We should be nervous when the most profitable company in the world takes a principled stance against the most powerful government in the world. Apple released a statement today (they call it a “letter” to their customers) which states that the FBI has requested that they provide a backdoor to the iPhone’s operating system and they are refusing to give it to them. This is huge because If there is any sort of consistent observation across decades and genres of social theory it is that as organizations get bigger they tend to treat the rest of the world as a potential threat to their own interests. War criminal and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summed it up nicely: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The same can be said for Apple, China, General Motors, Russia, and Amazon. As a company or empire grows its stability relies on more and more factors and so the tendency is to bring those things into the fold either by buying them, colonizing them, or some indiscernible combination of the two. If Apple and the United States federal government are at loggerheads about data privacy it means that something big and fairly stable has ended. When powerful actors disagree, it usually heralds a major shift in one party’s conception of what is politically viable. Is that what just happened?

Last summer I wrote about the reactionary politics of hacking. There I argued that while most hackers (according to their own public pronouncements and the published research on these communities) are somewhere between anarcho-socialist and libertarian in their personal politics, their aggregate effect on the world may be promoting a security state. I wrote:

the hacker and the bureaucrat are polar opposites in terms of means –the former is trickster incarnate while the latter plots along as predictably as humanly possible– but they advocate for similar solutions to difficult problems. Even though the bureaucrat seeks and fosters smooth operation of a system, and hackers are motivated by a goal and are animated by chaotic destruction, they both share a fundamental distrust of humans as political entities. Hackers may embody the opposite of bureaucracy, but they ultimately desire the same thing as bureaucrats: technologies that obviate trust.

Encryption is only as important as one’s belief that there are bad actors waiting in the wings to do harm. The important thing for us to consider here is that both Apple CEO Tim Cook and the whistleblower Edward Snowden both seem to heartily believe that such bad actors are out there and encryption is necessary for digital life. Such uniformity of belief across such a presumably wide political spectrum –from corporate CEO to enemy of the state—has to mean at least one of these three things is true:

• Encryption is so obviously important that even people with huge ideological disagreements can at least agree that it is necessary.
• Snowden and Cook are actually not that ideologically different or they are similar in an as-of-yet-undefined political coalition. That is, we might not have a word for the persistent and predictable opinions that Snowden, Cook, and maybe all people in those positions hold. In other words, they look further apart ideologically than they really are because we’re looking at them from the wrong perspective.
• The United States government is so far afield from what makes for a sane argument about encryption and data privacy that really different people can be on the same opposing side.

I suspect most people would waffle between 1 and 3, and maybe even say that those statements are synonymous: that the government is so greedy for power or narrowly focused on its objectives that it has lost sight of the obvious risks associated with breaking encryption. I tend to believe that 1 and 3 are true today but 2 is most important of all. There is a new political common sense forming and its borders are peculiar. They circumscribe a really broad group of people and interests that all converge on the importance of the individual’s ability to have absolute control of their data within the confines of the laws that do not immediately endanger that data sovereignty. Your data is yours and yours alone with few exceptions.

In most instances the logic above is sound, but if today tells us anything, it is that this logic has been borne out of defensive posturing, not creative thinking about the kind of society we want to live in. The arguments for encryption are being forged in the heat of reaction, not the light of creativity. So while I agree with Apple (and Snowden) in this instance, I worry that we are building a reactionary political program that can be wielded easily by powerful actors, not a radical one that confronts the underlying abuses of power that individuals face on a daily basis. Apple is right that encryption backdoors today mean deeply broken and insecure networks tomorrow, however we should reject the premise that we will always live in a world where this will be the case.

Cook is fond of using home security as a metaphor for data security. In today’s letter he said a backdoor to encryption “would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.” At an electronic privacy conference last fall Cook said something similar: “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too.” He concluded by warning that if bad guys “know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it.”

It is obviously important that, in the mean time, we have sufficient locks on our doors, but focusing on locking ourselves away seems more in line with an over-stepping government than a free society. If big organizations like governments and corporations only have interests, we should be focused on the project of making it against their interest to want access to our data and our homes. To do so requires radical thinking –by definition, thinking that gets at the root of problems—not reactionary thinking that is characterized by short term, stop-gap measures fueled by fear and anger.

If we look at calls for encryption as reactionary, not progressive or radical, the disagreement between Apple and the government looks much different than how I characterized it in the beginning of this essay. Instead of a foundation-shaking change in how the government operates, we are seeing a reactionary movement that, like many reactionary movements, creates single-issue coalitions. It may have the long-term effect of making us less free, if we are constantly preoccupied with building better locks rather than better communities. Encryption may be tactically useful for preserving individual liberties now, but we should be concerned about where it will leave us in years to come.

David is on Twitter.

Header image by Karol Franks

Elon Musk's goal for Tesla is amazingly simple yet incredibly difficult: create sustainable transportation. When combined with SpaceX, Musk is dedicating all of his time and energy to pursuits aimed to advance humanity. Even though Musk's ambitions and motivation are not up for debate, the degree to which Tesla will be able to complete Musk's goals are once again being drawn into question following Tesla's recent earnings report. As long as Tesla remains an automobile manufacturer, Apple is the best positioned company to rethink personal transportation. Instead of buying Tesla, Apple will look to stand on Tesla's shoulders. 

Tesla, the Pioneer

Much to critics' disappointment, Tesla will forever be known as a pioneer in personal transportation. The company didn't just build an electric vehicle, which is not too difficult to achieve, but successfully designed and manufactured an electric car that was able to produce an emotional connection with its driver. Tesla made electric cars cool.  Electric cars were once cast off as boring vehicles that were purchased as an act of charity to the environment. However, Tesla was able to show what technology and software can do when added to a legacy industry where there hadn't been any successful new U.S. entrants in 50 years.

It is this focus on product that has served as fuel for the "Apple should buy Tesla" suggestions that began to pop up a few years ago. As tech enthusiasts bought the Model S and experienced the same emotional connection with a car that they had with their iPhone, something felt wrong. These Model S owners wondered why Apple didn't create the Model S. Tesla seemingly beat Apple to the automobile punch. Accordingly, in order to fix this cognitive dissonance, the theory was that only after Apple bought Tesla would the world once again make sense with Apple selling the best smartphone and car. 

Of course, that type of thinking is not just grossly misguided, but intellectually dishonest. There is no rule or law that says every great product must come from Apple just as it is incorrect to assume Apple should or needs to buy a company simply because it has a product that people love. Unfortunately, this focus on Apple & Tesla M&A has led to many ignoring two important trends: Tesla is facing a growing dilemma as an automobile manufacturer, and the auto industry is showing signs of incredible change that will question the car's definition. 

Many have pointed to Tesla being not only an automobile company, but also a software start-up or energy company. While that claim contains some truth, as seen with Tesla's Gigafactory, Supercharger network, and Powerwall systems, one can not ignore the fact that at the end of the day, Tesla is building its own cars. Raw material enters Tesla's Fremont factory at one end, and Model S and Model X vehicles come out the other. Unless this dynamic changes and Tesla moves away from building its own cars, the company is an auto manufacturer and risks remaining a pioneer. 

Tesla's Dilemma

For the past few years, Tesla has been able to sprint forward on the energy associated with the Model S launch. Good press and reviews led to growing consumer interest and a subsequent increase in sales. It would appear Tesla made it. As shown in Exhibit 1, Tesla has been able to ramp up production each year by healthy percentages. In 2015, the company shipped approximately 50,000 Model S and Model X vehicles, which was less than Elon Musk's 55,000 initial goal. 

Exhibit 1: Tesla Vehicle Deliveries (Model S and Model X) 

While all may seem strong, under the hood, things are much more concerning. Tesla appears to be operating with a very slim margin of error. With $1.2 billion of cash on the balance sheet and capital requirements totaling $400 million to $500 million per quarter, Tesla does not have much excess capital, a critical ingredient for Musk's current strategy to create sustainable transportation. On the company's most recent conference call, management considered $1 billion to be the minimum amount of cash the company can hold in order to run the business. 

Tesla faces a cash dilemma, and nowhere is this more apparent than management's very own production guidance. Tesla is targeting 500,000 car deliveries by 2020. On the surface, this may seem like any other aggressive goal that a young company sets for itself, but dig a bit deeper, and this target seems problematic.

Exhibit 2: Tesla Vehicle Delivery Estimates

Note: Vehicle delivery estimates for 2016 and 2020 are from Tesla. 

The company will need to find a way to increase automobile production by 10x in just five years in order to meet its delivery goal, all the while having very little excess cash. It's not that this day wasn't predicted to happen by nearly every legacy auto executive, but an increasing number of observers thought Elon Musk would find some way around it, where "it" was the inevitable. An auto manufacturer needs immense levels of capital in order to produce a profit, and Tesla's strategy for reaching that type of profitability is being drawn into question.

