firehose

IDW has formed a new television division to develop its own projects in-house for adaptation, retaining rights, creative and financial control.

By Rita Banerji:

It is a fact. Gandhi had young women in his ashram, some of them still teenagers, one of them his own grand-niece [Manu Gandhi], sleep naked with him in his bed at night. This was an aspect of Gandhi that I had not read about before, and it surprised me at first. I was researching for my book ‘Sex and Power’ which looks at the history of sex and sexuality in India, and it was important for me to investigate this further.

My initial tendency was to regard this as “gossip,” but then some of the biographies confirmed it as fact, but also hurriedly dismissed it as something that we all apparently should accept as the eccentricities of “great” men! That’s not a logical argument for me and so I began to dig into archives for more information till a complete picture emerged. And that picture upset me. I saw Gandhi as a classic example of a sexual predator – a man who uses his position of power to manipulate and sexually exploit the people he directly controls.

Most angering for me was reading about the psychological and emotional trauma of the girls and women who he used for his “experiments,” which is what he called these incidents. The word ‘psychotic’ repeatedly came up in various documents with regards to these women’s mental state. The women, most of who were in their late teens or early twenties [not surprisingly, given he could have ‘experimented’ with the older women or even his own wife!] were repeatedly described as depressed and weeping, and seemed to be completely in his control. Besides this, some of the archival references lead me to believe that Gandhi may well have been practicing the traditional, historic form of Indian celibacy which hinges on one thing only – and that is control of ejaculation. Everything else is permitted.

What I could not understand is why school texts and biographies have selectively edited out this information because it was a big and explosive aspect of the inner dynamics of the Gandhi ashram and its inmates for the last 10 years of Gandhi’s life. It eventually led to the partial break-up of his inner-core circle.

But Gandhi is long dead. So why should the naked girls in Gandhi’s bed matter today?

Well, because the issue goes way beyond Gandhi. What really matters now, and it matters deeply, is how we respond to what Gandhi did!

Today we like to believe that we are far more progressive in terms of recognizing and condemning the abuse of power by men for sexual exploitation and abuse. And yet, I repeatedly find every time I bring this up [for eg. in this article Gandhi to Asharam: Who Empowers the Sex-Crimes of Gurus?] most people’s responses are defensive and regressive!

But this is what surprised me most! Compared to our reactions and responses today, the people in Gandhi’s time seemed to be far more progressive! They not only recognized that he was abusing his position and power in a way that was unethical and depraved, but they outright condemned it, confronted it, and eventually forced him to stop!

On 16th March, 1947, Nirmal Kumar Bose, one of Gandhi’s closest associates wrote a letter to Kishorlal G. Mashruwala, another of Gandhi’s close colleagues, saying, “When I first learnt about Gandhi’s experiment in which a girl took off her clothes and lay under the same cover with him and he tried to find out if any sexual feeling was evoked in him or his companion, I felt genuinely surprised. Personally, I would not tempt myself like that and more than that, my respect for [women] would prevent me from treating her as an instrument in my experiment…”

N.K. Bose’s letter was only one of the many exchanges among Gandhi’s closest associates and friends in the first half of 1947, about this practice of his that angered and upset many. These included prominent leaders of India’s freedom movement such as Vallabhai Patel, J. B. Kriplani and Vinobha Bhave. Many of them confronted Gandhi directly, and others stopped associating with him.

This 1947 storm in the Gandhi camp was set off by R. P. Parasuram, a young man from Kerala who for two years had served as Gandhi’s personal secretary and typist and watched his personal affairs from close by. Like many students in India at that time, Parasuram too had idolized Gandhi and after his studies, had travelled to Gandhi’s ashram to live and work with him, and help with India’s freedom movement.

But two years after working with Gandhi, Parasuram quit the ashram and his job. Before he left he wrote a 16-pg long letter explaining his distress at what he had witnessed in Gandhi’s behaviour with girls and women in the ashram – which included other things besides his ‘experiments’ in bed. He said that as much as he had worshipped Gandhi, his conscience did not allow him to stay silent any longer. And that in order for him to continue, Gandhi had to concede to 5 of his demands [all of which dealt with Gandhi’s physical interactions with girls at the ashram] which he listed in the letter. [See the letter below.]

On 2 January 1947 Gandhi responded to Parasuram’s letter with, “I cannot concede your demands…Since such is my opinion and there is a conflict of ideals…you are at liberty to leave me today.”

