There's nothing else on the planet like the plant called Welwitschia mirabilis. The ancient tree looks like little more than a pile of leaves, and it's only found in the extremely arid desert regions of Namibia. But the species has managed to live on for many millions of years, perhaps because of its unassuming nature. The Welwitschia is the only species in its genus and its order, making it incredibly unique — check out NPR for the full story on this remarkable organism.
Wednesday's bombshell advisory declaring TrueCrypt unsafe to use touched off a tsunami of comments on Ars, Twitter, and elsewhere. At times, the armchair pundits sounded like characters in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, as they speculated wildly—and contradictorily—about what was behind a notice that left so many more questions than answers. Here are some of the more common theories, along with facts that either support or challenge their accuracy.
Theory: Borrowing a page from the Lavabit crypto service that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden used, Wednesday's advisory was what legal practitioners call a "canary," intended to signal receipt of a confidential demand from a law-enforcement or national security entity. Since National Security Letters (NSLs) can impose draconian penalties on those who make the demands known, this theory goes, the TrueCrypt developers issued a thinly veiled warning to users that they should no longer count on the program to prevent snooping by the US government.
Pros: Several elements of the advisory left many readers with the vague sense that the writers' tongues were planted firmly in their cheeks. Most obviously was the advice that TrueCrypt fans—a mish-mash of privacy-loving Linux, Mac, and Windows users—should abandon the cross-platform app for BitLocker, Microsoft's proprietary encryption program that runs only on selected versions of Windows. With much less prominent mention of FileVault or LUKS—the rough Mac and Linux equivalents of BitLocker, respectively—some people regarded the advice as so absurd as to be a wink and nudge signaling something much more serious was going on.
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With wormhole-hopping sci-fi film Interstellar garnering buzz ahead of its November release, Warner Bros. and MGM want to get in on the action as well. The studios are planning a new film trilogy based on Stargate, says The Hollywood Reporter. The project is said to be based on the 1994 film, which led to comic books, novels, a video game tie-in, and TV spinoffs like Stargate SG-1, and Stargate: Atlantis.
Warner Bros. is bringing back Roland Emmerich, the director of the original Stargate, who will be joined by producer Dean Devlin, who's worked on films like Independence Day, and 1998's Godzilla. No word yet on whether any of the original actors like Kurt Russell or James Spader will be involved, or when the films are set to go into...
Apple has just confirmed plans to purchase Beats Electronics for $3 billion. The acquisition ranks as the largest that Apple has ever made and will see it take ownership of an enormously successful and profitable line of consumer headphones as well as a burgeoning subscription music service. Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will also join Apple as part of the acquisition, which it will pay for with $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AndrewThe future ain't what it used to be!
Google's been hacking regular cars to make them drive themselves for a while now, but at the Code Conference today Sergey Brin showed off the next step: an entirely new self-driving car designed from the ground up. The project looks something like a smaller Smart car, and it lacks any human control whatsoever: no steering wheel, no pedals, no gearshift. It doesn't even have mirrors. It's just two seats and a window, and you simply call it to come get you, sit down, and let it drive you to your destination. This is my dream.
"We actually designed these with some safety features that haven't been seen," said Brin. "There's about two feet of foam on the front, and the windshield is made of glass, but it's a plastic glass." Brin said Google used automotive suppliers and car parts, but those parts have been customized. "We plan to go up to about one or two hundred of these, they're prototypes," he said. "There's no reason they couldn't go 100 miles an hour or faster once you can prove that they can do that safely." Brin said the car can be made "far safer" than human-driven cars, and that the current programming is "more defensive" than the average human driver: it waits to go on green, and it uses lasers to monitor the complete 360-degree field around itself.
"I'm certainly not advocating that we get rid of all cars that do not drive themselves," said Brin, although he wants some of his safety features to hit the mass market. "We worked with partners to build these prototypes, and we'll work with partners to build these." The cars will hit the road before the end of the year with safety drivers who can control the car with a joystick, but don't get too excited. "I think these being broadly available will take several years," said Brin.
"I did feel like I was on a Disney ride," said Recode's Kara Swisher, who took a ride in the prototype. "I wanted a drink. I wanted to drink while texting."
Over the last three generations, with the discovery of oil and vast natural gas reserves, the tiny Arabian peninsula nation of Qatar has gone from poverty to near-unprecedented wealth: it has the highest GDP per capita in the world, double that of the United States. The change has been drastic, but it has not always been easy.
This week, Qatar may have stumbled a bit in trying to reconcile some of those contradictions for which it is so famous. A government campaign called "reflect your respect" began distributing flyers explaining how foreigners should dress in all public places, and it's a little strict. Here's one of the flyers, showing how not to dress:
New campaign in #Qatar reminds expats how to dress appropriately 'leggings are not pants' http://t.co/e1HhA4Eug2 pic.twitter.com/yv6Gj8mBao
— Shaista Aziz (@shaistaAziz) May 24, 2014
The campaign can get a touch creepy. Here's another flier, posted to the campaign's official Instagram account, warning that foreigners can get up to six months jail time if they "gesture, recites songs, utters indecent phrases, or does any obscene act by any means in or near any public place," which is accompanied by an illustration of a shirtless man putting his arm over a woman in a sleeveless shirt.
Reflect Your Respect/Instagram
This isn't just for tourists: foreign workers make up about 85 percent of Qatar's population, a huge majority. They come from almost every corner of the world and do work that ranges from domestic help to senior management. Partly this is because Qatar's huge energy economy requires more workers than there are Qataris, and partly it's because the country's extremely generous oil and gas pay-outs means that most Qataris are too rich for their own job markets.
The result is a small population of very rich Qataris who often have very conservative values surrounded by a much larger number of foreigners who may not necessarily have those values. This dress code is Qatar trying to deal with the problem by asking foreigners to dress a little bit more like Qataris.
"Qatar is becoming a multi-cultural country and needs to accommodate the ‘cultures' of other people," Hammoud Brahim, an non-Qatari expatriate in the country, told the newspaper Al-Arabiya. The paper reports that the dress code is becoming a sensitive issue among expats, who worry whether Qatar will be able to play a good host when it has the World Cup. Fortunately, the games are not until 2022, so they've got some time to try out this dress code and see if it's a workable compromise between the locals who own the oil and gas and the many foreigners who help them run their economy on it.
In Santa Barbara, California, a man shot killed six people and injured seven more. And in the wake of the mass-murder, people have been trying to figure out why the alleged gunman, a 22-year-old named Elliot Rodger, went berserk. For some inexplicable reason, there are people who want to place the blame on the women who didn't date him.
#yesallwomen is a Twitter hashtag in response to a twisted narrative that the women who didn't date were to blame for Rodger's actions. Before Rodger allegedly shot those 13 people in Santa Barbara, he filmed videos where he expressed anger at women who didn't want to date him and that he shouldn't be a virgin at 22.
"I feel so invisible as I walk through my college. Your revealing shorts, your cascading blonde hair, your pretty faces. I want one for a girlfriend," Rodger said in one of the videos. "I am polite. I am the ultimate gentleman. And yet, you girls never give me a chance. I don't know why," he also said.
The gist: Rodger was frustrated that women didn't want to date him, felt entitled to a woman's affections, and talked about women like objects. And now there are people, in the wake of the shooting, who want to blame these women's rejections as the reason for Rodger's mass murder. The story, to those people, isn't that Rodger was disturbed but rather: this poor guy wasn't treated nicely by women.
This narrative spurred a myriad of conversations, one of those was #yesallwomen. #yesallwomen was created last night (the hashtag is an allusion to the Not All Men meme), by a blogger who goes by the name Kaye:
Guys, I'm going to be tweeting under the #YesAllWomen hashtag. Let's discuss what "not all men" might do, but women must fear.
— Kaye M. (@gildedspine) May 24, 2014
Some of the tweets reference things that Rodger spoke about — rejection, being "friend-zoned", and striking out with women. But the conversation being had there is much more than that, and has extended to personal stories of rape, domestic violence, and others that bring to light the fears and harsh truths that women experience in everyday life:
The #yesallwomen hashtag is still alive and trending and you can follow the discussion there.
Correction: This story initially said Rodger allegedly shot six people dead. Police believe that Rodger stabbed three people and shot and killed three more. I've updated the post to clarify and reflect that. I've also updated the Storify— it previously included a joke (and observation) from Louis C.K. that said that men are the number one threat to women, and passed it off as fact.
Happy Memorial Day! This weekend is one of the year's busiest for air travelers, with the AAA forecasting that 2.6 million people will travel by plane sometime between Thursday and today, up from 2.4 million last year.
