Month: March 2016
Uber, Ayn Rand and the awesome collapse of Silicon Valley’s dream of destroying your job
Steven Hill in Salon:
The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo recently wrote an oddly lamenting piece about how “the Uber model, it turns out, doesn’t translate.” Manjoo describes how so many of the “Uber-of-X” companies that have sprung up as part of the so-called sharing economy have become just another way to deliver more expensively priced conveniences to those with enough money to pay. Ironically many of these Ayn Rand-inspired startups have been kept alive by subsidies of the venture capital kind which, for various reasons, are starting to dry up. Without that kind of “VC welfare,” these companies are having to raise their prices, and are finding it increasingly difficult to retain enough customers at the higher price point. Consequently, some of these startups are faltering; others are outright failing.
Witness the recent collapse of SpoonRocket, an on-demand pre-made meal delivery service. Like Uber wanting to replace your car, SpoonRocket wanted to get you out of your kitchen by trying to be cheaper and faster than cooking. Its chefs mass-produced its limited menu of meals, and cars equipped with warming cases delivered the goods, aiming for “sub-10 minute delivery of sub-$10 meals.”
But it didn’t work out as planned. And once the VC welfare started backing away, SpoonRocket could not maintain its low price point. The same has been happening with other on-demand services such as the valet-parking app Luxe, which has degraded to the point where Manjoo notes that “prices are rising, service is declining, business models are shifting, and in some cases, companies are closing down.”
Yet the telltale signs of the many problems with this heavily subsidized startup business model have been prevalent for quite some time, for those who wanted to see. In July 2014, media darling TaskRabbit, which had been hailed as a revolutionary for the way it allowed vulnerable workers to auction themselves to the lowest bidders for short-term gigs, underwent a major “pivot.” That’s Silicon Valley-speak for acknowledging that its business model wasn’t working. It was losing too much money, and so it had to shake things up.
TaskRabbit revamped how its platform worked, particularly how jobs are priced. CEO Leah Busque defended the changes as necessary to help TaskRabbit keep up with “explosive demand growth,” but published reports said the company was responding to a decline in the number of completed tasks. Too many of the Rabbits, it turns out, were not happy bunnies – they were underpaid and did a poor job, despite company rhetoric to the contrary. An increasing number of them simply failed to show up for their tasks. As a results, customers also failed to return.
More here.
The New Fiction of Solitude
Nick Dames in The Atlantic:
This past september in Des Moines, President Obama conducted an unusual conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson. The transcript, published in The New York Review of Books, touched on high-minded topics such as the troubled relationship between Christianity and democracy, the durability of small-town values, and the importance and fragility of public institutions. The discussion was pitched abstractly, never descending into specifics that might inspire significant disagreement. Still, it was an impressive display of two very different minds—the guardedly optimistic leader habitually wary of strident assertions, the writer candidly admitting to darker worries—trying to think through, collaboratively, what it feels like to be an American now.
You might ask, why a novelist? The event had a touchingly antique feel: Think of Hyannis Port in 1960, when the presidential candidate and senator John F. Kennedy charmed Norman Mailer in order to rouse the discouraged liberal elites who were Mailer’s audience; or Manhattan in 1963, when Robert Kennedy asked James Baldwin to convene a private discussion on race that turned out to be an explosive exchange rather than a quiet policy debate. Obama’s motive cannot have been to seduce Robinson with his glamour or to solicit her as the representative of a constituency; novelists no longer command that kind of on-the-ground authority. His choice of a novelist suggests considerations both broader and narrower. Obama addressed Robinson not as a shaper of opinion but as someone with powers linked to her vocation, with a stature he sees as unique to a writer of fiction. He conferred with her as a specialist in empathy.
More here.
