence of Rockefeller’s current whereabouts. “Them cheeses,” Cooge said. “I would recognize anywhere, no matter whether it is day or night…Rockefeller, in my opinion, is somewhere on his estate.”

Rockefeller and his family had to leave the country, sailing for France in the spring of 1906. His name was discreetly left off the ship’s passenger list, and the rest of the family traveled under assumed names. 

The heat was on back in the States. A court in Ohio brought an antitrust action against Standard Oil and issued a warrant for Rockefeller’s arrest. John Archbold sent a message that Rockefeller should extend his European vacation: “There seems to be a perfect wave of attacks all along the line.” A sheriff vowed to meet Rockefeller’s ship when it came back and arrest him right there on the dock. 

Standard Oil had never taken lawsuits like this seriously, and there had been many over the years. It was able to fend them off with high-priced lawyers (and the fact that most of its rapacious practices weren’t illegal until the 1890’s). The company and Rockefeller remained silent in the face of public criticism, which was a tactical error; it made the company and its founder out to be as privileged and arrogant as everyone said they were. And as guilty.

In the new age of muckraking journalism and widespread attacks on the super-rich, this approach wasn’t going to work anymore. Standard Oil’s legal team arranged for Rockefeller’s voluntary testimony, and he was able to safely return to America. 

Rockefeller was served and did testify in court in 1907, and the government’s case against the company was filed in 1909. In May, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was “an unreasonable monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.” The company was broken up into 34 independent companies with different boards of directors. 

Rockefeller ended up owning a quarter of the shares in all the smaller companies. With the advent of gasoline-powered automobiles, the value of those stocks “mostly doubled.” His fortune reached as high as 900 million dollars. 

John D. Rockefeller, now even richer after the breakup of Standard Oil, was finally able to move freely about the land.

And wherever he went, his favorite cheese followed.

[metalandmagi]

Fall 2019 Anime Worth Watching

Wondering what anime to watch now that the jam packed summer season is over? Never fear, we’re into the fall, and there’s even more great shows this season! It’s my last rec list of the year so we’re in the home stretch now!

Full disclaimer, this season is packed with great shows, but a lot of these are not available on Crunchyroll...so here’s a link to a list of where you can watch everything legally on streaming! And I’ll but an (*) by everything that IS on Crunchyroll.

And here’s my recs for every season this year:

Summer 2019

Spring 2019

Winter 2019

And here’s my master list for 2020

New shows!

Chuubyou Gekihatsu-Boy (Outburst Dreamer Boy): A comedy in which a normal girl just wants a peaceful high school life, but finds herself surrounded by a group of ridiculous, overly dramatic boys who are all part of the “hero club” who try to make her school life better by helping her make friends. This is all well and good, but all the boys are delusional in one way or another. For example, one thinks he and his friends are basically Power Rangers, and another is obsessed with fabricating dramatic fake anime backstories for himself. It’s Ouran High School Host Club without the hosting. It’s absolutely hilarious, but it’s really flying under the radar because it’s not on Crunchyroll.

Kabukichou Sherlock: A surprisingly comedic modern version of Sherlock Holmes that takes place in the seedier portions of Japan in which a bunch of the city’s quirky detectives try and hunt down Jack the Ripper. I was not expecting this to be nearly as good as it was. The characters are great, Mrs. Hudson is a transvestite cabaret singer, the soundtrack is bomb, it’s an original anime by Production I.G. AND SHERLOCK EXPLAINS HIS DETECTIVE PROCESS THROUGH MYSTERY SOLVING RAKUGO!!!! 

Babylon: NO, NOT FATE BABYLONIA! This is a mystery/thriller involving a case of illegal clinical research for a pharmaceutical company that leads down a rabbit hole full of murder, suicide, and political intrigue. IT’S LIKE DEATH NOTE AND MONSTER HAD A BABY AND IT’S FREAKING AMAZING! I haven’t been this interested in a mystery/crime anime since Erased. The first episode will definitely leave you...hanging…. The only problem is it’s not on Crunchyroll, so I have a feeling most people won’t know about it because it’s on freaking Amazon Prime!

Hoshiai no Sora (Stars Align): A coming of age sports anime in which a boys soft tennis team sucks so bad that the school will disband them if they don’t win a tournament. And the team captain is so desperate for serious members, he literally pays his childhood friend who recently moved back into town to play on the team. And said childhood friend has an incredibly interesting backstory and struggling family life that ropes you in right away. How is soft tennis different from regular tennis? No clue, but this show is awesome! You can tell by the first episode it is going to be a great coming of age story, with more mature themes of abuse and class difference.

And it’s not the only sports anime with Sora in the title...

*Ahiru no Sora (Sora the Duck): Another sports anime, in which a short, spikey haired boy wants to play basketball (yeah yeah very original) but discovers that his high school basketball team is full of punks! It’s basically what would happen if Izuku Midoriya wanted to be a basketball player. The first few minutes are basically every sports anime you’ve ever seen, BUT it really lives up to its potential by the end of the first episode. It has a likable protagonist, good animation, and the female characters all wear realistic clothes to play basketball in! If you’re a piece of sports anime trash like me, this is definitely the show for you!

No Gun Life: In a detective noir world where everyone has basically become a cyborg, a guy with a gun for a head works to uncover the plans of an evil organization.  That’s it, that’s the whole thing. It’s made by Madhouse AND IT’S A CYBORG WITH A GUN FOR A HEAD! What else do you need?!

Beastars: IT’S JUST ANIME ZOOTOPIA! I’m not even kidding. It’s a school based mystery involving anthropomorphic animals who are faced with the murder of one of their classmates and the disruption of the peaceful coexistence of all types of animals in the school. It involves the whole predator vs prey dynamic and how appearances are deceiving, all with a jarringly serious tone considering everyone’s an animal. The only thing that doesn’t sit right with me is the use of 3D animation...which I notoriously despise no matter how great the show is. But even I am willing to put aside my hatred to keep watching this anime. The characters are interesting, it’s shot really creatively, and I love how ridiculously seriously it takes itself. Apparently it’s going to be on Netflix at some point.

*Shin Chuuka Ichiban (True Cooking Master Boy): It’s Food Wars’ less porny sibling that takes place in 19th century China, where a young boy named Mao is a master chef who travels around spreading his love for cooking! This is a reboot/continuation of an anime based on a manga from the 90s so there’s a really fun retro art style that’s nice to see updated. Apparently it picks up in the middle of the original story, but I haven’t felt like it’s necessary to see the source material to enjoy it or understand it. Also the soundtrack is bomb! It’s a great shounen to watch if you want more cross-cultural cooking anime that’s not straight up porn in your life, and it will definitely make you hungry!

Next seasons and Continuations!

 And don’t forget the summer leftovers, and some shows are getting continuations!

*Chihayafuru season 3: This is an incredibly fantastic underrated sports/club anime about a girl named Chihaya who struggles to find members for her karuta club after her best friend who made her fall in love with the game moves away. Never heard of “karuta”? It’s a physically and mentally challenging traditional Japanese game involving 100 poems written on cards that the players must memorize and locate before their opponent….it makes more sense when you see it I promise. This show is goddamn amazing, with incredibly realistic characters, an amazing game that most people don’t know about, gorgeous animation. It’s hilarious, it’s dramatic, it’s sad, and it’s uplifting all at once. 

This doesn’t premier until October 23, (so you’ve got time to binge the first 2 seasons!) but this is by far my most anticipated show of the season and quite possibly the entire year! I’VE BEEN WAITING SO MANY YEARS FOR ANOTHER SEASON, AND I’M SO PSYCHED!

Kono Oto Tomare (Stop this Sound) season 2: Speaking of club related anime, in case you missed the first season earlier this year, this is an anime about a boy who tries to recruit members for his high school koto club after all his senpais graduate. What’s a koto club you ask? It’s a large Japanese string instrument that no one cares about or plays anymore of course! Their club is endearingly terrible, with literally only one competent person on the team, but they’re aiming for nationals anyway, because...of course they are. This show seems pretty textbook at first, but it really grows on you the further you get. There are great character dynamics, it’s fun, it’s sweet, and there’s cool music that people don’t hear a lot of! If you like sports or club focused anime, give this one a chance!

*Dr. Stone: An action adventure in which all of humanity is mysteriously turned to stone one day. When a genius high school boy named Senku and his….not so genius friend Taiju awaken 3,700 years in the future, the two must rebuild civilization and turn the world back to normal with the power of science! I know pretty much everyone is watching this already, but I just want to reiterate how amazing it is. It is mysterious, educational, hilarious, and it really makes you think about civilization as we know it today. It was one of the best (if not the best) new show of the summer, and I’m so glad it’s getting a full run!

Vinland Saga: THE VIKING ANIME IS GETTING A FULL RUN!!!!!!!! In case you missed this gem in the summer, it’s a historical drama about a young boy named Thorfinn and his journey to avenge his father’s death and become a great warrior. And it’s all while traveling with his enemies through Northern Europe. It’s a fantastic dark, realistic story in a historical setting that filled the void left by Dororo. Plus it’s animated by Wit, so it looks beautiful. The music is great, the characters are intriguing, the story is interesting, AND IT HAS AN AMAZING ANTAGONIST! It has hype written all over it, so I’m pumped for the rest of the season! Unfortunately, you can only find it legally on Amazon Prime, so that’s why no one’s watching it.

*Fire Force: The (unfortunately timed) action/drama where fire fighters with super powers must protect Tokyo from people who are spontaneously combusting and uncover the evil rooted within their own organization. It’s made by the same person who created Soul Eater, and it definitely shows. The animation is high flying and out of this world. It’s worth watching for the action alone. But be warned, the plot and characters are it’s biggest weakness. It will jump between gratuitous fanservice and hijinks and then rocket into moral dilemmas and disturbing situations with no warning. BUT I still like watching it for the action, and in these later episodes the plot has steered itself back on track a lot more, and I’m way more interested in where the story is going now. I’m hoping that means the second half will give us a better sense of the characters. It also has a top tier muscular waifu! 

*My Hero Academia season 4: I’m sure everyone’s already going to be watching MHA, but I guess I’d have my anime fan badge revoked if I didn’t at least mention this one. I may not read the manga, but I know this arc is going to be a good one! I firmly believe this will be a modern classic, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s really worth watching.

And that’s it for this season. I’ll probably do a list at the end of the year of my top shows of 2019, but otherwise, see you in the winter of 2020!

[the-invisible-self]

I copied the text of this article below for anyone who is unable to read it behind the content blocker:

Summary: In the second season of Netflix’s series The OA, its creators question the relentless technological progress of our time, but the result is somewhat scattered.

The OA

Article by Sanja Grozdanic

In early 2017, soon after the release of the first season of The OA, its co-creator Brit Marling spoke at length with her friend Malcolm Gladwell about the series for Interview magazine. During the conversation, Gladwell asked Marling why she is so drawn to fantasy and speculative science fiction, both as a writer and an actor. These genres, she explained, best reflect her view of the world and the deep mythology she naturally invests in everyday moments and objects.

“I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don’t,” she said. “I feel very alone when I don’t feel that.”

Social isolation, technological domination and the profound discontent of a generation are all explored by The OA, a series that positions itself against the exploitation demanded by capitalism and is strung together by a storyline dense with time travel. Understandably, it has divided audiences. It has been called “absolutely insane”, “batshit” and “brilliant” – and yet has also gained a cult following and brought into focus a desire for the construction of new narratives and mythologies.

As Marling told Gladwell, “The OA is our attempt at writing and making a new human language through movement, this mythology we’re inventing.”

The series began its first season with Prairie Johnson (Marling), a woman missing for seven years who is rescued following an ostensible suicide attempt. Prairie was once blind – now she can see. She will not reveal to her family how she gained her sight, nor tell them what happened to her. She denies she was trying to kill herself, insisting she was only trying to “go back”. To where is the central mystery of the show’s first season, tagged as Part I, slowly revealed over eight episodes.

As the first season unfurled itself, I understood The OA to be an extended metaphor for post-traumatic stress disorder. In another life, in another dimension, Prairie is held captive by the show’s central villain, Dr Hap (Jason Isaacs), a scientist obsessed with near-death experiences and the power they bestow on survivors. Prairie, I believed, constructed her captivity as a trauma response – a hyper-fantasy of good versus evil, which allowed her to regain a sense of control.

The show’s perplexing narrative structure echoed a survivor’s frenzied mental state, a reading of existential crisis that I liked. When mental illness is feminised, it is often depicted as tepid and lifeless. But The OA gave weight to Prairie’s somatic condition, depicting it not so much as a defect but as a lifeline; a way to give form to what she cannot say. “Madness as a defense against terror. Madness as a defense against grief”, as Susan Sontag described it. One cannot live in such a world, but its genesis is all too human.

Part II of The OA proved my reading entirely incorrect.

In this season, the series relocates from North Carolina to San Francisco, California. It feels a fitting evolution in many ways – from the margins to the centre of technocapitalism.

In San Francisco, Prairie awakens in the body of Nina Azarova – a Russian heiress who lives in a penthouse, dresses in Gucci and is engaged to a tech billionaire named Pierre Ruskin. She has no memory of this life of material excess, but no one from her former life – of Prairie, the blind orphan – remembers her. Concerned for her welfare, a psychologist sends Nina to a facility on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for a 14-day psychiatric hold.

At the same time, elsewhere in the city, private investigator Karim Washington (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is hired by an elderly Vietnamese woman searching for her missing granddaughter, Michelle. Michelle disappeared after winning thousands of dollars playing an app, which seems to alienate and consume its users, while tempting them with the possibility of vast riches.

Following Karim’s attempts to trace the app back to its creator, the series starts to question the ethics underlying the startling decadence and terminal decline of the Silicon Valley social order. Karim discusses the app with a tech worker who suggests crowd-sourcing is nothing more than a euphemism for free labour. “What, erase the boundary between work and play, hide your sweatshop in the cloud?” he asks her. “Exactly,” she replies.