Tesla's game plan was to use Model S and Model X cash flows to fund production of a mass market car, the Model 3. Once this Model 3 hit the market, Tesla would be able to reach profitability by having additional scale. Producing 50,000 vehicles a year just isn't going to cut it at Tesla's current prices. However, Model X production issues, specifically with the Falcon Wing doors, have led to delays and additional questions about how effective the Model X will be in terms of funding Tesla's production expansion. Whether customers would even want a lower-priced Tesla electric vehicle with fewer bells and whistles than the Model S and Model X hasn't even entered the equation and doesn't play a role in Tesla's dilemma. It is assumed that the demand will be there, and this may end up being grossly optimistic. Instead, Tesla's issues are related to the realities of being an automaker. 

The Changing Auto

There is no denying that the Model S and Model X rethink what an electric car can be, but they don't rethink what a car can be. Auto manufacturers currently compete on three attributes: performance, style and price. For Tesla, performance is how the Model S and Model X stand out. Elon Musk may have been able to beat BMW and Mercedes Benz in terms of performance, but the Model S and Model X remain firmly entrenched in the legacy auto industry. The addition of software and autonomous features doesn't change this fact. 

However, there are signs that the way consumers think of automobiles is changing. In the future, convenience and personalization will trump performance. We see the early stages of this with Uber as consumers now have an easier way of getting from point A to point B. Similar to how the iPhone altered the cellphone's trajectory, a new kind of car will do the same to the automobile, but the Model S and Model X are not the answers. 

While many in tech have been quick to focus on autonomous driving and new car ownership models as the interesting things to watch in the auto space, there will be more important developments to monitor early on. As automobiles include additional cameras and sensors, the car will begin to morph into a different kind of machine capable of capturing the world around us. The car will begin to handle new roles in our lives. Beginning to think of a car as a smart room on wheels naturally leads to the importance of having a fleet of similar "rooms" on the road in order to refine software and build neural networks (deep learning technology). Tesla's Autopilot is an example of software benefiting from having a fleet of 100,000 Tesla vehicles on the road. Accordingly, the important variable in this dynamic is the quantity of cars. Having a large fleet of cars will be essential regardless of car ownership trends. The process of overseeing the mass production of rooms on wheels will be the single most important variable to monitor in the auto space. 

Apple's Interest in Personal Transport

It has been a year since the first reports of Apple's electric car project, Project Titan, were published. In that time, although we have gotten additional clues as to Apple's interest in personal transportation, there still has been very little said of Apple's long-term plans for getting into the automobile industry. 

Apple's motivation for entering the automobile industry will be to fundamentally rethink what it means to use a car and alter the competitive advantages reside in the auto industry. The current auto industry is not set up to handle automobile production where product cycles are measured in weeks and months, and design plays a much bigger role in the production process. Instead, Apple is best positioned to capitalize on this change as the company now has more than a decade of experience using third-party contract manufacturers to produce mass-market personal technology devices. Simply put, owning car factories and producing cars will become a liability, not a strength, in the auto industry. 

Apple will not enter the auto industry if it lacks confidence that it can oversee enough car production to change the industry. Along those lines, Tesla's 50,000 to 100,000 vehicle annual production rate would simply not be significant enough for Apple. In fact, even Tesla's 500,000 vehicles per year goal would not be large enough. Apple is likely thinking how to design and build millions of vehicles per year. As shown in Exhibit 3, a hypothetical 2.5 million annual vehicle delivery rate for Apple nine years after launch would be five times more aggressive than Tesla's already lofty goal. Apple would be using a completely different sales scale to eventually have a multi-million car fleet of smart rooms on wheels. 

Exhibit 3: Tesla Vehicle Delivery Goal vs. Hypothetical Apple Car Sales Target

Selling 2.5 million vehicles per year would represent approximately three percent of the global automobile market. How can Apple reach that goal? Have a lot of cash and rely on third-party contract manufacturers. There is no other company in the world with as much cash as Apple. In addition, Apple has been gathering an incredible amount of experience from working with contract manufacturers to build 230 million iPhones per year (the smaller the device, the more difficult it is to design and manufacture at scale). 

Apple Doesn't Need to Own Tesla

There is no need for Apple to own an auto manufacturer in order to come up with its own electric car. This would be the equivalent of Apple owning a smartphone manufacturer in order to come up with the iPhone. Accordingly, the strategy Tesla is following in which it produces its own cars is not something that would be of interest to Apple. This isn't to take anything away from the Model S and Model X as top cars on the road, but Apple's automobile plans do not require owning car production facilities. 

Even though Apple doesn't need to buy Tesla to change the auto industry, there may be a place for Apple to use Tesla as a supplier. Depending on how effective Apple is in its R&D efforts, Tesla's upcoming Gigafactory may prove to be a viable battery source for an electric Apple Car. In addition, Tesla may end up proving to be a good partner for supplying larger portions of the electric powertrain. Over time, Apple would work to limit the dependency on any one partner and control all major technologies found in the car, but relying on a high-quality supplier in the beginning would contain some validity. 

For Elon Musk, having Tesla serve as a supplier to Apple is not a stretch or loss since such a reality would still align with his long term goals of reaching sustainable transportation. In addition, Musk has gone on record to welcome new companies to the electric car space. With Apple's contract manufacturing partners potentially using parts produced in a Tesla factory, there would be no need for Apple to own its own automobile assembly plants, similar to how Apple doesn't need to own key iPhone assemblers.

Apple will look to stand on Tesla's shoulders by not entering the low-margin vehicle production and assembly businesses and instead focusing on hardware and software design. Tesla laid the path for rethinking electric cars, and Apple will learn from Tesla's early decisions to rethink the car. 

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The post Help Us Spread the Word: Encryption Matters appeared first on Mark Surman.

Kanye West tweeted yesterday about the high cost of textbooks yesterday. (Buzzfeed collected his rants into an article. Because journalism.) As Tressie McMillan Cottom later noted, he might have been right about the sticker price, but his analysis – particularly the part when he appealed to the tech sector for a solution – was sorely lacking.

See, despite it being one of the most cited parts of Walter Isaacson’s biography, it’s not really evident at all that Steve Jobs, as Yeezy suggests, wanted to lower the cost of textbooks for the sake of educational affordability or access. Indeed, when Apple finally launched its digital textbook offering in 2012, it partnered with rather than “disrupted” traditional publishers. Moreover, Apple’s plans to charge schools and students a subscription for access to textbook content would prove to be more expensive than purchasing (printed) copies (not to mention the added cost of also having to buy Apple mobile devices).

Here’s the passage in question from the Isaacson biography where Jobs’ plans for the textbook industry are discussed:

Most of the dinner conversation was about education. [Rupert] Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

I quote Isaacson’s biography at length because I think it demonstrates that Steve Jobs’ plans for textbooks and his motivations for “disruption” were a lot more complex (and a lot less altruistic) than Kanye West and the popular narrative he’s parroting suggest. It’s not really clear who will save money, for starters. Who is “them” in Jobs’ final sentence? And sure, we might cheer the bypassing of an entity like the Texas Board of Education, renowned for its insistence that textbooks approved for use in the state (and by extension, textbooks that are sold to many other states) contain factually inaccurate information and reflect conservative socio-political values. But as we’ve seen with Apple’s tight regulation over its ecosystem – its decisions about what’s permissible in the App Store, for example – what we might actually read from Jobs’ plans is less about a shift from “expensive” to “free” than a shift in power from governmental bodies to technology platforms as the locus of control.

This is all a very long-winded introduction to some of the questions and concerns I have about Amazon’s recently-announced plans to offer a platform for open educational resources. Education Week’s K–12 Market Brief first reported the story, based on a presentation given at the School Superintendents Association’s recent conference. Details are light. Really, really light. But because the adjective “open” is in there, lots of folks seem to believe that this will be A Good Thing.

The platform’s in beta, and we know its name – Amazon Inspire – but little more. We don’t know what the business model will be. (Neither does Amazon, by EdWeek’s account, although Amazon Education’s vice president of strategic relations Andrew Joseph promises it’ll always be free. Mmmhmmm.) We don’t know how it’ll work, other than these two sentences: “Users of the site will be able to add ratings and reviews, and to receive recommendations based on their previous selections. Educators will be able to curate open resources, self-publish material they have developed, and put a school’s entire digital library that is open and freely available online.” We don’t know what the interface will look like or how usable it will actually be (and I think those who've used Amazon Fire will concur: the company does not excel at UX. It's also failed repeatedly when it comes to accessibility issues). We don’t know what format the OER will be available in (for composing, publishing, or remixing). We don’t know if content will be interoperable – that is, usable beyond the Amazon (Kindle) ecosystem – or if there’ll be integration with other software systems. We don’t know what data Amazon will glean from the resources posted there – it does say that materials will be tagged with Learning Registry metadata – and we don’t know what Amazon will do with that data. We don’t know how the licensing will work.

It’s also not apparent yet that Amazon has paid attention to the history lessons that other OER registries might offer about what has and has not worked to spur OER adoption. Mike Caulfield has touched on this in his response to the Amazon news, arguing that these efforts have mostly been ill-fated as they’ve largely focused on the centralization of resources in order to solve the so-called problem of discoverability:

It’s been a disaster for two reasons. The first is that it assumes that learning objects are immutable single things, and that the evolution of the object once it leaves the repository is not interesting to us. And so Amazon thinks that what OER needs is a marketplace (albeit with the money removed). But OER are living documents, and what they need is an environment less like Amazon.com and more like GitHub. (And that's what we're building at Wikity, a personal GitHub for OER).