That means 2.6 million people will be reminded yet again of the unremitting awfulness of the TSA, which has been subjecting fliers to frisking, invasive body scans, (alleged) racial profiling, needless checking of liquids and nail clippers, and various other indignities for nearly thirteen years now.
It's worth remembering that the inconvenience and injustice of the TSA's activities exists for literally no reason. If the agency's privacy violations and annoying carry-on regulations were merely the price we paid for reducing the incidence of terrorist attacks, that'd be one thing. But, as security expert Bruce Schneier likes to note, there's no evidence that the TSA has ever prevented a terrorist attack, and there's some research suggesting it could serve to increase non-airborne terrorist attacks. Airline security is, so far as we can tell, totally useless.
A literature review by George Mason's Cynthia Lum and Rutgers' Leslie Kennedy and Alison Sherley shows that studies testing the effectiveness of airport security — specifically, of metal detectors and security screenings — found, on average, that the measures in question prevented about 6.3 hijackings over the years examined. If that were all they found, that'd be a pretty solid case for the TSA.
But the attacks weren't simply being prevented; they were being displaced. While there were 6.3 fewer hijackings, there were 6.8 more "miscellaneous bombings, armed attacks, hostage taking, and events which included death or wounded individuals (as opposed to non-casualty incidents) in both the short and long run." Making hijackings harder, in other words, didn't reduce attacks, but encouraged would-be hijackers to attack through other means. Additional research done after the review has similarly concluded that screenings are, in effect, a wash.
The literature base on counterterrorism efficacy is appallingly small, and it's always possible that future studies with better research design will conclude different things. But given the costs of the TSA — to the federal budget, to individual privacy, to the time of travelers, etc. — the fact that there's no empirical evidence suggesting that it accomplishes any of its intended goals is galling.
What to do, then? Simple: just abolish the agency. This is hardly an extreme proposal; members of Congress, including influential figures like Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Congressman John Mica (R-Florida), have endorsed it. The Cato Institute's Chris Edwards wants to privatize the TSA and devolve its responsibilities to airports, but that preserves far too much of the status quo. Better would be to make security the responsibility of individual airlines, so as to allow competition on that dimension.
Some people, naturally, will value the security theater of screenings and metal scanning, just like Homer Simpson values having a rock to defend himself against tigers. So why not let them fly Bodyscan Airways while the rest of us fly airlines that don't include scans? You could imagine companies that own several different airline brands using this as a method of diversification. American Airlines could offer no-screening flights and US Airways screened flights, and the company that owns both services could enjoy the business of worrywarts and more relaxed fliers alike.
If you're curious about the traffic congestion where you are, web site Isoscope shows you how far you can get from any location in 10 minutes.
For the last year, patent reform advocates have been pushing for legislation to deal with trolls, litigious patent holders that have imposed growing costs on the American economy. On Wednesday morning, they thought that they were on the verge of a bipartisan deal that would get the legislation out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That would have been a major breakthrough. For years, the patent reform debate has been a stalemate between pro-reform technology companies and pharmaceutical companies that favored the status quo. But over the last year, the pro-reform forces seemed to have momentum on their side. The House of Representatives has already passed companion legislation, and President Obama is also on board. So Senate approval was the last major roadblock.
But a little after noon, insiders were caught off guard by an email from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announcing that he was shelving the legislation. While he expressed the hope that the legislation might be brought up again later in the year, the chances of Congress passing patent reform this year are starting to look bleak.
Who killed patent reform? And what does that mean for the future of the patent system? Read on to find out.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT). (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
In his Wednesday statement, Leahy wrote that he "needed broad bipartisan support to get a bill through the Senate." Unfortunately, he said, "competing companies on both sides of this issue refused to come to agreement," so Leahy chose to shelve the bill rather than take the risk of introducing a bill that might pass the House Judiciary Committee narrowly — or not at all.
Republican supporters of the legislation immediately blamed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). "This is the third time in three weeks the majority leader has blocked legislation with bipartisan support in the Senate," said Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) blamed "the Senate Democrat leadership" for the holdup.
Sen. Reid's office didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, but my own reporting confirms that pressure from Reid was a factor in Leahy's decision to shelve the bill. Senate leaders prefer legislation that is supported by the majority of their own caucus, and Leahy was struggling to get support from a majority of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. If Leahy had been forced to rely heavily on Republicans to get his bill out of committee, it would have put Reid in the awkward position of putting forward legislation that a majority of his own party might not support.
Sen. John Cornyn, left, with his fellow Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. (Ron T. Ennis/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT via Getty Images)
There were dozens of industry groups lobbying on both sides of the bill, so no single group was wholly responsible. But several sources said that one of the most influential groups was trial lawyers, who have long been political allies of Democrats in general and Sen. Reid in particular.
Trial lawyers' groups were worried about setting a precedent that would make it easier to enact loser-pays rules for other types of litigation
Trial lawyers were concerned about a provision that would allow a defendant who defeats a frivolous patent lawsuit to recover their legal costs from defendants. This kind of "loser-pays" rule has long been popular with Republicans and their allies in the business community, but is vehemently opposed by trial lawyers.
Leahy's legislation only applied the loser-pays rule to patent litigation, so it wouldn't have directly affected non-patent trial attorneys. But trial lawyers' groups were worried about setting a precedent that would make it easier to enact loser-pays rules for other types of litigation in the future. So they lobbied their Democratic allies to oppose the provision. (The American Association for Justice, the leading trial lawyers' group, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Of course, partisan polarization over this issue cut both ways. Republicans, led by Sen. Cornyn, saw the loser-pays provision as one of the best features of the patent reform package. Stripping the language out would not only have reduced the bill's effectiveness as a troll-fighting measure, it also could have undermined Republican support for the legislation.
The Berkeley campus of University of California, which once partnered with the patent troll Eolas to sue major internet companies. Universities have been a key opponent of patent reform. (Jay Cross)
Another influential group was pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. These groups benefit from strong patent protections and they've traditionally been resistant to legislation that weakens patent rights. They have close ties to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
Universities were also influential critics of the reform legislation. Universities are generally not defined as patent trolls, but some universities engage in patent-monetization behaviors that aren't so different from those of a classic patent troll. So legislation to rein in patent trolls could also reduce university licensing revenues.
It's notable who wasn't lobbying against the legislation: large, patent-rich technology companies such as Microsoft and IBM. These companies lobbied hard against a proposal to expand a patent office program to invalidate more low-quality software patents. But by this week, Senate negotiators had agreed to drop this provision, helping to unify the technology sector behind the emerging Senate proposal.
The details were still under negotiations, but provisions that were expected to make it into the final proposal included:
No. Some of the most important reforms were not going to be included. In particular, there were no provisions to invalidate low-quality patents, which many people see as the root cause of the patent crisis.
But it would have been an important step toward reining in abusive troll litigation.
Sen. Leahy says he "hopes we are able to return to this issue this year." But the odds of that happening don't look good.
Patent reform supporters have been pushing for action by the Senate since the beginning of the year. Sen. Leahy had originally scheduled a markup on the legislation for March, but had to repeatedly push the vote back to give negotiators more time to reach an agreement.
Yet that effort failed to reach a consensus. It's hard to imagine we'll get a better outcome later in the year, when there's less momentum and Senators are closer to election day.
President Barack Obama. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
This seems like a case where more active involvement from the president could be beneficial.
As my colleague Ezra Klein has noted, the president isn't omnipotent. Many of the president's legislative proposals have failed because House Republicans have refused to act on them, and there isn't much Obama can do to change their mind.
But the patent debate isn't like that. House Republicans have already enacted patent reform that contains several items on the White House wish list. And the package Leahy was putting together also has enough Republican supporters in the Senate to make a filibuster unlikely. The big problem seems to have been difficulty getting Senate Democrats to sign on. And the president should be able to persuade Senators from his own party to support White House legislative priorities.
White House spokesman Bobby Whithorne says that "the President has clearly stated that abusive patent litigation is a needless drag on our economy, and demands action. We are hopeful that all stakeholders will continue to work together to build the patent system that our innovators and our country deserve."
But if the president views patent reform as a priority, he might want to do more to encourage Democratic senators to sign on, despite the concerns of the patent bar.
The peculiar parking habits of Steve Jobs are quite legendary. Seeing his license-plate-free Mercedes parked in the handicapped stall of Apple HQ was a seemingly regular occurrence. So much so, in fact, that visitors treated it as a photo op....