Parasuram did leave as did some of Gandhi’s other close associates. But others, especially those who were in more senior positions as friends and associates, continued their pressure on Gandhi to stop.

One of the things that were a big issue was Gandhi’s hypocrisy and manipulation, to what seemed to many to serve his own ends. Gandhi had made an unwritten rule of celibacy for all the inhabitants of his ashram. Oddly, he would even make married couples take this vow because he believed this was central to his philosophy of non-violence. Sexual stimulation of any sort, he preached, evoked violence in one’s thoughts and behaviour. He would tell them that even touching each other was unacceptable. He made the life of one of his own son’s whose wife got pregnant, absolutely hell, angry that they had had sex when he had forbidden them to! Yet he was free to do as he pleased! He was so confident that he wouldn’t be challenged!

Swami Anand and Kedarnath in a question and answer grilling from 15-16 March 1947 shot off questions like “Why did you not take your coworkers into confidence and carry them with you [into] this novel practice?” and “Why do we find so much disquiet and unhappiness around you? Why are your companions emotionally unhinged?”

The Congress President J. B. Kriplani told him that he was simply, “exploiting human beings as means rather than as ends in themselves.”

N.K. Bose suggested this course of action for Gandhi: “… he should not allow Manu [Gandhi’s great-niece] to sleep in the same bed with him until he had tried enough to educate the public into his new way of thinking, or the public had got all the fact about him and clearly expressed its disapproval. Then he [can go]…back to his practice with the full brunt of his suffering for the opinion which he held right.”

Vallabhai Patel told Gandhi off to his face. He said what he was doing was adharma (immoral). In a classic, egotistical way Gandhi retorted to Patel by telling Balkrishna Bhave “for me Manu sleeping with me is a matter of dharma (moral duty).”

But under this onslaught Gandhi eventually conceded defeat, even if not willingly. He said he felt like a “broken reed.” His ego and narcissism had been broken by people around him who fortunately understood and did better than we do today!

This is the question that I’d like to ask everyone reading this. Why is it that hard to say, yes Gandhi, the hero of India’s freedom movement had also used his power and position to sexually exploit/abuse girls and women who came under the mantle of his leadership?

Below is an extract from R. P. Parasuram’s 16-page letter to Gandhi just before he quit. He called it his letter of “indictment.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________

1 January, 1947
Srirampur

Revered Bapu,

I write these lines in sorrow and pain…You know how shy and unforward I have been these two years. You must imagine to what depths I must have been agitated then to overcome my shyness and become bold and that too with a man who is considered by many to be the greatest man living…

You must also ponder over the fact as to what it is that has made me bold and say things so boldly. It is because I feel I am so clearly in the right and you so clearly in the wrong. It is the cause that gives me the courage.

It is not that I did not know these before. I knew and kept quiet. I thought “Why should I bring these to him?” There are men like Kanu [Gandhi], Kishorilal-bhai [Mashruwala], etc., experienced men and men knowing you fully. And then I had not the courage. I have come over my shyness with you…

When first I came to the ashram I came with high respect for the ashram and its inmates and its way of life. All that was knocked off in 24 hours…After coming here I must confess to having lost a portion of the respect I had for you….You are the Father of our Nation…You have taken us so far along the path of freedom and independence…You must see the hand of God…in the fact that I have overcome my shyness.

I object to your sleeping in the same bed with members of the opposite sex. In February 1945 or so I was given the draft of a statement to type. I was shocked by the contents…I must tell you that even before I know of this. One day Amin-bhai came and told me that he was shocked to see Manu [Manu Gandhi – Gandhi’s own grand niece] getting into your bed.

In those days I was more shy than I am now. My only friend in the ashram was Amin. Even then I came to know of the discussions about this affair because the ashram people are so careless and can’t keep their mouth shut. Everybody objected to your doing this…

Apart from the question of any affect on you what about the effect on girls?

There is something of other wrong with them [the women who sleep naked with Gandhi]. [The] Punjabi girl who lived opposite my room in Matunga…She used to weep unrestrainedly and that not caring whether others saw her or not. She laughed also unrestrainedly…And then here is Dr. Sushila-behn [The 24-year-old in-house physician at the ashram who Gandhi also used for his ‘experiments’]. How many are the days when she has not wept? She is a doctor and yet she is always a patient, always is ill. Who has heard of a doctor who cries out at night?

