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A panel selection from Preacher #27, illustrated by Steve Dillon, with dialogue and color removed. Screencap via

This week’s session of Strip Panel Naked, the weekly comic masterclass through video, focuses on the incredible, economic storytelling of comic artist Steve Dillon. Dillon, who tragically passed away last month due to complications from a ruptured appendix, was known for illustrating some of the best, edgiest work for DC and beyond. This episode focuses on a single issue of Preacher, which follows a priest in small-town Texas who's been possessed by a supernatural creature. As Strip Panel Naked host Hass Otsmane-Elhaou describes in the video, “Dillon never over complicated his approach. His pages never seem as dynamic on the surface as you might find from other artists. Rarely would you see any crazy angles or characters getting thrown out of panels, or really extravagant panel design.”

A panel selection from Preacher #27, illustrated by Steve Dillon, with dialogue and color removed. Screencap via

“A big part of his work,” explains Otsmane-Elhaou, “as you can see, is all about facial expressions, and that’s so much to do with why he is economical with his storytelling. He actually doesn’t need very much more than a face to tell you something important.” Dillon’s illustrative technique set the pace of every comic he worked on, far more than most of the writing that actually drove the story. “Dillon will be remembered as one of the best storytellers the comics medium has seen, and rightly so, because all he needed was an eye-level angle, a single point of focus, and his repertoire of facial expressions.”

Learn more about Dillon’s economy of artwork, and get tips on how to effectively illustrate your own comics, by watching this week’s Strip Panel Naked below:

To see more, visit the Strip Panel Naked YouTube page, and check out its Patreon page to support the series.

Related:

A Lesson in Comics from Spider-Man's First Appearance

A Comic Artist Talks Narrative Framing Around a Single Page

Learn How to Craft a Feeling of Isolation in Comics

 

 

 

 

 

Addition to the family triggers a service outage. 

Service will resume in a few days.

Baby and Toy explosion in our living room

I don’t know if it’s because this is my second go around or if it’s because Mae is sooo much bigger than Theo was at this age but it seems that we are outgrowing our newborn items much faster.  This is bringing into focus for me how quickly everything can change with kids and how, as my mother often says, everything is a season.  In our small space I have moments where I feel overwhelmed by all the “baby things” we have (and we have very few comparatively), but then I am quickly reminded that all of this is a season and soon we won’t need many of these things.  While each developmental phase brings some new gear or toys with it, I don’t believe there is a phase that requires as much gear as the first year.

For example, the play mat/activity gym (similar here) we have is big and bright and I feel that I am always shifting it around the house.  But before I know it the play mat won’t entertain her anymore and she will be crawling and getting into everything.  I will pass the play mat on to a friend and then I’m sure I will have a moment of sadness missing that stage. I know I will also forget I was ever missing those 2 square feet of space.

I guess what I am trying to say is that while the days are long, the months are short and the things that are making me crazy in our space won’t be there forever.  I haven't found there to be a time more full of "things" than the first year of a baby's life.  So I know if we can manage our small space during this time it will only get better.

The challenges are quite predictable:

1) Rising levels of spam and abuse.
As an online community grows, you will encounter more incidents of spam and abuse. This is partially mathematical. 0.1% of the population being trolls sounds fine until you have 1m members and 1000 trolls to deal with every day.

It’s also partly the outcome of having a higher profile. The bigger your community becomes the more of a target it becomes to those looking to provoke a reaction. Finally, it’s also about the nature of discussions. More discussions provide more opportunities for people to disagree and attack one another.

2) Declining quality of discussions.
In the early stages, an online community may attract the most devoted, hardcore, fans of the topic. These are people with considerable expertise and can engage in high-quality discussions. However, as the community grows it attracts more newcomers and those less interested in the topic. This group often start more beginner-level discussions or repeatedly ask questions which have been asked many times before.

As the quality of discussions declines, it is common for the regular, expert, members to drift away either to private groups or disappear from the community altogether leaving the community solely with low-quality discussions and inviting someone to create a rival community.

3) Declining sense of trust/community.
The early-stage community tends to attract members who form close bonds, know one another, and share high levels of homophily. All of these breed a strong sense of community and trust. However as the community grows, especially when it reaches stages of fast growth, members will recognize less and less of the members.

The newcomers are also likely to know and understand the history of the group. They will not use the same references to insider jokes or unique language. As a result, this destroys the trust established by community members which may either cause regulars to flee or destroy established and beneficial norms of reciprocity.

The lack of trust means many members are less likely to share information about themselves or their projects which harms the overall quality of the community.

4) Participation inequality.
The most famous problem is rampant participation inequality. The majority of social networks are said to abide by a 90-9-1 rule (often criticized by us) which highlights that 90% of people lurk, 9% participate, and 1% create. Whether this metric is true depends largely upon the definitions used and nature of the platform. However, participation inequality is a major problem.

