I think there is in general a lot to recommend this approach. The article describes learning ecosystem projects in the Pittsburgh region through CMU. The ecosystem concept "doesn’t come with specific prescriptions about which types of organizations should be involved or how collaborative learning should unfold. It’s a flexible approach that can develop in unique and authentic ways in any community... there are huge benefits to breaking down the silos that have long separated formal education from the rest of daily life. As resources are shared and people from a range of organizations collaborate, opportunities for students multiply."
IBM has stated that it is no longer developeringfacial recognition technology, according to a letter it penned to members of the United States Congress.
The company says that it is not going to offer any software related to facial recognition, and is opposing the use of the technology for mass surveillance or racial profiling.
“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” the letter reads.
The tech giant’s decision to exit the facial recognition software business comes as states are calling for police reform following the death of George Floyd.
This is a significant move on IBM’s part, as the company had tested its facial recognition software with the New York Police Department.
Police use of facial recognition has recently come under severe scrutiny in several countries, including Canada. Earlier this year it was revealed that several Canadian police departments, including the RCMP, had used Clearview AI’s facial recognition system.
It’ll be interesting to see if other tech giants will choose to exit the facial recognition business as well given the controversy surrounding the technology.
Thank you Ben Werdmüller. An evocative post about your family history and comparison with our current times. Now I crave some sayur lodeh.
“The Dutch, it must be added, were themselves a brutal colonial power.” Yes, we were. And the echoes and consequences still ripple and ricochet through our society, often ignored.
The food I cook is made from spices and the history of all of us, our family and the families like ours, fractals of ebbs and flows of people that form the atoms of history and culture.
This is the world. We're all part of a constantly-changing map of humans caught up in each others' wake: twisting currents in the tide of generations. We are constantly moving and we have always been. All of us are immigrants. All of us belong. All of us survive through kindness and ingenuity, despite the forces of militarism, hate, and intolerance.
Apple maintain on open source repository full of heuristics for implementing smart password managers. It lists password rules for different sites (e.g. min/max length, special characters required), change password URLs for different services and sites that share credential backends - like icloud.com and apple.com. They accept pull requests!
While folks have been marching, protesting, and generally kicking fascist ass in the USA, I’ve had my head in the clouds. Not only literally as we work to roll out Reclaim Cloud, but also figuratively as I find myself day-dreaming of an alternative future for the country I was born in. And that is thanks to the many courageous folks who stood up and said they had finally had enough of a racist regime that was literally suffocating its people. As it plays out on my screens and throughout the Italian media, it’s readily apparent the African-American community has led the charge and precipitated what many of us are hoping will be the start of a new day.
I’m far away and forever in debt to those who rose and continue to rise, but for the last few days thoughts of home have me smiling rather than shaking my head. Thinking back to a land where the seeds of equality, possibility, and the people’s ability to change the status quo may be taking root. That all seemed far away these last 4 years as I watched from afar, and between the dis-information, fear-mongering and brutality it became increasingly easier to grow despondent. But when folks see through the violent strategy of financial and emotional austerity and refuse to be silenced, that’s a break in the socio-political dam that spouts hope.
So, I just want to recognize what’s happening, what matters and thank all those back home who refused to let fear get in the way of hope. You are heroes. What’s more, I recognize my absentee role in it, and beg forgiveness as I proceed to put my head back in the cloud to pass the days in hope
They had a black man scrub “Churchill was a racist” off the statue then had 4 white Tory’s stand in front of it to make it look like they’d done it 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/7yZmcJgIqO
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least to have this announced at WWDC, and for the transition to last anywhere between 6 months to a few years, accelerated by App Store binary updates (bitcode or not).
Laptops are most likely to be first, as usual, and an ARM Air would be a thing of beauty, power and grace (now that they’ve fixed the keyboards).
“Big iron” like the Mac Pro, though, is in awkward situation. But Ryzen-powered desktop Macs are not likely to be a thing, regardless of rumors to that effect. Unless, of course, Intel’s deal with Apple is due to expire… But there’s no such thing, right?
So I expect to be running a Linux desktop (with a Mac mini “sidecar”) by this time next year–which is sure to be an interesting journey, especially now that AMD is on the verge of launching new APUs with Vega graphics.
(Life would be so much simpler if there were decent Radeon GPUs out there for ITX cases… I’m willing to start doing hardware reviews of those, if anyone’s interested.)
Die Studie geht auf das Imperial College London zurück. Die scheinen auf die Kritik an ihren früheren Simulations-Vorhersagen reagiert zu haben, indem sie ihre Annahmen sehr konservativ gehalten haben:
They assume nobody would have changed their behaviour in response to the Covid threat without a lockdown - and that hospitals would not be overwhelmed resulting in a surge in deaths, which nearly happened in some countries.
Speziell die Annahme, dass die Krankenhäuser nicht in Kapazitätsprobleme gekommen wären, erscheint mir eher unrealistisch.
Apple may have plans to fully refresh the design of its iMac for the first time in more than eight years.
A redesigned iMac with slimmer bezels, an SSD and Apple’s T2 security chip will be announced at WWDC 2020 later this month, according to Apple leaker Sonny Dickson. The new, more squared-off design is rumoured to closely resemble pricey Apple’s Pro Display XDR and the recent iPad Pro in terms of appearance.
Though Apple has updated the iMac’s internal hardware several times over the past few years, the desktop’s look has remained mostly the same since 2012 when the company reduced the thinnest part of its tapered casing to 5mm. Even more so than many of its other products, including the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, the iMac’s substantial bezels are starting to look really dated in the face of sleeker-looking all-in-one Windows 10 PCs.
Along with a new aesthetic, Dickinson says Apple’s new all-in-one desktop will feature AMD’s well-received and powerful Navi GPUs and that all configurations will feature an SSD. Every iMac in the lineup including an SSD lets the desktop to take advantage of Apple’s T2 co-processor, allowing for faster read/write speeds and several security features.