Amazon is a commercial powerhouse – as Paul Ford recently wrote, “It is possibly the most purely optimized commercial enterprise in history, marrying hard computer science to ruthless labor practices in pursuit of delivering brown, branded boxes to anyone who might conceivably want them.” It is also a technology powerhouse. Amazon Web Services, which includes computer storage and processing, is a $5 billion business that undergirds in turn much of the rest of the tech sector. (Netflix, Coursera, Yelp, Zynga, and on and on all run on AWS.)

But it doesn’t appear as though Amazon Inspire is about enabling schools or educators to spin up their own infrastructure to publish, host, and share content. It’s about building a marketplace, controlled by Amazon, to buy, sell, and trade stuff. This is Amazon.com for education, not AWS. And that’s a pity, because rethinking some of the infrastructure of an educational Web – something that Caulfield has been writing about lately – is far more interesting than building yet another centralized and corporatized OER repository.

Textbooks cost too much, and everyone knows it, as the 64,000 retweets of Kanye West perhaps underscore. But that inflated price tag is just one of the problems that OER purports to solve. (See David Wiley’s 5 Rs of open content: the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute work.) It remains to be seen if Amazon Inspire will support these activities or if the “problem” that Amazon really seeks to solve here is a stronger foothold in the education market.

Whilst looking around to see what sorts of graphical editors there are out there for teaching introductory python programming, I ran a search for blockly python. If you haven’t come across Blockly before, it’s a library for building browser based graphical programming interfaces, based on interlocking blocks, with a Scratch style aesthetic: blockly.

I already knew that Blockly could be customised to generate Python code but the BlockPy environment from Virginia Tech’s Software Innovations Lab is even richer:

For a start, the environment is set up for working with small data sets, and can display small tabular datasets as well as plot them. (You may remember we also used data to motivate programming for the FutureLearn Learn To Code (a line at a time) course.) The language is a subset of Python 2.7 (the environment uses the Skulpt client side Python interpreter; I’m not sure if the turtle demo works!).

The environment also supports blocks-to-code as well as code-to-blocks translations, so you can paste a chunk of code into the text view, and then display the blocks equivalent. (I think this is done by parsing the Python into AST and then using that as the bridge to the blocks view?)

Alternatively, it you’re happier with the blocks, you can write a programme graphically and then grab the code version. Or you can flip between the two…

As well as the blocks/code view, there is a pseudo-code view that maps the code into more explanatory language. This feature is under active development, I think…

To aid debugging – and learning – the environment allows you to step through the code a line at a time, previewing the current state in the panels on the right hand side.

If you get an error, an error prompt appears. This seems to be quite friendly in some cases, though I suspect not every error or warning is trapped for (I need to explore this a bit more; I can’t help thinking than an “expert” view to show the actual error message might also be useful if the environment is being used as a stepping stone to text-based Python programming.)

The code is available on Github, and I made a start on putting it into a docker container until my build broke (Kitematic on my machine doesn’t seem to like Java at the moment – a known issue – which seems to be required as part of the build process)…

The environment is also wrapped up in a server side environment, and on the Virginia Tech is wrapped in a login-if-you-want-to environment. I didn’t see any benefit from logging in, though I was hoping to be able to name and save my own programmes. (I wonder if it’s also possible to serialise and encode a programme into a URL so it can be shared?)

You can also embed the environment – prepopulated with code, if required, though I’m not sure how to to that? – inline in a web page, so we could embed it in course materials, for example. Being able to hooks this into an auto-marking tool could also be interesting…

All in all, a really nice environment, and one that I think we could explore for OUr own introductory computing courses.

I also started wondering about how BlockPy might be able to work with a Jupyter server/IPython kernel, or be morphed into an IPyWidget…

In the first case, BlockPy could be used to fire up an IPython process via a Jupyter server, and handle code execution and parsing (for AST-block conversion?) that way rather then using the in-browser Python Skulpt library. Having a BlockPy front end to complement Jupyter notebooks could be quite interesting, I think?

On the widget front, I can imagine running BlockPy within a Jupyter notebook, using it to generate code that could be exported into a code cell, for example, though I’m not really clear what benefit this would provide?

So – anyone know if there is any work anywhere looking at taking the BlockPy front-end and making it a standalone Jupyter client?! :-)

Legal friends! The world needs you. Here’s the graph of readership of All Writs Act on Wikipedia:

That’s 45,035 reads yesterday (by humans, not bots).((Big thanks to the tech team for figuring out how to differentiate – not something we could do until fairly recently, at least for public stats!)) That would put it 5th on SSRN’s all-time legal download list, right between William Landes and Cass Sunstein. Not bad company! Or in other words: anything you fix in this article in the next day or two is likely to be the most-read thing you ever write.

The article has been edited 39 times since the Apple letter was published. So it is a lot better than two days ago. But it could still use a lot of love – history, applicability outside of the Apple situation, etc. Contribute!

Since lawyers are particularly concerned about citation, it is worth mentioning that the editing experience especially when adding citations has become vastly better in the past year – in most cases for articles on SSRN, simply dropping the link into our citation editor will get you a fully-fleshed out and formatted citation (with thanks to our friends at Zotero!)

 

Co-written with Derrick O’Keefe and originally published at Ricochet.

Even if he’s really only offering a pragmatic form of social democracy, Sanders has created a political space in the mainstream left that’s sorely missing in Canada. His insurgent campaign for the Democratic Party nomination has put inequality and systemic injustice front and centre in the United States.

Policy proposals aside, merely having the word “socialism” back on the agenda in the United States signals a massive shift. Compare Sanders’ unabashed use of the term to recent NDP history.

Canada’s traditional social democratic party has spent recent years downplaying and scrubbing away the last vestiges of socialism from its public presentation. Under pressure from party leaders and bureaucrats, the NDP removed all but one reference to it from its constitution in 2013. The s-word is now only mentioned in passing in the party preamble.

It’s useful to take a broader view than just the recent botched campaign and the party itself. For years, the NDP’s leadership and top advisors have taken their cues from their counterparts in control of the Democratic Party — an electoral machine that has been effectively captured by a small coterie of the rich and powerful.

While Sanders and his campaign is speaking to a broad section of the working and middle class from the left for the first time in ages, the NDP has been unable to tap this majority for support in Canada. And while Sanders’ critique is systemic, the NDP has been largely focused on the edges of power, messaging to voters about big banks raising transaction fees rather than big banks rigging the economy.

Inequality and revolution

Of course, it’s fair to point out that the “political revolution” Sanders is calling forth would look different in Canada. Some things are less radically broken in our country: our campaign finance system is not as out of control as that in the United States, the financial sector is not as dominant, and some basic social welfare programs the United States still lacks, such as universal health care, were secured long ago.

On the other hand, while the gap between rich and poor is smaller in Canada than in the United States, it has recently grown wider and faster here. Canada’s levels of inequality, furthermore, do not compare well with other countries of the Global North.

Similarly, although we sometimes like to think of ourselves as a North American Sweden, we’re much of a “USA North.” Canada is closer to the United States than Scandinavia when it comes to the ability of the welfare state to redistribute income. While racial inequality is front and center in the United States, Canada has largely evaded its racist legacy with respect to First Nations and Aboriginal peoples, who today face barriers as high as those faced by African Americans.

When it comes to keeping tabs on elites, we also score poorly. Media ownership is highly concentrated, and ever more so. In Canada, as in the United States, diversity of opinion is lacking and many opinion-makers are disconnected from the reality of everyday life for the majority. It’s noteworthy that Sanders continues to denounce the “establishment media” in his stump speeches, recognizing their role in legitimizing the system.

Finally, Canada is also a relatively small open economy that is at the mercy of international pressures much more than the United States. This means that it is much easier to sell austerity policies and job losses that hurt millions as hopeless necessity; just ask southern Ontario. That we are subject to vicissitudes of the world economy to a greater extent, however, only means we have to think more creatively, not lower our expectations.

With all these differences in mind, the surge of support for Sanders nevertheless surely calls for a rethink of Canada’s left politics, especially after the Liberals swept to power in 2015 on anti-austerity rhetoric that may turn out to have little substance. If and when a movement like the one building behind Sanders comes to Canada, what should it say?

Tax the rich

One of Bernie Sanders’ big successes has been to break with decades of anti-tax ideology posing as common sense.

How to raise revenues to pay for a social democratic program is a hard question. The right’s pocketbook rhetoric has effectively prevented discussion of this matter, lowering expectations year after year: every tax increase must be modest and have a tit-for-tat tax cut for someone else.

Sanders has smashed through this dogma, making it clear the rich and big business have to pay more. In Canada, ever-lower taxes and copious opportunities for evasion have resulted in less capacity for government to provide even basic services. Canada’s one-percenters can pay more. Billions more for social spending could be gained from top tax rates not higher than those that existed in the 1950s or ’60s. Less noticed, Sanders has emphasized that the middle class, too, could pay more to help fund social programs that, like universal health care, end up saving most people money but also move things off the capricious and inegalitarian market.