Even then the whole thing is considered wrong by the world. I do not like it. Nirmal babu [Bose] does not. Sucheta-behn [Kriplani] did not like it and said “However great he may be, he cannot do such things. What is this?” You must admit that there is something in our objection. You cannot waive it aside.

As for blood relations [This is reference to Manu Gandhi]. The world is sceptic even there. There have been cases of immorality between father and daughter, brother and sister…

I object to your having massage done by girls. When I was studying in college I read a report saying you were being massaged by Dr. Sushila-behn…And now I find you do get yourself massaged by girls.

Those people who know that you are naked during massage time say that you could at least put a cover over it [his genitals]…

The same objection I hold against girls coming to the bathroom when you go there. Ramachandran saw you like that and said you had fallen a little from his estimation. However great you may be, you cannot do these things.

Your placing your hands on shoulders of girls. You had written once that you gave up this practice because others intimated you with evil intention. I have not come across any other writing saying you could resume it. So it was strange to me why you resumed it…During the two years I have been with you, about 50 letters or so objecting to this practice from admirers and calumniators came. None of them got any reply…

Your being seen naked [during his bath and massage] jars on the mind of strangers, admirers though they might be. Ramachandran did not like it. He said it was the limit…

Ever since the 17th December [1946] when in the small hours of the morning you made those dreadful sounds, dreadful because it came from you man of such eminence, even otherwise unbecoming for any wise or old man, my head has not been at peace. I have heard of another such instance from Mr. Ramachandran of the API [Associated Press of India] when you told Sushila-behn to leave you. I have seen such another instance at Delhi…But this event shook me to my depths. I said to myself that God and the nation would not forgive me if I kept quiet…

You commit Himalyan blunders. But you refuse to see these things and when told, you are irritated…I say you are conceited and constitute yourself to be the repository of all the wisdom in the world…

And now to my charges. Unless [my demands] are fulfilled I depart…I beg to differ and go away…Your actions to which I object:

1. Your sleeping with any member of the opposite sex.
2. Being massaged by any member of the opposite sex.
3. Allowing yourself to be seen naked by any member of the opposite sex.
4. Allowing yourself to be seen naked by strangers and even by people who are of your party who are not so intimate.
5. Placing your hands on the shoulders of girls when walking.

Original Source

by craftyshadow

Work 'may be no way out of poverty':

hedwig-dordt:

lyra500:

The UK” Conservative government commissioned a report on social mobility and child poverty. Their own report says that most working parents do not earn enough to raise themselves out of poverty and that wealthy pensioners benefits should be cut and the minimum wage should go up.

The government’s response? To defend benefits for wealthy pensioners while admitting that child poverty targets will be missed.

And yesterday when asked yesterday about the four fold increase in food bank use in the UK at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister wouldn’t even mentioned the phrase ‘food bank’.

OFFS!

djempirical

#hahahahahahahahaha

“He is calling every single one of us to love our neighbor as ourselves, which is a really hard thing to do,” she said.

Original Source

Cellar Door Games continued its Rogue Legacy by bringing it to Mac and Linux this week, where it's available now via Steam. The "rogue-lite" that stars successions of heroes, each one differently debilitated, is also on the way to PS3, PS4, and Vita next year.

Rogue Legacy is SteamPlay-enabled, so those who purchased the PC version have access to the Mac and Linux variants, and a single $15 purchase grants access to all three. Cellar Door says it'll bring the new versions to other distributors "a little later."

Rogue Legacy out now on Mac, Linux originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 17 Oct 2013 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

It doesn’t require health insurance.

Don’t think of it as the enemy of baristas, insists Kevin Nater, CEO of the company that has produced this technological marvel. Think of it as an instrument people can use to create their ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for “out-of-home coffee drinkers”—Nater’s phrase—sick of an “inconsistent experience.”

Think of it as the future. Think of it as empowerment. Your coffee, your way, flawlessly, every time, no judgements. Four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup in a 16 oz. half-caff soy latte? Here it is, delivered to you precisely when your smartphone app said it would arrive, hot and fresh and indistinguishable from the last one you ordered.