At WWDC, Apple is also expected to announce its Mac lineup is shifting to ARM-based CPUs. It’s unclear if this rumoured iMac refresh will be the first computer to include Apple’s new proprietary chip given Macs aren’t expected to feature the new processor architecture until 2021. It’s possible Apple has plans to bring ARM to a laptop like the MacBook Air first, similar to what Microsoft did with the Surface Pro X.
At Apple’s upcoming all-digital WWDC, the tech giant will also likely reveal new versions of its operating systems, including iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS.
You have almost certainly seen this chart about newspaper advertising revenue since World War II:
The obvious takeaway is that the Internet killed what had been a profitable and growing business; what is interesting, though, is that circulation numbers tell a somewhat different story:
Time and Reach
That image is from Robert Gordon’s book The Rise and Fall of American Growth; one of the more startling facts surrounding this graph is that between 1910 and 1930 the average household purchased 3.1 different newspapers a day. As Gordon notes:
The fastest growth occurred in 1870–1900, by which time newspapers had become firmly established as the main source of information and entertainment for a growing population. Color presses were introduced in the 1890s and were first used to produce color comics and supplements. By the early twentieth century, newspapers had extended their content far beyond the news itself and added “gossip columns, travel and leisure advice, color comics, and sporting results.”
It turned out, though, that the daily deadline inherent to newspapers presented a market opportunity for periodicals. Gordon writes:
The mass-circulation national magazine was a creation of the 1880s and 1890s. Unlike newspapers, for which the circulation area was limited by the need to provide time-sensitive news to a particular metropolitan area, the features contained in magazines could reach readers at a more leisurely pace. Hence magazines were national almost from the beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and among those with the highest circulations late in the century were McClure’s, Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Ladies’ Home Journal.
In other words, the market opportunity was defined by the intersection of time and reach; newspapers needed to be timely, but that limited reach, whereas periodicals, by virtue of being weekly or monthly, could also have much greater reach:
These limitations of time and space affected the nature of content as well. While newspapers were focused on “time-sensitive news”, magazines, in a format pioneered by Henry Luce’s Time magazine focused more on contextualizing and analyzing the news that you probably already knew about because of your daily newspaper.
What drove the post-war decline in newspaper circulation was the television. Gordon writes:
Television news, on the other hand, increasingly gained a quality and credibility that the newsreel lacked. The information came first from a familiar anchor, with footage used for the most part as a substantive complement rather than purely as an eye-catching distraction. Indeed, the familiarity of the network anchors helped television news surpass not only the newsreel, but also the newspaper, as the main source of news…
The effect of TV news went beyond the ability to present a familiar, trusted face to deliver the top stories. Like radio, television news was immediate, but it also wielded the power of the image to evoke strong feelings in the viewer. In addition to coverage of the day’s top stories, television news also developed more in-depth journalistic programs…and cable television delivered CNN as the first twenty-four-hour news station in 1980…
Unsurprisingly, after reaching all-time highs in the postwar years, newspaper circulation per household soon began a gradual but continuous decline, dropping from 1.4 per household in 1949 to 0.8 in 1980 and to less than 0.4 in 2010.
This meant that the graph I created above now looked like this:
A daily cadence in a world of CNN was simply the modern version of a weekly cadence for magazines in a world of daily newspapers; what was particularly challenging for newspapers, though, is that TV had further reach as well.
That led the most forward-thinking U.S. newspapers to not just shift towards analysis like magazines had once done, but to also push for more reach of their own, none moreso than the New York Times; while the company first formulated its national strategy in 1998, the best articulation of its plan came in its 2003 annual report:
As we have mentioned in our previous annual letters, our long-term strategy is to operate the leading news and advertising media in each of the markets in which we compete – both nationally and locally. The centerpiece of this strategy is extending the reach of The New York Times’s high-quality journalism into homes and businesses in every city, town, village and hamlet of this country.
Then came the Internet, which accomplished exactly that.
Evolution Versus Revolution
In yesterday’s Daily Update I described how Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of Quibi, mistakenly assumed that mobile was simply the next step in the evolution from motion pictures to television, each of which created new possibilities for, in Katzenberg’s words, “the creativity of storytellers [to use] these tools in ways that their inventors had never imagined to amaze audiences.”
The problem is that mobile was completely different from movies and TV, not because of its form factor, but because of the Internet:
The single most important fact about both movies and television is that they were defined by scarcity: there were only so many movies that would ever be made to fill only so many theater slots, and in the case of TV, there were only 24 hours in a day. That meant that there was significant value in being someone who could figure out what was going to be a hit before it was ever created, and then investing to make it so. That sort of selection and production is what Katzenberg and the rest of Hollywood have been doing for decades, and it’s understandable that Katzenberg thought he could apply the same formula to mobile.
Mobile, though, is defined by the Internet, which is to say it is defined by abundance…The goal is not to pick out the hits, but rather to attract as much content as possible, and then algorithmically boost whatever turns out to be good.
This point cannot be emphasized enough: the Internet is the single most disruptive1 force of our lifetimes because it does not evolve existing ways of doing things, but completely smashes the assumptions underlying them — assumptions we often didn’t even realize existed.
So it was with the Internet and the trade-off between reach and time: suddenly every single media entity on earth, no matter how large or small, and no matter its medium of choice, could reach anyone instantly. To put it another way, reach went to infinity, and time went to zero:
This is, of course, an impossible graph, because zero and infinity cannot be illustrated with axis in two-dimensional space; this is probably a better representation of how time and reach collapsed in on themselves:
That is the first image of a black hole, and it is certainly an apt metaphor for the Internet: its effect on media assumptions is incalculable and inescapable.
Competing in an Aggregator World
One of the first Stratechery articles about this shift from scarcity to abundance and its impact on media was from 2014 in an article entitled Economic Power in the Age of Abundance.