They Made Him a Moron
Evgeny Morozov offers a masterpiece of an a**-spanking in the form of a review of Alec Ross's The Industries of the Future in The Baffler:
At times, the book reads like an extended college admissions essay, with the student, prompted to reflect on his most memorable experience, desperately trying to relate something very trivial he did last summer to lofty questions of globalization and democracy. Ross reflects, for example, on his time working as a janitor after his freshman year in college, linking it to his experiences as an innovation adviser to the Secretary of State. On another level, The Industries of the Future can be read as an extended effort to prove to the world that Ross does belong in the very center of that bizarre Venn diagram—right at the intersection of technology, foreign policy, and the Democratic Party—that had secured him his original job at the State Department.
Such books are normally written before a person is appointed to a high-level advisory position within the government; they are meant to attest to one’s intellectual credentials and articulate a grand strategic vision of the future, which can then guide the person’s advisory work. Ross, however, got his career backwards: he got his advisory position based on his campaign work for Obama, though he had few academic or intellectual credentials to his name. Then, after he left the State Department in 2013, he pursued the well-trodden path of aspiring pundits-cum-lobbyists: a fellowship at an Ivy League school (Columbia), seats on half a dozen corporate boards (FiscalNote, Kudelski Group, Leeds Equity Partners, Telerivet, AnchorFree, 2U), and now, finally, a book.
Given Ross’s career trajectory—from a supposed “big thinker” without any big thoughts to a power broker between industry and government—this book appears eight years too late. While his publisher blurbs him as a “leading innovation expert” whose book “belongs on the shelf alongside works by Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria” (pretty faint praise, this), The Industries of the Future reads more like a love letter to a few more unexplored corporate boards, preferably in industries that will last longer than Alec Ross’s career as the next Tom Friedman.
More here.
Trump’s Tomatoes: The story behind the billionaire’s fast food of choice
According to the Washington Post, guests on Donald Trump’s luxurious personal 757 jet—gold-plated seat-belt buckles!—who get peckish and order a burger are served Wendy’s. It would have to be Wendy’s. No other food chain strives so hard to avoid buying tomatoes from Florida, where they are almost guaranteed to have been picked by immigrants, a policy surely appealing to Trump. Admittedly, the tomatoes in question are quite possibly picked by a worker confined in conditions of near slavery, paid minimal amounts and forced to scavenge for food, but at least he or she is not an immigrant working in this country.
To understand the background to the Wendy’s guarantee, we have to go back to the beginning of the century, when a workers’ rights group in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, pioneered an innovative and effective strategy. Agricultural workers are a traditionally exploited group, excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, the New Deal law enshrining basic workers’ rights such as collective bargaining. Conditions have been especially dire for the men and women, almost entirely immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who picked the Florida fruit and vegetable crops. In 2001, tomato pickers were still being paid the forty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket of tomatoes that they were two decades earlier. (Some received nothing at all. When I visited Immokalee in 2001, the C.I.W. had just uncovered a slave camp nestled between a Ramada Inn and a retirement community in the little town of Lake Placid, the fifth such operation busted by the Coalition in the past six years. Inmates who tried to escape risked beatings or worse.
more here.
REMEMBERING SUSAN SONTAG’S FINAL DAYS
If there is anyone on earth who could decide not to die it would be Susan Sontag; her will is that ferocious, that unbending, that unwilling to accept the average fates or outcomes the rest of us are bound by. She is not someone to be pushed around or unduly influenced by the idea that everyone has to do something or go through something, because she is and always has been someone who rises above. Nonetheless, right before Christmas, she is lying in a bed in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, doing something that very much appears to those around her to be dying.
One night she and her friend Sharon DeLano stay up late listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets in her hospital room. Sontag is very doped up. She is in a good enough mood to tell Sharon one of her favorite jokes. “Where does the general keep his armies?” Sharon answers, “I don’t know.” “In his sleevies,” Sontag says, smiling.
The next day she is much more sober. When Sharon arrives, Susan is reading the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s juvenilia and they watch two movies together. Sharon has to press pause frequently, because Susan is talking through the whole movie, adding commentary and glosses.
more here.
Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century
London’s architecture has become laughably boorish, confidently uncouth and flashily arid. Neomodern bling and meretricious trash are the current norms. Without exception, big-name architects turn out to be horizontals who happily put their knees behind their ears at the first sight of an oligarch, a Gulf princeling, a Central Asian dictator, a modern slave-driver or a property swine, while lecturing us on sustainability, low emissions, affordability, bicycles, ethical regeneration and whatever other right-on shibboleths are in the air this week. London is a magnet for a caste of designers who seem hardly to notice that the milieu they inhabit is chasmically remote from the lives of those affected and afflicted by their creations. It is the city – sorry, ‘global city’ – where reputations built through decades of imagination and toil, strict image control and rigorous PR are frittered away in a blizzard of self-parody and voracious cupidity. The tectonic gerontocrats Rogers, Viñoly, Piano, Foster, Nouvel, Shuttleworth and so on are apparently locked in a perpetual competition to vandalise the sky with banality. There are outsiders in there too, architectural practices that, all too evidently, never had a reputation to lose – for instance, the incompetents culpable of the Strata building in Elephant and Castle, or those at Broadway Malyan, whose destruction of Vauxhall deprived London of a valuable terrain vague. A few hundred metres west, the ineffable Gehry has his head in the corpse of Battersea Power Station like a vulture in a lamb’s ribcage.
Despite all this, or rather because of all this, the standard of English writing about urbanism, architecture and its mostly unintended or unforeseen consequences has risen to dizzying heights.
more here.
How to Read Dante in the 21st Century
Joseph Luzzi in The American Scholar:
già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle.now my will and my desire were turned,
like a wheel in perfect motion,
by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
These breathtaking lines conclude Dante’s Divine Comedy, a 14,000-line epic written in 1321 on the state of the soul after death. T. S. Eliot called such poetry the most beautiful ever written—and yet so few of us have ever read it. Since the poem appeared, and especially in modern times, those readers intrepid enough to take on Dante have tended to focus on the first leg of his journey, through the burning fires of Inferno. As Victor Hugo wrote about The Divine Comedy’s blessed realms, “The human eye was not made to look upon so much light, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.”
In truth, some of the most sublime moments in The Divine Comedy, indeed in all of literature, occur after Dante makes his way out of the Inferno’s desolation. But Hugo’s attack suggests the particular challenge in reading Dante, whose writing can seem remote and impenetrable to modern tastes. Last year marked the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1265, and as expected for a writer so famous—Eliot claimed “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third”—the solemn commemorations abounded, especially in Italy where many cities have streets and monuments dedicated to their Sommo Poeta, Supreme Poet. Yet Dante has the unenviable fate of having become more known than read: his name is immediately recognizable, his achievements justly acknowledged, but outside the classroom or graduate seminar, only the hardiest of literary enthusiasts pick up his Divine Comedy. Oddly enough, and at least in the United States, we seem to know more about Dante the man—his exile, his political struggles, his eternal love for Beatrice—than his poetry.
More here.
Tuesday Poem
Wayside Shrines
Doomed as I was to follow a big rig
laden with pigs and a wrecker with its intermittent strobe
I was all the more conscious of piles of rock
marking the scene of a crash,
some with handwritten notes, others a cache
of snapshots in a fogged-up globe.
Even a makeshift mobile may see off one of Calder’s
and the path among the alders
pan out like a prom-queen’s occipital lobe,
yet nothing can confirm one’s sense of being prized
like another’s being anathematized.
.
by Paul Muldoon
from Plan B
London: Enitharmon, 2009
Chocolate Can Boost Your Workout
Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:
Epicatechin is known to prompt cells that line blood vessels to release extra nitric oxide, a substance that has multiple effects in the body. Nitric oxide slightly increases vasodilation, or a widening of the veins and arteries, improving blood flow and cardiac function. It also gooses muscle cells to take in more blood sugar, providing them with more energy, and it enhances the passage of oxygen into cells. Because of its many physiological effects, each of which can aid physical performance, athletes long have looked for ways to increase the amount of nitric oxide in their bloodstreams. Some down supplement pills, although the benefits of nitric oxide supplements are unproven. Others swallow beetroot juice, a beverage that contains a hefty dose of nitrates, which then break down in the body into nitric oxide and other substances. There are questions, however, about the safety of nitrates and also, as anyone who has tried beetroot juice will tell you, the palatability of a beverage that tastes distinctly like liquid dirt.