Kitchens are just factories we haven’t automated yet

In a common area at the University of Texas at Austin, the Briggo coffee kiosk, covered in fake wood paneling and a touch screen and not much else, takes up about as much space as a pair of phone booths. Its external appearance was designed by award-winning industrial designer Yves Behar, with the intention that it radiate authenticity and what Briggo says is its commitment to making coffee that is the equal of what comes out of any high-end coffee shop.

The kiosk at the university is the second version, the one that will be rolling out across the country in locations that are still secret. It needs just 50 square feet (4.6 sq m) of floor space, and it can be dropped anywhere—an airport, a hospital, a company campus, a cafe with tables and chairs and WiFi just like Starbucks. It’s manufactured in Austin.

Inside, protected by stainless steel walls and a thicket of patents, there is a secret, proprietary viscera of pipes, storage vessels, heating instruments, robot arms and 250 or so sensors that together do everything a human barista would do if only she had something like perfect self-knowledge. “How is my milk steamer performing? Am I a half-degree off in my brewing temperature? Is my water pressure consistent? Is there any residue buildup on my brewing chamber that might require me to switch to a backup system?”

The Briggo coffee kiosk knows how to make a perfect coffee because it was “trained” by an award-winning barista, Patrick Pierce. He’s since left the company, but no matter: as in the techno-utopian Singularity, whose adherents believe that some day we will all upload our brains to computers, once a barista’s essence has been captured by Briggo, his human form is just a legacy system.

Besides, baristas, especially the ones at America’s favorite “high end” coffee shop, don’t often stick around long enough to become as good as Pierce. Turnover at Starbucks, which is typical of all demanding retail environments, leads to what Nater calls “variation,” and not the kind that’s exciting—the kind that coffee connoisseurs frown upon, because it means coffee isn’t being extracted from beans in the optimal way.

“What we’ve created is in essence a small food factory that absolutely replicates what a champion barista does,” says Nater. Briggo roasts its own beans—sourced by a pair of coffee supply veterans who between them spent a combined 40 years at Starbucks. “We have calibrated this machine to pull espresso shots to the same specification as an Illy or a Stumptown or an Intelligentsia. We’ve just done it without the human element.”

It’s 2020, and waiting in line for coffee is about as popular as waiting in line for bread

Ever stood in line at a Starbucks or some other cafe and wondered why, in the year 2013, you can’t just send in your order 10 minutes early via an app on your phone, and pick it up as soon as you walk in? Briggo has such an app. It asks you to log in, so it can memorize your order and payment information, which enables one-click coffee ordering. Or you can order a coffee for a friend. And use the app to check out how long the wait is for a drink. Fifteen minutes? Just complete your order now, while you’re walking across campus—it will be ready by the time you arrive. Hit another button to announce on Facebook that you’ll be at the Briggo kiosk by 9:30, and hey, who wants to meet up?

Some experiences viral-market themselves.

“What we find at [the University of Texas] is that we have a younger generation of consumers who have no inhibition about ordering remotely and having self service,” says Nater. “Coffee shops are a great social interaction point, but so is social media.”

Had a great experience at Briggo? Why not tweet that? Invented a new combination of syrups and brew temperatures and other elements that yields the perfect drink? Tweet that, too. Briggo will make you an espresso, a latte, even an iced coffee made with a cold-brew process, something even many coffee shops don’t offer because it’s time consuming to produce. Not a coffee drinker? How about a chai latte, an ice chai latte, hot chocolate, or milk steamer?

High-end restaurants automated coffee production and no one noticed

In 2012, Julian Baggini, a British philosophy writer and coffee aficionado, wondered why dozens of Europe’s Michelin-starred restaurants were serving guests coffee that came out of vacuum-sealed plastic capsules manufactured by Nespresso. So he conducted a taste test on a small group of experts. A barista using the best, freshly-roasted beans went head to head with a Nespresso capsule coffee brewing machine. It’s the tale of John Henry all over again, only now it was a question of skill and grace rather than brute strength.

As the chefs at countless restaurants could have predicted, the Nespresso beat the barista.

Capsule coffee systems make consistent only two steps in the coffee-making process, but they’re the most important ones: Roasting and brewing. Beans roasted in a factory don’t change from the moment they’re vacuum-sealed into a capsule, because oxygen is the agent that causes food to go stale. (By contrast, beans roasted “fresh” are oxidizing continuously, until they’re brewed.) And the coffee-brewing process is complicated enough that achieving its most perfect expression requires a machine free from human interference.