The NDP should take note: a message of taxing the rich is not only necessary, but can also be extremely popular.

Universal care

One modest place where a new politics could surely start is with the unfinished business of the welfare state. We have universal health care, but no universal pharmacare. Care for the vulnerable sick is a public, social function, but what about care for children and the elderly? Just in terms of health care, only about 70 per cent of spending in Canada goes through the public system. Why are some areas of health care such as dentistry left to the market and to very unequal access?

Here, even today’s NDP has been clear that we could do more. Its proposals go from relatively comprehensive on pharmacare to very incremental on child care. This is a start, but we have to remember that it is not only what is done and how much by the public sector but also how. It is not enough to pump more resources into services; we should be thinking about how to do things differently.

Bernie Sanders wants to transform how the United States delivers health care from an inefficient private system to a better public one. In Canada, we can propose more. Public healthcare can be done differently with greater patient autonomy and more democratic accountability. It is harder to undermine a system in which we are invested more than simply as passive consumers.

Free tuition

Universities are public institutions in Canada so free tuition could have an even bigger impact here than Sanders’ plan in the United States. Critics say this is a handout to the rich, but there is a broader context. Is it that troubling that Frank Stronach’s, or some other one-percenter’s, children don’t have to pay tuition if we can recoup more from them in higher taxes? Much more important are the far greater numbers of working- and middle-class youth who will have the chance to graduate without or with much less debt. Remember that total university revenues from tuition are below $10 billion across Canada. (That’s less than 4 per cent of the federal government budget).

This is the way universal services work: with broad buy-in from a society that gets high-quality services, while the rich have to go along and pay their fair share. And if we get better social control over these services (say elected university boards or greater student involvement in curriculum development and so on), it might well be easier to develop lasting support to keep them public and accessible.

Affordable housing

If it is mostly young people who feel constrained by high tuition and rising student debt, then many more are affected by unaffordable housing. Working- and even middle-class families are finding themselves priced out of their own cities and neighbourhoods. The condo booms in Toronto and Vancouver have shown the economy is adept at producing investment vehicles that double as overpriced homes. Unlike the United States, Canada’s housing price boom kept going through the global financial crisis and house prices have grown 10 per cent faster than incomes over just the past five years. The house price to income ratio is higher today in Canada than other similar small countries, nevermind cities like Vancouver where the ratio is a whopping 10:1.

That some working-class families have won the property value lottery during the boom is no mitigating factor; it only means many now have to choose between enjoying a more secure retirement or staying rooted in their communities. Like free higher education, affordable housing could be central to rebuilding the kind of working class and youth coalition that is propelling Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom. It too is an opportunity to ask for more: not just more public housing to make homes affordable again, but better housing with more citizen input in everything from design to management to urban space. One of the authors recently summarized a range of attainable ideas.

Not afraid to slam Big Oil

In the federal election campaign, the NDP tacked hard to the “responsible” and “moderate” political centre on the issue of pipelines and expanded oil exports. On the big issues like Kinder Morgan and Energy East, their central messaging was barely distinguishable from the Liberals, neither for nor against these two contentious pipelines.

Sanders has been willing to take clear stands on particular pipelines. More importantly, he has sharply critiqued the oil and gas industries as a whole for obstructing climate action and corrupting the political process. In Canada, we are overdue for a political left willing to make this critique of Big Oil. Until we have that, it’s hard to imagine a political movement emerging in Canada as youthful or as dynamic as the current Sanders surge.

Jobs for all with less work

Who will do everything suggested so far? Well, what if we stood ready to provide good jobs to all who wanted them and work that is socially useful? This is a simple yet politically hard idea: a federal job guarantee. It is no cure-all but it could alleviate unemployment, stagnant incomes, growing inequality, and ongoing racial and gender discrimination.

Everything we’ve discussed — from necessary new social services like child care to dealing with climate change, to building out affordable housing — will need people to take them on. Today we have a federal government that regulates and spends in favour of big business with a system of subsidies and regulations aimed at benefiting the wealthy few. A jobs program could turn this on its head with benefits for the many rather than the few. And more jobs are compatible with less work for all. While some countries in Europe are experimenting with the 6-hour work day, it’s useful to remember that our horizons should be even broader. Writing a century ago, Keynes thought we’d only be working 15-hour weeks by now.

First things first: build a movement

The equality of fundamental rights and needs is at odds with a system that rewards some far, far more than others. If health care, education, and housing are rights, then providing them to all in with genuine democratic control makes more sense than the “one dollar, one vote” of the market.

Higher taxes and social democracy are not the end of the conversation, but just the start. If an oligarchy runs our political democracy due to its economic power and weight, it is high time the left started again to reconsider the meaning of economic democracy, something that goes far beyond a trip to the ballot box every few years.

What is perhaps most valuable about Bernie Sanders is the fact that he is willing to call for a broad-based mobilization. His campaign can show us what it means to think bigger, to go outside the bounds of the stifling consensus that has seen the wealthy think big about how much they can gain, while the rest of us are left to think small, focused solely on what is “good enough.”

The point is not to copy or even approximate the specifics of the Sanders campaign here in Canada. A revitalized left that responds to the problems the vast majority of us face in one way or another, and that recognizes the economy as a playground for elites, can reignite a political movement to take back power from elites across the board.

At least in this case, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad to be USA North?

We recently released the first version of Firefox for iOS. It’s a great browser and we’re excited to bring you more new features today. The latest release of Firefox for iOS brings improvements to make browsing simpler and more fun by taking advantage of the latest iOS hardware and software features.

Firefox for iOS on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus now offers 3D Touch to help you access commonly used features faster than ever before. Simply press the Firefox app icon to open the Quick Access menu which has shortcuts to Open Last Bookmark, open a New Private Tab or a New Tab.

Firefox for iOS also supports Peek and Pop which lets you preview a tab and take actions on it such as Add to Reading List, Copy URL or Close Tab with fewer steps. You no longer have to tap on the page, wait for it to load and then tap again to use these popular features. Instead, you can preview content by lightly pressing on a tab in the tab menu then swipe up to access these shortcuts. This is especially useful when you’re organizing many tabs and will help you sort them faster.

To speed up searches in open tabs, Firefox for iOS lets you type your search query directly into the Spotlight Search Bar on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. You can also search for text in a Web page with ‘Find in Page’ by long-pressing on a text item or from the ‘Share’ menu. Managing your saved Logins with Firefox for iOS is easier too. You can search, filter, view and edit your saved Logins in Settings, whether they’re stored locally or synced through Firefox Accounts.

Finally, when you open the latest version of Firefox for iOS, you’ll see a page listing all the updates we’ve made. We hope you enjoy the latest, faster Firefox for iOS.

 

 

More information:

• Release Notes for Firefox for iOS

That is the name that a small group, unified its opposition to megabridge Massey Tunnel replacement project chose for itself last night. The forces of No once again facing up to the deceptions of the Christy Clark government.

There are two contributions from that group this morning. The first is the GMTRP brief draft prepared by Nicholas Wong – a substantial document that may get some updating and, if it does, will get replaced by later versions over time. For now here is the first paragraph of the Executive Summary, which should convince you it is worth your time to read the whole thing: the brief deals only with the traffic, seismic, and pricing concerns and thus leaves a whole raft of issues unexamined

The GMTRP has been plagued by contradictory or absent information. In such an environment, it is impossible to form an educated opinion of the project. To explore the systematic nature of the political deception surrounding the bridge proposal, three broad areas were explored: traffic, seismic safety standards, and budgetary concerns. The conclusion being that removing the GMT is unnecessary and a poor economic choice to alleviate traffic congestion or to address any of the stated project goals. The only advantage to removing the GMT is to allow larger ships up the Fraser River indicating that the tolled crossing is designed as a subsidy for the export industry.

The second is the text of a report which was adopted by the Richmond Council General Purposes Committee last Monday and will go to Richmond Council for final vote this coming Monday.

To: Mayor and Council                                                            Date: February 10, 2016

From: Harold Steves                                                               File: 10-6350-05-08
Councillor

Re: George Massey Tunnel Replacement Project

Richmond Council is concerned about the abrupt change in direction from upgrading the George Massey Tunnel to building a bridge. Richmond Council was fully consulted on the publicly announced plan to twin the tunnel. Richmond Council was not consulted on the decision to change the plan to building a bridge.

The following attachments show how the project changed abruptly from a tunnel to a bridge:

1) July 15, 2004 Massey Tunnel seismic upgrade. Province to spend $22.2 million on seismic upgrade for the Massey Tunnel.

2) Feb. 16, 2006 Twinned tunnel part of Victoria’s long-term plan, “expandingHighway 99 on both sides of the tunnel from four lanes to six.”   “The project is on the back burner in part because it would put pressure on traffic bottlenecks to the north requiring expansion of the Oak Street and Knight Street bridges into Vancouver or a new bridge into Burnaby.

3) Feb. 18, 2006 Massey Tunnel will be twinned and “widened from four lanes to six once the provinces more pressing transportation projects are complete.”  “Twinning the tunnel would also require improvements to other crossings over the North Arm of the Fraser, such as Oak Street and Knight Street bridges, or a new crossing to connect with growing central Burnaby.”