Many large-scale communities frequently become dominated by a small group of regulars with strong common histories who suck up most of the attention and recognition from one another. This creates a sense of social stagnation where members do not participate because they never feel they can gain the acceptance of the core group. As such, most communities become dominated by a relatively small percentage of their total audience.

5) Highlighting quality and authority
As more people participate and contribute to a community it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish high-quality contributions and genuine experts from low-quality contributions and non-experts. As the quantity of contributions increases, it becomes ever more important to highlight the best quality information in the community or the most relevant information to each individual user.

This may also cause frustration and the departure of top members who may believe they are failing to gain the recognition they deserve. This can also cause confusion about the validity of responses and reliability of the information participants receive in the community.

6) Answering questions at scale.
In the early days of a community, it may be possible for a community manager or brand representative to answer every question in the community personally. However, as the community grows this becomes impossible. This often results in the quality of responses declining, the time to receive a response increasing, or reliance upon others to answer questions at the same quality.

In support communities where answering a question is the very reason for the community’s existence, this can become a critical problem very quickly. If the majority of responses fail to receive a rapid reply, the community’s raison d’etre disappears.

7) Privacy, security, and legal threats.
As a community grows it becomes an increasingly attractive target for hackers and others who wish to do the community harm. A community may store many personal details about community members which are imperative to keep private. If these details are released, members of the community may take legal action against the community.

This is closely tied to the legal challenges involved in growing a community. Members might post material which is illegal or the community might fall foul of data privacy laws in different member countries. This can become a critical problem in scaling a community.

8) Building echo chambers and restraining activism.
Larger online community groups often foster online activism which, well-meaning or otherwise, causes problems. This might be attacking a perceived enemy or campaigning in a manner which reflects extremely badly upon the community. This is often caused by an echo-chamber effect in which members only wish to receive information that supports their existing views.

This can often lead to an increasing level of extremism among community members, as members look to gain the support of others by citing increasingly extremist viewpoints within the field and attacking those whose viewpoints disagree from their own.

9) Demands upon technology.
In a small online community, the server can easily support the bandwidth of a few thousand active community members. However, as the community demands increase and new features (such as uploading videos, photos, and files) are introduced along with a rapid growth in the number of members, you can throttle that bandwidth quickly. Hosting can also become extremely expensive on many providers.

The community may soon require more features than those offered by the community platform. They may request best spam solutions, integration, voting, and plenty more features that require either upgrades to the platform or new platforms entirely.

10) Managing a team and volunteers.
A growing online community requires an increasingly large team of paid staff and volunteers to support the rising level of work. Yet paid staff may soon find the majority of their time consumed resolving petty disputes, replying to the most common questions, and struggling to build real relationships with members.

It may also be difficult to keep volunteers motivated as the level of recognition for each volunteer drops as the overall number of volunteers increases. Volunteers may ask for increasingly more costly rewards to sustain their interest.

If you’re growing an online community, none of the above should come as a surprise. The very best of us are those who can figure out innovative solutions to tackle each of the above.

(h/t Pipes To Platforms)

Bill Fitzgerald @funnymonkey
Can all the right wing folks so ecstatic about Wikileaks now line up to support a pardon for Chelsea Manning?

Just a day after Samsung confirmed to Reuters that it will be shipping its own digital assistant with the Galaxy S88, the Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is considering adding a dedicated button to the handset to quickly trigger its AI-powered digital assistant. Continue reading →

Whether older generations understand its appeal or not, Snapchat has evolved into a massive social media platform.

Major companies, especially Facebook, have made several attempts to replicate Snapchat’s features in Instagram via Stories, Messenger, and even WhatAapp. After rebranding the company to just Snap Inc. earlier this this summer, it looks like the social media platform has additional plans for growth.

This week, it was discovered that an investment company under Alphabet, Google Capital, has made an investment into Snap Inc. As Google Capital rebranded to CapitalG this past week, the company’s portfolio site was updated to include Snap’s logo. Snapchat relies heavily on Google’s cloud infrastructure to function and the company has famously turned down acquisition offers from both Google and Facebook in the past.

The latest round of funding made public by Snapchat amounted to $1.81 billion USD in investment back May of 2016, which puts the company’s total value at around $20 billion total. Snapchat has been working with an increasing number of media outlets on new shows for Snapchat and its Spectacles announced this summer have given many in the technology sphere reason to speculate where the company is headed.

For almost the entirety of 2016, Samsung has promised to bring Samsung Pay, its mobile payments platform, to Canada before the end of the year. With less than two months before the calendar turns, the company has very little time to uphold its promise. However, a new screenshot taken within the Samsung Pay app suggests the launch of the platform may, in fact, be imminent.

The screenshot you see below was taken by enterprising Reddit user sticktoit360, who sideloaded the Samsung Pay APK onto their Galaxy S7 smartphone. Sticktoit360 wasn’t able to verify whether the tap and pay functionality of Samsung Pay actually works in Canada because they’re a BMO customer.

 

However, it seems clear that the app is ready to start accepting Canadian credit cards. Well, at least some Canadian credit cards.