“With a pre-dose capsule, it’s always the right grind,” says Mark Romano, a senior director at Illy coffee, which makes its own line of capsule coffee systems. “And with a self-contained extraction chamber, you can consistently get to 80-90 [out of a quality scale of 100].”

Capsule brewing systems can now control more variables in the brewing process—the relevant ones being temperature, pressure, and the way in which water reaches the ground beans—than even the best machine at an average Starbucks, says Romano.

“In any system you work with, the biggest risk you have to quality is the residual coffee oils that become oxidized, rancid and stale. They are conveying flavors into the next cup,” says Romano. Cleaning these machines properly is hard, and may just replace the problem of residual coffee oils with the problem of residual cleaning products. A capsule system, being disposable, is immune to these problems. It also, claims Illy in its promotional literature,  “ensures a complete saturation of all the particles in the capsule,” something traditional brewing systems have trouble achieving.

I ask Romano whether Starbucks would be better off serving its customers coffee brewed from capsules. “I think in many cases they would. Perhaps a large percent of their locations should be using capsules.” Romano also notes that while Illy still employs “baristi” in many of its 240 cafes in Europe, there are only eight Illy cafes in North America, mostly because it’s impossible to find baristi who have been trained to the company’s exacting standards.

I also asked Starbucks if it would ever increase the amount of automation it already uses in its stores. Linda Mills, a spokesperson for the company, would say only that it wouldn’t move in this direction because an automated barista would “diminish what we offer every day.”

What she means, presumably, is the experience of being served by a human being. But is that enough?

Will you want to drink robot coffee?

Briggo’s leaders assert that they are “fanatical” about coffee, and that automation is primarily an enabler that will, as Nater puts it, “allow us to get large fast.” Their recent hire of Starbucks vets who have backgrounds in sourcing, blending and inventing new and seasonal drinks is, they say, about making something that is the equal of any other “third-wave” coffee shop like Starbucks or Stumptown.

Generally automation in food service has meant first standardizing the foods to be prepared, which means robbing them of their individual character. Currently, Briggo sells only a single blend of beans from three countries. But there’s nothing stopping the kiosk from dispensing single-origin coffees and adjusting its every parameter to accommodate a new crop of beans, says Nater.

The Briggo coffeebot “can measure humidity and shock time and can automatically adjust the grind of the bean to compensate,” he says. “We have visibility with that bean. We track every single shot of espresso. We know if it’s within our quality spec, and we fully control the whole supply chain. We can go well beyond what a high-attrition part-time employee can do.”

Briggo doesn’t have to be better than the best baristas in the world. It just has to be better than the nearest coffee shop. Think of this not as the epic chess showdown between Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue; think of Briggo, rather, as the Redbox video kiosk to Starbucks’ Blockbuster.

If not the end of coffee shops, at least the dawn of a new kind of coffee culture

Still, there are limits to the Redbox/Blockbuster analogy. Blockbuster went into decline because it couldn’t offer anything that wasn’t offered by video kiosks or, more importantly, online-streaming services like Netflix. But as Romano of Illy points out, a coffee vending machine can’t reproduce the experience of a coffee shop. “Coffee is something social—do you really want to replace the social value of [your barista]?” he asks. And indeed, Nater told Melanie Kaplan of Smartplanet, ”We’re not asking people to stop going to coffee shops.”

But Briggo is hoping to at least displace Starbucks somewhat. Tim Kern, a 22-year veteran of Starbucks who joined Briggo in July, observes that some of the places where the company is scouting locations, like public areas in corporate campuses, are the sort where people might get both their social and their caffeine fix rather than trek to a nearby coffee shop. It’s not unlike the disruption of the PC industry by tablets and smartphones: these mobile devices haven’t replaced the PC, but they certainly reduce the number of occasions when you need one.

For now, a direct replacement for Starbucks—imagine a cafe with a host but no baristas—is not in Briggo’s business plan, though the company’s leaders have discussed it in the past, says Kern. (Romano is skeptical of such ideas: “We could go back to the 50′s, where you could go into the Automat, where you’d have those machines where you could get whatever you wanted, but what is the real value of that experience?” he asks.) The near-term plans are to move into places with bad coffee—think universities, hospitals, airports and corporate cafeterias—and improve the offerings. “With just 50 square feet we can create a barista-quality experience in a location where a coffee shop can’t have the economics to operate,” says Nater.