Andrewscary
Do you really know how your various friends, relations, acquaintances, and hangers-on plan to use your Internet connection when they drop by and ask for "the Wi-Fi password"? Unlikely—and yet anything that they do illegally through your home network can bring cops to your door with search warrants, asking tough questions about child pornography.
Case in point: Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Local police in Marin communities like Novato are members of the regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, and as such they participate in the common law enforcement practice of monitoring peer-to-peer file-sharing networks for possible child pornography files. In September 2013, Novato detective Amy Yardley was looking for such files being traded from Marin County IP addresses, and she scored a hit on the Ares network with a suspicious file downloaded by a Sausalito Internet subscriber.
Yardley passed the tip to the Sausalito Police Department, where detective Brian Mather obtained a search warrant for the subscriber's address. He showed up at the house with a search team but couldn't find any child pornography within. The home's residents, no doubt unnerved by both the search and the charge behind it, pleaded their innocence and gave Mather a complete list of all houseguests who had used their wireless network in recent months.
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The Warthog may live to fly another day—or another year, for that matter. The A-10 Thunderbolt II, the venerable Cold War era attack plane built by the now-defunct Fairchild Aerospace Corporation, has fans in Congress pushing for its continued funding despite the threat of a presidential veto of the entire Department of Defense budget.
As part of its budget plans for 2015, the Air Force had planned to retire its entire fleet of A-10 attack planes. But the Senate Armed Services Committee appears poised to throw a monkey wrench into that strategy, which was aimed at freeing money to boost spending on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.
On May 20, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, told reporters that he and a group of other Armed Services committee members have found a way to move hundreds of millions of dollars from other parts of the Air Force’s budget to keep A-10s flying. Levin said that the budgetary moves stayed within the total budget presented by the Department of Defense and did not pull from the Pentagon’s overseas contingency operations funding.
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Car companies are on pace to issue a record number of safety recalls for US vehicles this year.
It's only May, but automakers have recalled 22.3 million vehicles in the United States. That's already more than last year — and it's on pace to shatter the previous record set in 2000:
The biggest story here — by far — is General Motors, which has already recalled 13.6 million vehicles in the United States this year (and 15.4 million cars globally).
GM has recalled more cars this year than it sold last year
That means GM has now recalled more cars for safety problems this year than it sold all last year (9.7 million).
The problems began earlier this year, when GM recalled 2.6 million vehicles over a faulty ignition switch that has been linked to at least 32 crashes and 13 deaths since 2006. The company quickly faced a congressional investigation and criminal probe for not recalling the vehicles earlier. This month, GM was fined $35 million by regulators for not recalling the vehicles sooner — the maximum possible penalty.
That crackdown, in turn, seems to have made GM even quicker to recall other vehicles for unrelated problems, no matter how serious. On May 20, the company recalled another 2.4 million vehicles because of potential flaws in cables and plastic clips.
That's not cheap — when an auto company recalls a vehicle model, it promises to pay to fix the problem (and, at times, loan replacement cars to the owners during repairs). GM is already planning to take a $1.7 billion loss on recalls so far this year.
And GM's problems seem to have spurred other companies to issue their own recalls this year: There was a big April 9 recall by Toyota, which called back 1.8 million US vehicles over problems with airbags and seat rails. Plus Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, and Honda.
Automakers typically recall cars or trucks when they've identified a defect that could jeopardize public safety.
The decision to recall a vehicle isn't always clear-cut
That's not always a simple decision, though. Many problems are obvious hazards — like faulty airbags. Other defects, however, are less clear-cut. What if a car has windshield wipers that, under very rare conditions, might become improperly torqued? (Toyota faced this situation last year.) Should the company issue a costly recall? Or let it slide?
Different automakers make different calculations in those close-call situations. But since the 1990s, a growing number of companies have been erring on the side of issuing a recall — even for seemingly minor problems.
Here's a chart showing that recall campaigns have been rising since 1990 (though, as the chart above shows, the actual number of vehicles affected by each campaign can vary):
One reason: the federal TREAD Act, passed in 2000, requires automakers to promptly alert regulators about any potential problems rather than waiting for customer complaints. (Most recalls are voluntary, though an increasing number are initiated by regulators.)
Another factor: in recent years, US regulators have been more assertive about treating car safety issues as potential criminal matters. In March 2014, Toyota had to pay $1.2 billion to the Justice Department after allegedly concealing evidence about a deadly unintended-acceleration problem in its vehicles. And GM is facing its own criminal probes.
Those crackdowns may have helped spur the recent recall frenzy. "Given the sensitivity around auto safety in the last five years, it should be no surprise that we see as many recalls as we do today," Jessica Caldwell, an analyst at Edmunds.com, noted back in April.
Toyota recalled 650,000 Toyota Prius hybrids in 2010 to repair cooling pumps that could fail and cause the vehicle to overheat and lose power. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Another question is whether auto recalls are increasing because the cars themselves are becoming more unreliable.
Automakers are trying to cut costs by using the same parts for different car models
At first glance, this seems unlikely. After all, consumer surveys from J.D. Power and Associates have found that US cars actually became more dependable between 1998 and 2012.
But there are subtle twists that might affect the number of recalls. In an April interview, Karl Brauer, a senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book, pointed out that auto companies have been trying to cut costs in recent years by using the same parts across multiple vehicles.
The downside? If a particular part is faulty, then the problem will affect many more models. After Toyota had to recall 5.3 million vehicles in 2013, it blamed the fact that a single defective part had been used in a number of different popular models. And, in 2013, the same defective airbag used by BMW, GM, and Toyota forced all three automakers to issue recalls.
Ford announced the recall of over 400,000 2013 models of cars and SUVs, including the Fusion, Escape and Taurus models for a possible fuel tank leak that could cause fires. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
Here's another important fact about recalls: they're never perfect. Usually, auto makers send out a recall notice to car dealerships and hope that about 70 percent of drivers bring in their vehicles for repairs. 70 percent is considered a good rate, analysts say.
one-third of recalled cars never get fixed
Why only 70 percent? Plenty of drivers never hear about the recall in the first place — especially if they've bought the car second- or third-hand. (The notice often goes to the original owner.) And other drivers can't be bothered to bring their car in for repairs. "Usually about one-third of cars will never get addressed," says Brauer.
That's one reason why it was a big deal that GM waited so long to recall its vehicles over the faulty ignition switch — as the years go by, people sell or trade in their defective cars and it becomes much harder for companies to identify the owners. (GM, for its part, says that it's currently poring through registration data to try to find and notify as many owners as possible.)
Further reading: Popular Mechanics has a nice list of the five most notorious car recall campaigns of all time.
People generally like Google and Netflix and they generally really, really hate their ISP. However, The Hill reports that Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) would like to correct your thinking: You see, it's broadband companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable who are the real innovative producers out there while the content-producing companies are "free-riding" moochers.
If you talked to me seven years ago, the concept of phone games beyond Snake and basic flash games would've been beyond me. That wasn’t really on my mind, especially because playing games like Battlefield 2 effectively required a desktop. I did try it on a Dell XPS M170, with an Nvidia 7800 GTX graphics card, 1 GB of RAM, and a Pentium M processor, but even then, it was no guarantee that it would load the game consistently. Crashes to desktop were common because of the RAM requirements, and hitting the page file would cause frustrating freezes. Of course, things have completely changed since then. Mobile became one of the fastest growing sectors in the tech industry, 40-60mm thick, 14 pound laptops were no longer necessary to play games at acceptable IQ/FPS levels, and the slate-style smartphone has gone from distant curiosity to everyday necessity.
So the port of Half-Life 2 and Portal to the Shield was interesting, because I’ve seen the sheer breadth of experiences that Source can provide, from Resistance and Liberation to Nightmare House 2. Nvidia has stated that Half Life 2 on Android is a port of the Linux version with OpenGL support to OpenGL ES, and based upon a casual playthrough of both Half Life 2 and Portal, it’s not immediately obvious that there are any issues with the engine port itself. In fact, it runs quite well. When immersed in playing the game, the experience is incredible, especially compared to the experience that one usually gets on handheld consoles like the PS Vita and 3DS. While I was concerned that the control scheme would be difficult to adapt to as a PC gamer, it turns out that with auto-aim and some other compensation mechanisms that gameplay is perfectly workable. The one issue that I did have was targeting things like headcrabs in mid-air, as pixel-precise pointing still isn’t quite there for joystick control systems. Battery life was also great. I managed to go around four hours of nonstop gaming at a mid-level of brightness, although this is an extremely rough rule and can vary greatly. I hope to get more precise data on this soon.