Note that screen says Samsung Pay is currently exclusive to select CIBC credit cards, which corroborates an earlier report from Android Central that said the mobile payments platform would launch in Canada with limited support for Visa cards issued by CIBC only. Based on that report, the mobile payment service’s launch in Canada has been delayed; Samsung Pay was supposed to start rolling out the first week of November, according to the report.

When MobileSyrup reached out to Samsung for comment shortly after that report came out, a spokesperson for the company had this to say: “Earlier this year, Samsung Canada confirmed Samsung Pay will be available in Canada in 2016. We remain committed to this plan and will share more details shortly.”

Once again, this news comes on the heels of solid indication that Android Pay, Google’s mobile payments platform, is reportedly scheduled to come to Canada before the end of the year.

Related: Hands-on with Samsung Pay, coming to Canada later this year

Samsung seems all set to start a public beta testing of the Nougat update for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge in the United Kingdom and the United States. An FAQ document from Samsung’s website details how the Galaxy beta program for the upcoming Nougat update for the S7 and S7 edge will work. Continue reading →

Images courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery.

When people aren’t busy arguing over the moral character of the presidential candidates, voters and pundits are growing increasingly paranoid about voter and voting machine fraud. Artist R. Luke Dubois enters this atmosphere of paranoia with a new exhibition that turns mid-20th century voting machines into interactive sculptures—ones that explore choice in the binary elections of Republican vs Democrat.

In The Choice Is Yours, now open at bitforms gallery, Dubois repurposes a series of mechanical voting machines made in the 40s, 50s, and 60s by the Automatic Voting Machine (AVM) Corporation in Jamestown, New York. Using these new Learning Machines, participants vote on a series of choices, all dichotomies or binaries that range from “the poignant to the absurd.” After voting, the machine gives the voter a user-specific audiovisual response drawn from datasets of media developed for and used in machine learning research. Dubois then displays the real-time results from voting in the gallery into an “exit poll.”

The smaller machines work with image, sound, language, and symbols. They pull from datasets like Google images, a large BBC sound effects archive, an archive of text from Project Gutenberg, and a LOGO interpreter that can draw and make sound based on generative grammars. Depending on the machine used, participants will get, as Dubois tells The Creators Project, “a montage of still images, a musique concrète-style mix of sound recordings, a mash-up of text, or an audiovisual drawing/musical piece based on abstract symbolic instructions.”

With the large machine, participants vote on “values,” which are adjectives drawn from Myers-Briggs. On this machine, people can vote on their desires, how they describe themselves, or in various other ways.

“So if you say you want ‘Strong, Beautiful, Dutiful, and Brave’, the machine will look through Instagram and the New York Times for those combinations,” says Dubois. “In a surprising twist that I really love, choosing lots of adjectives tend to yield results like obituaries rather than headline news from the Times.”

Dubois tells The Creators Project that both humans and machines are engaged in learning in The Choice is Yours. The big machine is constantly adjusting based on the aggregate of votes. It “learns” in the sense that it is sensitive to user selections and will reprise previously chosen media at certain intervals.  

“The smaller machines make some adjustments as well,” explains Dubois. “But it’s more about the people in this case, seeing how simple choices can lead to complex and unexpected outcomes, and how choosing over and over can give you insight into how to make better choices in the future.”

Dubois started playing around with mechanical voting machines in 2015. Originally Dubois, a musician as well as an artist, wanted to turn the machines into musical instruments. He imagined a series of works in the vein of Victorian music boxes, but with some controls attached to the machines. But after some thought Dubois realized the voting machines would be great for exploring choice in various ways using large media datasets.

Users trigger machine-generated montages based on choices they make with the pointers. As Dubois explains, since voting machines tend to be all metal, “hacking” them with sensors is tricky because the whole machine conducts electricity. To get around this, the sensing of choices is created with fluorescent nail polishes and cameras on the back of the machine.

To transform these machines into sculptural objects that could hold camera, lights, and a screen, Dubois worked with Joe Vidich from Kin & Company design studio. Dubois’s collaborator Ksenya Samarskaya then developed a “novel, unified typographic style” for the machines that reflects mid-century labeling.

In addition to the Learning Machines, the exhibition features a vitrine with bits and pieces of voting technology, like machine manuals, levers, spare gears, and paper ballots that were used in the Votamatic machines that produced the “hanging chads” from the 2000 election, amongst other ephemera. Dubois’s colleague, Jonathan Soffer, professor of History at New York University, also contributed an essay on the brief history of voting in the United States.

In connecting The Choice is Yours to the coming elections, Dubois wonders if voting in the United States is a chicken and egg question. If we’re only ever offered false dichotomies as choices, is this what polarizes society? Or does the polarization lead to false dichotomies where we have to, as Dubois says, ‘pick a team’?

A Votamatic machine from the 2000 election that produced the infamous “hanging chads”.

“The media the machines give you when you vote in the show will become thinned out if you only make one or two selections,” he adds. “So depending on what you’re looking for you might decide that’s the best option.”