But here comes the competition

Barista robots are barely even a thing yet, and already the space is getting crowded. One company aiming for the lower end of the market is Marley Coffee, which in partnership with vending machine manufacturer AVT has developed “an Android-based coffee kiosk that comes with a full touchscreen automated checkout system,” says Joe Meninchiello, vice president of sales and marketing at AVT.

One model sports a gigantic, 48-inch (122 cm) touchscreen. “You press the type of coffee you want, and specify how much sugar you want, and you swipe your card, and while it’s being ground and brewed for you, it’s playing Bob Marley music,” says Meninchiello. Yes, Marley coffee is named for that Marley. ”Bob Marley is one of the top 10 most recognized names in the world,” says Meninchiello. “From a branding standpoint it’s a no-brainer for us.”

AVT’s system isn’t nearly as sophisticated as Briggo’s—there is, for example, no expertly foamed, market-fresh milk here, just the powdered kind—but still, says Meninchiello, “we’re grinding the beans individually for each and every customer. Ours will have that crema [the oils from coffee beans] on top that coffee won’t have unless it’s just been ground.” This, he says, “makes it almost better than at any brick-and-mortar coffee shop.”

The parts that go into a Marley Coffee kiosk are at this point standard enough that AVT expects to have plenty of competition. “Coffee is coffee and there are a lot of companies that follow the same model as us,” says Meninchiello. “When we were at NAMA—the big vending convention in Las Vegas—I was looking around and there were a lot of machines where you could press a button and they’d do the bean to cup thing where it’s ground fresh for every customer.”

Indeed, one of AVT’s competitors is Starbucks itself. It already has a deal with Redbox to put coffee kiosks everywhere there’s currently a Redbox DVD rental kiosk, under the Seattle’s Best brand that Starbucks owns. These systems are actually built by Coinstar, which owns Redbox, and the machines go by the trade name Rubi.

But there are nonetheless different niches within the market. Starbucks’ kiosks tend to be aimed at convenience stores and supermarkets. Briggo is going after a higher-end customer. Marley Coffee sits somewhere in the middle, and is putting its systems into airports (where Briggo also has ambitions) and university bookstores.

It’s not a coffee company, it’s a technology company

There are two ways for an upstart to disrupt an incumbent like Starbucks: One is to deliver a better experience, which Briggo’s leaders believe they can do through a combination of convenience and technological whiz-bang, and the other is to compete on price. A cup of organic coffee from the Briggo kiosk is $1.40, while a cup of drip (non-organic) coffee at Starbucks is $1.85 in many locations. The difference in price reflects, in part, the difference in the expense structure of the two approaches: Briggo doesn’t have to deal with the overhead of all that human labor, and at present it also doesn’t have to think about the cost of renting all that retail space.

Briggo has raised “in excess of $11 million,” says Nater, and while it has only “about 20 employees,” it has managed to stack its executive suite with with people who have deep experience in building and running technology companies that scale. Briggo founder Charles Studor was formerly the head of the billion-dollar integrated circuit division at Motorola/Freescale. The CIO, John Craparo, was formerly the CIO of GE Capital and Dell Financial Services. Briggo’s VP of engineering spent 25 years leading manufacturing projects at Johnson & Johnson. The Briggo kiosk is designed in collaboration with Deaton Engineering, which has created everything from battle-hardened PCs for the Air Force to industrial waste-bailing systems.

“Our aspirations are to build a global business,” says Nater. “We’ve had interest from the Middle East, North America and Asia. We think this model works very well in Asia where a mobile platform and automated experience has been adopted heavily.”

Two big unknowns loom over Briggo and anyone else trying to follow its lead. The first is whether or not people will, at least some of the time, accept a coffee kiosk as a substitute for a coffee shop, even if the product is the same or better. And the second is whether Briggo’s high-end machines can deliver a cup of coffee so much better that cheaper competitors like Marley and Seattle’s Best can’t crowd them out.

But it’s still early days. Starbucks itself was an example of how an evolving company can take a winding path toward finding its perfect market fit, says Kern. When Kern started at Starbucks, the company was still trying to be a “retail experience” designed to sell coffeemakers and beans. But customers kept coming in demanding a cup of coffee, so eventually it decided to change direction. “What Starbucks turned into is something I could not have conceived when it was just six stores,” says Kern.