Who will protect those most vulnerable, like Michelle, in this rigged game? How are we compromised when our most intimate, private desires are mined as data? In a sprawling converted factory, Karim finds young women held in a literal dream farm, an attempt by a tech billionaire to instrumentalise the social unconscious in a search for the secret to time travel. A dystopia perhaps not radically removed from our present.

But amid all these subplots, the point is scattered, lost between too many narrative arcs. The choice to be so laser-focused on Marling’s character feels like a misstep – particularly while the profound discontent of this season’s younger characters seems far more urgent and vital than Nina’s struggle. Those characters are sidelined. Instead, the series insists upon a love story that has long since lost its romance or intrigue. Karim, too, is denied sufficient screen time and character development.

It is clear The OA is attempting to tap into something deeper. A renewed interest in the exploration of multiple dimensions and realities, including the series’ Netflix stablemates Russian Doll and Stranger Things, suggests a general recognition of a profound cultural lack. Suspended over a void, we face several conflicting futures. History repeats itself endlessly – infinite parallel worlds with interchangeable players.

Pierre Ruskin could be Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor long dogged by rumours he wants to inject himself with the blood of young people to stave off the effects of ageing. In another, more socially minded dimension, he could have been Alexander Bogdanov – the Soviet physician, philosopher and science fiction writer who also had an interest in what blood transfusion could do, but from a communist, rather than hyper-capitalist, perspective.

The 19th century defined the idea of progress as an infinite and irreversible improvement; the Hegelian idea of cumulative progress. Indeed, the myth of progress has been the West’s ruling ideology. But for downwardly mobile millennials facing social collapse, environmental catastrophe and unprecedented species extinction, this narrative has lost its primacy, or indeed its validity.

In the final episode of Part II, detective Karim saves one of the app’s users, but in doing so only manages to seem moralising and out of touch. Though addicted to the physically invasive, impossible game that inherently negates social life, the millennial doesn’t want to be saved. Remorseless and defiant, they see no future in the present Karim offers.

With this season, Marling and her co-creator, Zal Batmanglij, show themselves to be genuinely interested in moving The OA beyond emotional landscapes to the structural conditions fomenting this discontent. As Batmanglij explained, the pair sought to make “a gangster movie without the gangsters, because it’s the idea that it’s not just killing one bad guy or two bad guys, but it’s a whole city is to blame”.

But the question remains whether a show commissioned by Netflix – a company now worth more than Microsoft founder Bill Gates and only slightly less than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos – can ever honestly critique our present moment, shaped by the dominance of the tech giants. A successful Netflix product can be judged by its compulsive consumption; how quickly do viewers watch a season? “At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, et cetera,” said Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings. Where profit was once maximised with families and romantic comedies, in our moment of precarity it is apocalypse that is commercially seductive.

[rennyji]

July 19th tweets...

July 19th tweets...

“Prayer III “ - by DMX - enough said…

Tangram Smart Rope-regarding products like this, when, as weAll inLife, canExperience lackOfMotivation inSome ADD typeWay, a gimmickOfSomething nice looking/technological, 2 work w/the minds lackOfInterest(rooted in thoughts&resulting in feelings as boring), canHelp w/motivation.

"Tea Tree Hair and Body Moisturizer, Leave-In Conditioner, Body Lotion, After-Shave Cream" from Amazon...I want this product to always be available, so I just want to say this is an awesome hair gel...regarding the other uses, never tried applying like a lotion or aftershave...

Regarding my oppressed brothers, like me, in their respective cave or figurative jail cell: “who we be” - by DMX shows ur not the only one … Just remember: America’s system screws with you, cuz ur better than most…

“Dragostea Din Tei” from my Spotify 90s Playlist…awesome…and then there is Livin La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin- the Spanish version…and Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of…) by Lou Bega…"Everybody" by Backstreet Boys…”you give love a bad name” by Bon Jovi...all good songs...

don’t think there is a woman on this earth that I think more beautiful than @Shakira… randomly heard "ojas asi": one of her songs- sounds exotic…just made me think how much @Shakira stands out in appearance...

and now to get serious, to express the other side of my scale, with some thinking that I'm going to share -

---

In my request to end “the situation”, “the phenomena”, I keep saying tell me what’s going on to help me end it. That’s one thing I lack: a witness or someone to be this kind of friend to me. My request is with urgency. The orchestrators may say, “it’s almost done” or “ we already spent more than a decade, why not a little bit longer?!”

They maybe even say “get involved with what, we the orchestrator, say, and the “phenomena” will end sooner .” You cannot clap with one hand alone, so don’t be the corresponding hand to the orchestrators hand, to make a clapping sound. Do not be their army. Act by not acting, or simply refraining from action-probably what concepts such as inaction vs. action vs. nonaction get into.

In the Bible, it says,

59 He said to another man, “Follow me.”(BL)

But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”(BM)

61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”(BN)

62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Point of this passage, in the time of urgent calling from life or when there is a need:

We, as humans, will always have excuses. But “the time being now” is a concept that is so serious, when Jesus hears a man saying “he’ll be right there, I just want to attend to my dad’s funeral rites”, Jesus himself says (in what may come off as insensitive to impulsive human emotion), that, “let the dead worry about the dead, and you, do what needs and must be done. “

End this “phenomena”, “this situation”, now.

If you, the high minded American orchestrators, have a problem following the request of a lowly Indian, know that my request is dictated through the directives of the Golden Rule.

Jesus gave us the Golden Rule, but in being ANY follower of God, that would make us a “Champion for Justice.”

From the Christian perspective, it’s said:

Matthew 10:34

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

What Christ is saying is, He came to teach us insight, to challenge established rules and traditions and to get us to go beyond them. The path of doing what’s right could put us in wrong terms with family, could get you jailed. But followers of God can’t just cozy up and be apathetic to what goes on in the world. Through your words and influence, you need to fight deceptions and evils and injustices of this world with the figurative sword of the might of your will power and compassion and conviction.

So, on the basis of the following two Biblical verses, you might’ve heard:

Mark 13:6

Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many.

Matthew 24:5

For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.

I seem to be in some mind reading/and the possibly secret mind control cr*p.

Regarding the Christ, it’s said many will pose as Him, for the purpose of deception.

Here’s a scary reality, in knowing aggressive power hungry American mentality, that can happen. There is one band of orchestrators who very well could take over my body, not just mind control my hands to go up and down or allegedly read minds. Whether they’ll allow this message to seep through their filters, God knows. In Sha Allah - God willing- in Arabic- my words will reach you before the end of this.

For me being me, people may feel one way or another, toward me.

But with respect to me, know me and not judge me, based on the content of my character, my words, my actions…not even my alleged secret thoughts. You need to be direct with me to pick up on these things. Something very sinister could take advantage of my influence, posing as me, with my appearance, for their own selfish agendas.

Going back to Christ with the present day reality I am facing, it’s said many will come, saying they’re Christ. We have pictures of Christ, but the reality is, no one really knows what He looks like. ( Based on Middle Eastern appearances 2 thousand years ago, he may have had a tan, may have been about 5’5 in height-but don’t know for sure/different story/deviating from main serious point…) How will you recognize God, the Messiah, or Christ? Perhaps that why you shouldn’t get lost in names or various labels like doctor, police or whatever. Appreciate the company before you, through the Golden Rule. Be your best you, learn what you can, see not just with your eyes but through insight, practice the Golden Rule, and be mindful of the times. You are a Child of “The God” (capital G), making you little gods (small “g”) made in the Image of God.

Act with compassion, authority, dignity like a god,

and treat ur neighbor through listening/donation and dedication of your time/your verbally expressed perceptions or kindness or expression of a good word…

Regarding true insight and being mindful of the times, especially these times where under drunkenness, figuratively expressed through naivety and innocent smiling faces, living as though in paradise, taking part in what will inevitably/ultimately happen to them and their loved ones, through the completion/perfection of the orchestrators agenda- like something from the book, “1984”…these are the times of the “thought police”…and you foolish people are making it happen under the American corny sentimental notion of “preventing it from happening.” If the project is completed, it will lie in wait to tempt the orchestrators for use. Simply existing is a temptation. I’m a kind of serious that an American thinking they’re in paradise will never comprehend, when I say the following: “do not partake in the project/situation/ even if it means I rot or ultimately die from direct involvement or extreme mental exhaustion.” To my family, my parents: if Mary, the Mother of Christ, can endure the crucifixion of her Son, if the Apostles can get arrested and freed from their cells through Angels, please do your part of giving value to my suffering and not partaking in the success of the orchestrators project.

In Matthew 16:1-3:

The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.

2 He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ 3 and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.

In our times in America, we live an age where the orchestrators: government officials, military, law enforcement, and whoever else with earthly power to engage in a mind reading/control project, are knowingly or unknowingly engaging in deception of the masses “to accomplish their ends.” They tell the crowds, we’re helping a defenseless/sweet boy. They tell the families, we’ll make him big. They get my age group, particularly females to behave one way or another. What better way to complete and conceal a covert government/possibly military project that in broad daylight with - no offense- overly joyful kid like voices doing the narration and handling P.R.  stuff with the public? They probably picked my family for this, after studying their naivety and innocence and realizing they can be manipulated. I mean I pick up on some obvious flaws right off the bat and ur telling me that top level people doing mind reading/control stuff, didn’t realize any of it?- I mean is that plausible deniability that they try to cover up with? I.e. making the family more American and solving familial problems? If my Family has any flaws, the universal fix to all of it is my success, progression, and well being. In the spirit of the situation/project being done in broad daylight…I mean come on America, come on “the world,” see the American sinners create a situation where my own family cannot talk to me about the situation for more than 10 years!!!. I’m not allowed to talk to them. The world won’t tell me what’s going on and act on the instructions of false American gods. If I make any attempt to talk about what transpires, I’ll be labeled mentally ill and/or drugged-this while everyone is led to smile about the situation in public, at this atrocity, that has been going on for more than “A Decade. “The American infidel of orchestrators are focused on completing their project, despite my suffering and health crumbling parents. When all is done, they may stop filtering what I’m saying, show you what was said by me (if even that! ), and save their a*ses by blaming America’s inability of being direct to one of their fellow citizens, or from a Christian perspective, their neighbor.

Have you ever seen anything so complex and conniving…For the American gods and their following, lay down what’s been done, what’s transpired, or maybe there’s a pattern to all their instructions…do I lie? Am I disillusioned?

this not even about interpretation. In broad daylight, look at the literal kind of things occurring. By the Will of God, let justice prevail.

The orchestrators ultimately give the promise of giving me the world. When I first came across the idea of being handed the world, I got the vibe of it ringing along the lines of Satan himself.  Positions in life and women are cool, but at what cost? You literally are offering me the world to screw with the sanctity of person’s mind, I.e. the mental Kingdom of God…I mean the chaos the orchestrators have caused is indigestible.

Now I don’t think the orchestrators have the insight to see this much detail, buts it’s like Satan himself tempting Jesus with offering of the world, in, if I remember correctly, His 40 days in the desert.

What will the orchestrators do in completing their mind project, while cleverly passing it off as a show of being cute with finding what a guy is thinking.

-I kinda want to say to the orchestrators,”you tricky tricky b*stards” or “ you f*in son of a b*tch”… In seeing my words from today or yesterday, they may calm normal reactions to atrocities, lighten the mood, by making a joke out of all this or saying things casually like "oh -

-now he's mad", or "oh he wants an army" - isn't that adorable of sugary sweet Indian man?" - 

The orchestrators will use their project to enhance their military, in warfare, to subdue the enemy, and things like that first and foremost.-

With the time they wasted on attaining gifts reserved for the Enlightened of God, through science, the orchestrators could’ve solved male pattern baldness or type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Recently I saw a woman whose son suffers from low blood sugar. In just solving this mother’s sons problem, would the joy you bring her, equate to enhancing your armies?

I have a lot of things floating through my head, and these kinds of philosophies are among them. But I’m about balance and this is just one side of a scale. Regarding me, I am no one, I am trash, I’m just a guy waiting to go on a date, after a decade, or go to a party of my peers. As I pass by in your lives, I just wanted to share what’s relevant for the moment.

Don’t focus on remembering me, but remember what I told you.

[spiftynifty]

LGBT representation in Voltron

UPDATED: I realized I wasn’t coming off as neutrally as I’d like and there were hints of shipping peeking through. I also didn’t feel I had expanded properly on certain aspects. I’d like this particular post to be as neutral as  possible so that it’s accessible to people from all ships and headcanons.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately about LGBT representation in Voltron. From shipping wars to insistent demands that headcanons be fulfilled, it’s all getting a little bonkers. I wanted to step back, encourage everyone to take a breather, and discuss the potential of any LGBT on the show, including and excluding popular expectations. So here we go, a post on LGBT representation in Voltron and in cartoons, and why it's not as simple as we'd like it to be. It’s a little long but don’t worry, there are pictures! AND A COMIC!

DISCLAIMER: I do not work on Voltron, nor do I work for Dreamworks or any of its properties. I'm just an animator who's worked on dozens of cartoons for a number of studios and the following is based on my experience in this industry. This post is NOT meant to indict any of the parties involved in the creation of Voltron or other cartoons. Making cartoons is a complicated, collaborative process and no one is a villain.

Here we go:

Before we can talk about LGBT rep & Voltron, we should probably talk about LGBT representation in cartoons in general. In case it isn't clear, I'm speaking specifically about Western cartoons that primarily air in Canada/US. Anime is a whole other category and one that Voltron does not fall under. I'm also removing cartoons that were made explicitly for adults.