Of course, the bigger question is how well it actually performs. While timedemo functionality can’t be accessed, video settings are locked out, and there’s no console access like in the PC versions, it’s still possible to gauge the approximate experience. Based upon a quick playthrough of Ravenholm, I managed to take a closer look at the FPS instead of relying purely upon subjective judgment. It turns out that there’s a pretty even distribution of FPS across the board from 20 FPS to 60 FPS. The median FPS was 43, and overall I’d say that it’s quite accurate, as in less intensive scenes it will stay capped at 60 but anything with effects such as fire and explosions will often cause the gameplay to stutter noticeably, as in the scene above. Portal was similar, but due to the relatively simple level design FPS remained higher in general. Overall, it appears that the CPU usually is only at around 50% utilization throughout the game, which is indicative that either the GPU is the limiting factor in performance of this game or that the engine is not well-threaded for the port. There was the possibility of thermal throttling, but unlikely because exhaust air temperatures weren’t hot enough for concern. Unfortunately, no data on battery voltage nor temperature is given by the Shield. Ultimately, while this is helpful information for someone that wants to buy the game, the real question is how well IQ and performance compare to PCs, and will require further investigation to get a rough idea of how well modern ARM SoCs compare with CPUs and GPUs from the 65-90nm era.
By most accounts, Microsoft was supposed to announce an 8-inch Surface Mini tablet yesterday. This gadget, which would reportedly have used a Qualcomm chip and slotted in below the Surface 2 in Microsoft's tablet lineup, was apparently shelved at the last minute. Most of the outlets that predicted that tablet was coming have since posted a number of different explanations to explain its absence.
Whatever the reason, the upshot is that we have no small Surface tablet. This leaves Windows users who want a smaller device a few different options: they can pick something from one of Microsoft's OEM partners, like the generally solid Lenovo Thinkpad 8 or Dell Venue 8 Pro. But those tablets don't have the third-party app ecosystems that iOS and Android sport, and the benefit of the Windows desktop on a computer with such a small display is dubious at best.
If you want a small-screened tablet with robust third-party application ecosystem, a touch-enabled version of Office, and the ability to connect to and use most of Microsoft's services, your way forward is clear: you should get an iPad mini.
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Look around you. If you work in an office, you're probably surrounded by cubicles, filing cabinets, florescent lights, and the many other mundane designs of the modern office environment.
But the cubicle — and the rest of these inventions — have a history that's more interesting than you might imagine.
Nikil Saval, an editor at the literary magazine n+1, recently explored this history in the book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. Here, he discusses a few of the most interesting origin stories he uncovered.
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(Shutterstock.com)
"The cubicle was actually intended to be this liberating design, and it basically became perverted," Saval says.
As he writes, its origins lie in the creations of Robert Propst, a designer at the Herman Miller company in the 1950s and 60s. "Propst tried to come up with an individualized, autonomous space for workers that was flexible, that could be changed if circumstances in the office changed. The design he eventually came up with and debuted in 1964 was called Action Office: it was three-walled, obtusely angled, fabric-wrapped wood. The idea was that you could shape it to whatever sort of setup you needed — it was never meant to be stuck in place."
At the time, these adjustable, independent units, equipped with both sitting and standing desks, were a forward-thinking way of upending the traditional office — in which lower-level workers were packed together in a bull pen, and surrounded by executives with private rooms. "But soon, the Action Office became popular and widely copied, and it became clear that managers saw it as a really useful tool for cramming as many people into as little space as possible," Saval says. "And that’s when it became more like a box."
It wasn't merely these boxes' unintended rigidity, though, that led to them becoming so detested. "In the 1980s and early '90s, the recession was especially harsh on white collar workers, and cut into their ranks. Layoffs became common, and there was a rapid increase in mergers, and you had workers emerging from them and being thrown into cubicles," Saval says. "So the cubicle became the symbol of the transforming workplace — of impermanence and the disposability of workers."
H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images
"We assume that some aspects of work, like vertical filing cabinets, are just a given — but it actually took several tries for people to come it that as a more efficient form of filing," Saval says.
The earliest filing cabinets, from the 1880s, were large, wooden structures that held horizontal stacks of files in drawers. Even these were revolutionary in the way that they made files accessible — previously, Saval writes, they were just folded or rolled up and stuck in desk pigeonholes.
But the idea of organizing files vertically in cabinets, which came about around the start of the 20th century, made records even more accessible — and unleashed the flood of paperwork that would come to define the modern American office. "This was connected to a larger craze of efficiency in America — Taylorism, and things like that," Saval says. "People were finding better ways to sort more and more paperwork. Offices became, basically, an enormous file."
Interestingly, as more and more offices were housed in skyscrapers, the flammability of wooden cabinets stuffed with paper became a concern, so they were replaced with metal. "So the file cabinet, in a way, mimicked the form of the skyscraper," Saval says.
Neither AC nor fluorescent lighting were specifically invented for offices — but they were both essential for the ubiquitous, glass-covered skyscrapers that now fill American downtowns with office workers.
Early skyscrapers required central courtyards to let in light and air, the expense of lighting meant that floor sizes were generally capped by the distance natural light could travel from windows. AC and cheap fluorescent lighting lifted these constraints. "They permit these giant floor plans in huge glass skyscrapers, which let in tons of light and have to be powerfully cooled," Saval says.
In 1952, the UN Secretariat Building in New York was completed. The next ten years, Saval writes, saw a wave of glass imitators sprout up across America's largest cities — over that period, the average office's floor space doubled, as did the total number of American white-collar workers. Air conditioning kept these large-scale offices (packed with hundreds of human bodies) at frosty temperatures, and fluorescent lights shined over the workers seated far from exterior windows.
"The giant glass skyscraper is a symbol of postwar US prosperity, and it was made possible by these advances," Saval says.
Ulrich Baumgarten via Getty Images
Nowadays, open offices may seem like a relatively modern concept, part of the backlash against cubicle farms. But "one interesting thing to note is that it’s not a new idea — it was really invented in Germany, in the late '50s and early '60s, they called it the office landscape," Saval says. "The idea was that you eliminate hierarchies, and barriers to communication, and create workplaces that allow flow of communication and paperwork."
Like the original cubicle, the initial concept of Bürolandschaft — which translates as "office landscape" — was strikingly different than the open offices popular today. Instead of orderly rows, desks were arranged in organic clusters, and all workers, whether entry-level or executives, had roughly equivalent amounts of window access.
The idea didn't end up taking off in Europe — where unions and working agreements often give workers a say in office design — but has become widely implemented un the US, if in an altered form. Despite the lofty ideals behind the open office concept, it's generally used for one key reason: "they’re often about real-estate costs, and making it cheaper to have more people in less space," Saval says.
The problem is that research has never supported the idea that open offices achieve any of the benefits their German inventors envisioned. "Human psychology studies show pretty definitively that they’re really bad, in terms of distraction," Saval says. "Psychologically, they’re more stressful — they have all the problems of cubicles, but compound them with visual distractions."
Although standing desks were used by a number of idiosyncratic thinkers throughout history, their place in modern office furniture, it turns out, can also be traced to Robert Propst and the 1964 Action Office.
"The idea was to let workers move positions," Saval says. "Early designs by other scientific management experts also emphasize the ability to move, and stand up, for workers. In the language of the time, they said that otherwise, 'toxins' would build up in them. And this isn’t scientifically accurate, but it’s basically sound in terms of health as a whole."
It's taken a while, but standing desks appear to be finally taking off — and Saval thinks that giving office workers the choice to stand is a pretty good idea, for the health benefits and other reasons. "The standing desk is one of the few office fads that I am hard pressed to criticize. Sitting is bad," he says. "I can be pretty grumpy about all this stuff, but I think these desks are good."
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
In Cubed, Saval also looks at recent trends in the evolution of the office, and visited several tech campuses — including Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, where, he writes, "you not only get free food all day and the gym anytime you want but also have day care, on-campus health and dental service, a resistance pool, and the ability to get your oil changed."
Saval's not the first to observe that all these utopian amenities hide something mundane: the company's desire to keep its workers there for as many hours as possible. "It's odd," he says. "In a way, they’re the most admired workplaces, yet they’re less exceptional in the way that a lot of them place a huge emphasis on having workers there. That seems to run against what people perceive as the trend, that you can work anywhere."
Like other observers, Saval is also critical of the way these inward-looking campuses, filled with workers shuttled in and out from cities miles away, fail to interact at all with the surrounding areas.
"The cities that are actually around the campuses have not developed, because they’re not designed to support communities around them," he says. "A really egregious example is the new Apple campus, called Apple II, that Norman Foster designed. It’s deplorable. You have a giant disk that occupies a wooded park that’s just for the workers, no one else."