One of the great paradoxes for newspapers today is that their financial prospects are inversely correlated to their addressable market. Even as advertising revenues have fallen off a cliff – adjusted for inflation, ad revenues are at the same level as the 1950s – newspapers are able to reach audiences not just in their hometowns but literally all over the world.
Before the Internet, a newspaper like the New York Times was limited in reach; now it can reach anyone on the planet
The problem for publishers, though, is that the free distribution provided by the Internet is not an exclusive. It’s available to every other newspaper as well. Moreover, it’s also available to publishers of any type, even bloggers like myself.
The city-by-city view of Stratechery’s readers over the last 30 days.
To be clear, this is absolutely a boon, particularly for readers, but also for any writer looking to have a broad impact. For your typical newspaper, though, the competitive environment is diametrically opposed to what they are used to: instead of there being a scarce amount of published material, there is an overwhelming abundance. More importantly, this shift in the competitive environment has fundamentally changed just who has economic power.2
What followed was probably my first clear articulation of Aggregation Theory, albeit without the name. The point about effectively infinite competition, though, is a critical one. Neither reach nor timeliness were differentiators, but rather commodities; the companies that dominated on the Internet were those — Google and Facebook in particular — that made sense of the abundance that resulted.
That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human interest stories that had the potential of going viral. Both approaches, though, favored media entities with the best cost structures, not the best content, a particularly difficult road to travel given the massive amounts of content on the Internet created for free.
That left a single alternative: going around Google and Facebook and directly to users.
Niches and the New York Times
That raises the question as to what are the vectors on which “destination sites” — those that attract users directly, independent of the Aggregators — compete? The obvious two candidates are focus and quality:
What is important to note, though, is that while quality is relatively binary, the number of ways to be focused — that is, the number of niches in the world — are effectively infinite; success, in other words, is about delivering superior quality in your niche — the former is defined by the latter.
This obviously isn’t a new concept to Stratechery readers — this is the entire strategic rationale of this site. Again, though, the fact that this is a one-person blog doesn’t mean that my competitive situation is any different than that of the New York Times or any other media entity on the Internet. In other words, to the extent that the New York Times has been successful online — and the company has been very successful indeed! — it follows that the company is well-placed in terms of both focus and quality, and in that order.
In this view, the fact that deeply reported articles about Chinese disinformation on Twitter are held as being low quality by the Chinese government is immaterial; what matters is that the New York Times‘ audience, which is mostly in the United States, finds it of high quality (I certainly do).
That’s an easy example, but there are ones that hit closer to home; for example, I thought this 2018 story that claimed that Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence was, as I wrote at the time, “deeply flawed at best, and willfully mendacious at worst.” It turns out, though, that I am not particularly interested in the “Everything tech does is bad” niche;3 that story was very high quality for much of the New York Times‘s audience.
I don’t bring up this example to complain — quite the contrary! As I wrote in a piece called In Defense of the New York Times, after the company wrote an exposé about Amazon’s working conditions:
The fact of the matter is that the New York Times almost certainly got various details of the Amazon story wrong. The mistake most critics made, though, was in assuming that any publication ever got everything completely correct. Baquet’s insistence that good journalism starts a debate may seem like a cop-out, but it’s actually a far healthier approach than the old assumption that any one publication or writer or editor was ever in a position to know “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet…the New York Times doesn’t have the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon. Amazon, though, along with the other platforms that, as described by Aggregation Theory, are increasingly coming to dominate the consumer experience, are increasingly powerful, even more powerful than governments. It is a great relief that the same Internet that makes said companies so powerful is architected such that challenges to that power can never be fully repressed, and I for one hope that the New York Times realizes its goal of actually making sustainable revenue in the process of doing said challenging.
Indeed they have, and I see the ongoing criticism of tech as a feature, not a bug.
Connections and Transformations
There is, in this long-winded explanation, a connection to recent events.
First, that hopeful note about the Internet bringing us closer to the truth by virtue of increasing the amount of information is quite obviously correct. The light revealing the dust in the air in terms of the African American experience is coming not from traditional publications, but from the fact that everyone is now a publisher; it turns out the black hole analogy applies not only to analog business models, but also to how the media covered what is clearly not a new problem.
Second, given the nichification of everything, whether by subject matter or sensibility, I am not surprised that the New York Times is finding it difficult to sustain an opinion section purporting to represent all sides of an issue. This isn’t the pre-Internet era, when only a few publications had the reach to plausibly claim they had a duty to show both sides, and more importantly, when that reach defined their competitive advantage. Today all opinions from all people are available everywhere, and the New York Times‘s ultimate responsibility is to its audience and its reporters.
Third, this discussion explains why Facebook’s calculation should be different: Facebook (and Google) are not participating in the competition of ideas/attention/monetization, they are defining the terms of that competition. Instead of insisting either company leverage their power explicitly — particularly in terms of politicians that have electoral accountability — more attention should be paid to the fact that that power is completely unaccountable in the first place, and applied in so many ways we cannot see.
What is more worrying is the question of what, if anything, will be connective tissue for society going forward. Infinite niches on as neutral a set of platforms as we can manage makes sense, but by what means do we ensure that people do not disappear into those niches, even if only to decide on how we wish the underlying platforms to be regulated?
Perhaps over time it is geography that will follow business model, instead of the other way around; the shift towards work-from-home is a fascinating development in this regard. What does seem certain is that the past is less of a guide to the future than a reminder that the transformative impact of the Internet is only starting to be felt.
In the small ‘d’ sense, not necessarily — although often! — the Christensen sense
The biggest change in the city view today, beyond the relative numbers for the circles, is a far heavier representation in India and a fairly lighter representation in China
The City of Toronto has expanded its bikeshare network with 1,850 new bicycles and 160 new stations in an effort to help people get around during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Toronto Mayor John Tory revealed the expansion to the city’s existing bikesharing network during a press conference on Tuesday.