LGBT in cartoons is a really recent development. If we include adult cartoons it can date back as far as 20 years (South Park showcasing some SUPER GREAT gay stereotypes :|) but if we're including cartoons geared towards kids (age 5-17)... we're talking this being a thing in the last FOUR years. And the number of times it's been done is so minimal, it can be summed up in these few images:

(left to right, top to bottom) 6Teen, 2010 CANADA ONLY - An incidental female character revealed she liked women. I don’t think this show ever aired in the States but it ran on Teletoon for years. The show also had an episode with an incidental gay character in 2008. Gravity Falls, 2013 - The sheriff and deputy are repeatedly hinted at being in a relationship. I believe in the series finale their relationship is more clearly identified. It was later confirmed by the show’s creator.

Legend of Korra, 2014 - The two female leads, after having previously dated the same male character, are strongly implied to now be dating each other as they hold hands and walk into the Spirit World together. This was as explicit as they were allowed to get with their relationship. The comics continue their relationship romantically and also highlight other characters from both series who are (or were) LGBT). Steven Universe, 2013 - The show doesn’t shy away from its LGBT romances, in particular Ruby and Sapphire and Pearl and Rose.  Star vs The Forces of Evil, 2017 - in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it panning shot, two background male characters are seen kissing.  Clarence, 2013 - The main character has two moms. In one episode, a handsome male background character is shown greeting another man for a date by kissing him on the cheek. Initially they were supposed to peck on the lips until other countries’ censors demanded the change. Loud House, 2016 - The main character’s best friend, Clyde, has two dads. 

I’m also going to toss out an Honourable Mention to Adventure Time for Princess Bubblegum & Marceline, whose past romantic relationship was sort of hinted at in the show but only confirmed outside of it. 

If we take that list and cut it down to just (broadcast TV) primary or recurring characters, we're left with this: Korra, Steven Universe, Clarence

I should also mention that while I repeatedly use the term LGBT, what I’m really referring to is more LGB. I would love to see a trans character in a broadcast cartoon. I’ve heard Amazon’s Danger & Eggs has a trans character, which is AMAZING and a solid start. However progressively speaking, broadcast cartoons tend to lag a little behind live action TV and movies aimed at older teens and adults, and those genres are still struggling to feature trans characters. 

So why is this?

Firstly, and more importantly, a lot of these shows air in countries that aren't nearly as open about LGBT as USA/Canada are. To say "screw those guys! They should keep up with the times!!" is to cut out a major consumer base and most companies are unwilling or unable to take that financial hit. This doesn't make them evil. Animation, just like filmmaking, may be an artform but it is first and foremost a BUSINESS. Major companies like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network won’t lose money, but the production studios they hire to do their shows will suffer the brunt of it and could lose the business of these powerful corporations. It’s happened time and time again that a show initially animated in the US or Canada has been taken away from that studio in favor of a cheaper, overseas option. In some cases they’ve closed. 

Second, even in 2018 there is still a lot of pushback from homophobic or “family-oriented” groups with decent clout and numbers. Also, there is a strange pervasive idea that LGBT is something that is Not For Children, likely because too many foolish people still associate heteronormativity with love and everything outside of that with sex. 

Additionally, you may have noticed that on the list of the three shows showcasing LGBT relationships in a primary or recurring character way... ALL of them feature women. The social discussion about why that is honestly merits an entire other post (or 5) so to put it plainly, broadly speaking, people tend to be more comfortable with female queerness over male queerness. We have yet to see a m/m relationship that has any iota of history or character development behind it, or a recurring queer male character.

With this in mind, Voltron, which features a primarily male cast, and thus has more chances of featuring a male LGBT character, has its work cut out for it.

___________________________________________________

Fresh off the heels of Korra, a series that in the 11th hour featured the two female leads ending up with each other, it's no surprise that showrunners Lauren Montgomery and Joaquin Dos Santos( along with other cast and crew) have fielded a barrage of questions about their intention to depict LGBT on the show. At NYCC when asked about it, this was JDS & LM's response: "It's very important to us... we’re fighting to create as open and as broad a spectrum of characters as we can."

Which is a pretty interesting way of putting it, and a pretty understandably CAREFUL way of putting it. Again, I want to reiterate, I don’t work for any studio involved in the production of Voltron so this is largely conjecture.

So here's how the hierarchy works, as far as I can tell. 

I'm not sure who approached who to get a new Voltron made, but primary creative decisions would fall to JDS and LM, who are in charge of things like major plot points, characters, and arcs. When they've figured this stuff out, they pitch it in a multitude of sessions with Dreamworks People... and that's when the battle begins. Pitching a show is always a tug-of-war. Let's be clear: No creator has ever gone in with a show and walked away with every single aspect that they wanted. Compromises and concessions are made because while the Creatives are focused on their story and character, their client is concerning themselves with budget, timelines, audience targets and $$marketing$$. Before they even got to the matter of LGBT, JDS/LM had lost and won battles over some plot and character decisions. You can actually feel it sometimes when you watch the show; key emotional moments that never happen, or character stuff that gets shaved in favor of action or the reuse animation of the lions forming Voltron. 

This show is still aimed at a young, male, market Dreamworks wants to believe is going to buy their incredibly limited line of related toys, and that is a market that is difficult for executives to see as being interested in romance, let alone a queer one.

The point is, as much as JDS/LM seem to want LGBT in their show, it is a negotiation that I'm sure has been on the table since Day 1 and probably one that is ongoing. Here's a vague idea of what MAY have gone down:

Dreamworks: We will consider the idea of two of them in a relationship, but the third has got to go. JDS/LM: .....we appreciate you considering the relationship aspect. Dreamworks: In addition, we feel that to balance the scales so to speak, at least one character needs to be overtly heterosexual. You know, hit on a lot of female characters, maybe even fall for one of them.

(sorry would have finished the comic but I sprained my wrist and I’m not supposed to draw rn but I cheated a little, also can you tell I love Saga)

This is very probably not what happened, but it is an example of what could have. I know there is a lot of support for a certain character in Voltron being bi, not least of all because of something LM drew. 

I think the placement of the characters holding the signs were less about associating the character with the header and more about making sure neither of the two warring ships were represented; it would have incited a new level on the shipping wars and the message and intent behind this art would have been lost.

There is a weird association with relationships and how they define a show if they aren’t hetero. Have only one relationship on a show about space battles and if it’s LGBT, people will start associating Voltron with being “the gay space battle show”. I don’t want to get into Discourse about This Thing because debate gets lost quickly in favor of toxic insults, but I think it’s important to touch on Bi!Lance. To be entirely neutral about it, it is possible that Lance was originally intended to be bi. But if there was the potential for other characters to be LGBT, the showrunners might have been asked to “strike a balance” so to speak, so that Voltron wouldn’t just be “the gay space battle” show since its hetero relationships would outnumber the queer ones. I don’t think Lance’s character has changed at all since his inception; the show needs a funnyman for levity and ridiculousness, and he is absolutely the charmer of the Paladins. He may have been intended to hit on just about any attractive being in his orbit (there are shades of what one might call a “man-crush” in regards to his Shiro hero-worship). While it would have been awesome to have a bi male character in a cartoon, changing his attraction dial from “all” to “female” doesn’t really affect his storyline, especially since it’s hard to contest that the show has been angling in potential for endgame Allurance in seasons 3&4. I realize that sounds dismissive of the bi experience, that’s really not what I’m trying to get at. I’m saying that in the grand scheme of things, it may have been easier to sacrifice an LGBT Lance in order to win another LGBT representation battle. Like I said, making cartoons that maintain the creative, storyline, and character goals you walk in with is a tug-of-war, and you’re going to lose something along the way. 

But it’s not all about Lance, and again, that’s all theoretical. It’s also possible that Pidge was at one point NB or even trans. There are hints of Coran having a close friendship with Alfor. The original blue paladin is hinted at flirting with a fellow male character in a “did he just--” moment that most people missed. Lotor surrounds himself with female generals but never seems particularly attracted to them. Keith’s undying devotion to Shiro could be interpreted as romantic. There are a dozen main characters whose orientations are nebulous at best and thus have potential to be queer. 

So what does this mean for the future of LGBT on Voltron?

The short version is: I'm actually, really, really hopeful. For a number of reasons.

1) JDS/LM as they've said, are fighting really hard for this to be a thing. Jeremy Shada has said "You'll be really happy" when asked about LGBT on the show. People may feel he’s referring to his character Lance, but I think he’s just hoping that people will be happy with any character who could be explicitly stated to be LGBT. 

2) Netflix isn't a TV broadcaster, which means they can operate under somewhat different rules. Sort of. They certainly don't shy away from LGBT content but they may be regulated under rules of "what is appropriate for children in certain age groups" which frustratingly, for kids 12 and under, does not often include LGBT content. Netflix notoriously doesn't release their viewership data so this is just speculation; but I wonder if the biggest audience taking in this show is actually people, primarily women, aged 14+. Taking this into account won't influence the plot, but the bumped up age could show an increased likelihood of LGBT rep as it pushes the show outside of the "content too sensitive for young children" zone.

3) It would be really nice to see explicit, unambiguous affection between two same-sex characters. However there can still be canonical queer romance without it, shades enough of “just friendship” that they can get past the censors and bigots while those who are more aware of what’s going on can recognize the relationship for what it is. Remember, some people still refuse to believe that Victor and Yuuri kissed in Yuuri on Ice, all thanks to the clever placement of an arm. Furthermore, LGBT doesn’t have to be portrayed through relationships but just the character itself. A character could make a passing comment that alludes to their sexuality. It’s not quite as satisfying as having it out in the open, but DW’s hands may be tied by the stipulations of the contract outlined by Netflix.

4) Despite what certain world events would have you believe, people are becoming more progressive and supportive of LGBT rights and content. We've seen it happen in movies and live-action television. More and more cartoons are going to be including LGBT content, in broader and more overt ways. There will be other cartoons who feature main characters who identify as LGBT, recurring characters in LGBT relationships who are allowed to be affectionate and cutesy with their partners, who are represented no differently or reverently than hetero cartoon romances. Voltron will likely end within the next two years, and within those next two years more and more cartoons will be taking "risks" and more and more broadcasters will feel emboldened to allow them to do so. If Dreamworks keeps its content steadfastly heterosexual while fellow producers embrace LGBT, it's going to reflect badly on them. 

People are desperate for representation in this show and it’s not hard to see why. It is not only one of the few serial cartoons out there, but one that deals with surprisingly adult themes considering it’s aimed at elementary schoolers. I think it’s really neat that people have so many headcanons about the LGBT rep in this show, and I think it’s great that it’s an element that has sparked a lot of passion in people. However, everything is still conjecture, the series is but half over, and putting all your LGBT demands onto one character or one relationship is unhealthy. It’s also pretty insidious to attack or harass crew, cast, or fellow fans whose views on how the LGBT should happen don’t align with your own. The show’s arcs and plot points have been written, the characters decided, but the internal fight over LGBT rep could still be going on. The creators aren’t going to cave to pressure from people who really want their ship or their character to be the sacred cow. Ship what you want to ship but recognize that while LGBT on the show may not happen the way you’d like it to, it’s still important to support its existence no matter what form it comes in. 

In the next part I’m going to cover one relationship in particular as neutrally as possible and whether or not it has potential to become canonically romantic.

[pierrehardy]

China vs America: Europe will decide

In just half of this wretched year, the world’s trust in China was cut in half. The current and crumbling world order is still American built. Or to be more precise, Western-built with American leadership, founded on principles of a liberal and open society. So what happens when a rival rises up to challengethe leader’s might, who is currently not acting like one? A rival that has a different ideology, at that. You get a quake that threatens to crumble the current world order.

On one side is the champion, America. On the other, the challenger, China. Whoever wins is whoever the rest of the world chooses to side with. I argue that the most significant determinant of that is the world’s old champion who still has considerable sway today, which has at least two of the past world leaders: Europe.

Europe and China

Not too long ago, Europe tried to be the diplomatic best-of-both-worlds kind of mediator between China and America. Europe nurtured its long-founded transatlantic alliance with America and was warm towards a growing China. Then came 2020, where China did a three-hit combo on trust. The first one is China’s repression of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang. This systematic act appalled Europeans due to its genocidal nature. The second was the virus, which originated in China. The country’s first response was to cover it up,  which really doesn’t inspire trust. When they vanquished their second wave, China’s obnoxious trumpeting of triumph and crass jumping at the propaganda opportunity left a bad taste in Europeans’ mouths. The third is China’s blatant breaking of the handover treaty between the UK and China regarding Hong Kong’s promised autonomy until 2047. The passage of the national law went above what’s necessary, violating the treaty, and signaling that China puts self-interest above the rule of law. It’s hard to play with a country that does not play nice and fair.

Then there’s America, escalating its campaign to cripple Huawei. This Huawei kerfuffle is catalyzing the decaying relationship between the West and Europe. Europe was initially not as hostile as America towards Huawei. Take the UK, which tried to integrate Huawei into less sensitive parts of its planned 5G network. UK spooks were assigned to thoroughly investigate Huawei’s kit to ensure that there’s nothing suspicious in it. But it was not reassuring when China failed to make it easier for the experts to examine their kit. Perhaps it was serendipitous for the UK to use the US sanctions against Huawei as an excuse to cancel plans to have them build their 5G network. They argue that the sanctions would make Huawei’s supply chains less dependable, increasing the risk that Huawei cannot deliver on its contract. The perfect excuse. 

But this is much bigger than just Huawei and 5G. The main cost is not delaying the adoption of new and crucial technology but in the decaying relationship that would undoubtedly affect trade and technology (I wrote about that in my last blog). Foreign direct investments from China to the EU have already declined by 69% (nice) from its 2016 peak (Figure 1).

Figure 1 [1] 

What to do with China?

Europe shares America’s ideals, so the obvious answer is that they’ll side with America and squash China, right? Well, that would be reckless and risk tearing the world into two. Remember my last blog’s warning about the seeds of world wars? No, China is a growing country that the West cannot change (though they tried to) and cannot ignore. More sensible is to save the current world order and modify it to accommodate, not suppress, an influential authoritarian country.