Joseph Stromberg: What made you decide to write this book?
Nikil Saval: Right out of college, I had a series of office jobs, in publishing houses, working for a private equity firm, and a string of other odd jobs. And by moving place to place, and comparing the culture, and design — it put all these ideas in my head, and made me begin informal research into the area, wondering if there was a good history overview of this topic.
And that mainly led me nowhere. Everything on the topic was segmented, and each specialization neglected something I thought was important, whether it was architectural history, or management theory, or whatever.
So I stumbled into writing about the history of the cubicle in particular. It was actually intended to be this liberating design, and it basically became perverted. And that story seemed to be paradigmatic. When people talk about offices, they talk about it as a place — "my stupid cubicle" — referring to the design, but it’s really a way of talking about the work. So I began to see this story about the office, through the way people regard it as a place. And no one had really done that.
Joseph Stromberg: So what happened with the cubicle in particular?
Nikil Saval: The origins lie in the design and thinking of this guy Robert Propst, who worked at the Herman Miller furniture company. The office he confronted is one you might be familiar with from "Mad Men" — it’s an office that’s constructed around the hierarchy of power, and prestige. You’d have a steno pool in the center, organized kind of like a factory of paperwork, with rows, meant to mimic an assembly line. And then around the corridor you’d have the middle managers and executives, awarded based on one’s level in the company.
Propst thought this was great at reflecting hierarchy, but not so great at reflecting the work that people actually do. So in response, Propst tried to come up with an individualized, autonomous space for workers that was flexible, that could be changed if circumstances in the office changed. The design he eventually came up with and debuted in 1964 was called "action office": it was three-walled, obtusely angled, fabric-wrapped wood. The idea was that you could shape it to whatever sort of setup you needed — it was never meant to be stuck in place.
Even at the time, other designers thought there was something inhuman about the setup, but Propst didn’t think so, he thought it was liberatory. And soon, it became popular and widely copied, and it was really during the copying that it became clear that managers saw it as a really useful tool for cramming as many people into as little space as possible. And that’s when it became more like a box.
But the thing to remember is that you can do any kind of work inside a cubicle. I think what actually made the cubicle so reviled is the way work changed in the American economy in the 1980s and early 90s. The recession was especially harsh on white collar workers, and cut into their ranks. Layoffs became common, and there was a rapid increase in mergers, and you had workers emerging from them and being thrown into cubicles. So the cubicle became the symbol of the transforming workplace — of impermanence, and the disposability of workers
So the thing isn’t necessarily that cubicles are bad — even though, in design terms, they’re not great — but that they seem to be symptoms of an arbitrary and callous workplace.
Joseph Stromberg: You wrote about this sort of unexpected history for a number of objects that became staples of the modern-day office — what were some of the backstories that surprised you most?
Nikil Saval:Well, the filing cabinet is interesting. We assume that some aspects of work, like vertical filing cabinets, are just a given — but it actually took several tries for people to come to it as a more efficient form of filing. And this was connected to a larger craze of efficiency in America — Taylorism, and things like that. People were finding better ways to sort more and more paperwork. Offices became, basically, an enormous file. So the filing cabinet was both efficient, but also symbolic. Many of them were made by Steelcase, which was instrumental in creating metal furniture for skyscrapers, and skyscrapers needed metal furniture because they were fire hazards. But the file cabinet, in a way, mimicked the form of the skyscraper. So in a way, the file cabinet is a symbol of the workplace as an efficient bureaucracy.
Air-conditioning and fluorescent lights, which go hand-in-hand, are also interesting. They permit these giant floor plans in huge glass skyscrapers, which they let in tons of light and have to be powerfully cooled. In a way, the giant glass skyscraper is a symbol of postwar US prosperity, and it’s made possible by these advances. Now, we see that they’re not the most sustainable — they use a huge amount of energy — but they made big offices possible and scalable.
Joseph Stromberg: What about the more recent backlash against cubicles, and the move to open offices? How did that come to happen, and what do you think of it?
Nikil Saval: Well one interesting thing to note is that it’s not a new idea — it was really invented in Germany, in the late 50s and early 60s, they called it the office landscape. The idea was that you eliminate hierarchies, and barriers to communication, and create workplaces that allow flow of communication and paperwork. You had these workplaces that were, in theory, purely based on work. These were successful in the UK and America, but actually unsuccessful in Europe — because many workers had protections, from unions or works counsels, that passed laws to ensure that workers could determine how workspaces were designed, alongside management.
But US embarked on the open plan, which originally had somewhat admirable intentions: collaboration, and openness, and transparency. But really, they’re often about real-estate costs, and making it cheaper to have more people in less space.
Human psychology studies show pretty definitively that they’re really bad, in terms of distraction. Psychologically, they’re more stressful — they have all the problems of cubicles, but compound them with visual distractions.
So in both instances, you see a pseudo-utopian idea imposed on workers, regardless of their needs when it comes to work.
Joseph Stromberg: So if you were designing an ideal office, what would it look like?
Nikil Saval:Well, I’m hesitant to propose something and sound like a consultant, but the thing I think is that workplaces are best when workers have some say, or control, of how they look and what they do. One example would be an ability to control whether you actually need to be in the office to work. And in general, offices that are better accommodate multiple kinds of work — they have common areas, where you can have meetings, but have other areas that are conducive to private work.
So it’s best when there are different areas and people can decide their day. In the Netherlands, for example, there are some workplaces where you’re allowed to work where you want, and when you want. I’m not a huge fan of Silicon Valley offices overall, but because there’s more of a need to cater to workers, they do reflect this a bit. There’s more mobility.
Joseph Stromberg:What are your criticisms of these Silicon Valley tech campuses, and what they represent about the future of workplaces?
Nikil Saval:They’re odd. In a way, they’re the most admired workplaces, yet they’re less exception in the way that a lot of them place a huge emphasis on having workers there. That seems to run against what people perceive as the trend, that you can work from anywhere.
Also — and I’m certainly not the first to notice this — these workplaces segregate all the functions that one might find in a city inside an office campus. So it’s very odd: there are these suburban campuses, and they’re like miniature cities. Workers commute to them from actual cities, like San Francisco.
And the cities that are actually around the campuses have not developed, because they’re not designed to support communities around them. So it’s kind of explosive, it’s not a great situation. This doesn’t explain all the tension in San Francisco around gentrification, but it’s part of this, this enclave culture.
They’re best when they open up to the area around them, and they’re not so hermetic and don’t occupy tons of land. A really egregious example is the new Apple campus, called Apple II, that Norman Foster designed. It’s deplorable. You have a giant disk that occupies a wooded park that’s just for the workers, no one else. These enclaves are not a good model.
Joseph Stromberg:This is kinda random, but another recent trend I’m interested in is standing desks — can you tell me a bit about the history of them?
Nikil Saval:The first design for the Action Office, that Robert Propst came up with, actually included a standing desk. The idea was to let workers move positions. And early designs by other scientific management experts, they emphasize the ability to move, and stand up, for workers. In the language of the time, they said that otherwise, "toxins" would build up in them. And this isn’t scientifically accurate, but it’s basically sound in terms of health as a whole.
I think the standing desk is one of the few office fads that I am hard pressed to criticize. Sitting is bad. So I can be pretty grumpy about all this stuff, but I think these desks are good.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
ConcertHotels.com — a business which does exactly what you'd think it does — had the clever idea to take Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest singers of all time, combine them with some current favorites like Taylor Swift and Adele, and see how their vocal ranges stacked up (or, at least, their vocal ranges for their recorded output). A lot of the results aren't too surprising (Barry White, it turns out, could sing very low notes indeed!) but I'm somewhat surprised that no singer even comes close to matching Mariah Carey's highs; I imagine a graph that included Ariana Grande would show less of a blowout. You can see ConcertHotels' interactive version, which shows the actual songs where the singers' hit their highs and lows, here.
Presidents consistently overpromise and underdeliver. What they need to say to get elected far outpaces what they can actually do in office. President Obama is a perfect example. His 2008 campaign didn't just promise health-care reform, a stimulus bill, and financial regulation. It also promised a cap-and-trade bill to limit carbon emissions, comprehensive immigration reform, gun control, and much more. His presidency, he said, would be change American could believe in. But it's clear now that much of the change he promised isn't going to happen — in large part because he doesn't have the power to make it happen.
Why can't the president be more like the Green Lantern?