Along with the new bicycles and stations, the expansion also includes Bike Share Toronto‘s coverage doubling to 200 square kilometres. Further, pilot areas that each feature eight stations are being created in North York and Scarborough. The pilot locations cover Ward 6 (York Centre), Ward 7 (Humber River-Black Creek), Ward 24 (Scarborough-Guildwood), and Ward 25 (Scarborough-Rouge Park).
An e-bike sharing pilot program is also launching later this summer that includes 300 pedal assist e-bikes and 10 e-bike charging stations. The e-bikes will be capable of travelling at up to 25km per hour, can travel 70km on a single charge and will be compatible with the city’s standard bikesharing network. It currently remains unclear what manufacturer is supplying the e-bikes. The City of Toronto says more details regarding the e-bike pilot program will be announced in “the near future.”
The city says this expansion costs $11.25 million CAD, with $9 million coming from a previous commitment by the provincial government.
“Residents are looking for different and yet safe ways to get around the city and as we continue to respond to the pandemic and make our plans for the post-pandemic period residents want to go outside, they want to be active and they want to have those transportation alternatives. It is our job to make that happen,” said Toronto Mayor John Tory during a press conference.
A 24-hour bikeshare pass that doesn’t include overage charges as long as the bike is docked every 30-minutes costs $7. A single fare is priced at $3.25, with a three-day pass costing $15 and an annual membership being priced at $99.
Toronto says its bike-share network experienced the highest ridership ever on May 23rd, 2020 with 20,911 rides.
As it stands, e-scooters are not included in Toronto Public Health and Transportation Services’ ‘ActiveTO’ effort to offer more space for people walking and cycling
Google’s Pixel line reportedly had its “best performance ever” last year, shipping 7.2 million units, according to global market intelligence firm IDC.
A tweet from IDC’s associate VP of devices in EMEA, Francisco Jeronimo, revealed that the Pixel line saw a 52 percent year-over-year growth in shipments. Further, Pixel now sells more devices that OnePlus, according to Jeronimo. The Pixel line saw strong performance in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan.
The news may come as a surprise, considering reports that the Pixel 4 didn’t sell well. 9to5Google notes that the Pixel 4 line reportedly sold around two million units over the course of six months, with part of those sales being in 2020. However, it’s also important to remember that the more popular Pixel 3 line was available for most of 2019 as well as the new Pixel 3a and 3a XL.
. @Google continues to expand the #Pixel portfolio and sales are growing. In 2019 shipments grew 52% YoY to reach the highest volume ever, with strong performances in the USA, Western Europe and Japan. It now ships more units than @oneplus but it is still far from reaching Top10 pic.twitter.com/qY66isF9vN
However, it’s also important to put the numbers in perspective, as 7.2 million shipments is a small amount in the grand scheme of things. While it was enough to pass OnePlus, it didn’t land Google anywhere near the top 10 manufacturers, according to IDC.
9to5Google notes that Oppo, the fifth-place smartphone maker, ships more than 114 million units per year, significantly more than the 7.2 million Pixels Google managed.
Ultimately, Google still has a lot of work to do in order to increase its smartphone market share. However, if the Pixel 4a proves as successful as the Pixel 3a, and if Google’s Pixel 5 can fix the issues with the Pixel 4, it could continue to see growth.
The numbers above are my own second-guessing of published data on CoVid-19 as at June 8th, 2020. For reasons explained below, they may be wildly inaccurate, but they’re my best guesses at this point, based on the sources cited.
This is my eighth and likely final update on what we know and don’t know about the first wave of the CoVid-19 pandemic. Those of us who’ve been following the numbers are getting increasingly disenchanted with the quality of data reporting, and it’s looking as if our wild guesses on how it’s proceeding will only get wilder as the data gets more and more suspect.
Spain, for example, presumably eager to jump-start its collapsed tourist industry, has essentially just stopped reporting new deaths. So has Brasil, a little more blatantly. And even in countries that have tried hard to report accurate data, much of what’s happening now is what in the wooly world of accounting is called “prior period adjustments” — jurisdictions reporting higher cumulative death totals but asserting that almost all the recent deaths actually happened a week or two earlier so there are almost no “new” deaths to report. Of course, given delays in reporting, this seemingly good news will give rise to further restatements a week or two hence, when today’s deaths are likewise revised sharply upwards. This has definitely “smoothed” some of the numbers for past months, but it dramatically understates some of the actual daily death totals for the most recent days, giving unwitting cover to those proclaiming that the risk has passed and that economies should be fully reopened.
Here’s some of what does seem to be true, however:
The mortality rate for CoVid-19 Wave One continues to look to be around 1.0%, based on retroactive data on excess deaths and on serology tests that estimate the proportion of populations that (symptoms or no) have been infected with the virus. The chart above, as of today, takes a stab at what the final actual Wave One death counts will be in various jurisdictions. Sources of the data for each column are shown, and as you can see some of them are pretty wild guesses, but it’s doubtful with the current obfuscation that we’ll end up with anything much more accurate in retrospect.
The actual likely deaths from the virus are continuing to average about 50% more than official reported figures even in the most diligent jurisdictions, for several understandable reasons I’ve mentioned in earlier posts. In countries with less advanced monitoring and reporting, it’s likely, as some reports have suggested, that actual death tolls could be as much as ten times official reports. The worst offenders are not necessarily the usual suspects however. There is some compelling evidence that China actually did, with its draconian measures, essentially halt spread of the virus so that only 0.1% of its population was infected. And while Russia is likely understating its numbers, its low male life expectancy means that less of its population is in the most vulnerable age groups; and Russians travel less than Western Europeans so we would expect less exposure to the virus especially outside the big wealthy cities. India’s data is a big question mark as well, with its young population less vulnerable to the virus, low reliance on the hospital system, and few funerals. And Brasil is anyone’s guess: Latin America (and Latino Americans in the US) seem especially vulnerable to the virus.