Many institutions around the world represent this “world order” I keep babbling about. Still, the main one for this topic is the World Trade Organization (WTO), a necessary but limp and frustrating institution. To be fair, maintaining order in the complex world of international trade is a daunting task, especially in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world that’s efficient but mercilessly self-interested and ruthless. Nonetheless, that’s not to excuse the WTO’s failure to adapt to the digital economy and the rise of a more authoritarian Mr. Xi Jinping. So America’s loss of faith towards the WTO is not without cause, but it’s still wrong to abandon it.

Ultimately, everything I will write here will be easier said than done. But it’s good to have goals. The biggest concern about why the West now wants to have some distance from China is how encroaching China’s government is. They have tentacles attached to every company in China. The West, understandably, do not feel comfortable with the presence of the CCP in their territory masked as a private business. 

While that may sound like forcing China to adapt to how they do it in the West, it is a reasonable need. Especially when there’s no excuse not to do it. Take Unilever, a traditionally Western multinational company that grants autonomy to its subsidiaries around the world. Your local Unilever would be hiring local executives that operate on its own, without fear of foreign government interference.

No matter what solution today’s leaders will develop, its efficacy ultimately falls on its execution. This is where I believe Europe comes in. 

Why does it depend on Europe?

Dealing with China requires the West to act together. America is already one country and one country that clarifies what it wants: not to let China be able to do what America is already doing. Hypocritical, I know, but it doesn’t invalidate the need to address China’s growing ambition and methods that goes against the grain of the predominant ideology. 

While it’s easy to dismiss Europe to follow whatever America decides, that’s just not them. The Europeans are a proud bunch with a history of supremacy (take that positively or negatively, up to you). Europe is America’s friend, but they’re no pushover or slave to it. The EU and America have their own bickering, the most significant of which nowadays is the whole antitrust and tax issues with America’s technology giants, mostly the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet, aka Google). 

It has been one of Europe’s biggest insecurity of not being able to produce technological giants like America has and hates being dependent on said giants. But this lack of giants is a natural result of the EU’s more robust antitrust regulations, which is the legislation that ensures a healthy amount of competition in the market. This goes straight to the heart of one of the new problems that economists have been grappling with: competition and the digital economy (my specialty, yay!)

So let me give you the basics. The digital economy is unlike the normal economy. It doesn’t follow the same rules. I won’t explain my entire degree here, but I’ll tell you what you need to know in the next six paragraphs. For context, first is the importance of healthy competition to ensure that capitalism serves the people (capitalism is not evil, it just needs to be taken care of. Anybody that vilifies capitalism doesn’t understand it enough. It’s a spectrum, aka countries can be both socialist and capitalist as much as China is both capitalist and authoritarian.) Anyways, competition usually means that there are enough companies in a particular market that compete. The main enemy of antitrust regulators are monopolies, which are companies that are alone in a specific market.

Let’s use an example from the Philippines that I personally witnessed. There used to be two ride-hailing firms back then: Grab and Uber. They weren’t a duopoly because they competed: they kept competing with each other by lowering their prices. Filipinos like me enjoyed the cheap rates and being able to choose the app with superior service. Then came Japan’s Softbank, which has stakes in both, and made Uber sell its PH operations to Grab. After that, suddenly, there was only Grab (or at least the only dominant ride-hailing app at that time). Grab quickly took advantage of this monopolistic position and jacked up its taxi rates into ridiculous heights. Here, the government failed to cultivate healthy competition at the expense of us, the consumers. We lost in this situation because we were left with no other choice but this expensive and, subjectively, inferior product. The underlying message is: competition is great for the people. It gives us excellent prices and quality. Without it, we get the short end of the stick.

The second concept is the digital economy, more specifically, network effects. If you read my last blog, you might be groaning on reading about this again, but I have no choice. It’s prevalent. But if you didn’t read my last blog, don’t worry, I’ll explain it again here. 

The rise of computers upended traditional economics. A quick example is that a car used to have many costs to design, then additional costs to actually make a bunch of it to sell. For software, though, there’s many costs to code a program but costs almost nothing to replicate it. Traditional economics would say that the price of that good is zero dollars, but that’s not right, is it? Pricing code, or ideas, or information, or data, or whatever you want to call this intangible good, is trickier. Data is just a bunch of ones and zeros, but god damn is it a valuable set of ones and zeros. That’s even how you “pay” for free services, right? With your personal data.

Pricing digital goods is one thing, but the focus is in the nature of its value. Digital goods usually exhibit network effects, which means it gets more valuable if it has more users, and subsequently, more data. More data, more input to make the product better. Knead this point another way. It means that the best digital companies have a monopoly, or at least a duo or oligopoly, of the market to suck up all that data for their taking. This implies a complete 180 turn from the whole monopoly-is-evil (it still is) thing. For example, a streaming service is only excellent if it has all the shows, right? It’s pretty shitty to have to subscribe to multiple services just to watch all the shows you like. So for a user, the ideal would be that only one streaming service that has everything. That’s why digital products usually have one or two dominant brands in every field. Streaming? Netflix. Music? Spotify. Online shopping? Amazon. Search? Google. Phones? Apple or Android. The reason why Google Maps is so useful is that everyone uses it and makes it better. The reason why Facebook is (was) engaging is that all your friends are in it. So you get the point: to make tech giants, you need to rethink antitrust regulation. 

Let me make it clear though, this is quite a dilemma for economists. Because while we discovered that digital goods of monopolistic companies benefit consumers the most, it still holds that companies can abuse this dominant position. This winner-takes-all outcome is risky for innovation and for everyone. Currently, we’re still hashing out clear rules and guides on how to balance this delicate tradeoff. We’re not there yet, but it is what it is as of the moment. 

So let’s take it back to Europe. Compared to America, antitrust in Europe is much more robust. Where America only has 4 major (and 2 minor) mobile networks (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint), Europe as a whole has 5 major mobile networks but with more than a hundred minor ones. This granted Europeans cheaper data plans than America, and the speed quality is basically the same (Figure 2). Good for European consumers, but not for European telecommunications companies. This same story applies to other industries.

Figure 2 [2] 

So Europe’s lack of tech giants is caused by healthy competition that’s great for its citizens. But this opens up the fear of lagging behind the rest of the advanced world technologically. Can’t have it all, it seems. But here’s where we connect it back to China: since the whole Huawei thing is about 5G, plenty of Europe’s short-term reactions have to do with their insecurities about lagging behind in the 5G arena.

So let’s talk about that. I think my blog is getting too long to explain what 5G is, so I’ll leave that for you to Google or YouTube. But basically, 5G is the next generation of 4G that promises 100 (!!!) times faster than 4G. For ordinary people, you don’t need that much. We’re okay with 4G for our daily needs. But that insane speed would enable the next generation of technology such as the Internet of Things or autonomous driving, which requires the back and forth of enormous amounts of data in real-time. But the more important feature of 5G is its ability to reconfigure the network for tailored needs. Taking advantage of this is still in development, and profitable business models to take leverage of this is yet to be born. So if there’s no big rush, we can hope that other companies can step up, like Nokia, Ericson, or Samsung. Or better yet: open standards regarding 5G could be developed, forgoing the need for proprietary kits.

Another possible good news for European network operators is that this 5G insecurity might be just the thing for European antitrust to acknowledge the need to ease competition requirements for some tech companies. This could allow for European tech giants to sprout, but knowing Europe, this will be heavily deliberated.

So, in short, I would say that there’s no time pressure and rush for adoption. In this part of the equation, Europe can afford to delay its 5G progress and ditch Huawei to make their networks a bit more secure. China’s retaliation, however, is another thing. This brings us to the final point of this write-up and one of the most significant factors affecting how the West will respond to China: Germany. Or, more precisely, Mrs. Angela Merkel.

Merkel and China

To have a unified response to China requires not only transatlantic cooperation but also European cooperation. It’s hard to talk about EU decisions without singling out Germany, especially regarding trade. In general, Mrs. Angela Merkel’s personal political conviction embodies old Europe’s view on China. Mrs. Merkel has always been warm with China and, in its essence, personifies this blog’s proposal to adjust for China. Mrs. Merkel has always wanted to include China into the world stage by wishing for its involvement in matters requiring global cooperation like climate change or writing the rules of governance regarding AI.

Being the economic-minded leader that she is, Mrs. Merkel is well respected and admired by most of us liberal economists. It’s no surprise that under her, Germany is the EU’s economic powerhouse, and it’s also no surprise why she’s cautious with relations with China. The difference between the West’s last superpower rival with differing ideologies, the USSR, is that China is a trade heavyweight. China’s market is vast and lucrative. However, China has also shown too much willingness to bully any country that dare go against it, weaponizing its trade heft to inflict economic damage. Now, if you notice, I keep saying “Mrs. Merkel” instead of “Germany.” This is because a sizable proportion of German politicians and businessmen have been turned off by China nowadays, and views Mrs. Merkel’s caution with China to be subservience to the bully. Even within Mrs. Merkel’s own party, this cowing to China has grown unacceptable, and they have a reason for that.

First, let’s see a snapshot of Germany’s exports (Figure 3). China is Germany’s 3rd largest trading partner. With America and China having a spat, of course, the best thing to do is be friends with everyone. But when it comes down to only choosing one, America would be the bigger trading partner. One thing to note is that most of their exports, which is Germany’s specialty in general, are high value-adding manufacturing products like cars, appliances, and machines.

Figure 3 [3]

Then came Mr. Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 initiative. If it wasn’t apparent at first, perhaps when Midea, a Chinese company, acquired Kuka, a German robotics firm, in 2016 was the wake-up call: China is trying to have Germany’s main competitive advantage, by also building to have a high value adding manufacturing industry. This turns China from partner to competitor. 

German businessmen have also been finding China as an unfavorable business partner. Figure 4 shows a survey from the German Chamber of Commerce in China. It shows at least a quarter of companies planning to stop doing business in China. Several reports cite the unacceptable terms that China demands on business partners, most notably in forced technology transfer. It certainly feels less of a partnership and more of an arrangement for taking advantage of. Put this in the context of the Made in China 2025, and this can be a serious threat for German exports.

Figure 4 [4] 

All in all, let’s go back to the point of China’s lucrative market. While it’s easy to see the reason for distancing from China, it’s also worth noting that German companies make a killing in China. Volkswagen earns a whopping 40% of its revenue there.

So cutting relations with China is not the key. Instead, a mere rebalancing is direly needed. Taking it from Thorsten Benner of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, Germany must build a wholly European 5G infrastructure, team up more with countries that share the same ideology (like South Korea or Australia), and advise German companies that they will no longer enjoy the same amount of political cover than before. Time to stop getting played and level things between the two countries.

As trust towards China declines, Chinese diplomats, dubbed the wolf warriors, have been active in a tongue lashing at every criticism. They would always retort that these anti-China sentiments are supposedly rooted in a colonial and racist mentality.  However, it’s undeniable that China also bears a considerable part of the blame for the blossoming mistrust against them. From the way they do business partnerships, to the economic bullying, to the inconsistent transparency on COVID-19 reporting, to the repression of Hong Kongers, to the suppression of Uighurs, to the territorial bullying of neighbors, to the lack of concrete reassurance that they don’t spy with their products, to the inability to take criticism, and others.

No country is perfect (I can list the same amount of American faults). But it’s the number of blunders in such a short amount of time that brought the trust down (people generally have short term memory and attention, but this was just too fast and too furious.) It was a trade-off between taking advantage of a global pandemic and seeming untrustworthy. I trust China to have seen this possibility and took calculated actions. But one doesn’t have to resort to such actions to assert one’s presence in the world stage. Europe tried to be warm to both the East and the West, but everyone has their limits.

References

[1]https://rhg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MERICS-Rhodium-Group_COFDI-Update-2020-2.pdf 

[2]https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/u-s-mobile-broadband-among-most-expensive-world-new-report-finds 

[3] The Observatory of Economic Complexity: https://oec.world/ 

[4]https://china.ahk.de/fileadmin/AHK_China/Market_Info/Economic_Data/BCS_2019_20.SEC.pdf 

[nehatiwari454545-blog]

Web Scraping: Leave it All to AI or Add a Human Touch

What was once used by the US military as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency network) is today known as the Internet. With data grew from few gigabytes to 1.2 million terabytes today. In 1995 the internet was used by 16 million users. Today there are more than 4600 million users on internet and numbers are growing with each passing second. The last two years alone has made up for 90 per cent of the internet data today.  

This growth of internet users and their information has increased the data storage exponentially. Whatever you do on the internet, you will leave a digital trail. Even a random search by a random user will count in internet trend and affects the indexing of search engines. The data servers are now occupying space of football fields. Major companies like Google, Amazon etc are providing with cloud computing and cloud storage services to tap internet users’ data storage demand. With the need to store replicate data in case of natural catastrophe; more space is consumed by dedicated servers.

The surfing of the internet as much as it can be fun for regular users like us, for data scientists and businesses that desire some relevant information can become an uphill task. To find a needle in a haystack is easier than finding desired data on internet manually. The amount of data created and stored by a single large company is so vast that private data centres are employed. By this, we can envision how much data is available on the internet.

The role of data science, data mining and data scraping has increased tremendously. Web scraping services are used majorly for data extraction and data analysis. Web scraping is used for diverse purposes like business competition, research and analysis, consumer insights, security purposes, government purposes etc.

What is Web Scraping?

The extraction of data from websites is called web scraping or web harvesting. The specific data is copied from websites to local database or spreadsheet. Web scraping services or data scraping services use hypertext protocol or Extensible hypertext protocol for data extraction. The scraping can be done manually by visiting the particular page and copying data manually into a spreadsheet.

The manually scraping is possible when we are working for personal usage and data we are working with is limited. When we are dealing with a large amount of data an automated process is essential. It is implemented using a bot.

Web scraping and web crawling often mistaken for same but are different. Web crawling is done by search engines for indexing of hyperlinks, whereas web scraping does the data extraction. Web crawling is used in web scraping for fetching pages.