Dubois ultimately wants The Choice is Yours to be a bit of a respite from this “shitty election,” providing them with a mental reset to think about voting. Hopefully, the participants come away from the exhibition with a greater understanding of choices that we make, not just on Election Day, but every day.

The Choice Is Yours runs at Bitforms Gallery until December 23rd. Click here to see more work by R. Luke Dubois.

Every vote counts, so remember to hit the polls on November 8. Check out the VICE Guide to the 2016 Election here.

Related:

Voting Booth-Drum Machine Makes Debates into Beats

What the 2016 Election Merch Looks Like Powered By Twitter Trolls

Sex Dolls and Period Blood Paintings Deflate the Donald

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the modern media (television and the Internet) is largely to blame for the sorry state of politics in America today.

Politicians are judged more on how they look than ever, as well as how they carry themselves on TV. Intellect and brilliant policy ideas get lost. Great minds and bold plans are drowned in a sea of rapid-fire snippets and punditry masquerading as news.

The modern media reduces political speeches to sound bites. In the past, entire speeches were published in newspapers and people typically read them, or at least good portions of them, instead of reading just the tiny snippets selected largely for their impact on TV.

This sets up a scenario where people are almost guaranteed a biased view of candidates. Everything you learn about a politician is based upon sound bites selected to have the most impact on the audience of the show or network you choose to watch, so they are almost guaranteed to be selected to skew your view of the politician based on the leanings of your preferred channel’s typical audience.

Fox News chooses sound bites to make liberal candidates sound bad and conservatives sound good (to their audience, which leans conservative) and CNN does the opposite. Since they don’t give you the whole speech, your entire opinion is based on intentionally misleading information.

Since almost nobody, except the few people who really dive in, ever hears or reads the full speech or policy statement or proposal, the entire electorate makes decisions based on biased, skewed information they’ve gotten from these intentionally leading sources on TV.

In the past, yes, newspapers had bias and their politically likeminded audiences, but the statements and speeches and treatises were published in full, so even with the punditry alongside it, readers still got the whole story and could judge for themselves.

Abraham Lincoln is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, leaders in history. But I doubt he would have been elected if today’s media existed in his time. He wouldn’t look good on TV. His magnificent speeches, then published in their entirety in the papers, would be broken into sound bites and hammered by pundits trying to score with their audiences, and he would lose.

His kindness and goodness and keen intellect would be lost in the muck of TV news.

I’ve seen newspapers from the days following November 19, 1863 in which the Gettysburg Address is published in full alongside an article—almost a review—dissecting the speech. Most of them slammed it as being meaningless or second-rate. But it was there for voters to read, and it made an impact. Today, its words are famous and that speech is considered one of the greatest in history.

It’s now known that Lincoln was suffering from the early stage of smallpox when he gave the speech. He looked pale and unwell even as he clearly spoke his brilliant words. How would that have played on TV, broken into snippets with the liberal media and the pro-slavery media both picking and choosing sound bites and commenting on how he doesn’t look fit to be president?

Instead, Lincoln was reelected a year later, in part because of speeches such as this. The people saw his address for what it was and what it was meant to be, despite the pundits.

We’ve lost that. We take in what we want to see; what silly or stupid or semi-profound tidbits our friends retweet or share on Facebook, and what the pundits we listen to want us to hear, then we vote based on that partial (meaning both incomplete and biased) information.
We live in a TL;DR world, and it’s killing our ability to have an informed electorate.

There is a debate raging about the value of giving international aid to poor countries. Perhaps the question could be better framed as: Do we give financial assistance or do we provide the means to enable nations to become self-sufficient and independent? It’s a complicated question and bears a closer look.

Some argue that without aid, poor countries would never be able to develop the infrastructure needed to become independent. They wouldn’t be able to develop industries, educational networks, or the political organization to become fully functioning and independent. The motivation behind this action is moral. Rich nations can afford to do more. According to the World Bank at least one quarter of the world’s population live in poverty while merely ½ of one percent of the world’s riches are dedicated to aiding the poor. In 1990 the World Bank set a target for the wealthy nations of giving 0.7% of their Gross National Product to foreign aid. If they meet this goal they say we can reduce poverty by 40%.

But others argue that much of this aid breeds corruption and dependency. There are also unexpected consequences. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment”.

These third-world cultures are not breeding the risk-taking mindset needed to establish prosperity. Some would say this is a “Western mind set.” But if these nations want to duplicate economic success, shouldn’t they appropriate strategies that worked for the West?

In the end we will have to choose between long-term financial dependency and a program of economic education that leads to self-sufficiency.

The post The Advantages and Disadvantages of Giving International Aid to Poor Countries appeared first on BookRiff.

If you happen to be one of the lucky few to have received Google’s upcoming Daydream View headset a few days early, it looks like you still won’t be able to use the Android-powered virtual reality device until its official launch on November 10th.