It’s also worth noting that in a key sense, Briggo isn’t a coffee company. It would be hard pressed to beat all the others on the quality of its beans. Rather, it’s an automation company, whose special skill is in creating computerized robot systems than can be endlessly refined and elaborated. Which means that if another company were to try to acquire Briggo, rather than a larger coffee conglomerate or a food retailer, why not one that is all about the perfection of automated processes—like Amazon?

Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy (including withdrawing broadband access for persistent pirates).

Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenue and livelihoods.

But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?

This image is based on an excellent post at The Cynical Musician called The Paradise That Should Have Been about pitiful digital royalties. (Thanks to Neilon for pointing that out). I’ve taken his calculations and added a few more.

As ever, this was incredibly difficult to research. Industry figures are hard to get hold of. Some are even secret. Last.Fm’s royalty and payment system is beyond comprehension. (If you can explain it to me, please get in touch)

Note: these figures do not include publishing royalties (paid to composers of songs). The full spreadsheet of data does though. You can see all the numbers and sources here:http://bit.ly/DigitalRoyalty

Original Source

As the “Summer of Snowden” winds down, I’m seeing more articles that draw parallels between online advertising and government surveillance. NPR took it one step further by publishing a story that refers to the practices almost interchangeably, and the New York Times randomly mentions NSA collection in the middle of an article on advertisers using cell phone data.

It’s irresponsible to confuse readers about these two very different types of data capture. The government gathers data regardless of the desires of the parties involved. It can reach into every corner of our lives, from phone calls to chat messages and search queries, and has a track record of bending the rules. Online advertisers need the permission of at least one party, either the consumer or the publisher, in order to capture your data, and in the EU they must notify consumers that such sharing is happening. Stories that conflate government activity with digital marketing will hamper innovation, not only making advertising less relevant—and content creation less profitable—but also scaring people away from participating in data-driven advances in healthcare, education, and transportation (pdf). But these benefits hinge on consumer comfort with data-driven endeavors.

To understand how different online advertising is from government surveillance we can start by looking at methods of collection and use. If the US government wants information about you, it can either employ a technology like PRISM or use a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order to compel companies to hand over the data, and forbid them from informing you of the disclosure. In some cases the data are passed to the DEA and IRS who then propagate it further to local law enforcement who can use it as long as they come up with a story about why they really arrested you, in order to obscure the true source of data. The New York Times reports that these data have been used to fight everything from cigarette smuggling to copyright infringement—hardly threats to national security.

In advertising, companies typically gather information with the goal of selling more things with lower marketing costs. The data used include search terms, web pages viewed, things you are shopping for, and more recently, information about what you purchase. There is strong self-regulation that requires opt-in for sensitive information and prohibits the use of any data for decisions on eligibility for insurance coverage. The success of data-driven advertising is measured in the reduction of wasted media spending and often results in showing the consumer more relevant advertising.

It’s a stretch that the government would use information from advertisers for spying. The NSA gathers data in transit that is orders of magnitude more sensitive than what’s used to target ads—the existence of the behavioral advertising industry doesn’t make information gathering any easier for the NSA.

The New York Times editorial board, in an effort to state the case for the regulation of behavioral advertising, came up with a hypothetical scenario of how data collected for advertising could cause harm:

information could also end up in detailed individual profiles that could be obtained by government agencies or purchased by employers or banks to evaluate candidates for jobs or loans.

Yet this hypothetical is ill-founded. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires high levels of transparency around any data used for financial eligibility decisions. The government doesn’t need advertising data because the NSA gathers data that is orders of magnitude more sensitive than what’s used to target ads. Take the recent report from Time that showing that the NSA captured just under 500,000 contact lists a day. That is to say, the existence of the behavioral advertising industry doesn’t make information gathering any easier for the NSA.

To be fair, there are examples of questionable uses of data by marketers. Last year, the Wall Street Journal documented several cases where cookie data was used to implement variable pricing: customers were offered different prices based on their proximity to a brick-and-mortar competitor. Anecdotally, I’ve heard about airline fares increasing after repeated searches. Though not exactly harmful, what’s perhaps most common is the feeling that being “followed” is creepy and annoying.

But the wholesale demonization of behavioral advertising stands to undermine online business models without confirming a key assumption: Are consumers really bothered by the use of data for advertising once they understand how it’s used? A study we’re running at Enliken has found that less than 10% of the data advertisers use bothers consumers and Acxiom found the same result when they opened up their database to the public a couple of weeks ago. Research from PWC (pdf), DMA, McCann (pdf) supports the idea that consumers want to share information with brands they trust.