The websites now a day are highly advanced with using gifs, scripts, flash animations etc in an integrated ecosystem. Websites are developed, keeping human in mind, not bots therefore data extraction become a challenging task. The data extraction is based on the data stored by websites in text form. The mark-up languages such as HTML and XHTML are used for the development of a basic framework for any website. The specialised software use this rich text data for extraction.

There are simple plug-ins such as Scraper, Data Scraper for Google chrome used for web scraping. There specialised software such as ParseHub, OutwitHub, etc employed for slightly advance level of web scraping. The major e-commerce companies such as Amazon and social networking companies such as Facebook provide their APIs (Application programming interface) for public data extraction.

AI is a necessary evil in data scraping. The quantity of data has forced the implementation of AI. The AI as helpful it can be, unnerve people with wild sci-fi fantasy that pales the Matrix trilogy in comparison.

Also Read: 12 Best WordPress plugins every Sales and Marketing website must have

The legality of web scraping

“Just like the wild west, the Internet has no rules”. The times have changed in the wild west and on the Internet. The computer fraud and abuse laws criminalise any act of breaking into any private computer systems and accessing non-publically available data. In 2016 hiQ  Labs, a data science company web scrapped the publically available LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn terms this as a violation of the company’s policy on data usage without permission and authorization. The hiQ took LinkedIn to court. In a landmark judgement for web scraping legality, the court ruled in favour of hiQ stating, “web scraping of public data is not a violation of computer fraud and abuse act.”

Also Read: Data scraping for BI: Picking the right service is vital

The morality of web scraping

The web scraping is used in business for online price monitoring, price comparison, product review data. The real estate companies use it to gather competitor real state listing. The websites use other website public data for their convenience without having to work for it. The web scraping lies in the grey area of morality where few times its use cab be justified with internet policy and sometimes complete violation of basic internet ethics.  

If you are searching for cheaply available phones with a certain price range and use web scraping tool on a major e-commerce website for data extraction then it quite ethical and can be justified. When you extract data for a content-based site with its USP being uniquely available content such as blogging websites and created a mirror site then it cannot be justified.

A basic moral conscience is necessary for making a righteous judgment in the age of the internet where the lines are quite blurred.

Concept of the good bot and bad bot

The supporting of web scraping often linked with freedom of the internet and fair use of public data but the picture is not as rosy as it seems. There are many bad bots ie malicious automated software available which can steal data by breaking into user accounts, overload servers with providing junk data and harm websites.

The AI bot gets a bad reputation due to malicious bot crawling the internet space. Many websites prohibit web scraping. The websites use advance tools for bot detection and prevent them from viewing their pages. This solution to this is the use of DOM parsing, simulation of human behaviour etc to extract data from sites.

Does it require adding a magic touch?

We are leaving in the age of artificial intelligence. It is the intelligence demonstrated by machines. The machines are incapable of thinking by themselves. The highly complex software is used to develop machine intelligence that learns, adapt and collects data. The AI is now used in several areas from traffic regulation, pilot training in the aviation industry, critical fields such as nuclear reactors etc. The AI has made possible rooming of the rover on Mars.

People are apprehensive of AI and believing a new world order where machine rules human. These make up for a good sci-fi script or story but the reality is too mechanical. AI has made it possible to work in an environment where humans could not survive. The sensitive area such as military, national security etc relies on AI for information processing. Human lives depend on AI proper working.

The internet is brimming with boundless data. The manual data extraction can be tedious in past but with data storage reaching in terabytes, it is nearly impossible. We have to implement AI for web harvesting and data mining services. The AI can extract store and process data from thousands of pages in a few seconds. The manual scraping does only a few hundred pages in days.  The AI has made it possible to scrape websites with a gigantic database and analyses it for forming business strategies and predictions.

Does that mean the AI has replaced human in web scraping area at least? Well, the answer is not binary. The AI does a spectacular job in web harvesting but the human touch is indispensable. When data is extracted just like an ore is extracted. It has to go through various processes of floatation, smelting etc to be useful. The data gathered from the site could be repetitive, redundant and in the wrong format. When we are extracting this kind of data we are overloading storage with unnecessary data. Data verification and data scrubbing will cleanse the inaccurate and corrupt records from the extracted data. These are quite state of art tools but the ultimate power lies in the hands of a human.

The intelligence of the machine is called artificial for a reason. The AI extracting data cannot determine its necessity for a purpose like a human does. Let us suppose a company want to launch a new clothing line for teenage girls. They are extracting data for what teenage girls find fashionable. Many times websites want to remain on the forward listing of search engines pages and use the metadata incorrectly. The AI being AI will extract the data for teenage fashion and data will imply something else.

Also Read: How Digitalization is transforming the Business of B2B Industry Data

Many websites prevent web crawling by using CAPTCHAS, embedding information in media objects, login access requirement, changing website HTML regularly etc. The AI right now cannot trespass these mechanisms of prevention of web scraping.

In a situation like these, human touch became essential. As they say, “The artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as an artificial rose is to real rose.”

[ladystylestores]

Homecoming S2: The most fun you’ll have with an evil company this spring

Enlarge / Name? Date of birth? Home address? “I don’t know.”

YouTube/Amazon Prime

Warning: This story references happenings from Homecoming S1 but tries to avoid any major spoilers for FX’s Devs and the new second season of Homecoming.

Sometimes Hollywood at large seems to embrace the infamous Google strategy: make two of everything and see what sticks. Who recently asked for twin dog-as-best-friend-but-end-of-life tearjerkers? And did audiences need dual “Nikola Tesla races to make electricity” biopics starring beloved heartthrobs? (In a world where The Prestige already exists, probably not.)

This spring, streaming TV got in on this strategy, too. A pair of shows centered on secretive, shady startups—companies doing almost otherworldly things that piqued government interest but really complicated an employee’s life—each arrived with star-boasting casts and filmmaking pedigrees behind the camera. Like a dutiful TV reviewer, I watched the first four episodes of both series. Despite each having oodles of style, one felt opaque and unnecessarily complex, like piecing together a puzzle without knowing what the full picture was at the start.

And the other is Amazon’s Homecoming, which hits Prime with seven new episodes this weekend. (Apologies to FX’s Devs, which I’ll likely never finish.)

Janelle Monáe stars in Homecoming season 2, coming soon to Amazon Prime.

Still stylish

Though Homecoming lost some high profile talent ahead of S2—Julia Roberts’ character doesn’t appear and Sam Esmail did not direct any of these episodes—you wouldn’t call this show depleted after watching this new run of episodes. In her first starring TV role, Janelle Monáe is as captivating as ever. She plays a woman named Jackie who is struggling to remember how precisely she ended up alone and passed out on a boat in the middle of a remote lake. And instead of Bobby Cannavale representing our main corporate cog for the Geist behemoth, Hong Chau (the actor behind Lady Trieu of Watchmen) reprises her role as Audrey. Her corporate exec of few words was last seen as a pseudo-big bad at the very end of S1, but she gets fleshed out quite a bit here.

Jackie’s journey and the dynamic between Jackie and Audrey might be the most thrilling parts of these new episodes, similar to how the conversations between Roberts and Stephan James as Walter ended up as S1’s most riveting part. The only disadvantage for Chau and Monáe comes from circumstance: Roberts and James had the benefit of Geist’s overall product and scheme being a mystery that our two main characters learned and navigated together with the audience. This time around, audiences have a lot more info, taking away a bit of the show’s intrigue and tension. If story felt secondary at times to the performances for you in S1, that dynamic will be amplified here.

The chemistry between its leads, of course, was only half of Homecoming’s initial appeal. Mr. Robot creator Sam Email had generously applied his small screen cinematic lens, using different aspect ratios, lens filters, and a robust palette of ’70s film homages. New director Kyle Patrick Alvarez did previous work on Starz’ visually inventive Counterpart, so he appears to have the chops to carry over some of S1’s same visual language (with the emphasis on “some,” given how inventive Esmail has always been). For Alvarez, S2’s premier in particular feels delightfully Hitchcock-ian, as Jackie at times seems engulfed by large pines or encased in a spooky motel straight out of Twin Peaks.

As for the story unfolding in these episodes, well, that’s where Devs comes in.

Janelle Monáe stars as a mysterious woman who wakes up in a rowboat on a lake with no memory of who she is.

Geist Emergent Group, the company behind the Homecoming Initiative, might be involved.

YouTube/Amazon Prime

Stephan James reprises his S1 role as Walter Cruz.

YouTube/Amazon Prime

Also back: S1’s Audrey (Hong Chau), an assistant at Geist Emergent Group.

YouTube/Amazon Prime

Remember that S1 post-credits scene? It’s relevant to S2.

YouTube/Amazon Prime

The memory-erasing drug is gearing up for mass production, it seems.

YouTube/Amazon Prime

Chris Cooper plays Leonard Geist, who begins to have doubts about his company’s business.

YouTube/Amazon Prime

Prestige isn’t the point

Understanding the plot of Homecoming S2 absolutely requires a “previously on” montage. Rather than Shea Wigham detectiving into a new case (sidebar: nothing ever improves by losing Shea Wigham), these episodes revolve around the same basic happenings—just from new perspectives. We’re again watching the Geist signature product being cultivated and applied, the government still contracts with them to do unsavory things, Walter Cruz still endures some less-than-ideal circumstances.

As such, any mysteries (like, why is Janelle Monáe left out to sea again?) are a bit narrower in comparison to S1. We’re not watching plot gain momentum toward a grand conclusion; we’re largely learning about more of the plot’s mechanics, the stuff previously in the background.

This sounds bland when you spell it out like that, but some of the best television shows in recent memory have deployed this basic concept to an extent. Watchmen gave viewers multiple perspectives of the same events in consecutive episodes; Better Call Saul is entirely about the mechanics of how one bad guy lawyer grew into his sleeze. Homecoming is not of the same caliber, but this show knows the story it’s telling and commits to exploring it from new angles. S2 has a confined plot and commits to revealing it stylishly, succinctly (with this and I Am Not Okay With This, half-hour drama remains my favorite bingeable format), and with new likable characters. (In addition to Jackie and Audrey, Geist himself makes an appearance, played by Chris Cooper of “rage-y neighbor in American Beauty” fame.) This season ain’t cracking TV’s Mount Rushmore or Alan Sepinwall’s Top 20 of 2020, but it’s thoroughly enjoyable (think more Stranger Things S2 than Mr. Robot S2). 

That bit of reflection kept taking my mind back to Devs. TV critics generally seemed smitten by that show’s ambition and perplexed by how small Homecoming has set out to be in S2, but I’ve come away feeling the opposite. Devs’ hourlong episodes could be a slog, as the show didn’t seem to know whether it cared more about the kinetic personal action (our “hero” employee trying to get the upper hand and figure out her sinister employer) or about some possibly magical machine with greater philosophical implications. The former is the stuff that kept you going through early episodes, but the latter had so much time devoted to it that you couldn’t help but feel “this must be the point” even as the series didn’t seem to understand how to translate it for everyone sticking with the show. So after four episodes, I stopped, and no “oh, you have to stick it out ’til the finale!” rationale could suck me back in.

Homecoming, on the other hand, never feels overly weighty or chore-ish. The defined focus and faster run time (you could watch all of Homecoming’s two seasons in roughly the same amount of time as Devs’ one) means no sequences feel obviously aimless or like filler. The show has presented what Geist is doing as fact without some mind-occupying takeaway, so instead the series stays most interested in the action. After four episodes, I wanted to see how everything played out and had to stop myself from just “play next”-ing through the whole thing. (Amazon outlined a number of things reviewers couldn’t reveal, and it seemed a number of those things cluster in the season’s second half—temptation avoided.)

To borrow the Hollywood twins analogy once more, one of these evil corporation shows aimed for prestige glory and ended up as The Equalizer. The other knew it wanted to be a competent b-movie the whole time and delivered John Wick. And if being parked on my couch looking for a new show to watch mid-pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes it’s OK to put the pressure for ambitious greatness on hold for a minute and just enjoy something. As you’d expect, Janelle Monáe guarantees a certain base level of that.

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[sciencespies]

The Science of Fear, the Royal Scandal That Made France Modern and Other New Books to Read

https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-science-of-fear-the-royal-scandal-that-made-france-modern-and-other-new-books-to-read/

The Science of Fear, the Royal Scandal That Made France Modern and Other New Books to Read

To confront her crippling fear of heights, journalist Eva Holland jumped out of an airplane and learned to rock climb. But while she endured these experiments with a semblance of aplomb, she found that the experience did little to assuage her fears. “I was facing my fear, but it was hard to imagine my resulting feelings, or my control over them, ever improving,” explains Holland in Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, one of five new nonfiction titles featured in Smithsonian magazine’s weekly books roundup.

The latest installment in our “Books of the Week” series, which launched in late March to support authors whose works have been overshadowed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, details Holland’s nerve-racking exploits, the stories of 50 forgotten female innovators, a 19th-century royal scandal that unmade France’s Bourbon dynasty, an investigation of how street addresses reflect race and class, and an overview of St. Louis’ turbulent history.

Representing the fields of history, science, arts and culture, innovation, and travel, selections represent texts that piqued our curiosity with their new approaches to oft-discussed topics, elevation of overlooked stories and artful prose. We’ve linked to Amazon for your convenience, but be sure to check with your local bookstore to see if it supports social distancing-appropriate delivery or pickup measures, too.

Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland

When Eva Holland’s greatest fear—her mother’s untimely passing—was realized in 2015, she decided to embark on a journey of self-discovery, examining “the extent to which her many fears had limited her … and whether or not it was possible to move past them.” Nerve, a work that contextualizes Holland’s personal phobias by delving into the latest scientific research, is the product of this years-long quest.

As Holland writes in the book’s prologue, she began by breaking down fear into three “imperfect” categories: phobias, trauma, and the ephemeral. From there, she set out to answer key questions, including how and why humans feel fear, whether a cure for fear exists, and whether there is a “better way to feel afraid.”