You would think voters in general and professional media pundits in particular would, by now, be wise to this pattern. But they're not. Each disappointment wounds anew. Each unchecked item on the to-do list is a surprise. Belief in the presidency seems to be entirely robust to the inability of any particular president to make good on their promises. And so the criticism is always the same: why can't the president be more like the Green Lantern?
According to Brendan Nyhan, the Dartmouth political scientist who coined the term, the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency is "the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics." In other words, the American president is functionally all-powerful, and whenever he can't get something done, it's because he's not trying hard enough, or not trying smart enough.
Nyhan further separates it into two variants: "the Reagan version of the Green Lantern Theory and the LBJ version of the Green Lantern Theory." The Reagan version, he says, holds that "if you only communicate well enough the public will rally to your side." The LBJ version says that "if the president only tried harder to win over congress they would vote through his legislative agenda." In both cases, Nyhan argues, "we've been sold a false bill of goods."
The Green Lantern Corps is a fictional, intergalactic peacekeeping entity that exists in DC comics. Members of the Corps get a power ring that capable of creating green energy projections of almost unlimited power. The only constraint is the willpower and imagination of the ring's wearer. There was a long period of time when the ring was ineffective against the color yellow but in more recent comics that's just "the Parallax fear anomaly" at work and with enough courage and willpower, the ring works just fine against the color yellow.
In 2006, Vox executive editor (and then-TPM Cafe blogger) Matthew Yglesias, responding to an argument for bombing Iran, coined the term "The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics".
A lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.
What's more, this theory can't be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them.
In 2009, Nyhan, commenting on an argument Yglesias was having with the writer Matt Taibbi, extended the idea to arguments in "which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will."
That's the literal answer, anyway. The more philosophical answer is that comics, primarily out of the Marvel and DC universes, increasingly serve as a kind of shared American mythology and so writers turn to them as vehicles for communicating abstract ideas.
Basically, it denies the very real (and very important) limits on the power of the American presidency, as well as reduces Congress to a coquettish collection of passive actors who are mostly just playing hard to get.
The Founding Fathers were rebelling against an out-of-control monarch
The Founding Fathers were rebelling against an out-of-control monarch. So they constructed a political system with a powerful legislature and a relatively weak executive. The result is that the US President has little formal power to make Congress do anything. He can't force Congress to vote on a bill. He can't force Congress to pass a bill. And even if he vetoes a bill Congress can simply overturn his veto. So in direct confrontations with Congress — and that describes much of American politics these days — the president has few options.
Green Lantern theorists don't deny any of this. They just believe that there's some vague combination of public speeches and private wheedling that the president can employ to bend Congress to his will. Ron Fournier, a prominent Green Lantern theorist, offers a fairly typical prescription for presidential success:
He could talk to the media and the public more often with a more compelling and sustained message. He could build enduring relationships in Washington rather than being so blatantly transactional with his time. He could work harder, and with more empathy, on Capitol Hill to find "win-win" opportunities with Republicans.
The problem with this is that the Green Lantern Theory isn't just false. It's often backwards. The basic idea is that more aggressive and consistent applications of presidential power will break down opposition. But political science research shows the truth is often just the opposite.
When the president takes a position on an issue the opposing party becomes far more likely to take the opposite position. In a clever study, political scientist Frances Lee proved this by looking at noncontroversial issues, like whether NASA should try and send a man to Mars. She built a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. Typically, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time. But but when the President took a clear position the likelihood of a party-line vote rose to more than half. In other words, when the president pushed on an issue the opposition party became more likely to oppose him.
The reason is simple: elections are zero-sum affairs. The more the American people perceive the president as successful the less likely they are to vote for the opposition in the next election. "If you're cooperating then it suggests to the public that things are working just fine," explains Lee. "And it undercuts the whole logic of your campaign against the president or the president's party's continuation in office."
The Green Lantern Theory also infantilizes Congress. Take this Maureen Dowd column in which she argues that it's actually the president's job to force Congress to behave, as if the most powerful and democratic branch of the American government is just a bunch of petulant children waiting for discipline:
It is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It's called leadership.
This kind of thing both lets Congress off the hook and confuses Americans about where the power actually lies in American politics — and thus about who to hold accountable.
LBJ, congressional superhero. (CBS via Getty Images)
What about him? "The LBJ story misses the fact that he had huge majorities in congress at the time he was passing most of his legislation," says Nyhan. "He was benefitting politically from Kennedy's assassination. And the public was unusually supportive of government involvement at that time. If we attribute all those successes to arm twisting then LBJ looks all powerful."
The other problem is that the Washington of the 1960s bears little resemblance to the Washington of 2014. As you can see on this graph of party polarization in Congress, the 1960s were a low ebb:
This was a period in which the Democratic Party contained hardcore conservatives and the Republican Party was thick with Northern liberals. There was so little enmity between the two parties that in 1950, the American Political Science Association's Committee on Political Parties released a report calling on the two parties to sharpen their disagreements so that the American people had a clearer choice when casting their ballots.
Political scientists thought the problem in American politics was that the two parties didn't fight enough
Think about that for a second: political scientists thought the problem in American politics was that the two parties didn't fight enough. Can you imagine anyone, anywhere saying that about American politics today?
The middle of the 20th Century was a strange historical moment in which segregation scrambled the American political system. Now that it's over the parties are at war and the minority party knows that their political success is inextricably tied up in the majority party's failure.
It's also the case that many of the tools that presidents and congressional leaders once used to buy votes are no longer available. As Elizabeth Drew writes:
Party discipline has collapsed and even if Obama could promise John Boehner to make his mostly small-town Ohio district into the new Byzantium, Boehner wouldn't be able to extract one more vote from the Republican caucus. Moreover, "earmarks" have been virtually banned on Capitol Hill, denuding senior members of Congress as well as the president of influence they used to have. Budget restrictions and a more vigilant press have made horse-trading almost a thing of the past-or at least far more risky. There's strong reason to doubt that even the mythical LBJ could get a civil rights bill through Congress today.
Finally, there's the simple fact that because the parties have polarized so much and because Republicans and Democrats tend to represent such safe districts it often hurts members of the opposition party to cooperate with the president. Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's constituents — both in their home states and in Congress — don't want to see them cutting deals with a liberal Democratic president. If they begin cooperating with Obama too often they'll face primary challengers and threats to their leadership positions. This is part of the way the Green Lantern Theory infantilizes Congress. Members of Congress are skilled politicians who understand their political incentives and ideological aims perfectly well. The idea that they're just waiting to be more wined-and-dined by the president is silly.
One reason is that even as the US executive is structurally weak he's perceptually strong. "The heroic narrative of the presidency dominates media coverage," Nyhan says. It also dominates culture. Fictional representations of Washington like the West Wing tend to feature powerful presidents and weak, corrupt congressmen. They also tend to emphasize the power of stirring speeches, as stirring speeches work great on television. Both in fiction and in reporting American politics is a drama that is told through the character of the president and so it's natural that people tend to see American politics as a function of the president's action.
The heroic narrative of the presidency dominates media coverage
Another reason that Green Lantern theories have been so prevalent in recent years might be that people's perceptions of the president's power were reset during the Bush years. "I think the post-9/11 experience gave people unrealistic expectations," says Nyhan. "It was a very unusual time and people thought that was the norm. It's not often you have both parties lined up behind a president who has approval ratings in the 80s. But I think a lot of people's internal compass was reset by that in a misleading way."
Congress tends to give the president a fair amount of authority over foreign policy, particularly when it comes to war (though even those powers are on loan: it's Congress that declares and finances war). But even in the Bush years, the limits on the president's power were evident: his efforts to privatize Social Security and reform immigration came to naught, for instance, despite an incredibly aggressive push by Bush himself.
Another way you know the president is not the Green Lantern: the Green Lantern could totally beat Spiderman. Particularly a child Spiderman. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
For what? Not doing things he doesn't have the power to do?
Obama can do a good or bad job within the actual limits of the presidency. The problem with the Green Lantern Theory is that it focuses so much attention on the presidency that it lets everyone else off the hook — and thus makes it harder for voters to hold elected leaders accountable. Outcomes that are actually being driven by Congress, for instance, get attributed to the president, and voters don't know who to blame.