This is because the headset requires an app called “Google VR Services” to be installed in Android 7.0 Nougat before View is compatible with any device. This app has yet to be published in the Google Play Store and doesn’t seem to have appeared on any APK hosting websites, which means side-loading isn’t an option.

Right now the only devices that can be used with the headset are Google’s own Pixel and Pixel XL, though Google says more Daydream-certified smartphones are on the way from various Android manufacturers.

Google’s Daydream virtual Reality headset is set to launch in Canada on November 10th for $99 CAD.

Related: Daydream View Hands-on: Google Cardboard grows up

We first looked at the Masonic Temple built at Georgia and Seymour in an earlier post (only our second on the blog – so 600 posts ago). It was designed by Dalton and Eveleigh in 1909 and was built at a cost of $45,000. Before this there were three different lodges meeting in different leased spaces. Subscribers from the membership of the three lodges; the Mount Hermon, Cascade, and Acacia Lodges, raised the funds to build the new hall, which was opened on March 15, 1910.

The picture from 1938 shows a Safeway store and J S MacLaren’s Children’s Shop. Safeway had 35 stores in the city in 1938, having absorbed the Piggly Wiggly chain in 1935. Safeway had operated here from the early 1930s, replacing the Fountain Lunch that was here in 1930. The store closed down in 1946, was empty the next year, and in 1948 became a piano store with the ticket office of the Vancouver Symphony Society; the Freemason’s still occupied the upper floors that year.

The building was redeveloped in 1971, although we’re pretty sure that the frame and elements of the structure remain. The staining on the northern, wider bay on the Seymour Street façade suggests that underneath that part of the building has a different construction. The building is part of the Bay Parkade site, and now that the owners are reaching the end of the construction of their building now known as the Trump Tower, and have completed designs for their Little Mountain housing project, we may see a development proposal for this location.

Image source City of Vancouver Archives Bu N445.2

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Tesla’s electric vehicles aren’t cheap, but for years drivers have been able to charge up their Teslas quickly and for free at thousands of free Tesla Supercharger stations. This morning, the company announced all that free Supercharging will soon come to an end, at least for new cars.

In a Monday morning blog post, Tesla explains that starting in 2017, there will be a “small fee” to use a Supercharging station.

Tesla says vehicles currently on the road will not be affected, nor will any new vehicles where the owner takes delivery of the car before April 1, 2017.

That means that the potentially hundreds of thousands of lower-cost Tesla Model 3 vehicles coming in 2018 will have to pay to use Supercharging stations. The company says charging for Supercharging will help it expand the number of stations available to owners.

To take some of the sting out of it, Tesla will give affected owners credit for 400 kWh (about 1,000 miles) of Supercharging per month. For some owners, this may cover their full monthly charging needs.

Tesla vehicles don’t need Supercharging to power up their batteries, but these stations work significantly faster than other options. According to Tesla, you can get up to 170 miles of driving range from just 30 minutes of Supercharging, whereas your typical public charging station will only give you around 10-15 miles of driving range in that same time.

“We will release the details of the program later this year, and while prices may fluctuate over time and vary regionally based on the cost of electricity,” says a statement from Tesla, “our Supercharger Network will never be a profit center.”

Since 10% of trips to work in Vancouver are by people riding a bike, its fun to see how the bicycle evolved into the elegant machine we use today.

Thanks to Chris Bruntlett at Momentum Magazine for this book review.

 

“Bicycle: The Definitive Visual History” is available from DK Publishing. $30 USD, 256 pages. 2016.

 

Earlier this year, Google confirmed Android Auto would run natively on smartphones. Sure enough, the wait is over. Continue reading →

If you let your ethics and point of view into your brand, you’re going to leave money off the table.

Google has completely overhauled its iPhone Gmail app, bringing the design more in line with the Android iteration of its mobile email platform.

The Mountain View, California-based company notes that iPhone and iPad users can now download the new Gmail app that Google promises is faster than the previous version.

In addition to having the ability to add multiple accounts and swiping to archive and delete messages, Google has also brought several Inbox feature to users, specifically the ability to Undo Sending emails in order to “prevent embarrassing mistakes.” This feature has also been available in the desktop version of Gmail for some time now.

Search in Gmail has also been revamped and features faster results as well as spelling suggestions. Overall, the app’s functionality more closely resembles the desktop and Android version of Google’s mail client.

Here are quick links to our Best Posts about Winter Cycling. Check them out - we've tried to cover all of the most important issues and questions about winter cycling.

The post Our Best Posts about Winter Cycling appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

But one persistent fact within this complex history of uneven neoliberalization has been the universal tendency to increase social inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements in any society -- be it Indonesia, Mexico, or Britain -- to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization. While such a trend has been ameliorated here and there by social policies, the effects at the other end of the social spectrum have been quite spectacular. The incredible concentrations of wealth and power that now exist in the upper echelons of capitalism have not been seen since the 1920s. The flows of tribute into the world's major financial centres have been astonishing. What, however, is even more astonishing is the habit of treating all this as a mere and in some instances even unfortunate byproduct of neoliberalization. The very idea that this might be -- just might be -- the fundamental core of what neoliberalization has been about all along appears unthinkable. It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism.