4) Dec 11, 2008 BUS LANE WILL SPEED TRANSIT commute along Highway 99  with ” high quality, point to point service … between White Rock and Richmond. A “$4.7 million contract” was awarded “to build the four metre wide shoulder bus lane.

5) Feb. 2, 2012 “BC Government meets with Port Metro Vancouver, Surrey Fraser Docks and Engineers to plan George Massey Tunnel Replacement Bridge”

6) Nov. 19, 2012 “Clearances for potential new river crossing” “We should consider future terminals. For example liquid bulk tankers, with large air draft requirements(e.g. LNG)” ….. “We need to consider future terminals such as VAFFC, Lehigh, and possible terminal at our Richmond properties.”

7) Dec. 4, 2012 “Tunnel: Depth required is 15.5 metres below geodetic datum for 50 year life expectancy and 18.5 metres below for 100 year life expectancy.”

8) March 19, 2015 The 14 billion transit plan the BC Liberals conveniently forgot.

9) Nov. 5, 2015 Stone insists Massey bridge process is proper.

The Province spent $22.2 million on a seismic upgrade on the Massey Tunnel in 2004, announced the tunnel would be twinned in 2006, and announced rapid  bus in 2008. Studies were done that justified twinning the tunnel and improving public transit. It was noted that the carrying capacity of the Oak Street Bridge and other bridges was limited and therefore the tunnel should only be six lanes. Rapid Bus would reduce traffic and reduce GHG’s. Richmond Council was opposed to both a No. 8 Road Bridge to Delta and a bridge to Boundary Road in Burnaby because it would do irreparable damage to Richmond East farmland. The Rapid Bus system resolved that problem.

What caused the province to suddenly change from a tunnel with public transit to a bridge without it?
The FOI information from Doug Massey shows a concerted effort was made in 2012 by Fraser Surrey Docks and Port Metro Vancouver and others to have the tunnel removed to accommodate deep draft Panamex supertankers. The BC Government met with them to discuss tunnel removal on Feb 2, 2012, future terminals at VAFFC, Lehigh and a new one in Richmond, including liquid bulk tankers (e.g. LNG); and the need to dredge the river to 15.5 metres on Dec. 4, 2012.  Secondly the more conservative members in the Liberal Caucus appear to have gained control in the 2013 election.

On Nov 5, 2015 Todd Stone admitted that they did not yet have a business case for a bridge, Now the reason is clear. It appears that the  province changed their plans to permit the industrialization of the Fraser River by Port Metro Vancouver. They did not have a business plan for a bridge because the business case was for twinning the tunnel and providing Rapid Bus.

Recommendation:

That the City of Richmond request that the Provincial Government provide copies of all reports and studies – including but not limited to business plans, feasibility studies, technical studies, seismic studies, and/or environmental impact studies – that relate to the original plan to twin the George Massey Tunnel and/or provide Rapid Bus service that were considered during the period from 2006 to 2008; and that if necessary, that the foregoing request be made as an official Freedom of Information request.

Filed under: Transportation

If you followed my Twitter feed in the past couple of weeks you’ll know that I fell really ill right after my two weeks of fieldwork in Madrid. My family doctor says it was a combined influenza plus overexhaustion plus almost-pneumonia kind of illness, and he got me on a two-week course of antibiotics (one week of injections and one week of pills). I am barely finished with the antibiotics and have started feeling like a human again. The first week was terrible. I had to sleep 24 hours in a row, for two days in a row.

I learned a few things these past two weeks. The first one is that some people will not understand that being ill is not a choice, and that my main focus is, and should be on getting better, not finishing a chapter/paper/article. I think it is not worth working with someone who doesn’t understand the human aspects of academia. I don’t work weekends. I don’t work holidays. I don’t work when I am sick.If that doesn’t work for you, then I don’t want to work with you.

The second thing I learned is that I should trust my doctor when he says that I need to recharge my batteries and to choose my activities wisely. He said “you will have energy to do ONE thing per day. ONE. So, be wise about which activity you do each day while you recover”. That’s exactly what I did. For example, on Wednesday, I chose to promote the Bachelor of Public Policy program in Leon, where my parents live. It was exhausting and I needed to just keel over and sleep for an hour afterwards. On Tuesday, I chose to attend an important meeting with my CIDE colleagues. On Thursday, I chose to attend a meeting with our students. I didn’t worry about doing anything else. I only had energy to do ONE thing and I did it well. And then I went back to sleep.

The third thing I learned is that I should avoid forcing myself to do anything, particularly work, while I’m convalescent. Contrary to what many people may think, I have a very fragile physique. I have severe allergies (alcohol and lactose, just to start), and my immune system has been compromised since I was a child. I’ve had to take care of myself since I was very little, and while the past few years I was able to avoid falling gravely ill, this 2016 seems to have taken a toll on me way too early, and thus I need to rest even more, as my Spring semester is actually quite busy.

The fourth thing I learned is that I should only gradually come back to do my activities, instead of trying to Get Everything Done As Soon As I Feel Remotely Healthy. I have been doing one, two small things in addition to one big thing every day, and I feel much better.

And the fifth thing, which probably should be the first, is a reminder of something I already knew: no academic accolades are worth your health and your life. No matter how many papers you are supposed to publish per year, how many conferences, your health is and should be first.

This evening I’m flying towards Barcelona for this year’s MWC, the main annual mobile industry conference. I’ve been going since 2001, on and off, when it was in (cold, rainy) Cannes and a tenth of the size - last year there were 85,000 people. 

2001 was a year after the European auctions of 3G spectrum, when mobile operators, right at the top of both an internet bubble and a mobile bubble, spent €110bn in a few months, and then spent years nursing the hangover. A large part of the reasoning for those prices was the promise of data services to be delivered over that spectrum. But it took until 2005 for the first 3G phones that weren’t bricks to arrive on the European market, and until 2007, of course, for data services deployed on that spectrum to start become interesting. 

Today, one can date ‘mobile’ to before iPhone and after iPhone.  But the interesting thing, looking back, is that before the iPhone, it didn’t really feel like we were desperately in need of some catalytic event. As a professor at university once told me, ‘people in the ‘Middle Ages’ didn’t know they were living in the ‘Middle Ages’’. It felt like we were making steady progress. It wasn’t clear at all that we were waiting for a new class of device, with a new approach, that would transform the mobile internet from a segment of telco revenue into a near-universal experience that would become the main part of the internet itself. 

In particular, it strikes me that the division between ‘smart’ and feature’ was not nearly so clearly defined as we think now. I switched from ‘feature phones’ (which generally ran J2ME apps) to ‘smartphones’ (which ran PocketPC or Symbian apps) and back again, but the ecosystems were so poorly developed, in hindsight, that I didn’t get much of a sense that I was losing something when I went from smartphone to featurephone. Hence, this is the sequence of devices I owned from the early 2000s to the original iPhone (missing, sadly, my Nokia 7110 and Ericsson t68). 

You can see the same point in this chart of device sales at a large European operator.  The taxonomy has no sense that some of these are ‘smart’ and some are not - it’s all about the hardware features. That pretty much mirrors how people actually used them. 

Meanwhile sale of apps were small, niche and focused on very particular types of apps. The average price was $20.90. 

In parallel, of course, there were ‘PDAs’, which eventually merged with phones (for a long time people hoped Apple would make another PDA to follow the Newton). These certainly did have a ‘proper’ OS, at least from PocketPC onwards, but they were an expensive ($500+) niche that few normal consumers would buy. 

Only the SonyEricsson in this picture had a cellular radio (and that was only 2G) - the HP had Bluetooth and the others only had infra-red. Otherwise, you'd need to spend over $100 on one of these radio cards, just to connect it to your phone and get online (over GPRS, at narrowband speeds). You could buy a pretty good 4G Android smartphone now for the price of one of these cards.

In hindsight, PDAs were a classic bridge solution. That is, they were not the long-term answer, but the long-term answer didn't work yet and they were OK for the time being, for that small number of people willing to put up with some pretty strong trade-offs. 

Meanwhile, the one place mobile data services really were working was Japan, powered by featurephones entirely specified and controlled by the mobile operators. I acquired all three of these devices in 2001. All of them were part of the future, but the iPod won.  

So, the Japanese phones had colour screens and polyphonic ringtones, the J-Phone (then Vodafone, now Softbank) phone had a CAMERA (120x160 pixels) and DoCoMo's imode phone had no camera but ran J2ME-based apps (mostly but not entirely games), downloadable from an app store with built-in frictionless payment. Yet they also pointed to a blind alley - operator control, closed platforms, no real OS. In fact, they were just as much a bridge solution as PDAs: the Japanese model was the only way to do mobile internet in 1999 or 2001, and it looked pretty good, but it was only a bridge and the right answer was yet to come. 

Meanwhile the iPod, which looked like an expensive toy at the time, was signalling the future at a more structural level- a fundamental change in who could make phones and in who controlled what you could do on them. Things that look like expensive toys are often the future.