Probably about 3% of the world’s population will be infected by Wave One of the virus by this summer; but that number hides some huge variations both between and within countries. It’s likely that over 20% of people in some big cities will have been infected, more than twice the infection rates for the rest of the country. (Highest proportion is 57% in Bergamo, Italy’s hardest-hit city.) And in some places in these same countries infection rates are less than 0.5%; and less than 0.1% — under one person in a thousand — is likely still infectious. Therein lie the hazards of early relaxation of restrictions. Nowhere is the number who’ve been infected (and presumably are now immune) anywhere near “herd immunity” levels.
According to a report today from the WHO, research now suggests “it seems to be very rare that an asymptomatic [infected] person actually transmits [CoVid-19] onward to a secondary individual”.[EDIT June 9th noon: the WHO just walked back this assertion, saying it was inaccurate to say this was “very rare”; these guys just can’t seem to get their act together. Here’s a taste of the staggering damage this reckless WHO statement has done in just a few hours]. That means almost all transmission is from people visibly suffering from symptoms of the disease, which reinforces other evidence that this disease is less infectious than we thought, and more deadly when it is transmitted than we thought. And reinforces that, alas, the vast majority of us have zero immunity if the relaxation of restrictions leads to new spikes in cases, and to the next wave.
Anthony Fauci reported today that, even when a vaccine is developed and safely introduced, “it likely isn’t going to be a long duration of immunity.” The level of rigour needed to vaccinate everyone not just once but regularly is going to be an ongoing challenge. Some coronavirus research has suggested we may all need to be inoculated more often than once a year.
Two new as-yet-not-peer-reviewed articles pre-published today in the journal Nature say it’s likely that (imposed and voluntary) restrictions on contact have already reduced the number of cases by more than half a billion in just six nations studied, including 285 million in China and 60 million in the US. With a 1% mortality rate that’s five million lives saved. The second study says three million lives have been saved in a dozen European countries (an 82% overall reduction in cases and deaths), equating to a reduction of 300 million infections in those countries. At least eight million lives already saved in fewer than 20 countries studied; probably worth the social and economic sacrifice, no?
A group of 511 epidemiologists surveyed about their personal plans for the next year said the following activities are off the table for them until at least next year:
attending weddings, funerals, church services, sporting events, concerts or plays
going out with people they don’t know well
hugging and handshaking
not wearing a mask when not social distancing
the same group will mostly also not do the following at least until the fall: dinner parties, picnics, camping, day care, play dates, buses, subways, airplanes, gyms, dine-in restaurants, shared office spaces, visiting elderly relatives, visiting friends in their homes
Those on the west coast of North America who were feeling a bit smug about their low infection rates relative to the rest of their countries might be chagrined to know that it appears most of the west coast cases are genetically closer to the European variant of the virus than the Chinese variant. That suggests that despite some very early first reported cases in California, Washington and British Columbia, the virus probably made its way from east to west, so west coasters actually had a few extra days to shut down and social distance relative to hard-hit New Yorkers and Québecois, rather than the other way around. More possible evidence for just how effective the Asian actions and preparedness were compared to the rest of the world’s.
And though it probably needn’t be repeated, it’s still absolutely true that we don’t know how CoVid-19 kills us. And we also don’t have any idea why some countries with big crowded cities (Sri Lanka, Lebanon), lots of travel, lots of old people (Japan), lots of poverty (Haiti), and few restrictions (Cambodia) have largely been untouched, while others that have locked down early (Peru), whose people travel relatively little (Dominican Rep.), have low poverty levels (Belgium), have young populations (Ecuador), and are less densely populated (Bolivia), have been hammered. It has to be more than luck, and perhaps the next wave will be an equalizer, but I’m not so sure: there must be a reason.
I got passionate about this when I worked with a group of epidemiologists for a while after the SARS virus emerged. I realized then (and wrote about) how great the danger was and how unprepared we were for it. I wish I’d been wrong. I still think this is just a test run; it could have been, and eventually will be, much much worse. Ready or not.
IBM’s CEO sent a letter to Congress regarding technology and racial justice reform. It’s notable for taking a clear stand on ways to use technology to promote more opportunity, rather than as a tool that could be abused by law enforcement. Analyzing Arvind Krishna’s letter Here’s what IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wrote, with my commentary. … Continued
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has approved Bell’s plan to use AI to block certain fraudulent and scam calls on a 90-day trial basis.
Bell’s application to the CRTC proposed the use of AI to analyze telecommunications traffic in order to “flag anomalies that suggest possible fraudulent and scam activity.” These anomalies would be subject to review, and if Bell verifies the scam activity, then the carrier would block subsequent related calls.
“Given that the call-blocking system would be implemented at a network-wide level, every call originating on, terminating on, or merely transiting through Bell’s networks would be subject to analysis and potential blocking,” the decision reads.
The commission notes that since the blocking occurs at the network level, the scam caller or the recipient would not be notified that the call has been blocked. It’s important to note that only voice calls are subject to this system, and that text messages are not affected.
As part of the proposal, Bell was asked to provide a definition of what it considers to be a fraudulent or scam call. The carrier’s definition refers to a scam call as “a voice telecommunications call that attempts, by deceit, falsehood, or other fraudulent means, to defraud a person, organization, or the public of any property, money, valuable security, or any service.”
Vidéotron had stated that Bell’s proposal would cause consumer confusion between the measures that are taken by the CRTC and those taken by Bell. The commission found that Bell’s proposed trial would not have a negative impact on existing regulatory measures, such as Universal Call Blocking and STIR/SHAKEN, and would instead complement them.
The commission’s decision also outlines that false positives through the system are unlikely “given the extensive and thorough verification system [Bell has] developed.”
Further, the commission states it is satisfied with the measures Bell has put in place for the protection of confidential information, and that the consent requirements for the use of the collection and disclosure of personal information are sufficient.
Theresa Stewart’s story, which she shared on Twitter this past weekend, is just one of many stories I’ve heard recently from a whisper network of acquaintances, friends, and former employees about how abusive the environment at the Cards Against Humanity office is to women, particularly women of colour. Please read Theresa’s thread and then come back to this post.