More here.
3 Quarks Daily is looking for new Monday Columnists
Dear Reader,
You would have a column published at 3QD every fourth Monday. It should generally be between 1000 and 2500 words and can be about any subject at all. To qualify for a Monday slot, please submit a one or two paragraph bio and a sample column to me by email (s.abbas.raza.1 at gmail.com) as an MS Word-compatible document, or a URL if what you want us to look at is available online, which I will then circulate to the other editors and we will let you know our decision by about April 11. If you are given a slot on the 3QD schedule, your sample can also serve as your first column if it has never been published anywhere in print or online before. Feel free to use pictures, graphs, or other illustrations in your column. Naturally, you retain full copyright over your writing.
Please DO NOT submit more than one piece of writing, and also do not send the URL for a whole blog or website. I do not have the time to look through multiple postings. Select one piece of writing that you think is representative of the kinds of things you'd like to do at 3QD and just send that please.
Several of the people who started writing at 3QD have gone on to get regular paid gigs at well-known magazines, others have written well-received books. Even those who have not, have written to us saying that it has been a uniquely rewarding experience.
The deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM New York City time, Saturday, April 2, 2016.
Yours,
Abbas
NEW POSTS BELOW
The End of the Party
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
And this is as it should be. The entire system of American democracy is based on the premise that reasonable, intelligent, and well-informed citizens of integrity and good-will might nevertheless disagree deeply and sharply about fundamental moral, social, and political matters. Many of the most familiar political and constitutional mechanisms of our politics are aimed at managing such reasonable disagreement among citizens in a way that all disputants could be expected to recognize as even-handed, fair, civil, and rational. What's more, reasoned yet deep disagreement among intelligent and sincere citizens is not some unfortunate obstacle that democratic citizens should wish could be surmounted; working through such disagreements while sustaining conditions of civility and stable governance simply is what modern democracy is all about.
In this way, a modern democratic society needs there to be combating traditions of political commitment. Those who tend to find conservatism lacking need there to be stalwart defenders of conservative views that are articulate and smart. And the same goes for those who tend to reject various forms of liberalism and progressivism; they need there to be formidable exponents of the views they oppose. As we have written in previous 3QD posts, and have argued in our book Why We Argue (And How We Should), the only responsible way to oppose a view is to oppose the best version of it, and this requires one to know the best arguments in its favor. To put the point dramatically, modern democracy is an intellectual ecosystem that thrives only under conditions of civil disagreement among sincere and intelligent citizens. Were one of the many longstanding and noble traditions of democratic political thought to disappear from the public debate, the entire system would suffer.
Fermat’s Last Theorem and the 2016 Abel Prize
by Jonathan Kujawa
In keeping with tradition (see here: 2015, 2014) we're taking the opportunity to check out the math of behind the Abel Prize. This is the rare instance when the prizewinner's work appeared in the New York Times and may well need no introduction. Wiles won for
…for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.
— from the Abel Prize Announcement
Fermat's Last Theorem (FLT) is the claim that, for any n greater than or equal to three, there are no integer solutions to the equation
That is, you can't find numbers a, b, and c from among 0, 1, -1, 2, -2,… which can be plugged into
and have the same number on both sides of the equal sign. The same goes if the six is replaced with a 3, or 2016, or 187,201, or any other number greater than or equal to three.
If you haven't heard of FLT before, it's hard to see why anyone should give a rat's rear end about whether nor not there are integer solutions to this equation. On the other hand, Fermat conjectured FLT in 1637 and here we are in 2016 giving Wiles the Abel Prize for proving that yes, indeed, there are no such solutions. Something interesting must be going on.