(As an aside, I remember sitting in a yacht* in the harbour in Cannes in, I think, 2004, hearing a senior exec from Motorola explain how hard it was to put hard disks into phones, because people accepted an iPod breaking if they dropped it but not a phone. Meanwhile, Apple was already moving onto flash storage)

All of this is the background for what happened to Nokia and RIM from 2007 to, say 2010. As we all know, the senior management at both of these (and elsewhere) laughed at the iPhone, seeing only the 'minimal' parts of the MVP and not realising that it reflected a fundamental shift in the tradeoffs that were possible and that consumers would choose. But the other reason for this failure to see the threat was that their own 'smart' products seemed to be doing really well. This was much less visible in the USA because, for all sorts of reasons, Nokia's products and indeed most of the best products on the market in Europe (let alone Japan) were not available there. So Steve Jobs and his team hated their phones much more than Europeans - their phones weren't as good. Again, in hindsight, it's clear that the quality of the user experience on S60 had been in decline, and that Nokia lacked the skills or structure to fix it or to deliver Meego/Maemo. But at the time, Nokia and Blackberry seemed to be doing great. Sales of S60 and Blackberries grew strongly for over two years after the iPhone was first announced. That was how long it took for the iPhone to fix the issues in the MVP and get widespread distribution, and for the first Androids to start appearing. Then, within a quarter of each other, sales went away at both companies (only one of which wrote a 'burning platforms' memo). And of course at that point it was far too late. 

 

Michael Mace wrote a great piece just at the point of collapse for Blackberry, looking into the problem of lagging indicators. The headline metrics tend to be the last ones to start slowing down, and that tends to happen only when it's too late. So it can look as though you're doing fine and that the people who said three years ago that there was a major strategic problem were wrong. You might call this the 'Wille E Coyote effect' - you've run off the cliff, but you're not falling, and everything seems fine. But by the time you start falling, it's too late.

That is, using metrics that point up and to the right to refute a suggestion there is a major strategic problem can be very satisfying, but unless you're very careful, you could be winning the wrong argument. Switching metaphors, Nokia and Blackberry were skating to where the puck was going to be, and felt nice and fast and in control, while Apple and Google were melting the ice rink and switching the game to water-skiing. 

Going back to 2001, when I was an sell-side equity analyst covering European mobile operators, I got bits of this right - I talked about operating systems and customer ownership, and I showed people my iPod and pointed at that it was not always going to be necessary to have co-invented GSM before you could make a phone (though I didn't buy Apple stock). But what would I have said to get the whole thing right? The question that every investor kept asking was 'what's the killer app for 3G?' It turned out that the killer app for having the internet in your pocket was, well, having the internet in your pocket, but that was the wrong question.

I could have said this, though: 

• I'll take a decade for the devices to do all this to become mass-market. 
• But then, all of the stuff in the concept videos and mock-ups and crazy imagineering and futurology will happen. All of it. For billions of people. 
• But the device-makers won't make much money at all, except for Samsung, a very second-tier player, and a has-been computer company called Apple (remember them?) that's just launched... an expensive MP3 player, and has no assets, expertise or IP in mobile at all. 
• It will all be software and all the open internet, and these things will be real, fast, computers, with hundreds of times more computing power than the PC on your desktop today. And it won't matter that the battery only lasts a day.
• And though everyone will do all of this, the telcos won't do any of it, because the portal model and the AOL model are going to fall apart, though not many people expect that even for portals and AOL. Telcos spent all this money, built all the infrastructure, hired all these clever people, imagined and planned and consulted for all of it, have all this market power, and they'll get none of it. 

How many people would I have convinced, in 2001?

It's always fun to laugh at the people who said the future would never happen. But it's more useful to look at the people who got it almost right, but not quite enough. That's what happened in mobile. As we look now at new emerging industries, such as VR and AR or autonomous cars, we can see many of the same issues. The big picture 20 years out is actually the easy part, but the details are the difference between Nokia and DoCoMo ruling the world and the world as it actually happened. There's going to be a bunch of stuff that'll happen by 2025 that we'd find just as weird. 

* That is, a floating Winnebago upholstered in beige vinyl

We all compare prices when making purchases, particularly online where it is incredibly easy to shop in multiple locations at once. For domain name buyers, it can be a big mystery why the exact same domain name is more expensive in one place vs. another.

To help you make a more informed decision with your next domain purchase, I’d like to clear up some of the confusion behind domain name pricing. There are many factors that go into setting the price of a domain name, so it’ll take a little bit of research on your end to figure out why your particular domain is fluctuating in price.

Below is a list of key considerations to be mindful of.

The Top-Level Domain is On Sale

Top-level domains (the last part of your domain name, for example .com, .org, or .xyz) often go on sale, so this would be the most obvious reason why the same domain has different pricing. Sales are a great opportunity to pick up a cheap domain, but be wary of the renewal cost. It might be better to get a domain at the regular price of $15 from Provider A, rather than a $10 domain that renews at $25/year from Provider B.

Domains Are/Aren’t The Main Product

A common practice at many registrars is to bring customers in with cheaper domain names, and make their margins through upselling additional services. The goal here is for your $0.99 domain name to turn into a $50 order after adding privacy, hosting, email and a website builder.

On the other end of the spectrum, Hover focuses solely on domain names and email. In some cases this will result in a domain costing a bit more, but the tradeoff is that we won’t try and confuse you into making additional purchases that you didn’t plan on making.

Additional Items Included

Before checking out, taking a look at what else comes with your domain may help explain a domain’s price. Look around your provider’s website and see if your domain will include any extras that provide better overall value. For example, Hover includes WHOIS Privacy with domain name purchases to prevent your contact information from being publicly available, whereas other domain providers will charge upwards of $11.99 for the same service.

Domain Support

Of all of the factors to consider, support is one that you really can’t put a price on. When something goes wrong with your domain name, you need to get it resolved instantly. If a provider is a dollar more but they will pick up a phone and help resurrect your website should it ever mysteriously stop working, it’s money well spent.

So…this is just a “why Hover is more expensive” post?

Not exactly. Many of the domain extensions we offer are cheaper than you’ll find elsewhere. Are all of them like that? No, and believe me, we’ve heard about it. If you have two browser tabs open – one that says a domain is $12.99 and one that says it’s $14.99 – then of course you’d want to know why there’s a difference. I would too.

Hopefully you can now see a more detailed picture of what else to look for besides a domain name’s price when comparing domain providers. It may be that sometimes a domain name includes privacy, customer support and is cheaper. Or, maybe all you’re doing is setting it up as a forward and don’t care about on-demand support or privacy. Either way, there are several factors that contribute to a domain’s price, and knowing what to look for will help ensure that you register your domain with whichever provider makes the most sense for you.

My class used to play a mean joke on supply teachers.

Before the teacher arrived, we would turn our desks around with our backs to the blackboard.

Would the supply teacher give the lesson from the opposite side of the classroom? Most of the time, yes. One continued to teach lessons from this spot even after he learned the prank.

The speed at which group members (especially newcomers) accept a social norm is determined by three factors:

1. Frequency. How often do members see this behavior repeated?
2. Uniformity. What % of the visible members of the group embrace this behavior?
3. Consistency. Is the behavior consistent?

At the moment, many of the great behaviors (the social norms you want to establish) don’t become norms because they’re not seen frequently enough, not taken up by enough people, and aren’t consistent enough.

Actually perception trumps reality here. It’s not that the behaviors aren’t frequent, consistent, or uniform enough – but people don’t believe they are. You can influence this more than you think. Let’s take 3 examples:

The Customer Retention Example

Let’s imagine you want the group to use or buy more of your product or service (retention). You can create a list for people to add how long they have been a customer and display this.

This might be a simple badge to display in profiles, or a place in their bio to list what products/services of yours they use today.

For example:

• Frequency: People see each other updating their profiles with each product/year they collect. Those with 3+ or 5+ years can get a special notice. The behavior is repeated frequently. When a new upgrade is released, you can host an open discussion for people to say when they have upgraded (imagine the Facebook “I voted” badge)

• Uniformity: Only those who display the badge/list the products are shown. You can have a big opt-in list by year where people can display how long they have been a member/customer, how many events they have attended. Newcomers only see the people who are taking it, not the others.

• Consistency: The behavior is simple and easy for others to adopt. Anyone can add themselves to the list, download a badge by year, or notify others of their ‘birthdays’.

This works well for events, discussions, or any retention-based activity. You turn the time they have already been spending on that behavior into a valuable item.

Another easy way would simply be to encourage people to make purchases or extensions of your product/service more visible to others members so it encourages the social norm to develop.

The Knowledge Sharing Example

Let’s imagine you want employees (or customers) to share more valuable knowledge. This usually means specific, tactical, tips.

The audience needs to believe most people are doing this a lot.

• Frequency: Create a tactical tips of the week digest linking solely to discussion posts where the most useful, specific, tips were shared. Do this every week and list every useful tip. It should grow in size over time. If there aren’t enough, do it monthly and break it down to weekly or even daily as it grows.

• Uniformity: Reply, use sticky threads, and otherwise influence discussions so those discussions with the best tips are shared and make up the majority of the top 10.

• Consistency: You might also want to add a score (just a +1) only admins can give to those that share specific ideas which members can collect and display on their profile (this is also good for finding the tips throughout the week).