I heard about that allegation, and after some time had passed, I continued to be friendly with him. I strongly advocate believing women, but in this particular instance, when it came time for me to uphold that principle and act accordingly, I failed. I have no excuse for this.
As the executive director of a non-profit, I accepted donations from Max and Cards Against Humanity. Max and I have been on each other’s podcasts. I occasionally sought him out for advice. I’ve stayed at his house, and I’ve worked out of the CAH office while in Chicago.
And even though I felt conflicted about it, I kept doing it. I looked around at our mutual friends and didn’t see anyone else having a problem, so I gave myself permission to think that there wasn’t one. I did not realise that they were doing the same to me; they were looking at me, and since I didn’t seem to have a problem, they too assumed there wasn’t one.
This thinking is wrong.
Back in 2014 when the abuse allegations were first published, there were people who spoke up. Various news outlets reported the story, and the XOXO Festival permanently banned Max from attendance. Last year, Carta Monirbravely spoke at an event at the CAH office and confronted the team directly in their own house, calling out Max and the complicity of everyone around him.
As Theresa Stewart points out, the abuse is not limited to those who speak out about the rape allegation. Workplace abuse and gaslighting is a part of the culture at CAH. Things are worse for those Max has direct power over, and they are worst of all for his female employees, who are most likely to suffer real harm from social punishment. Women he has employed, and especially women of colour, are legitimately afraid of having their careers sabotaged by speaking out against him. There is a very real, very deep fear of speaking up, because of how much power Max holds.
Critically, this goes beyond just Max: this is the entire culture of the company. Racist and sexist behaviours from the top down have created a toxic environment for employees. The person steering the ship is an abuser and liar. The culture is set and maintained from the top.
I’m amplifying Theresa’s story to help demonstrate the harm powerful men can cause, and how a constellation of abuse affects so many Black women and women of colour in this society. I have been running a feminist organization committed to intersectionality for 11 years, and during that time I have regularly spoken out against abuses of power. By publicly associating with Max, I allowed him to take cover via tacit approval from me and my nonprofit. I am not willing to do that anymore.
In November of 2019, I confronted Max about the rape allegations and told him that I was being a hypocrite by associating with him, and not living by my feminist principles by continuing the friendship. I told him that, if he genuinely wanted to work towards repairing the harm he’s caused, I would try to help — otherwise we could no longer be acquainted.
Max told me that he wanted to do whatever he could to keep our relationship intact. I urged him to take a couple of days to reflect and then to get back to me so that we could make a plan.
I never heard from him again. Instead, he unfollowed and blocked me on social media. Like everyone else who attempted to talk with him about these issues, I was met with silence and dismissal.
I truly believe in transformative justice, and that people who have caused harm should be given the opportunity to mend that harm and work towards being better in the future. But Max has demonstrated none of the actions of a person who feels remorse and wants to be better.
Max was recently uninvited from an annual conference we both usually attend in Chicago because his presence made several attendees very uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, when asked about this by other attendees wondering where he was, he deflected or lied to justify his absence. On the other hand, he recently raised over $3m on Kickstarter without batting an eye. He could not have done this without collaboration from others, many of whom know about his reputation and the allegations against him, but are willing to look the other way in order to benefit from a relationship with Max. A temptation I know all too well.
I am sorry that my passivity and continued silence contributed more tangible harm towards his targets, and that by continuing to publicly associate with him, I gave targets a reason to fear approaching even public advocates of feminism to ask for help. I never meant to undermine my own work and those of others who create safe, supportive communities, but that’s exactly what I did. And I am sorry that it took me this long to take concrete action.
This is the work. Recognizing my privilege. Recognizing my complicity. Calling myself out. Admitting my role in harm. I have to be willing to admit when I am wrong. I share all of this to acknowledge my responsibility in allowing an abusive man to continue getting away with harm. I want to mend the harm that I’ve done with my silence, and I promise to do better in the future.
If you are friendly with Max, reflect on your own complicity in maintaining a relationship with someone who has caused harm, abused his power to hurt those less powerful, and refuses to be held accountable for that harm. If you have business ties with Max, Cards Against Humanity, or Chicago Board Game Cafe, as Theresa urged you, now is the time to break ties with them. This will not be a merely symbolic gesture; Max benefits greatly from the power and status of those who continue to associate with him. By breaking ties with him, we actually reduce the amount of social power he wields.
As someone recently told me, “You can be comfortable or you can be courageous, but you can’t be both.” Please join me in this work. It’s never too late to be courageous and face the consequences for what you’ve done.
Adrianna Tan@skinnylatte
This is the formula for white food media personalities cooking Asian food.
Use sesame seeds or gochujang: Korean!… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
I think I've found a way to be comfortable publishing syndication feeds for the or this archive website. This is what I wrote about my reluctance in the last post announcing the site:
There aren't any sort of RSS or syndication feeds yet and I am still deciding whether there will be. The orthis site is meant to be more an archive than a publication or a daily feed. It's meant to be a patient place to find or reference an image in a future measured in weeks or months or years rather than something to be consumed in the moment.
That doesn't need to preclude things like syndication feeds but I am no less prey than the next person to the desire for immediate response and gratification, and the bad habits that desire fosters, when sharing something online. The decision not to broadcast updates yet, or even to commit to any kind of a schedule for updates, is an attempt to take a deliberate step back from that behavioural orbit because it seems to do more harm than good these days.
Rather than publishing new drawings in a syndication feed I've set things up to publish an on this day style feed. The feed will be regenerated every day and contain pointers to drawings that were done on that day in past years. I like this approach because it emphasizes the practice of revisiting things. I like it because it fosters a relationship between drawings over time.