There's plenty meanwhile that is actually up to the president. The Obama administration, for instance, was in charge of implementing Obamacare and they botched it badly. They have a lot of power to set sweeping limits on carbon emissions from power plants and there are real questions as to how they'll use it. They clearly have more power than they've chosen to exercise over the pace of deportations. They now have the ability to push both executive and judicial nominees through the Senate and so the continued slow pace of nominations is on them. The Treasury Department left a lot of money earmarked for helping homeowners languishing in a bank account. Even people without magical power rings can be very powerful:
The executive branch is a big and powerful that manages programs of enormous consequence to Americans — and it's often run quite poorly. That's something the president really should answer for. But political reporting in America tends to focus more on new laws that are being pushed through congress than on the implementation of existing government programs. That's a process the president is involved in, but not one, contrary to how Green Lantern theorists portray it, that the president can ultimately control.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AndrewHere ya go, Tom.
The Flash is coming to CW this fall, and a first good look at the new superhero series has just premiered online in the form of an over five-minute-long trailer. The show appears to start as a fairly standard origin story, and while it definitely taps into some comic book clichés, it also appears to be willing to have a little fun — which is perhaps a good thing for an extended television series.
Though it won't be airing until fall, The Flash, as his alter ego Barry Allen, has already appeared briefly in CW's other DC Comics superhero series, Arrow. The Flash will be a casual spinoff in that sense, and from this new series' trailer, it looks like there will continue to be a big crossover between the two. It still appears to land far...
In the last two weeks, the debate over network neutrality has focused on a specific legal maneuver known to insiders as "reclassification." A decade ago, the Federal Communications Commission decided to classify broadband internet as an "information service," a legal category that limits the agency's ability to regulate it. That led to a legal setback in January, when an appeals court ruled that it was illegal for the FCC to impose common carrier regulations on services in this category, meaning that the network neutrality rules it had agreed to were a no-go.
That left the FCC with two options: it could water down its net neutrality rules to fit within the boundaries the court had set for information services, or it could declare that broadband is actually in a different legal category, a "telecommunications service," which would allow the FCC to establish the kind of robust rules that net neutrality supporters favor. Right now, net neutrality activists are outside the FCC urging the agency to reclassify.
But not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Incumbent telecom companies, free-market advocates, and a number of members of Congress have all urged the FCC to retain the low-regulation "information service" category. Here are the three biggest problems that, opponents claim, could be created by reclassification.
This is a favorite argument of the cable industry. "Cable operators and telecommunications companies have made massive private investments in broadband networks," the National Cable and Telecommunications Association wrote in a Wednesday letter to the Federal Communications Commission. The NCTA worries that reclassifying would put cable networks into a "heavy-handed framework" of regulations that "would discourage network investment." The theme was echoed by Rep. Gene Green (D-TX), in his letter warning the FCC not to reclassify.
Gus Hurwitz, a legal scholar at the University of Nebraska College of Law, says that reclassifying could give the FCC the power to regulate broadband prices, connection and disconnection of service, and interconnection with other internet companies. He says the 1996 Telecommunications Act could even be read as requiring the FCC to regulate how internet services interconnect with the traditional telephone network — a nonsensical concept that could waste the time of FCC policymakers.
If the FCC reclassifies, that decision is almost certain to trigger a lawsuit
Network neutrality supporters say this concern is overblown because of forbearance. That's a legal procedure that allows the FCC to choose not to enforce provisions of the law that are deemed overly burdensome or counterproductive. But Hurwitz argues that the FCC has never tried to use forbearance on the scale that would be required to apply telecommunications regulations to the modern internet. It could become a legal quagmire and at a minimum it could become a distraction for FCC decision makers.
Reclassification opponents say broadband providers will be less willing to open their wallets when there's a lot of uncertainty about when and how they'll be allowed to profit from their networks. Of course, as Vox's Matt Yglesias has noted, the NCTA's own statistics suggest that cable companies are investing less in their networks today than they did in the early 2000s, a time when there was a lot of uncertainty about the legal status of broadband networks.
The FCC has been bogged down in litigation over the legal status of broadband networks for years. Opponents contend that reclassification will only make the situation worse.
Indeed, this is the primary argument made by Tom Wheeler himself. In its January ruling striking down the FCC's network neutrality rules, the DC Circuit Appeals Court gave the agency a kind of road map for crafting regulations that could pass muster with the courts while maintaining the current classification of broadband. Many net neutrality proponents believe that this approach will lead to network neutrality rules that are too weak, but Wheeler contends that weak rules now are better than additional years with no enforceable rules on the books.
If the FCC reclassifies, that decision is almost certain to trigger a lawsuit. Most observers believe the courts would eventually affirm the FCC's power to reclassify, but it could mean years of additional uncertainty. "If we do see reclassification, we're probably looking at another 2 to 4 years of just litigating questions of the commission's basic authority," Hurwitz says.
Opponents of reclassification have dubbed it the "nuclear option," drawing a parallel to proposals to end the filibuster in the US Senate. It's not a bad comparison. In both cases, critics don't have the legal power to stop the "nuclear option," but they're effectively threatening to make life miserable for the majority if it's invoked.
There are two ways opponents of reclassification could make life difficult for Tom Wheeler if he reclassifies. First, members of Congress can haul Wheeler before Congress to grill him about his policies. And second, telecom companies could mount more legal challenges to FCC decisions, forcing the agency to spend more time defending itself in court, leaving it with less time to pursue other initiatives.
AndrewThoughts?
No one knows exactly why Jill Abramson was fired as editor of the NYT. But one thing is clear: she was fired not long after she started asking questions about the amount that she had been paid, over the course of her career in NYT senior management, compared to the amount that her male predecessor was paid.
Very few people like to talk about how much money they make — especially not people who earn a lot of money. Since companies tend to be run by people who earn a lot of money, the result is a culture of silence and secrecy when it comes to pay. Such a culture clearly served the NYT ill in this case. If the salaries of senior NYT management had not been a closely-guarded secret, then Abramson would not have been shocked when she found out how much Bill Keller made before her, and Arthur Sulzberger would not have reacted badly to Abramson’s questions about pay.
secrecy about pay is bad for women, who are worse at asking for raises than men are
Indeed, secrecy surrounding pay is generally a bad idea for any organization. Ben Horowitz has the best explanation of why that is: it can’t help but foment poisonous internal politics. But there are other reasons, too.
For one thing, secrecy about pay is bad for women, who are worse at asking for raises than men are. If men secretly ask for raises and secretly get them, while women don’t, then that helps to explain, at least in part, why men end up earning more than women.
Secrecy around pay is also a great way to allow managers to — consciously or unconsciously — play favorites with their staff. When you’re deciding how much to pay your employees, you want to be as transparent as possible. A not-great way of being transparent is the civil service method: set narrow pay bands for every level of seniority, and then declare that the only way to get a substantial raise is to get a promotion. The problem with this kind of system is that it begets the Peter Principle: everybody gets promoted to a position of incompetence.
Still, there’s quite a lot to be said for a system, like the civil service, in which everybody knows what everybody else is making. It makes conversations around pay much easier, and reduces craziness like this:
He sat down opposite me and then he told me the job was mine. "Do you want it?" Yes, I said, a little startled. The job, he explained, came with a guaranteed salary for three years. After that, I would be on my own: I’d make what I brought in from my patients and would pay my own expenses. So, he went on, how much should we pay you?
After all those years of being told how much I would either pay (about forty thousand dollars a year for medical school) or get paid (about forty thousand dollars a year in residency), I was stumped. "How much do the surgeons usually make?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Look," he said, "you tell me what you think is an appropriate income to start with until you’re on your own, and if it’s reasonable that’s what we’ll pay you." He gave me a few days to think about it.
More generally, a system whereby salaries are set internally, according to the value of the person and the position, is a system which doesn’t find itself constantly buffeted by unpredictable exogenous factors.
virtually everybody in corporate America has internalized the primacy of capital over labor
We’ve all worked in companies, I’m sure, where the only way to get a substantial raise is to confront management with a job offer from somewhere else. That’s clearly a dreadful way to run a company, since it gives all employees a huge incentive to spend a lot of time looking for work elsewhere, even if they’re very happy where they are.
One of the problems is that virtually everybody in corporate America — from senior management all the way down to entry-level employees — has internalized the primacy of capital over labor. There’s an unspoken assumption that any given person should be paid the minimum amount necessary to prevent that person from leaving. The simplest way to calculate that amount is to simply see what the employee could earn elsewhere, and pay ever so slightly more than that. If a company pays a lot more than the employee could earn elsewhere, then the excess is considered to be wasted, on the grounds that you could get the same employee, performing the same work, for less money.
How is it that most Americans still believe in this way of looking at pay, even as we reach the 100th anniversary of Henry Ford’s efficiency wages? Ford was the first — but by no means the last — businessman to notice that if you pay well above market rates, you get loyal, hard-working employees who rarely leave. Many contemporary companies have followed suit, from Goldman Sachs to Google to Bloomberg: a well-paid workforce is a happy workforce, which can build a truly world-beating company.