This increases frequency, creates a sense of uniformity (it only shows these tactical tips), and highlights the behavior you want performed consistently. You could even get members to use the +1s as well.

The goal to establish a social norm quickly among any group is to develop a method which is visibly performed very frequently, by most members of the group and the behavior is consistent.

If you want to learn more about establishing valuable social norms, consider our Advanced Engagement Methods program.

The theme for last week’s #TBT was #Machines. Thank you for the many great photos you shared with us!
Here are some of our favorites, but feel free to take a look at all the submissions our our Facebook and Twitter page.

Noah Lorang, a data scientist at Basecamp, explains the key for most companies isn't finding a way to use the most advanced methods. Instead, it's about asking the right questions.

The dirty little secret of the ongoing “data science” boom is that most of what people talk about as being data science isn’t what businesses actually need. Businesses need accurate and actionable information to help them make decisions about how they spend their time and resources. There is a very small subset of business problems that are best solved by machine learning; most of them just need good data and an understanding of what it means that is best gained using simple methods.

Much along the same lines as when I say you can think like a statistician without the math.

Tags: data science

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Last month, I published an interactive visualization that simulates how and when you will die. It reached millions of people worldwide, and I basically had one eye glued to the real-time traffic dashboard for a week. It was kind of nuts.

A few days in, I woke up and checked the stats. The Daily Mail was in the referral list. I clicked through to the article and my interactive was fully embedded on the page, which was strange because I didn't give permission to do that.

To be clear, this wasn't just screenshots or an animated GIF that showed your life moving along. It was the interactive visualization embedded with an iframe so that Daily Mail readers would stay on the tabloid site to take the “test” created by “Professor Yau.” FYI: I have a PhD, but I'm not a professor, and I'm not especially thrilled I got to see my work reduced to some online quiz, but okay.

Never mind that now. The point is that The Daily Mail lifted my visualization and slapped it on their site. This is what it looked like:
 

 

I was especially confused because just the day before, Stuff.co.nz did the same thing with my visualization (without my permission), so I put in safeguards on both my server and the visualization page itself. Here's me being really mature:
 

 

I made an alert pop up that said “poop” whenever someone loaded the Stuff.co.nz page. Like I said, I'm sophisticated.

So how did Daily Mail embed the visualization without the word “poop” popping up on an empty page? They downloaded all the files from my server on to their own server and deleted the snippet that brought up a poop alert. That way they didn't have to deal with those pesky safeguards I setup.

In other words, The Daily Mail deliberately stole my work.

What.

Who does this?

I open up my email for the first time that day to tell someone over there to take down the visualization. I notice there's an email from The Daily Mail asking for permission sent at 1:44am PST. I was sleeping. So obviously I couldn't give a yes or a no. Instead of waiting for a response, The Daily Mail article went up a couple of hours later at 3:38am PST. Apparently a non-response means all systems go and steal everything.

Anyways, I email back after I get my son ready for the day and take him to school. The response is basically oops, sorry, we didn't know.

I doubt it.

Do a search for The Daily Mail stealing things — photos, articles, and apparently visualization — and it's clearly their M.O. to take from others. For example, note this tidbit from the New York Times:

One former Daily Mail reporter who declined to be identified for fear it would prevent him from continuing to work as a journalist said that when he started working at the paper, his job required him to rewrite articles that ran in other papers.

Also: Did I mention this is the second time The Daily Mail stole from me? In February 2015, I made an interactive map that compared the best and worst commutes, and I got a similar permission request from The Daily Mail. They asked “to see if we can have permission to grab some visuals generated from this page.”

So, screenshots, right? I said fine, as I typically do with these sort of requests. Then The Daily Mail did this:
 

 

They didn't just screenshot the map. They didn't just embed the map itself. They iframed my entire site, which is why the FlowingData logo and header appear on their site. Yay for hosting bills to pay.

Wait.

What.

Who does this? The Daily Mail.

Side note: The way I have my own site setup, this was technically an iframe within an iframe. I feel like I should get some spinning top award or something.

Anyways, this is why when they emailed me a couple of weeks before for an “embed link” to show a different interactive on causes of death by age, I didn't respond. They didn't do anything that time. So I probably would've done the same for the simulation graphic had I been awake, but I suppose from now on I will have to respond with a “no thank you” to make it clear. I don't want another non-response mistaken as something else.

Why has this behavior continued for the past several years? I have no idea. I'm a one-man shop with limited time, energy, and resources to figure this stuff out, which is why it took me so long just to write this.

I'd rather be working with data or helping others work with data.

But maybe that's what The Daily Mail banks on. They take what they want, and if someone asks them to take it down later, they comply — after some page views.

What The Daily Mail does is wrong. It's dishonest. If a visualization creator, or any maker for that matter, doesn't include a snippet to embed on a different site, you don't go sniff around the source code for what you can ripoff.

So I write this in hopes that something good might come out of it, or to at least give a record of what's going on here. I am sure this is not the first time this happened to someone. Probably not the last. It already happened to me twice.

Tags: Daily Mail, theft

@stoweboyd:

Donald Trump’s G.O.P. is a rear-window party pining for a white America that is never coming back - David Brooks https://t.co/TTWIJbgABx

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) February 19, 2016

@stoweboyd:

Yahoo’s board gives up on an independent future for Yahoo https://t.co/A5IY8bfhU4 How long before Mayer if gone? Weeks?

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) February 19, 2016

@stoweboyd:

Google buys work chat tool Pie https://t.co/WP8XE8YJaQ But that might not just be the start of SE Asia talent build. A Slack offensive?

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) February 19, 2016

Two economists have been advocating revising the time zone system and giving up the Julian calendar. 

The time zone argument is simple: we live in a global world and there’s a tremendous amount of effort wasted in commerce by trying to convert time zones so that people can get on the phone at the right time. The current system is a pain, countries change time zones frequently, and Daylight savings time only confuses things more, and does so twice a year. We shouldn’t be burdened by an agrarian convention in an Internet era.

Yes, we will have to make a distinction between universal time (where it’s 8:00 everywhere on Earth at the same time) and working hours (when does your local Starbucks open, and when are you in the office working). But just as companies post their geographical location for their offices, and contact information, they could just as well post working hours in a universal format.

But I differ with the proposed calendar modification, the Hanke-Henry calendar:

By sticking with 12 calendar months they miss a great opportunity to make things even simpler. And they wind up with an extra week  (Xtra) every six or seven years. 

My proposal is simpler: The Boydian Calendar, 13 calendar months, all with 4 weeks of 7 days each.

I suggest that we scrap the historical names for months, and instead refer to months numerically. Hence, a month called Thirteen. ‘Let’s try to have a call on the third or fourth of April’ would be ‘Let’s try to have a call on the third or fourth of Four’, for example.

Note the benefit of this particular number of days per month: the first of every month is a Monday the first. The tenth is always a Wednesday.

But what about the extra days? 28 X 13 = 364, one shy of the traditional 365 days in a year. I propose that we set aside that extra day to be New Years, and it would not be part of a month or week, but would be the day before the first of January. This has a historical precedent. The expression ‘a year and a day’ comes from (most recently) British common law regarding a period of time irrefutably longer than a year.

Of course we have to deal with leap days, which would precede New Years day every four years, and like New Years would be outside of any week or month.

I know it’s hard to imagine, but it would be great to simplify this mess. Oh, and go down in history as the godfather of the Boydian Calendar.

Apple’s in a bind. The FBI wants them to crack the encryption on a San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone. Apple believes that’s a dangerous precedent. Apple CEO Tim Cook’s open letter is breathtakingly simple and clear. Learn from it. Here’s Apple’s logic: Breaking encryption creates a “back door.” Any such back door would inevitably get out. Thieves … Continue reading Apple’s Tim Cook shows how to communicate in a crisis →

The post Apple’s Tim Cook shows how to communicate in a crisis appeared first on without bullshit.

mkalus shared this story from CommitStrip.

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After recently upgrading my VDSL line at home, it was also time to upgrade my Wi-Fi equipment to support the higher speeds. When doing some speed tests after the upgrade I noticed to my satisfaction that my Wi-Fi connectivity now easily supports the 50 MBit/s VDSL line. I also noticed, however that downloading a file from a local web server at 100 MBit/s takes a heavy toll on my CPU, it’s almost completely maxed out. At first I suspected the Wi-Fi driver to cause the high load but I soon found out that Firefox is the actual culprit.

The picture on the left shows the story. When using SCP to download the file at around 100 MBit/s (see the wlan0 graph) the CPU loads shown in the top four graphs are quite low, around 10%. That’s what I would expect. Starting in the middle of the graphs the SCP file transmission came to an end and I started to download the same file via Firefox from the same server while the SCP transmission is ongoing, which is the reason why there is no transmission gap between the two transfers. A quite significant change happens as soon as the Firefox HTTPS file download starts, however, as CPU usage goes through the roof. On average all CPU cores are at 50% load while Firefox transfers the file.