On this date is a pretty arbitrary, and pretty meaningless, framing device but it's still a good device so I'm going to stick with it for now. It reminds me of the short-lived oh yeah that website that I ran for a time in 2014. Writing about it, I said:
The belief that a tool needs to be greedier and greedier of a person's time and attention in order to... well, that's the question I suppose. The net result are tools that, whatever the motive or lack thereof, feel like their sole aim is to become the activity rather than complementing the things people are already doing.
There should be drawings enough already to fill every day in the calendar (except today, as it turns out...) so that will take care of the year to come. With any luck there will enough new drawings from the rest of this year, and years to come, so that every day the past has something new to say.
Teachers and others keeping up with their professional development need to do far more than take the occasional class. And John Spencer writes here, "teachers all over the world are meeting in small groups, doing book studies to refine their practice. Without prompting from a district or a principal, they are are taking ownership of their learning. They own their learning." Listing a number of personal professional development (PPD) activities, this post is similar to professional learning framework in the last post. Here's the large version of his diagram.
Yesterday, spurred by the re-emergence of Zettelkasten through a set of new tools such as Obsidian, I decided to reacquaint this site with its early origins as a personal Wiki and turned on Wiki-style backlinks again (you’ll find them at the bottom of every page that is referenced somewhere else).
I did that in a couple of hours that also involved refreshing dependencies and making sure the site could be redeployed without breaking anything, and after a soaking period and some minor cosmetic tweaks I think I’ll call them “done”.
There’s also a new approach to tags and page metadata, but that’s part of the internals and a “target of opportunity” I decided to tackle simultaneously, since the underlying mechanisms are identical.
Back when this site had a “normal” Wiki layout, backlinks were a bit disconcerting to many people since they tended to balloon on some often-referenced pages, but I’m trimming the list to only a few references and adding a bit more context, so this time I think they’ll be less obtrusive while providing some enjoyable paths through the brambles of sixteen years’ worth of content.
The Ineffable Essence Of Coding
It felt really nice to hack in the extra SQLite tables and fix a few things that I had meant to do since 2015 or so, and I’d say that the early move to Python 3 and the switch to piku have paid off handsomely in terms of maintainability.
After all, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve had to re-engineer anything of consequence (even adding posting content via git had near-zero impact on the code itself), so I don’t think it will be worthwhile to do major changes in the engine itself (like porting it to Go or do it as “originally intended” in Clojure).
I keep thinking about making this a fully static site, but going back and tweaking the markup of a few thousand of its 7900+ entries to port all of my content across is not something I am interested in doing right now.
The layout, however, might be worth sprucing up a bit. I like it a lot (and love Georgia for its readability), but after six months of meetings, paperwork and e-mail (that despite everything good that came with it still feels too much like “make work” to my engineer self) I need to code and build something new or else I’ll just go borderline insane.
There’s a difference between a self-sustaining community and a self-managing community.
Your community might be able to sustain itself with fresh activity, but it can’t revamp the website, prioritise certain features or discussions to meet your objectives, or build close relationships between top members.
It can’t weed out threats or optimise the member journey. It also can’t easily improve the quality of the conversation without the impetus of a community team. This is more valuable than you might think.
“The presence of a moderator increased user engagement, encouraged users to discuss negative emotions more candidly, and dramatically reduced bad behavior among chat participants.
Moderation also encouraged stronger linguistic coordination, which is indicative of trust building. In addition, moderators who remained active in conversations were especially successful in keeping conversations on topic.”
When you cut the community team, you might not see it in the level of activity – but you will certainly see it in the quality of activity. You will find yourself with a less trusting, more toxic, and less valuable community.
Ich mag Chromebooks. Es gibt nichts, was ich so schnell in Betrieb nehmen kann. Kein iPhone, kein Android, keinen Mac und schon gar kein Windows. Einschalten, Netz verbinden, Google Konto anmelden, peng. Alle Updates laufen automatisch. Dazu kann man seine Android Apps installieren und sein (Android-)Telefon verbinden. Und was ganz toll ist: Man kann ein Chromebook mit mehreren Leuten benutzen und jeder hat seine eigenen Daten. Google-Konto reicht. Das geht mit Android-Tablets theoretisch auch, aber ich bin da ein paarmal reingefallen, weil es ruckzuck keine Updates mehr gab. Das ist bei Chrome anders. Dieses Gerät soll Updates bis 2028 bekommen.
Das Lenovo Ideapad Duet Chromebook ist ein Convertible im Stil eines Surface Pro. Man kann es als Tablet in der Hand halten, mit einem Kickstand aufstellen und eine Tastatur andocken. Wenn die Tastatur dran ist, dreht sich das Interface nicht mehr, ansonsten wechselt es schnell von Landscape in Portrait. Das Tablet hat ein graues Alu-Gehäuse, das im oberen Viertel ein hellblaues Kunststoffband hat. Das Design scheint vom Google Pixel inspiriert. Hinter dem blauen Band befinden sich höchstwahrscheinlich die WLAN- und Bluetooth-Antennen. LTE gibt es nicht.
Das ganze Setup besteht aus drei Teilen: Tablet (458 g) mit 10,1-Zoll IPS-Display mit 1920x1080 Auflösung und Stereolautsprechern, eine Tastatur (264 g) und eine magnetisch gehaltene, stoffbespannte Rückseite mit dem Kickstand (234 g). Macht zusammen 956 Gramm, ganz schön viel für so ein kleines Gerät. Es ist mir auch ein wenig zu klein, weil die unbeleuchtete Tastatur im rechten Bereich Kompromisse macht, um noch alle Tasten unterzubekommen.
Geladen wird das Tablet via USB-C über ein 10 W Netzteil. 7000 mAh fasst der Akku und soll bis zu zehn Stunden halten, was ich für optimistisch halte. Die Tastatur speist sich über die Kontakte. Man kann sowohl die Tastatur als auch die Rückseite einzeln andocken, was zumindest für die Tastatur recht unsinnig ist, weil das Tablet ohne Rückseite platt auf dem Tisch liegt.