-- David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

(emphasis mine)

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I recently had a conversation with another programmer about economics, deficit financing, and growth.

They expressed to me an exasperation about governments issuing debt to finance their future, and made an analogy to a "bathtub model" of money in which we pour money in the top (taxes) and take money out the bottom (spending), and have only so much to spend each year. That it was some kind of violation of laws of physics, or at least good taste, to take more out than you put in (notwithstanding how this analogy has a simple "turn the taps on stronger" answer to that problem, anyway).

I argued in response that deficit financing is nothing miraculous or deceptive: it's somewhere between mainstream and slightly-left-of-mainstream neo-keynsian / neo-chartalist economics, and rests on not-terribly-sexy observations about government spending: that it's a simple description of how the money supply expands (in an expanding economy), and not much of a risk because in such an expanding economy the cost of a unit of debt in real future terms is always falling (future-money is cheaper than today-money).

To this, they replied that they "don't see the growth", and talked about how national economies in the west are stagnant after the decline of western manufacturing in the 80s and so forth. That Canada in particular is really just a glorified extraction industry, and one quickly mortgaging its future. We have to save what little money we have, because it's quickly running out of the bathtub. Etc. etc.

This is ... a thing I hear a lot. An economic-decline narrative. To some extent I agree with it -- there is a significant decline in standard of living for the middle-and-lower quintiles of the population since the 80s, thanks to neoliberalism -- but the overall, cumulative-economic-activity story isn't quite right. Extraction accounts for only about 6% of the country's activities, despite making up much of our exports; the internal domestic economy is quite large and diversified and, more to the point, it has grown and continues to grow in at very least nominal, if not also real terms. People still keep having babies, economic transaction rates keep climbing, technology keeps improving, capital keeps investing in production growth, etc. These continue to (modestly, but persistently) push "economic growth" up, in terms of GDP or other financial measures. If something grows by even 1-2% every year, it adds up!

This happens whether one likes it or not. Personally I do not! I wish we took a lot of time off work, idled increasing amounts of production capacity rather than exploiting it, and stopped having so many babies. But it is a fact that we are not doing that; our economy grows along with our population of humans and machines, and governments have at least some obligation to act in concert with facts. So when someone suggests that governments ought to stop expanding spending, I wonder if they think that having (say) 23 million people, as Canada had in it when I was born, is the same as having 35 million people, as it has today. Or if the $200bn in GDP that it had back then is the same as the $1.8tn in GDP that it has today.

In the most glaringly practical terms: should we now assign 3 students to every teacher who taught 2 back in 1977? Should we put 3 people in every 2 hospital beds? Should we put 3 people in every 2 subway seats? Should we put 4 container vessels in the docks built for 1 back in 1977? Should we put 3 airplanes on runways built for 1? Because this is what it means to stop expanding public spending, when everything else is expanding.

This entry was originally posted at http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/235788.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Questions

Julia Evans writes about the incredible utility of asking questions. I couldn't agree more! Asking questions -- summarizing my own level of ignorance on a topic and/or why I'm perceiving something clearly contradictory, asking someone to correct my misunderstanding -- is the #1 super most important power I have ever learned, practiced, exploited in any professional context.

Julia is right that asking perspective-broadening (how, why, what-if, historical) questions about a system you don't understand, and asking in a relatively curious and humble (not demanding or judgemental) way, is a great skill to acquire, and gets easier with practice. People love to explain stuff if they think you're not just attacking them, and if you can handle constantly putting yourself in the ignorant-learner role, you'll learn a lot!

Do it. Ask the questions. Best pass-time.

Remoties

Johnathan Nightingale writes about remote work and the risks he thinks it carries to an employment relationship. As a decades-long remotie, I cannot say I like this line of thinking. I know Johnathan and I believe he's not a monster; but I do think that he's engaging (as he says) in some pretty serious "privilege enforcement". On the meat of the post, I agree much more with Christie Koehler's analysis:

1. offices are often noisy and distracting (open-plan is a disaster)
   
2. people being in their seats tells you nothing at all about what they're doing
   
3. people in office X are often working with people or systems not-in-X anyways
   
4. the amount of informal interaction in offices can magnify tiers of employees (cliques, isolated out-groups)
   
5. from a process-control perspective, the paper trails, single-source-of-truth, 24/7 operations and automation-orientation of remote-focused teams (that Johnathan acknowledges) can be a big productivity improvement.
   

But at some level, I think those points (and the arguments Johnathan puts forth to defend companies that don't "do" remoties) are missing the big issue. The big issue, which Johnathan mentions up front but then casts aside, is privilege enforcement. A whole lot of people don't have the ability, time, energy, money, health, legal rights or obligation-flexibility to relocate, or to be in your office from 9-5. Insofar as we do not yet live in a universal basic income society, and one must work to survive, unilaterally removing those people from your candidate pool is a matter of equity, of basic fairness, of (dare I say) social justice. I realize employment law doesn't treat it that way yet, but I think it's reasonable to be critical of firms who behave like it's no big deal to exclude everyone with location constraints. That's a lot of people, and disproportionately underprivileged people.