From this observation it is obvious that it’s not the Wi-Fi driver that is very inefficient but rather something in Firefox. Perhaps it’s the encrypted HTTPS transmission that requires additional CPU resources even though that’s unlikely as SCP uses an encrypted SSH tunnel and thus also has to decrypt the incoming data stream. To cross check I used WGET to run the same test again, this time over HTTPS instead of SCP’s SSH tunnel. Like with SCP the CPU load only went up to at around 10%. In other words, it’s Firefox that is creating this incredible overhead.

The takeaway from this is that for testing high speed network throughput, file downloads with Firefox are not the way to go anymore until they tidy up their code base in that area.

Tara Mohr, Quartz, Feb 21, 2016

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The values in question are as follows: "They’ re taught to prepare carefully to complete the tasks that will be asked of them; to do lots of research and homework to discover the right answers; to pay attention to what authority figures want and provide it." Men often have role models who break these rules, but women rather less frequently (and the school lessons are  reinforced at home). All people need to break out of this conditioning. "To cultivate our abilities as leaders, we need the opposite skill: The ability to recognize and stick with what is distinctive about our thinking, and use these distinctive traits to influence and challenge authority."

When I was in my late teens, I would wear a red t-shirt I made myself with the slogan in gold letters, "The Revolution Lives!" When people asked "what revolution?" I would answer "the revolution of the mind." This is what I meant back then, the idea that I could think for myself and trust my instincts.

[Link] [Comment]

Yochai Benkler, Creative Commons | YouTube, Feb 21, 2016

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I listened to this on the way into the office this morning. It's quite a good talk that depicts the commons (as defined by, say, Creative Commons) as anew model of capitalism.  Yochai Benkler depicts the market capitalist model based on rational and avaricious self-interest as a model focused on the extraction of resources, but which doesn't comprehend the social (and maybe ecological) environment necessary to create them. We are not moved merely by financial incentives; our creations do not need to be collectivized, but nor either do they need to be commodified. The talk was given at the Creative Commons Global Summit last October in Korea. I agreed with a lot of it, I liked the way the different schools of sharing were brought out and explained, but I don't think he captures fully the necessary ways society needs to shape networks (he talks about self-organization, but not about the role and function of self-organization).

[Link] [Comment]

Why do we love it when wildlife gets lost in Vancouver?

There was a weekend in the media where two separate articles about lost animals in the city surfaced. One covered a cow on the loose while another covered a crow riding the SkyTrain. This brought to my attention what seems to be a fixation among Vancouverites – paying attention when animals get lost in our city. The following examples have each gained significant media hype:

• Downtown Deer
• Jimmy the Squirrel (a rabid squirrel that used to bite people in Stanley Park, as read about in Vancouver Was Awesome)
• Black bears and Coyotes on the North Shore
• Whales in Burrard Inlet
• Cougars in Stanley Park

The news loves these types of stories. I suspect it has something to do with very little real wildlife managing to co-exist with us in our urban environment. Although Vancouver shares boundaries with the wild, it is a unique gift to come face-to-face with wilderness on the streets. I believe these news articles suggest that our citizens have a romantic desire to experience a ‘genuine’ nature without having to leave the comfort of the city. In a similar vein, the Museum of Vancouver recently played host to an exhibition titled Rewilding Vancouver. The exhibition and articles allude to an imagination of what living in an eco-metropolis might mean.

What is an eco-metropolis? According to Mathew Soules:

EcoMet(ropolitanism) increases density and livability while amplifying  and exploiting the relationship to the natural environment by synthesizing the production of metropolitan culture with that of ecologically designed architectural environments.

Soules further writes that the EcoMetropolis would cater to migratory birds, fish-stocked lakes, hunting, eagles, agriculture, local flora and fauna, and promote biological co-existence. The piece by Matthew and the media attention point to a shared desire to maintain a stronger bond to our natural environment. First Nations groups have been teaching similar morals since long before colonialization. Perhaps these trends in the media point to an embedded culture of diversity, sustainability, and respect in Vancouver’s future.

Avid readers rejoice!

Amazon has brought another e-reader to Canada and it’s called the Kindle Voyage, an updated version of the Kindle Paperwhite that’s reminiscent of the Kindle Fire.

The Amazon Kindle Voyage features a six-inch e-ink display with a resolution of 1430 x 1080 pixels and 300 PPI. The Voyage weighs in at 180 grams and is only 7.6mm thick, while weighing less than 180 grams and featuring three weeks of battery life.

The Kindle Voyage also comes equipped with a the new ambient light sensor that adjusts the brightness of the display depending on lighting conditions, as well as haptic feedback designed to signify when pages are turned.

While this e-reader was first released in the US in 2014, it’s worth noting the Voyage’s release could be signify Amazon is warming up to the idea that Canada is a region worth launching products in.

However, according to the Good Reader, a site dedicated to e-Readers, the Canadian release of the Voyage may have been spurred by an outstanding patent request. “The reason the Kindle Voyage isn’t being sold in Canada is because the Canadian Intellectual Property Office has not approved the patent for the Voyage’s use of haptic feedback,” writes the e-reader blog. “It doesn’t look like there has been any movement, but it looks like Amazon is just going to sell it anyways.”

Amazon will also be pushing out a software update this month designed to bring a new way to search for books and authors, an option to personalize the homescreen, updated My Reading lists, book recommendations, and an easier way to share a book quotes via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Kindle Voyage is now available on Amazon Canada’s website for $299 (CAD) for the Wi-Fi version and $369 (CAD) for the 3G model.

Toronto-based developer Matt Wiechec has brought a little 1970s video game nostalgia to the Apple Watch. Pong, one of the first video games to make it to market, is now available on Apple’s wearable.

In classic fashion, A Tiny Game of Pong allows players to compete against an AI opponents, as well as friends’ top scores, thanks to Game Center leaderboard integration. Wiechec also found an inventive way of navigating the Apple Watch’s tiny display, opting to utilize the Digital Crown to move the player’s paddle left and right across the screen, rather than touchscreen presses.

Wiechec says he decided to put together the project as a way to gain a better handle on the Apple Watch’s operating system, watchOS 2, preparing him for the development of future apps for the wearable.

A Tiny Game of Pong is now available on the App Store. FREE for a limited time! https://t.co/dFgY1NgPd0 pic.twitter.com/rEGukT55mM

— Matt Wiechec (@mattwiechec) February 16, 2016

“I thought pong’s gameplay was straightforward enough to translate well onto the small screen; and the idea seemed small enough to tackle too. Plus when the new API opened up the Digital Crown to developers it seemed like a great fit – the original game had a dial control too. I think the analog control of the Digital Crown is what makes the game so satisfying to play,” said Wiechec.

When it comes to development challenges, Wiechec says he ran into a number of difficulties creating an app for the new platform, mainly related to the fact that the Apple Watch’s development tools aren’t yet as comprehensive as what is available for the iPhone or other mobile devices. Translating a video game to wearable devices has also proven a difficult task and few titles beyond text based choose-your-own-adventure style games like Lifeline and Spy_Watch have resonated with players.

“There are a lot of technical constraints building for the Apple Watch because the watch doesn’t yet have all of the capabilities of a device that has been around for a while like the iPhone. An iPhone’s software and hardware are much more developed. So you have to get a bit more clever with what you’re given,” said Wiechec, discussing the difficulties that stem from developing software for a relatively new platform, as well as a wearable.

“Natively watchOS 2 doesn’t support the Game Center framework, so we have to communicate back and forth with the iPhone. Syncing that up took some time,” said Wiechec.

Moving into the future, Wiechec says he doesn’t have any specific Apple Watch applications in the works, but that he has a keen interest in the wearable’s fitness-focused functionality.

“There’s no pressing projects I want to jump on yet. I love the fitness capabilities of the Apple Watch and some of the sensor data that it has access to is really interesting to me but I want to see how this does first,” said Wiechec.

A Tiny Game of Pong is free on the iOS App Store for a limited period of time. A $1.39 version of the game is available that unlocks a classic game mode, new theme colours and a supporter badge.

The CRTC has been incredibly busy this year, facing the usual complaints about carrier collusion, as well as hearing arguments from smaller Internet service providers about a lack of competition in the wireless industry.

Back in May, the Commission ruled that network providers who make an effort to build their own cellular network would be able to purchase access to other networks in locations where they don’t have infrastructure of their own. At the time, the CRTC did not mandate that fully virtual carriers (MVNO), those having no network infrastructure of their own, would be legally afforded that same network access from the bigger carriers.

The Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC, a group consisting of some of the country’s smaller wireless players) filed an appeal to that decision in August, hoping to win a legal requirement that saw larger carriers being required to sell any carrier shares of their network capacity. Specifically, some of the CNOC member companies that resell cable and DSL services are looking into offering cellular services as well, but those companies don’t maintain their own cell towers.

On Thursday, the CRTC responded to the August appeal, ruling that the original decision would stand, since the facts and arguments since then hadn’t substantially changed. The CRTC noted that mandating this kind of wholesale agreement weakens the other wireless carriers, particularly new entrants like Videotron and Wind (now owned by Shaw). These companies, and future MVNOs, would be more likely to rely on existing towers than to invest in their own networks.

The CRTC added that wireless carriers spent $7.5 billion on wireless infrastructure and network investments in 2014, which is over half of the telecommunications sector’s network investments for the year.