Wanting to bridge this disconnect between consumers’ understanding and advertisers’ imperatives has led my colleagues and I at Enliken to build a product we’re calling Transparency as a Service. Enliken makes it simple for any marketer to be more responsible and transparent with the data used to tailor and target advertising. Not only do consumers prefer to do business with companies who adopt transparent data policies, but it also pleases regulators.

Transparency allows for a compromise between advertisers and privacy advocates, one that helps consumers make better choices about who they share their information with while still allowing data to be used in a way that has far-reaching social and economic benefits.

You can follow Marc on Twitter at @guldi. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

flickr | scottlynchnyc

Banksy in NY (bigger than you might have thought)

The Nobel Foundation, which said last year it was using hedge funds to help boost capital, is now considering charitable donations after previous strategies failed to bring in enough money.

Near the end of the vote, members and staff were startled when someone who appeared to be a House stenographer suddenly went to the microphone and started to yell. She was quickly escorted out, but House floor staff looked visibly shaken.

Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks. And it doesn’t require health insurance.

Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson!

nevver:

Don’t be a dick

ABC News

Police pledge more arrests in escaped inmate case Seattle Post Intelligencer PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Investigators worked to fulfill their pledge to find and arrest the people who helped two Florida inmates escape from prison using forged documents. The two convicted killers were back in custody and being grilled by ... Officials vow more arrests in Florida inmate escape caseLos Angeles Times Escaped Florida prisoners grilled: Who helped you?Eagle-Tribune Recaptured Florida prisoners grilled about forgery, escapePress Herald Orlando Sentinel -Washington Observer Reporter all 721 news articles »

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50 Shades Of Gray costume

Guess who I saw in Pokemon's Wonder Trade ⊟

Did you know that your mother is so Snorlax, when she takes a nap, she blocks all traffic through Route 7, and you have to go on a dumb quest to find a Poké Flute that will wake her up.

This Pokémon XY Wonder Trade surprise popped up in Fhosking3’s game. Wonder Trade is a pretty awesome feature.

BUY Pokemon X and Y, official strategy guide, upcoming games

Ritual Dagger

• Dated: 17th century or earlier
• Place of Origin: Eastern Tibet, Kham region, Derge, Eastern Derge or China
• Medium: gilt copper alloy and rock crystal
• Measurements: 8 x 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (20.32 x 3.81 x 3.81 cm)

Source: Copyright © 2013 LACMA Museum

Hello, and thanks for reading. Have you played pro football? College ball? Highschool? Pee-wee? Have you played Madden before? Do you sort of kind of know some of the rules of football? If yes keep reading. If no...well also keep reading! We will take ANYONE. This could turn into a regular gig for the right person. The Cleveland Browns as you may have noticed are having problems scoring points on offense consistently. We are deciding that we actually want to win this year and that we have a real shot at it too. 3 wins in 6 games!? We were expecting maybe 1/3 of those wins for the whole year, but SOMEHOW we have a shot still. Here's the thing...our defense is sick nasty, but we've got problems under center...well one problem. Brandon Weeden. If you're sick of seeing desperation heaves to the sidelines, countless sacks after superb coverage, and underhanded lightly tossed interceptions in the 4th quarter then please come apply! If you can throw a ball, come apply! If you can't, come anyway! We can teach you the basics....throwing the ball to the guy who has the same color shirt as you. Throwing the ball reasonably close to a receiver that's WIDE OPEN, throwing the ball more than 3 yards on 3rd and 16. Think you got what it takes? Come on down! You're the next contestant on Cleveland Quarterbacks! Please no redheads, people named Brett, or any U. Of Florida alum.

However, the nation’s leading Republican senator came out of the deal far from empty handed. That’s because it’s been reported that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell secured language in the new government funding bill that includes nearly $3 billion for a dam project in his home state of Kentucky. According to reports, a provision in the funding bill includes $2.918 billion in funding to the Army Corps of Engineers to install locks as part of the Olmsted Dam and Lock Authority Project on the Ohio River. A recent investigation by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found that the project has run millions of dollars over budget and should have been completed “years ago.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the project will not be fully complete until 2024. McConnell’s spokesman dodged a question about the funding provision when asked by local radio affiliate WFPL.