Over the course of her research, Holland grappled with her own fears, interviewed individuals who have a rare disease that prevents them from feeling fear and met with scientists working to cure phobias with a single pill. Though she freely admits that she “can’t say that I am now in perfect control over my fears,” the journalist does note that her relationship with fear is forever changed. With Nerve, Holland hopes to instill these same lessons in others.

She adds, “Fear is an experience that unites, even as, in the moment, it makes each of us alone.”

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask

Street addresses, argues Deirdre Mask in The Address Book, convey crucial information regarding their demographic details, including race, wealth and identity, of those who live there. These numbers and names also reflect power—“the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.” As Mask writes in the book’s introduction, addresses come in handy when directing ambulances where to go, but at the same time, they “exist so people can find you, police you, tax you, and try to sell you things you don’t need through the mail.”

Take, for instance, rural West Virginia, which had few street addresses prior to 1991, when a telecommunications company began an unprecedented address-making campaign aimed, “quite literally, [at putting] West Virginians on the map.” Locals, who had long been accustomed to providing directions based on geographic landmarks rather than street names, viewed the initiative with suspicion, writes Mask.

Mask explores the tensions raised by street names—and the ripple effects of not having an address—through case studies of Nazi Germany, a Haitian cholera outbreak, ancient Rome and other communities across four continents. Per the New York Times’ review of The Address Book, the book is surprisingly encouraging for a story on “class, poverty, disease, racism and the Holocaust,” drawing on a “cast of stirring meddlers whose curiosity, outrage and ambition inspire them to confront problems ignored by indifferent bureaucracies.”

The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels

The July Revolution of 1830 is perhaps best known for ending the Bourbon dynasty’s rule in France. But as Maurice Samuels writes in The Betrayal of the Duchess, the uprising had at least one unexpected side effect still evident in modern French society: namely, the rise of rampant anti-Semitism.

Samuels traces France’s pervasive anti-Semitism to the 1832 betrayal of Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, by her trusted advisor, a “seductive yet volatile man” named Simon Deutz. The duchess, mother of the 11-year-old heir to the crown, had been exiled in the aftermath of the July Revolution, but far from placidly accepting this unwelcome turn of events, she rallied supporters and led a guerrilla army tasked with restoring the Bourbon dynasty to the throne. De Berry evaded authorities for six months, but on November 6, 1832, was found hiding in a Nantes home. Upon emerging from a secret compartment, she reportedly said, “I am the duchesse de Berry. You are French soldiers. I entrust myself to your honor!”

Deutz, the man responsible for the duchess’ discovery, was a Jewish convert to Catholicism who gave up his former confidant for a small fortune. In the aftermath of the betrayal, according to Samuels, the duchess’ supporters came to view Deutz’s action as emblematic of modernity—in other words, a “symbol for the evils … ushered in by the French Revolution.”

Adds Samuels, “The story transformed resistance to modernity into a passion play with the Jew as villain and, in so doing, helped make anti-Semitism a key feature of right-wing ideology in France.”

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson

As the geographic center of the United States of America, St. Louis has seen more than its fair share of historical happenings. In The Broken Heart of America, historian Walter Johnson traces the city’s evolution—including Lewis and Clark’s 1804 expedition, the Missouri Compromise, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and the 2014 uprising in nearby Ferguson—from the nation’s “most radical city” to an urban center marred by racial inequality.

“The story of human geography of St. Louis is as much a story of ‘Black removal’—the serial destruction of Black neighborhoods and the transfer of their population according to the reigning model of profit and policing at any given moment—as of white flight,” writes Johnson in the book’s introduction.

Imperialism, capitalism and racism have long coalesced in St. Louis, but far from being a representative city at once torn between “east and west, north and south,” the historian argues, the Missouri capital has, in fact, “been the crucible of American history,” much of which has “unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness in the city of St. Louis.”

Anonymous Is a Woman: A Global Chronicle of Gender Inequality by Nina Ansary

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own contains several sayings that have since become mainstays in the feminist lexicon. The 1929 essay’s title, for example, is commonly used to describe the privacy and independence needed to foster female creativity. Anonymous Is a Woman, a new offering from women’s rights expert Nina Ansary, derives its title from another oft-repeated Woolf quote: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

In keeping with the British writer’s line of thinking, Anonymous Is a Woman explores the stories of 50 female innovators whose accomplishments have been largely overlooked. Beginning with En Hedu-Anna, an Akkadian woman who was the world’s first known female astronomer, and ending with Alice Ball, a 20th-century American chemist who discovered a treatment for leprosy, the book uses short biographical sketches illustrated by artist Petra Dufkova to unravel 4,000 years of gender inequality. As Ansary writes in the book’s opening chapters, “It was a challenge to select only fifty women. … [D]espite formidable cultural barriers, women have developed their skills and talents, employed their intellect and creativity, and achieved distinction in diverse endeavors.”

Proceeds from the sale of Anonymous Is a Woman will be donated to the Center for Human Rights in Iran and the London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security.

#Nature

[jonathanalumbaugh]

Weekly Digest

Dec 23, 2017, 4th issue.

A roundup of stuff I consumed this week. Published weekly. All reading is excerpted from the main article unless otherwise noted.

Read

When women are discussed on the main economics discussion forum, the conversation moves from the professional to the personal...

Even with generous subsidies, low-income people are still unlikely to buy health insurance...

Managers are biased negatively against minority workers, and this, in turn, makes the minority workers perform worse...

Living standards may be growing faster than GDP growth...

The World Bank’s $1-a-day poverty line inadequately deals with local context, and a better measure can be derived through more complicated math...

Decriminalizing sex work makes it safer and more common...

Poor kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods do a lot better than poor kids who grow up in poor ones...

Better trained doctors mean fewer opioid related deaths...

After a bad outcome, female surgeon’s referrals went down much more than male surgeons...

The average worker does not value an Uber-like ability to set their own schedule...

Foreign finance has led to more inequality...

Preschool programs targeted at the poor don’t work nearly as well as universal pre-school programs...

Shocks to the economy in certain sectors can have larger effects on the entire economy than previously thought...

— 13 economists on the research that shaped our world in 2017

Comments section: Pilote345 - NO WONDER: Recently, the pilots' pay was less than it was in the 1980's. They might be trying to improve, but for example, I just now found Allegiant Air found pays MD-80 1st Officers $34,440.00, not much more than the $15/hour crowd wants for starting burger flippers.

— Airlines battle growing pilot shortage that could reach crisis levels in a few years

— APOLLO 10 0N BOARD V0ICE TRANSCRIPTION

Under Schmidt’s leadership, Google notched its fair share of not-quite-not-evil missteps. After getting everyone hooked on Gmail and Search, the company started to erode some of its original privacy promises.

— Be Kind of Evil

“People want to cast it as a choice between policy or technology as a solution but those should exist hand-in-hand. We would have never gotten renewable energy prices where they are today without really ambitious public policy. It shows the importance of bold goals,” Brown says.

— California Poised To Hit 50% Renewable Target A Full Decade Ahead Of Schedule

“Keep your phone away from your body,” the state health department writes. “Although the science is still evolving, some laboratory experiments and human health studies have suggested the possibility” that typical long-term cell phone use could be linked to “brain cancer and tumors of the acoustic nerve,” “lower sperm counts,” and “effects on learning and memory.”

— California says the only safe way to talk on your cell phone is to text

Developer infatuation with Chrome is not good — because competition between browsers is good.

— Chrome is Not the Standard

The initial physical deployment of 5G networks alone could pack a major economic punch. A 2017 Accenture report forecasts the cellular communications industry will invest $275 billion in new networks, which will create up to 3 million jobs and add some $500 billion to the United States’ gross domestic product. Longer term, researchers expect the new 5G networks to help stimulate productivity growth to rates not seen since the 1950s.

— The Coming 5G Revolution

In early tests, the company claims the feature helped to reduce ghosting behavior on its service by 25 percent.

— Dating app Hinge rolls out a new feature to reduce ‘ghosting’

Liberated from the diamond and pointing calmly eastward, perhaps a designer’s pure intent is revealed—direction for an otherwise aimless walk in the woods.

— Decoding the Mysterious Markers on the Appalachian Trail

Trade the ginkgo biloba for a bag of spinach during your next stop at the store: Leafy greens may be your best resource for boosting memory... The study involved 960 people, all between 58 and 99 and without dementia. Everyone enrolled in the study was part of the Memory and Aging Project, which has been ongoing since 1979 at the Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University.

— EATING SALAD EVERY DAY KEEPS BRAINS 11 YEARS YOUNGER AND PREVENTS DEMENTIA, STUDY SHOWS

— Edward Snowden on Twitter

Commander Persera swam out into intergalactic space last week, she says in a forum post, piloting a ship called the Jack of Flames. The reason for the trip is simply to go further from Sol than anyone else (a previous record was set by one Commander Deluvian, who travelled 65,652 lightyears from Sol along a similar route). But also, she says, to bring a canister of mugs from the infamous Hutton Orbital space station into the void and leave them there. Just because.

— Elite Dangerous pilots are scrambling to rescue an explorer stranded in the void between galaxies

[Eminem says] that he's not making his music for other artists who aren't fans to begin with.

— Eminem Responds to Vince Staples’ Criticism of Him

Reports so far claim the spec will offer support for low, mid, and high-band spectrum from below 1 GHz (like 600 and 700 MHz) all the way up to around 50 GHz while including the 3.5 GHz band. It’s been said that the first 5G networks for consumers will begin rolling out in 2019 and this will continue throughout 2020.

— First 5G Specification has been Declared Complete by the 3GPP

As Brian and his wife wandered off toward the No. 2 train afterward, it crossed my mind that he was the kind of guy who might have ended up a groomsman at my wedding if we had met in college. That was four years ago. We’ve seen each other four times since. We are “friends,” but not quite friends. We keep trying to get over the hump, but life gets in the way.

— Friends of a Certain Age

Comment section: Blaming Amazon for this is wrong. The people make a choice to work for them. This is an indictment on our society that forces these people to have to work. Amazon isn’t a charity that should have to take care of people. But it’s all of us who are to blame.

— A Glimpse Inside CamperForce, Amazon's Disposable Retiree Laborers

Effective filmmakers, no matter their genre or taste, put their fingers in the air, feel for a current, and then make art that either complements or pushes against it. They distill the world they live in, which is why there’s no such thing as an apolitical film.

— How Big Screen Sci-Fi and Horror Captured 2016’s Political Paranoia

The Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts California will eventually make more than $1 billion annually from taxing recreational marijuana.

— HOW RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA IN CALIFORNIA LEFT CHEMISTS IN THE DARK

What makes for an effective office environment? Random encounters with your coworkers. And food. Lots and lots of food.

— How to Build a Collaborative Office Space Like Pixar and Google

Fidelity suggests having your yearly income saved at 30, three times your income at 40, seven times your income at 55, and 10 times your income at 67.

— How Much Should You Have Saved at Every Age?

HCI (human-computer interaction) is the study of how people interact with computers and to what extent computers are or are not developed for successful interaction with human beings.

— Human-computer interaction, from University of Birmingham

The company says it is now focused on “on developing and investing in globally scalable blockchain technology solutions,” but, as reported by Bloomberg, it has exactly zero partnerships in the works with crypto firms

— Iced Tea Maker's Stock Price Triples After Adding 'Blockchain' to Name”

9 “Should you invite someone who assaulted you to your wedding.” No.

— It Came From The Search Terms: “I Can See The Sun In Late December”

The best way to cook a steak is medium rare. Plenty of people will disagree with this statement, for different reasons.

— Medium Rare: The Best Way to Cook a Steak

It sounds like it was made by an algorithm. It checks off so many boxes it could land in anyone’s “Because you watched” recommendations.

— Netflix’s first big movie “Bright” feels like a blockbuster built by an algorithm

State law that is rarely invoked requires tied elections to be settled by “lot.”

— Oyster shucking? A duel? No, Virginia will pull a name from a film canister to settle tied election

— Parents give teacher wine with son's face on label

— Reggie Watts: Fuck Shit Stack

— Reggie Watts: Humor in music

Self-efficacy is defined as a personal judgement of "how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations".

— Self-efficacy (Wikipedia)

The problem Haven aims to address is known as an “evil maid” attack. Basically, many of the precautions you might take to protect your cybersecurity can go out the window if someone gains physical access to your device.

— Snowden's New App Turns Your Spare Android Phone into a Pocket-Sized Security System

After doing a lot of online research and making a terrible mess, I thought I could make a tutorial for humble people like me. If I can do it, you can do it too.

— The Ultimate Guide to DIY Screw Post Book Binding

The robot obediently appeared in the distance, floating next to Miller. Miller then walked into the same space as the robot and promptly disappeared. Well, mostly disappeared, I could still see his legs jutting out from the bottom of the robot. My first reaction was, “Of course that’s what happens.” But then I realized I was seeing a fictional thing created by Magic Leap technology completely obscure a real-world human being. My eyes were seeing two things existing in the same place and had decided that the creation, not the engineer, was the real thing and simply ignored Miller, at least that’s how Abovitz later explained it to me.

— We Need to Talk About Magic Leap's Freaking Goggles

What’s this mistake so many make? It’s using your current job title as your headline.

— What Your LinkedIn Headline Reveals About Your Self-Confidence At Work

With the Dec. 14 repeal, Comcast and others will be able to charge content companies exorbitant fees without, technically, blocking. This fundamentally changes how the internet works, argues Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

— What will happen now that net neutrality is gone? We asked the experts

The story [Cat Person] stuck with me because I, too, have felt like the story’s main character, Margot. I have belittled myself to make a man in a vulnerable situation feel more comfortable. I have allowed myself to spend time with boys who I did not like that much but who I felt I owed my time to because they really liked me. And I have also taken part in the practice of ghosting- ignoring somebody who is texting me, instead of outright rejecting them. With time, I have gotten much better at being straightforward when someone is interested in me and the feeling is not reciprocated, but I still do the dance many women do: We exert energy into finding the most polite, passive way to get ourselves out of uncomfortable situations with men.