Such companies are, sadly, still rare, however. That’s bad for employees — and it’s bad for the economy as a whole. We need wages to go up: they’ve been stagnant, for the bottom 90% of the population, for some 35 years now. We also need employee turnover to go down: employees become more valuable, in general, the longer they stay with a company — and it takes a long time, and a lot of human resources, to train a new employee up to the point at which they really understand how their new employer works.
There are two things I look for, then, in any company. The first is high entry-level wages. They’re a sign that a company values all of its employees highly; that it likes to be able to pick anybody it wants to join its team; and that it considers new employees to be a long-term investment, rather than a short-term source of cheap labor.
The second thing I look for is a system whereby managers regularly earn less money than the people who report to them. You shouldn’t need to get promoted to a position of incompetence just in order to earn more: you should get paid well for doing the job you do best, even if that doesn’t involve managing anybody. The whole "I work for you" rhetoric of touchy-feely CEOs is actually true, or should be true: value is created by talented workers on the front lines, not by middle management, and it’s management’s job to support those workers any way they can, including by paying them as much as possible.
let’s bring pay rates out into the open, where they belong
If you have a company with high entry-level wages and where the front-line talent often gets paid better than the managers, then you’re probably in a pretty efficient industry with relatively low turnover. On the other hand, if you have a company with low entry-level wages and where pay invariably rises the higher you go up the org chart, then you probably have a company where managers spend altogether too much time hiring and training people to do jobs they could probably do better themselves.
If you work for a company where everybody knows what everybody else is earning, then it’s going to be very easy to see what’s going on. You’ll see who the stars are, you’ll see what kind of skills and talent the company rewards, and you’ll see whether this is the kind of place where you fit in. You’ll also see whether men get paid more than women, whether managers are generally overpaid, and whether behavior like threatening to quit is rewarded with big raises. What’s more, because management knows that everybody else will see such things, they’ll be much less likely to do the kind of secret deals which are all too common in most companies today.
So let’s bring pay rates out into the open, where they belong. Doing so will create better companies, staffed with better-paid and more productive employees. Which is surely exactly what America needs, in a world where it can never compete by racing to the bottom.
Depending on how you look at it, the "Solar Roadways" proposal is either a brilliant solution to America's energy woes — or totally insane.
The idea is simple enough: The United States would replace the asphalt and concrete in its roads, sidewalks, and parking lots with a type of industrial-strength glass that contain solar panels. Like so:
Artists' rendition of the Solar Roadways concept. Solar Roadways
The result? The United States would have plenty of space for solar panels generating clean, carbon-free electricity. Those glass roads might also be able to do neat things like provide their own lighting or LED signs for drivers.
This isn't entirely fantastical: For the past decade, Julie and Scott Brusaw's Idaho-based startup Solar Roadways has been developing a type of glass that can withstand the stress from cars and heavy trucks driving over them.
The company has already received a grant from the US government
The company has already received a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to build a crude prototype of this glass. It was selected as one of Google's "Moonshots" in May 2013.
Currently, as Rob Wile reports at Business Insider, the company is trying to raise $1 million in funding to move the technology from the prototype phase to production. (They've raised $145,000 so far.)
It's a fun idea, and worth a shot. But there are still reasons to be skeptical. Yes, solar power — particularly rooftop solar power — has been making some impressive gains in the United States in recent years. But solar roads are likely still a longer ways off.
At a very abstract level, it's easy to see why solar roads might be attractive. On their website, the Brusaws offer a detailed FAQ and some rough numbers on this score.
In theory, solar roads could generate three times as much electricity as the US uses
They note that there are about 30,000 square miles of roads, parking lots, driveways, playgrounds, bike paths, and sidewalks in the contiguous United States.
Assuming we could replace that pavement with glass-covered solar panels that have an 18.5 percent efficiency rate, we could generate up to 14 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year — more than three times what the United States uses.
Now, in practice, we almost certainly wouldn't be able to harvest that much power. For the time being, there still aren't many practical ways to store solar-generated electricity for hours when the sun isn't shining. What's more, electricity generated on remote roads would have to be transported to where it was needed. That would all require a lot of infrastructure.
Still, the concept might be useful on a local scale — say, starting with parking lots and driveways inside cities and towns. Or perhaps one day it could be combined with wireless technology to charge electric vehicles as they move along the roads.
But that still leaves harder questions about cost…
Jill and Scott Brusaw with a prototype of their solar panels. Solar Roadways.
Right now, the Brusaws say they're working on updated estimates of how much these solar roads would actually cost to install and maintain. Yet earlier back-of-the-envelope calculations offered plenty of reasons for skepticism.
Covering the entire country with these panels would cost trillions
Back in 2010, the company assumed that a 12' by 12' glass panel would cost around $10,000. At this rate, covering all of our roads would cost $56 trillion — nearly 20 times the annual federal budget. Even on a smaller scale, these panels are at least 50 percent more expensive than regular roads, and possibly more.
Back then, the Brusaws argued that an investment in solar roads could pay for itself within 22 years. After all, the solar panels would cut down on electricity bills. And, of course, most of the pavement in the nation's roads needs to be replaced over time anyway — so we wouldn't need to pay for asphalt. (What's more, if solar panels continue to get cheaper and more efficient, the price could come down further.)
But as Aaron Saenz pointed out at the time, many of those estimates seemed awfully questionable. For one, asphalt wasn't nearly as expensive as the company assumed. And the maintenance costs for these solar roads is still wildly uncertain.
Solar Roadways is currently trying to rework its calculations to take into account a new hexagon design for their glass. It's also possible the roadways could find other ways to pay for themselves, like offering advertising. But, right now, the cost estimates are pretty fuzzy.
Meanwhile, there are other questions that haven't been answered satisfactorily yet. How will the roads stay clean? (The company's answer here — tinkering with self-cleaning glass or maybe employing street sweepers — is a bit vague.)
Right now, the Department of Transportation is asking for smaller demonstrations in, say, store parking lots. If that actually works, perhaps the idea could scale up slowly over time. But we're still a long way off from covering all our roads in solar panels.
Further reading: While we're dreaming about solar roads, it's worth checking out the gains that actual rooftop solar has been making over the past year. It's still a small part of the US energy supply, but prices have been tumbling fast — and there's now enough installed capacity to power more than a million homes.
Over the years, various governments around the world have attempted to enact regulations that warn cell phone users of the supposed risks of heavy cell phone use. There's just one problem with that: medical authorities have had a very hard time determining what those risks are.
It's not for lack of trying. Various small studies have found hints of an association between cell phone use and specific cancers. But large meta-analyses and extended cohort studies have come up empty, suggesting that either the small studies produced spurious results or that only a small subset of the cell phone using population is at risk. Without a larger, definitive study, it's simply impossible to tell.
But that hasn't stopped a steady flow of smaller studies from continuing to retread well-worn ground—or journalists from giving these limited studies more attention than they deserve. In the latest example, the AFP picked up a French study that shows a potential elevated risk of cancer from high levels of cell phone use. But the study has the usual collection of limitations, and it has some details that run counter to some of the past studies that found elevated cancer risk.
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AndrewThis is really good. Cause really, we shouldn't be debating on if humans have impacted global warming.... it should be what humans are going to do to lessen their impact.
That climate change is occurring, and that humans are the primary cause, is beyond dispute at this point. Surveys have found that 97-98 percent of climate researchers and 97 percent of climate papers expressing a position on the subject agree with the consensus view that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change.
But you wouldn't know that if you were to watch most cable news debates on the subject, where the tiny minority expressing doubt about climate change generally receives equal billing with people explaining the actual science. That's really skewed, when you think about it. So John Oliver, on his new show Last Week Tonight decided it was time to do the debate right: three climate deniers faced off against 97 people representing the scientific consensus. And one of those 97, naturally, was Bill Nye the Science Guy:
One of Star Wars' best pilots won't be returning in Episode VII. Denis Lawson, who played Rebel ace Wedge Antilles in the original trilogy, has confirmed that he turned down the chance to return in the upcoming Star Wars sequel. Speaking at a screening of his new movie, The Machine, Lawson said "they asked me but it just would have bored me."
Wedge — not to be confused with the Captain Antilles strangled by Darth Vader minutes into Episode IV — appeared as a hotshot pilot in all three original movies. While his part was minor, Wedge notably helped save Luke Skywalker during his attack on the first Death Star, survived the battle of Hoth, and contributed to the destruction of the second by flying into its core alongside Lando...
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