Language stuff

Language research keeps moving. Here are some things I've been reading about lately:

1. Practical languages with effects: Koka, PureScript
   
2. Verified compilers: CakeML, Pilsner
   
3. Session types: Scribble, Multiparty Session C, Effect-Sessions.
   
4. Verification-oriented languages: Whiley, Dafny, FStar
   

The most exciting PL-related news of the year, however, is that the HOPL website is back online. If you need me, I'll be wandering the stacks of the High Cold-War languages.

History

Speaking of history, if you have not yet watched and read the slide deck for The Secret History of Silicon Valley, and you work in or with the valley, you should! Especially if you think it might be hilarious to know that civilian radio telescopes like (*cough*) the Stanford Dish were funded to borrow time on to listen to Soviet radar signals bouncing off the moon.

I also recommend (though they can be trying) The Idea Factory (about Bell Labs) and Turing's Cathedral (largely about Von Neumann), if you have any doubts about the relationship of the public sector (especially military!) to computing history.

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“To produce this smooth space between disciplines, Eames felt “vision” was the best tool. To teach students to see, however, must come through exposure to an excess of data. For Eames only through information inundation could learning commence. He was very specific on this point; the purpose of the class was to experiment with “how much information could be given to a class.” Data overload as a pedagogical principle.”

- Orit Halpern Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. P101 (via notational)

Brian Feldman, Maybe Peter Thiel Is Just a Crank:

It’s odd: Regardless of whether they view him as a benevolent futurist or scheming magnate, most people, it seems, perceive Peter Thiel as very, very smart. It’s this assumption of intelligence, along with the sheer iconoclasm of the stance, that’s made Thiel’s support for Trump fascinating to journalists and tech observers: Surely he has a sophisticated and convincing argument for supporting the silliest and most incoherent presidential candidate in living memory.

But every speaking engagement Thiel has taken over the past few months, and every interview he’s given (all exclusively to the New York Times), has revealed that Thiel — much like the rest of Silicon Valley — loves speaking in broad platitudes and few specifics. His analysis, of the election and the problems facing the country, is no more sophisticated than any other Trump supporter or political reporter: He subscribes to the general idea that politics is broken and only an outsider can fix it. “We’re voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed,” Thiel said, aligning himself with the 40 percent or so that support the GOP candidate and positioning himself, as he often does, as a perpetual outsider.

The problem may be that the media is taking Thiel seriously without taking him literally. That is: His support for Trump isn’t a down payment on the alt-right or a long-shot bet on political favors. Thiel doesn’t support Trump because he’s a super-genius who can see deep into the future. He supports Trump for exactly the reasons he keeps telling us: because he’s a crank who doesn’t have a very deep understanding of politics.

Thiel does not seem smart, to me. But just like Trump, who has tapped into the angst of a large fragment of the US populace, Thiel is the willing front man for a bizarro strand of techno-libertarianism, a bunch that believes the world would be a better place if we could sidestep the inconveniences of democracy and let the technocrats run things. 

Consider this exchange between serial entrepreneur and Silicon Valley mouthpiece, Jason Calacanis, and ex-Facebooker and angel Chamath Palihapitiya, chatting about the government shutdown in 2013:

Palihapitiya: The government, they’re completely useless.

Calacanis: The government got shut down today and the stock market went up 1 percent.

Palihapitiya: We’re in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we’ve known it now for probably four or five years. But it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in LA. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there’s no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero …

Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid. They just sit there and they just kind of, you know …

[Applause.]

Calacanis: There you have it.

Thiel is supporting Trump for the same reason Putin is: he would like to disrupt democracy in the US and promote dysfunctional government. It’s equivalent to shrinking government, because a dysfunctional government accomplishes nothing, and such a government will not hinder the expansion of techno-globalism.

And if you want more on how dangerously unhinged Peter Thiel is, see Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian, and Beware Peter Thiel.

After introducing emoji reactions last year, our own Slack team saw a dip in the total number of messages sent. With hundreds of members communicating across a couple thousand channels, it was a welcome change. Before emoji reactions, messages begot more messages: replies, questions, acknowledgment. In a word, noise.

Fascinating look at how Slack is using emoji inside the company. It's sort of amazing how versatile emoji can be when used in work communications with a bit of creativity. I'm also going to implement this idea for our own Slack:

Speaking of 18F, check out their blog post about using emoji reactions for knowledge management. They tag all “evergreen” content found in channels with :evergreen_tree:, and use a search query like the one mentioned above to find new messages worth codifying in their handbooks. At Slack, we do something similar, where anyone can tag a message with :notebook: to indicate it might be worth adding to the company’s internal documentation.