— Why Women Are Ghosting You

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/the-decades-biggest-technology-disappointments/

The Decade's Biggest Technology Disappointments

Like most teen years, the past decade in technology started out someplace relatively innocent before growing moody, dark and disillusioned. In 2010, we were excited about new iPhones and finding old friends on Facebook, not fretting about our digital privacy or social media’s threat to democracy. Now we are wondering how to rein in the largest companies in the world and reckoning with wanting innovation to be both fast and responsible.

Over the past 10 years, new technology has changed how we communicate, date, work, get around and pass time. But for every hit, there have been high-profile disappointments and delays. That includes overpriced gadgets for making juice, face computers, promises of taking a vacation in space and companies claiming to be saving the world.

The failures served a purpose, acting as reality checks for the technology industry and the people who fund, regulate or consume its products. Tech companies spent the last decade first trying to grasp, then distance themselves from, their impact on society. Facebook’s famously decommissioned “move fast and break things” motto sounded plucky in 2010 and laughably misguided in 2019, when the company had, in fact, broken things.

It was a decade when billions of dollars were thrown at tech companies, and yet many of the promises those companies made never materialized, blew up in our faces or were indefinitely delayed. And while tech failures are nothing new, taken together they brought the innovation industrial complex closer to earth and made us all a bit more realistic – if less fun.

Like proper adults.

The benevolent, world-saving tech company

“Don’t be evil” read Google’s famous motto, which sat atop its code of conduct until 2018, when it was quietly demoted to the last line.

At the beginning of the decade, that is exactly how many of the largest tech companies and CEOs marketed themselves. Their products were not only going to make daily life easier or more enjoyable, but they also would make the entire world better – even if their business models depended on ads and your personal data.

“Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2012 letter, just before the company’s initial public offering. He outlined lofty visions going forward, including that Facebook would create a more “honest and transparent dialogue” about government through accountability.

Instead, the decade turned toward disinformation, and hate speech spread on social media. Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube were used to spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, while Google briefly worked on a search engine for China that would censor content. Companies profited off mountains of user data they collected but failed to protect, as major data breaches hit Equifax, Yahoo and others.

In response, workers are pushing back, growing into quiet armies attempting to redirect their companies toward social goals.

Face computers

Google co-founder Sergey Brin debuted Google Glass in 2012 by wearing a prototype of the smart glasses onstage. Its real PR outing came later that year when skydivers live-streamed their jump out of a blimp above San Francisco during a Google developer conference.

By showing information in front of the face instead of on a phone, Google said, the $1,500 Glass would allow people to interact more with the world around them. Instead, its legacy has been questions about our right to privacy from recording devices, the word “glasshole,” and at least one bar fight. The company stopped selling Glass to consumers in 2015 and shifted it to a workplace product, targeting everyone from factory workers to doctors.

Google was not alone. Microsoft made HoloLens, a technically ambitious piece of eyewear that looked like round steampunk goggles and used augmented reality. Facebook bought virtual-reality goggle maker Oculus for $2 billion and heavily invested in and promoted it as a gaming and entertainment device (and the future of social media). Magic Leap, another augmented reality headset promising immersive and mind-blowing entertainment, managed to raise $2.6 billion and only release one $2,295 developer product.

Eventually we may wear glasses that display useful information on top of the real world, outfitted with smart assistants that whisper in our ears. Google’s early attempt at a consumer face-wearable was not destined to be that device.

A more efficient way of eating

Juice. Colorful, thirst-quenching, packed with vitamins, on-demand juice. It seemed an unlikely thing for Silicon Valley to try to disrupt. But in the 2010s, entrepreneurs’ impatience with preparing and even consuming the calories necessary to survive led to a number of eating innovations.

One of the decade’s most memorable tech failures asked the question: What if you spent $699 for an elaborate machine that squeezed juice from proprietary bags of fruit and vegetable pulp for you? The answer, discovered by intrepid Bloomberg journalists in 2017, is that you could squeeze those packets with your hands instead of overpaying for a machine. That machine was Juicero, and it raised $120 million in funding before shutting down just five months later.

Other food innovations have fallen fall short of their revolutionary promises. Smart ovens became fire hazards; meal-kit delivery start-ups went under; robots tossed salads, mixed drinks and flipped burgers; and pod-based devices for random foods (cocktails, tortillas, cookies, yoghurt, jello shots) failed. And then there’s Soylent – a meal in drink form, designed to save time by cutting out “tasting good” and “chewing.” Soylent has managed to find a small but enthusiastic fan base, and even got into solids recently with a line of meal-replacement bars called Squared.

The decade’s real food change came from delivery apps that pay on-demand workers to bring meals made in actual kitchens to your door. Those companies are dealing with employee protests over low and confusing pay while trying to become profitable.

Non-Facebook social networks

Remember Path? Color? Yik Yak, Meerkat and Google Buzz? And iTunes Ping, Apple’s short-lived attempt at making its music hub social? Start-ups and the tech giants alike launched social products over the past decade, but few succeeded.

In 2010 there was Google Buzz, which was quickly replaced by Google+ in 2011. The service struggled to attract users and experienced privacy issues, such as a bug exposing more than 52 million people’s data. It was finally declared dead this year, though some of its best features live on in Google Photos.

Vine burned bright for too short a time before being closed in 2016 by Twitter, which had bought the company for a reported $30 million in 2012. (Speaking of Twitter, it hung on thanks in part to its popularity with politicians, celebrities and people who are mad online, though it is far smaller than Facebook. Snapchat and TikTok have also carved out niches.)

Facebook dominated at the start of the decade and continues to dominate at the end, in part by buying or blatantly copying any competitors along the way. It acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, integrating both more closely with the Facebook brand. Even with major scandals and fumbles, its global user base grew to more than 2 billion people.

A crowdfunding, DIY revolution

For a short time, it looked as though the next generation of gadgets would come from outside the usual Silicon Valley idea factories. They would be dreamed up by passionate hobbyists, prototyped on 3-D printers and funded by fans instead of venture capitalists (though still manufactured in Shenzhen, China). Despite some notable successes – Oculus, Peloton, Boosted Boards – it turns out getting an idea from your cocktail napkin to market is pretty tough.

Notable failures include the disappointing Coolest Cooler, which featured both Bluetooth and a blender and raised more than $13 million on Kickstarter in 2014. It failed to deliver products to a third of its backers; many that shipped didn’t work. Others never materialized, such as iBackPack, which was supposed to produce a WiFi hotspot. The people behind it raised more than $800,000 and were accused by the Federal Trade Commission of using those funds to buy bitcoin and pay off credit cards. Skarp Laser Razor, a razor with dubious hair-removal technology, managed to get more than $4 million in pledges from interested customers before Kickstarter suspended its campaign for violating policies on working prototypes.

(Kickstarter said the vast majority of its products make it to production and that it aims “to be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly.”)

Consumer 3-D printers also failed to live up to the hype. We were supposed to have a printer in every home, spitting out replacement LEGOs and screws, art projects, and even food. The high cost of the devices and the skills needed to use them could not compete with overnight shipping.

Drones dropping deliveries

“Could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it’s gonna be a lot of fun,” Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said.

The year was 2013, and Bezos was on “60 Minutes” to unveil the next big thing in package delivery: drones. He said that within that time frame, quadcopters would be able to drop packages from warehouses at customers’ doors within 30 minutes. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

In 2016, Amazon showed off its first commercial drone delivery in a rural area of the United Kingdom, a 13-minute delivery of an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn. Its latest drone iteration was on display earlier this year at MARS, its weird tech conference, again promising that drone deliveries were coming soon.

But as of the end of the decade, Amazon packages are still being delivered by humans. In fact, Amazon announced in 2018 that it was adding 20,000 delivery vans via third-party delivery partners to its ground fleet. Other companies, including Uber, UPS and Alphabet’s Wing, have also been testing drone deliveries, and it’s possible that we will have boxes from the sky onto porches in the next decade.

Vaping to fix smoking

It was supposed to be safer than smoking and a way to quit nicotine altogether. While vaping has indeed caught on, its biggest selling point has blown up in recent years. Eight deaths and more than 2,500 cases of lung-related illnesses have been linked to vaping in the United States.

Critics say fun-sounding flavors and colorful devices, most notably from the company Juul, have made vaping wildly popular with teenagers – one in four high schoolers vapes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now the FDA and lawmakers are investigating vaping companies. But if we draw on experience from the cigarette industry, vaping is not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Amazon’s big phone play

Apple and Google have direct access to billions of people with their smartphone operating systems and hardware – 2.5 billion devices run Google’s Android operating system, and 900 million iPhones are in use.

One company noticeably absent from our pockets is Amazon, but not for lack of trying. After several years of stealth development, Amazon announced its Fire Phone in 2014. The smartphone did not look like much, started at $199, ran on a customized version of Android and was available only on AT&T. Amazon reported $83 million of unused inventory in late 2014, and it discontinued the Fire Phone a year after its introduction.

Now that Amazon is competing against those two companies for voice-assistant dominance, its lack of a smartphone is even more glaring. It has put Alexa in anything with a microphone, from cameras to headphones and, soon, eye glasses. (It is on smartphones, but you have to open the Alexa app first.) Meanwhile Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant are already in pockets, built into the core of the devices and listening for their next cue.

Tourists in space

It is no secret that big-name billionaires love space. Despite their passion, the three boldest aspiring space barons have made and missed deadlines for sending people into space this decade.

Richard Branson said Virgin Galactic would fly tourists into space by 2020, but its last test mission was two test pilots and a crew member at the start of last year. Bezos said at an Air Force Association conference in late 2018 that Blue Origin would send a test flight into the upper atmosphere with people on board this year, but the most recent test flight, on Dec. 11, contained no humans. In 2017, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX had taken deposits to fly two passengers around the moon in 2018. That flight did not take place. He has the whole next decade to hit a different goal, set in 2011: sending someone to Mars by 2031.

There are plenty of interested customers. Virgin Galactic has sold tickets to more than 700 people wanting to take a trip to space at $250,000 a seat.

If there is one thing on this list we would not want to rush just to meet a deadline, it is loading civilians into private rockets and hurling them into space.

© The Washington Post 2019

[localbizlift]

Facebook still wants to be a media company

Facebook may have disbanded its “Trending” news section, but the social network is not abandoning its media company ambitions, despite whatever CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to Congress. In fact, the opposite of “not being a media business” is now occurring: Facebook is directly paying news publishers to create video, even as it claims its focus is on you and your “time well spent” on its site.

Sorry, Facebook, but you can no longer claim you’re just a platform, just a technology enabler, when you are directly funding journalism.

And you can’t claim you care about our time when you’re funding all these new videos meant to draw us in daily and keep us watching.

Facebook funds the news

It was recently announced that Facebook will roll out a series of news video shows from select partners, including TV news organizations CNN, ABC News, Fox News Channel and Univision, along with local news publisher Advance Local, and digital companies ATTN: and Mic. The shows will include a mix of live and breaking news as well as longer-form series and features.

The shows are being funded by Facebook for at least one year’s time, though the (undisclosed) terms will vary by network.

Even though publishers have had the rug pulled out from underneath them before — when, suddenly, Facebook decided it was time to focus on “quality time” on its network, and decreased publisher content in the News Feed as a result — they seem happy to create content for Facebook yet again.

I know, it’s baffling.

In addition, it’s building out a game-streaming competitor to battle Amazon’s Twitch and Google’s YouTube.

But what’s even worse is that Facebook continues to claim some sort of “we’re just a platform” sentiment — and one that cares about users’ time, no less! — even as it pursues these initiatives.

Time well spent… watching our news and videos

The move to fund news videos not only invalidates Facebook’s claims on the “just a tech platform” front, it calls into question how serious the company is about its “time well spent” focus.

This newer set of product development guidelines aims to increase the visibility of personal content at the expense of publishers and other junk.

The company is not alone in thinking about time well spent, even if it doesn’t understand what it’s doing about it.

Amid a growing backlash about the evils of technology addiction on our brain, emotional and social development and quality of life, other tech companies, including both Apple and Google, have now announced notable new efforts to regain control over our phones’ ability to interrupt, stress and addict. Both are rolling out new digital wellness tools in their next mobile operating system updates that will allow users to monitor and control their phone and app usage like never before.

Facebook, to some extent, has been attempting to participate in this movement as well, even as Apple in particular targets it as one of the apps we should all cut down on.

To its credit, Facebook reduced publisher content on the News Feed and the presence of viral videos, and saw its daily active users decline as a result.

Today, its latest “time well spent”-associated feature is arriving: “Memories,” a section where you can fondly look back on all the personal sharing and connections Facebook has enabled, and celebrate those moments with family and friends. (To be clear, Facebook is not calling Memories a part of “time well spent,” we are.)

The feature aims to remind users that the social network is truly about your personal connections, not the browsing of third-party content. It ties into Facebook’s larger self-image: The company still likes to envision itself, ever optimistically, as a force for good in the world. A platform that brings people together.

Yes, the platform used for Russian election meddling in the U.S. Yes, the one where millions of users had their data misappropriated through lax data handling policies. Yes, the one that contributes to genocide.

But look, have some old birthday party pictures! We care about you! 

If ‘connecting people’ was the goal, Facebook would look a lot different

Look, there’s nothing wrong with Facebook pushing users to revisit their memories with family and friends, and many will even appreciate Facebook’s Memories feature and find joy in using it.

But it’s increasingly hard to take Facebook seriously when it claims “connecting people” and “quality time” are its larger goals while it puts its money elsewhere.

To date, Facebook has squandered so many opportunities to innovate on its platform around the subject of personal sharing, and has instead largely turned into a cloning machine where it adopts the innovations of others.