Camus and the Aesthetics of Stone
by Dwight Furrow
I recently finished reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms on the same day in which the utter hopelessness of our political situation became obvious, as the “beacon of liberty” accelerates its descent into fascism. The final passages of the book didn't help my mood much. In Hemingway's masterpiece, the drudgery and pointlessness of war becomes a metaphor for the drudgery and pointlessness of life. In the end, neither the heroism of love nor the promise of birth can stanch the tragic flood that threatens every idyll. For Hemingway, stoic resignation seems the only proper attitude as Henry slogs his way home from the hospital where Catherine and their child had perished, huddled against the relentless rain that had darkened the final pages.
The world is not good enough and we can't do much about it. Soldiering on is the best we can do.
When in such a mood I like to consult Camus. No, I'm not masochistic, or at least I don't think so. The Camus that inspires me is not the fist shaking Camus of The Rebel or the dubious, Stoic-tinged Camus of the Myth of Sisyphus. There is another side to Camus that gets far too little attention. In an early essay, Nuptials at Tipasa, he writes:
The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there's nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me in tact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living. (Nuptials, 69)
In the face of a world unresponsive to human values, despair is ruled out, for ensconced within Camus' numbing litany of all-too-human failure are lovely passages in which pure sensuous enjoyment lifts the spirit and provides justification even in life's trying moments. This is the lyrical Camus extolling what he sometimes calls the “Mediterranean life” where the live-in-moment vitality of sensory experience is a repository of meaning infusing life with significance in the absence of transcendental certification, even in the face of inevitable loss.
Intuitively, Camus' idea that meaning is to be found in the everyday rendered alluring by our willingness to see its beauty is appealing. The problem is I have never found an argument in Camus' work that links the Stoic-like absurd hero with the happy hedonist. How could something as seemingly trivial as the sun and sea provide meaning in the face of the absurd?
perceptions
Ernst Haeckel. Kunstformen der Natur. 1904.
“A German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, stem cell, …”
Godwin’s Bot
“She was Dolores on the dotted line.”
~ Nabokov
Which isn't to say that this shellacking has beaten humanity into quiescence. Earlier this week, we exacted some sort of revenge by appropriating Microsoft's latest entry into social AI, the Twitter bot @TayandYou, and transformed it into “a racist, sexist, trutherist, genocidal maniac”. If we were to consider @TayandYou and AlphaGo to be birds of a feather, which is of course sloppy thinking of the highest (lowest? most average?) order, that would be a small consolation indeed, and not much different from stamping on an ant after you just got mauled by a bear, and still feeling good about it. But comparing @TayandYou and AlphaGo does lead to some useful insights, because one of the principal issues confronting the field of AI is the idea of purpose. This month, I'll look at the case of @TayandYou, and follow up with AlphaGo in April, since come April no one will remember @TayandYou, whereas with AlphaGo there's at least a chance.
Now, this idea of AIs lacking a purpose may seem like a daft claim. After all, the softwares in question were created by teams of computer scientists backed by wealthy corporations (artificial intelligence is the sport and pastime of what passes for kings these days). And in the popular consciousness AIs are implacably possessed of purpose, usually to the detriment of the human species. There seems to be little chance that there could be any ambiguity about such a basic question. Still, the extraordinary flameout of @TayandYou beckons the question of what, precisely, any specific AI is for. For what was really at stake with @TayandYou will, I think, be very surprising.
The Water All Around Us
by Tamuira Reid
She says if it's not singing than it's telling her stories. She says she sees faces in the waves. She doesn't know any of them though.
***
I was nine when my parents divorced and we moved to Santa Cruz. We played in the white wash for hours, the salt sticking to our legs in sheets. My mother watched from her perch further up the shore. She didn't like to get wet.
“Can you believe it? Two blocks from the beach.”
“It's an apartment, mom. And it's green.”