→ Source: slackhq.com

While I have pushed for reflection and slow scholarship in my blog, I have to admit that some of the less romantic and glamorous parts of academia don’t particularly excite me. I call that “the grunt work“.

This is grunt work: Cleaning up THIRTEEN references I just imported into Mendeley pic.twitter.com/OT3BX4QQge

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 19, 2016

Like many people in my profession (academia), I find it hard to motivate myself. Even with my own tricks and “hacks”, where I convince my brain that I can knock off a few Quick Wins by finishing simpler tasks in blocks of 30 minutes, where I do granular planning and break down each component of a project into thirds (the Rule of Three method), even though I focus on just ONE task at a time, it’s hard for me to get motivation. And doing the grunt work doesn’t excite me either.

Even worse, sometimes, writing IS grunt work, as writer Jodi Picoult emphasizes.

#AcWri advice by @jodipicoult : writing IS grunt work. pic.twitter.com/kcwAsucLde

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 31, 2016

Writing memoranda, rhetorical precis and extracting quotations to fill your Excel conceptual synthesis dump sheet? Grunt work.

I would LOVE to say that as soon as I turn on my laptop, Word immediately launches and I can start typing sentences that are coherent, and that I write for 2 hours and that life is good and I have a solid 2,500 words by the end of my morning session. This isn’t the case.

Let me tell you a little story, just from the past couple of days. I am coauthoring a book chapter with a colleague in Germany. To work on this chapter, I needed to do the following:

• Print out his email to me, and the chapter draft he sent me.
• Read my coauthor’s requests and map out in my Drafts Review Matrix what I was going to do.
• Start going through the table, all the while deciding what I could realistically finish in the time I was allocating for the edition of this chapter.
• Search Mendeley for the right references I needed to insert to back up my argument.
• Since I am not the lead author on this particular chapter, I had to make sure to insert the references and then create a bibliography from where he could copy the references he needed (he uses EndNote and I use Mendeley, which can make coauthoring a bit complicated).
• Type an email responding with the changes I made.

Of the list of activities I show above, only ONE would count ordinarily as “writing” (e.g. producing text). But as I have argued before, typing the email response, creating the Draft Review Matrix, writing the list of items I had to edit, all of this was grunt work, and therefore, it should also count as writing.

What counts as grunt work?

• Cleaning up Mendeley (or Zotero or RefWorks) references.
• Highlighting and scribbling on the margins of papers you read.
• Searching for references in academic databases, downloading them, properly labeling them, organizing them into folders, uploading to Mendeley, printing them, labeling them with plastic tabs, organizing them within magazine holders.
• Writing your To-Do list and organizing your weekly project activity board.
• Searching the web for newspaper stories, clipping them into Evernote, sorting them and properly labeling them, creating a new Notebook, etc.
• Downloading a new database and cleaning it into a workable dataset.
• Writing (and cleaning) the R/Stata/MatLab code for your regressions.
• Transcribing interviews to be able to dump the text into MAXQDA or Dedoose or Atlas.ti
• Scribbling notes for your lectures and then typing them into a Power Point file.

I wish the grunt work were valued as much as the actual production of words. But all academic activity includes a certain amount of this type of activity. I hope we can find a way to value it as much as we do other research-related activities.

While the OLED Touch Bar that graces Apple’s MacBook Pro 2016 has a whiff of the future about it, the actual concept of replacing traditional function keys with an adaptive solution has been around for a long time.

Lenovo produced its own, more limited version of the Touch Bar in 2014 called the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Ultimately, the laptop was a flop, but it turns out the manufacturer wasn’t alone in designing such a feature for the PC ecosystem. In fact, the Windows creator itself, Microsoft, was plotting its implementation of adaptive hardware since 1999.

Something worth checking out, worked on this a while back. Especially, given recent tech news. @microsoft @surface : https://t.co/M08AoGAkF7

— Steven Bathiche (@sbathiche) October 29, 2016

The feature’s design iterations is the subject of a blog post from the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group, which was recently tweeted out by Steven Bathiche, the manager of that division.

Microsoft’s take on adaptive hardware was conceived of in 1999 by Bathiche, who envisioned a keyboard “that displays the active action keys and hides the irrelevant keys for a given application, application mode, and application state,” sketching a paper prototype in his notebook (pictured above).

After that Bathiche and various team members went through multiple prototypes, using a number of different display and projection tactics. In 2009, the research team put together a prototype fairly similar to Apple’s Touch Bar, featuring a large, touch-sensitive display strip resting atop the keyboard.

When questioned on Twitter as to why Microsoft’s concept never made it to reality, Bathiche replied: “We did not build computers back then, and when we did start, we made computers with touch screens.”

With this, of course, he refers to the Surface, which pioneered an entirely new vision of the future for on-the-go computer users: the 2-in-1 tablet-laptop hybrid. The two very different approaches to touchscreen technology aren’t surprising considering the stark contrast between the two companies, but it’ll be interesting to see which tech giant eventually wins out.

Related: Microsoft will detail its affordable headsets in December