Really, what has it done lately that’s not a copy of Instagram copying Snapchat?

Even Apple now has a better Photos product than Facebook. Apple’s is infused with AI smarts and automatic sharing prompts in iOS 12, while Facebook is still figuring out where to stick its Stories module.

And why can’t Facebook users easily search back through their memories and photos, in the robust machine learning-infused ways that Apple and Google can?

Facebook can’t find old photos from the search bar

Google can with ease

Really, why hasn’t Facebook — at least more recently — built us anything useful with the data we provided?

After all those check-ins and posts about which books we’re reading or what we’re watching on TV, all we get are more targeted ads.

If the company cared about connecting us with our friends, it could have built dozens of features on the back of this data by now:

Robust search features that turned our shared data into our own private, personal search engines

What to watch recommendations and reminders for our favorite streaming services

TV Time-like tools for tracking our binges and meeting fellow fans

Book clubs based on what your friends are reading

Notifications about restaurant openings nearby based on where you’ve eaten before

Collaborative photo albums (yes, it tried this through its Moments app, which spiked in popularity, but instead of doubling down on the app it’s allowed Google Photos to dominate and Apple to catch up with AI features and iCloud advancements)

Personalized travel guides (another experiment that died)

Private family groups that offered things like digitization services for sharing photos from old albums (it could have partnered with third parties on this), grandma’s recipes, private updates, family histories and more, instead of pointing families to its general-purpose “groups” product, which isn’t built with the specific needs of families in mind

I mean, these are just a few off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of a dozen more.

Instead we’ve got Facebook launching some round-up of old personal sharing features (and remember it stole On This Day from Timehop) and investing heavily in everything video by funding news and cloning Twitch — both of which aims to suck up your time.

I know, I know — it’s too late for Facebook to go back to being a just a social network.

It would require a radical revamp of what Facebook is and does. It would have to remove publisher content, destroy its video business and completely arrest the viral spread of news — fake and otherwise — by restricting URL-laden posts from being viewable by anyone but your friends or the Facebook Groups with which they were shared.

Facebook can’t do this. It won’t do this. Facebook wants to survive.

So instead, let’s just insist Facebook be honest about itself: Yes, we’re a media company AND a tech platform AND a video network AND a social network.

Anything claiming otherwise is a lie.

[pmsocialmedia]

Facebook still wants to be a media company

Facebook may have disbanded its “Trending” news section, but the social network is not abandoning its media company ambitions, despite whatever CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to Congress. In fact, the opposite of “not being a media business” is now occurring: Facebook is directly paying news publishers to create video, even as it claims its focus is on you and your “time well spent” on its site.

Sorry, Facebook, but you can no longer claim you’re just a platform, just a technology enabler, when you are directly funding journalism.

And you can’t claim you care about our time when you’re funding all these new videos meant to draw us in daily and keep us watching.

Facebook funds the news

It was recently announced that Facebook will roll out a series of news video shows from select partners, including TV news organizations CNN, ABC News, Fox News Channel and Univision, along with local news publisher Advance Local, and digital companies ATTN: and Mic. The shows will include a mix of live and breaking news as well as longer-form series and features.

The shows are being funded by Facebook for at least one year’s time, though the (undisclosed) terms will vary by network.

Even though publishers have had the rug pulled out from underneath them before — when, suddenly, Facebook decided it was time to focus on “quality time” on its network, and decreased publisher content in the News Feed as a result — they seem happy to create content for Facebook yet again.

I know, it’s baffling.

In addition, it’s building out a game-streaming competitor to battle Amazon’s Twitch and Google’s YouTube.

But what’s even worse is that Facebook continues to claim some sort of “we’re just a platform” sentiment — and one that cares about users’ time, no less! — even as it pursues these initiatives.

Time well spent… watching our news and videos

The move to fund news videos not only invalidates Facebook’s claims on the “just a tech platform” front, it calls into question how serious the company is about its “time well spent” focus.

This newer set of product development guidelines aims to increase the visibility of personal content at the expense of publishers and other junk.

The company is not alone in thinking about time well spent, even if it doesn’t understand what it’s doing about it.

Amid a growing backlash about the evils of technology addiction on our brain, emotional and social development and quality of life, other tech companies, including both Apple and Google, have now announced notable new efforts to regain control over our phones’ ability to interrupt, stress and addict. Both are rolling out new digital wellness tools in their next mobile operating system updates that will allow users to monitor and control their phone and app usage like never before.

Facebook, to some extent, has been attempting to participate in this movement as well, even as Apple in particular targets it as one of the apps we should all cut down on.

To its credit, Facebook reduced publisher content on the News Feed and the presence of viral videos, and saw its daily active users decline as a result.

Today, its latest “time well spent”-associated feature is arriving: “Memories,” a section where you can fondly look back on all the personal sharing and connections Facebook has enabled, and celebrate those moments with family and friends. (To be clear, Facebook is not calling Memories a part of “time well spent,” we are.)

The feature aims to remind users that the social network is truly about your personal connections, not the browsing of third-party content. It ties into Facebook’s larger self-image: The company still likes to envision itself, ever optimistically, as a force for good in the world. A platform that brings people together.

Yes, the platform used for Russian election meddling in the U.S. Yes, the one where millions of users had their data misappropriated through lax data handling policies. Yes, the one that contributes to genocide.

But look, have some old birthday party pictures! We care about you! 

If ‘connecting people’ was the goal, Facebook would look a lot different

Look, there’s nothing wrong with Facebook pushing users to revisit their memories with family and friends, and many will even appreciate Facebook’s Memories feature and find joy in using it.

But it’s increasingly hard to take Facebook seriously when it claims “connecting people” and “quality time” are its larger goals while it puts its money elsewhere.

To date, Facebook has squandered so many opportunities to innovate on its platform around the subject of personal sharing, and has instead largely turned into a cloning machine where it adopts the innovations of others.

Really, what has it done lately that’s not a copy of Instagram copying Snapchat?

Even Apple now has a better Photos product than Facebook. Apple’s is infused with AI smarts and automatic sharing prompts in iOS 12, while Facebook is still figuring out where to stick its Stories module.

And why can’t Facebook users easily search back through their memories and photos, in the robust machine learning-infused ways that Apple and Google can?

Facebook can’t find old photos from the search bar

Google can with ease

Really, why hasn’t Facebook — at least more recently — built us anything useful with the data we provided?

After all those check-ins and posts about which books we’re reading or what we’re watching on TV, all we get are more targeted ads.

If the company cared about connecting us with our friends, it could have built dozens of features on the back of this data by now:

Robust search features that turned our shared data into our own private, personal search engines

What to watch recommendations and reminders for our favorite streaming services

TV Time-like tools for tracking our binges and meeting fellow fans

Book clubs based on what your friends are reading

Notifications about restaurant openings nearby based on where you’ve eaten before

Collaborative photo albums (yes, it tried this through its Moments app, which spiked in popularity, but instead of doubling down on the app it’s allowed Google Photos to dominate and Apple to catch up with AI features and iCloud advancements)

Personalized travel guides (another experiment that died)

Private family groups that offered things like digitization services for sharing photos from old albums (it could have partnered with third parties on this), grandma’s recipes, private updates, family histories and more, instead of pointing families to its general-purpose “groups” product, which isn’t built with the specific needs of families in mind

I mean, these are just a few off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of a dozen more.

Instead we’ve got Facebook launching some round-up of old personal sharing features (and remember it stole On This Day from Timehop) and investing heavily in everything video by funding news and cloning Twitch — both of which aims to suck up your time.

I know, I know — it’s too late for Facebook to go back to being a just a social network.

It would require a radical revamp of what Facebook is and does. It would have to remove publisher content, destroy its video business and completely arrest the viral spread of news — fake and otherwise — by restricting URL-laden posts from being viewable by anyone but your friends or the Facebook Groups with which they were shared.

Facebook can’t do this. It won’t do this. Facebook wants to survive.

So instead, let’s just insist Facebook be honest about itself: Yes, we’re a media company AND a tech platform AND a video network AND a social network.

Anything claiming otherwise is a lie.

  via Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2sMCBaI

[workfromhom]

Facebook still wants to be a media company

Facebook may have disbanded its “Trending” news section, but the social network is not abandoning its media company ambitions, despite whatever CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to Congress. In fact, the opposite of “not being a media business” is now occurring: Facebook is directly paying news publishers to create video, even as it claims its focus is on you and your “time well spent” on its site.

Sorry, Facebook, but you can no longer claim you’re just a platform, just a technology enabler, when you are directly funding journalism.

And you can’t claim you care about our time when you’re funding all these new videos meant to draw us in daily and keep us watching.

Facebook funds the news

It was recently announced that Facebook will roll out a series of news video shows from select partners, including TV news organizations CNN, ABC News, Fox News Channel and Univision, along with local news publisher Advance Local, and digital companies ATTN: and Mic. The shows will include a mix of live and breaking news as well as longer-form series and features.

The shows are being funded by Facebook for at least one year’s time, though the (undisclosed) terms will vary by network.

Even though publishers have had the rug pulled out from underneath them before — when, suddenly, Facebook decided it was time to focus on “quality time” on its network, and decreased publisher content in the News Feed as a result — they seem happy to create content for Facebook yet again.

I know, it’s baffling.

In addition, it’s building out a game-streaming competitor to battle Amazon’s Twitch and Google’s YouTube.

But what’s even worse is that Facebook continues to claim some sort of “we’re just a platform” sentiment — and one that cares about users’ time, no less! — even as it pursues these initiatives.

Time well spent… watching our news and videos

The move to fund news videos not only invalidates Facebook’s claims on the “just a tech platform” front, it calls into question how serious the company is about its “time well spent” focus.

This newer set of product development guidelines aims to increase the visibility of personal content at the expense of publishers and other junk.

The company is not alone in thinking about time well spent, even if it doesn’t understand what it’s doing about it.

Amid a growing backlash about the evils of technology addiction on our brain, emotional and social development and quality of life, other tech companies, including both Apple and Google, have now announced notable new efforts to regain control over our phones’ ability to interrupt, stress and addict. Both are rolling out new digital wellness tools in their next mobile operating system updates that will allow users to monitor and control their phone and app usage like never before.

Facebook, to some extent, has been attempting to participate in this movement as well, even as Apple in particular targets it as one of the apps we should all cut down on.

To its credit, Facebook reduced publisher content on the News Feed and the presence of viral videos, and saw its daily active users decline as a result.

Today, its latest “time well spent”-associated feature is arriving: “Memories,” a section where you can fondly look back on all the personal sharing and connections Facebook has enabled, and celebrate those moments with family and friends. (To be clear, Facebook is not calling Memories a part of “time well spent,” we are.)

The feature aims to remind users that the social network is truly about your personal connections, not the browsing of third-party content. It ties into Facebook’s larger self-image: The company still likes to envision itself, ever optimistically, as a force for good in the world. A platform that brings people together.

Yes, the platform used for Russian election meddling in the U.S. Yes, the one where millions of users had their data misappropriated through lax data handling policies. Yes, the one that contributes to genocide.

But look, have some old birthday party pictures! We care about you! 

If ‘connecting people’ was the goal, Facebook would look a lot different

Look, there’s nothing wrong with Facebook pushing users to revisit their memories with family and friends, and many will even appreciate Facebook’s Memories feature and find joy in using it.

But it’s increasingly hard to take Facebook seriously when it claims “connecting people” and “quality time” are its larger goals while it puts its money elsewhere.

To date, Facebook has squandered so many opportunities to innovate on its platform around the subject of personal sharing, and has instead largely turned into a cloning machine where it adopts the innovations of others.

Really, what has it done lately that’s not a copy of Instagram copying Snapchat?

Even Apple now has a better Photos product than Facebook. Apple’s is infused with AI smarts and automatic sharing prompts in iOS 12, while Facebook is still figuring out where to stick its Stories module.

And why can’t Facebook users easily search back through their memories and photos, in the robust machine learning-infused ways that Apple and Google can?

Facebook can’t find old photos from the search bar

Google can with ease

Really, why hasn’t Facebook — at least more recently — built us anything useful with the data we provided?

After all those check-ins and posts about which books we’re reading or what we’re watching on TV, all we get are more targeted ads.

If the company cared about connecting us with our friends, it could have built dozens of features on the back of this data by now:

Robust search features that turned our shared data into our own private, personal search engines

What to watch recommendations and reminders for our favorite streaming services

TV Time-like tools for tracking our binges and meeting fellow fans

Book clubs based on what your friends are reading

Notifications about restaurant openings nearby based on where you’ve eaten before

Collaborative photo albums (yes, it tried this through its Moments app, which spiked in popularity, but instead of doubling down on the app it’s allowed Google Photos to dominate and Apple to catch up with AI features and iCloud advancements)

Personalized travel guides (another experiment that died)

Private family groups that offered things like digitization services for sharing photos from old albums (it could have partnered with third parties on this), grandma’s recipes, private updates, family histories and more, instead of pointing families to its general-purpose “groups” product, which isn’t built with the specific needs of families in mind

I mean, these are just a few off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of a dozen more.

Instead we’ve got Facebook launching some round-up of old personal sharing features (and remember it stole On This Day from Timehop) and investing heavily in everything video by funding news and cloning Twitch — both of which aims to suck up your time.

I know, I know — it’s too late for Facebook to go back to being a just a social network.

It would require a radical revamp of what Facebook is and does. It would have to remove publisher content, destroy its video business and completely arrest the viral spread of news — fake and otherwise — by restricting URL-laden posts from being viewable by anyone but your friends or the Facebook Groups with which they were shared.

Facebook can’t do this. It won’t do this. Facebook wants to survive.

So instead, let’s just insist Facebook be honest about itself: Yes, we’re a media company AND a tech platform AND a video network AND a social network.

Anything claiming otherwise is a lie.

  from Facebook – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2sMCBaI via IFTTT