She danced around the tiny two-bedroom apartment with my little sister on her hip. When she tugged on the mini-blinds, they scrolled up, the kitchen filling with an obnoxious light. Everything was bright in this town; there was light everywhere.
“Come on you guys. It's not that bad. Look – you've got a beach for a front yard, for Christ's sake.”
“I miss my dad.”
Maeghan started to cry. I decided the sound of the ocean scared her. My mother tried to quiet her, gently kissing the top of her head. Everyone was tired. She looked out the window at the U-Haul parked sideways across the front lot. Our old life had been reduced to nothing more than a sofa and some chairs.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Nostalgia is a Muse
by Jalees Rehman
“Let others praise ancient times. I am glad that I was born in these.”
– Ovid in “Ars Amatoria”
When I struggle with scientist's block, I play 1980s music with the hope that the music will inspire me. This blast from the past often works for me. After listening to the songs, I can sometimes perceive patterns between our various pieces of cell biology and molecular biology data that had previously eluded me and design new biological experiments. But I have to admit that I have never performed the proper music control studies. Before attributing inspirational power to songs such as “99 Luftballons“, “Bruttosozialprodukt” or “Billie Jean“, I ought to spend equal time listening to music from other decades and then compare the impact of these listening sessions. I have always assumed that there is nothing intrinsically superior or inspirational about these songs, they simply evoke memories of my childhood. Eating comfort foods or seeing images of Munich and Lagos that remind me of my childhood also seem to work their muse magic.
My personal interpretation has been that indulging nostalgia somehow liberates us from everyday issues and worries – some trivial, some more burdensome – which in turn allows us to approach our world with a fresh, creative perspective. It is difficult to make such general sweeping statements based on my own anecdotal experiences and I have always felt a bit of apprehension about discussing this with others. My nostalgia makes me feel like an old fogey who is stuck in an ossified past. Nostalgia does not have a good reputation. The German expression “Früher war alles besser!” (Back then, everything used to be better!) is used in contemporary culture to mock those who always speak of the romanticized past with whimsical fondness. In fact, the expression nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. In his dissertation “Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia oder Heimweh“, Hofer used nostalgia as an equivalent of the German word Heimweh (“home-ache”), combining the Greek words nostos(homecoming) and algos (ache or pain), to describe a medical illness characterized by a “melancholy that originates from the desire to return to one's homeland“. This view of nostalgia as an illness did not change much during the subsequent centuries where it was viewed as a neurological or psychiatric disorder.
What if Lee Child wrote “Purity” and Jonathan Franzen wrote “Make Me?”
by Andy Martin
JONATHAN FRANZEN RE-WRITTEN BY LEE CHILD
Begin with a backhoe. Obviously. Look at pp. 134-5 [of Purity]: Andreas spends far too much time digging. With a shovel. Get some decent machinery in there. Why struggle? Dig the hole deeper, shove the guy in, cover it over. Job done. Don't sweat it. And look, you postpone the murder till after page 100. Which is too long. Postponement is one thing, but you are going to lose a helluva lot of readers that way. (And then you take pages and pages just to do it! What is your problem?) You either need to kick off with the murder and then Andreas is the bad guy who must be hunted down (by the way, your solution for what happens to him… why the hell would he do that?) or… and this is more promising: what if he has a far better reason for knocking off this guy than… oh yeah, his girlfriend asks him to. ‘Hey, Andreas, would you mind if…?' Come on!
Stepfather? What about Godfather? What if you have Andreas, with all his skills, and his team of hackers, crack the mystery of this bad guy who must be channelling funds to Al-Qaeda while running drugs and girls and degraded nuclear material (probably polluting the environment too) and finally, and here we come to a climax, nailing this woman Pip, who is an ex-FBI agent (maybe abducting her, locking her up, and sadistically abusing…) And so Andreas is fully and righteously justified in offing him. No anxieties, no remorse. Maybe Pip could help bury him. A woman driving the backhoe. Which would be a breakthrough. Good revenge motive.