Bisher habe ich nichts gefunden, was das Gerät untauglich macht. Die Bildschirmauflösung ist angemessen, der MTK Octacore-Prozessor hat keine Mühe mit meinen Apps, 4 GB RAM und 64 GB Storage sind für mich dicke ausreichend. Eins konnte ich nicht probieren: Der Screen hat einen Digitizer, der jeden beliebigen USI-Pencil unterstützt. USI steht für Universal Stylus Initiative und diese Stifte kann man für relativ wenig Geld kaufen. Ich habe nur leider keinen zum Testen.
Die Android-Apps, die man aus dem Google App Store lädt, sind in der Regel für Smartphones entworfen und machen keinen sinnvollen Gebrauch von dem breiten Bildschirm eines Chromebooks. So zeigt die Microsoft Teams App immer nur ein Panel an, so wie auf dem Android-Phone. Das schmälert etwas den Nutzen. Aber anders als bei einem iPad kann man die Fenster frei anordnen.
Bei aller Sympathie für die Chromebooks passen sie nicht zu meinem Nutzungsszenario. Sie haben nicht die Power eines iPads und nicht die Softwareunterstützung von Windows. Microsoft Excel auf dem PC ist eine ganz andere Nummer als Excel auf iOS oder Android. Deshalb auch kein Editor-refuses-to-give-it-back Award. Wenn ich einen Rechner mitschleppe, dann muss es mindestens ein Surface Pro (oder ein iPad Pro mit Tastatur) sein, sonst leistet er für mich zu wenig. Allerdings reden wir hier von mehr als 1000 Euro.
Das Duet dagegen kauft man für 329 Euro, inklusive Tastatur und Kickstand, und für dieses Geld kenne ich eigentlich kein anderes Gerät, was ich eher kaufen würde.
Google announced several features coming to Google Maps over the next few days that will help people get around during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a blog post from the company, users will soon be able to get alerts about important COVID-related information in Google Maps. For example, drivers can get alerts about COVID-19 checkpoints and restrictions along their route, such as when crossing national borders. Google says this will start in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. first.
Additionally, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, France, India, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, the U.K. and the U.S. will get public transit alerts too. These alerts will inform users about relevant information from transit agencies, such as the need to wear a mask or changes to bus routes.
The blog also notes that Maps will remind users to verify eligibility and facility guidelines to avoid people from getting turned away when they navigate to a medical facility or COVID-19 testing center. This feature will be available in Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, South Korea, and the U.S. Testing center alerts will be available in the U.S.
Google says it shows alerts when it receives “authoritative data from local, state and federal governments” and that it’s actively working with other agencies globally to bring more helpful data to Maps users.
Helping public transit users avoid crowds
Google Maps has offered ‘crowdedness predictions’ for public transit since last year. The feature is powered by “tens of millions of contributions,” according to Google, which can help people see how crowded certain buses, trains and other transit options tend to be.
Now, Google says it’s making it easier for people to contribute crowdedness information for their transit lines. To do so, users can tap the ‘Crowdedness’ button when looking at a transit route to submit details about how many people there are.
Additionally, Google says it added more granular accessibility information for people to contribute, such as where there are wheelchair-accessible doors, seating, stop buttons and more.
Starting June 8th, Google says Maps will be able to show which times a transit station is usually most busy, as well as how busy it is at the current moment.
Google says that all these new features are powered by aggregates and anonymized data from users who have opted in to Google Location History. Location History is a Google account-level setting that is off by default.
So many people want to make change by forcing other people to do things. But I agree with Noam Chomsky here. “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of people are working all the time, and they’re working in their communities or their workplace or wherever they happen to be, and they’re building up the basis for popular movements.” If we want change, we have to do the work.
This post summarizes a dispute between Shea Swauger, who wrote a review of algorithmic test proctoring, and Proctorio, a company involved in the industry. First they asked him to retract, and then they wrote a column in response in Inside Higher Ed. It's an odd response, asking that we recognize a distinction between 'facial recognition' and 'facial detection' technology, and agree that "there is a potential threat to society when students are not expected to meet integrity standards set forth by their institution." In any case, Swauger's main point still stands, I think: "Biometric-based authentication technologies like facial recognition, fingerprint/retinal ID, voice, or keystroke recognition should never be used in an educational setting. There are too many privacy, security, and equity risks to justify any potential benefits."
I am of course delighted that in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge is singing like a giant ethereal harp, because it makes me wonder what it’s saying, and about the voices of other transport infrastructure, and what they would sing about too.
I’m also pretty taken with the idea that we don’t know what the Golden Gate Bridge is singing about, other than it being windy. It tickles me that the bridge has its own internal life that leads it to sing, but it’s no more speaking to us than a blackbird. Why should the bridge want to tell us anything? And why would we be able to understand it if it did?
What’s appealing is the scale difference and the parallel lives. In regular life, the bridge is subject to human concerns. But if we’re quiet, and we make some room, this sleeping giant dreams, and we can hear it talking in its sleep.
If earthly objects such as strings or pieces of metal make sounds when put in motion, so too must the Moon, the planets, the Sun and even the highest stars. As these heavenly objects are forever in motion, orbiting the Earth, surely they must be forever producing sound.
(Says Pythagoras.)
I’m currently lost in a bit of a wikihole reading about the music of the spheres, the musica universalis, and it turns out this is only one of three branches of “musica”:
musica mundana (sometimes referred to as musica universalis)
musica humana (the internal music of the human body)
musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis (sounds made by singers and instrumentalists)
So, a fourth brand, a musica city? Not cosmic but earthbound. The music of the human-created but somehow bigger than us?
If you’ve never been to The Monument in London, it’s a thin stone tower with a spiral staircase inside to reach the top, about 300 steps, and it was tall when it was completed in 1677 to commemorate the Great Fire. (Now it’s in a square mostly surrounded by office blocks.) Here are some pics.
The staircase is hollow from top to bottom. You can see straight down as you circle round, which always gives me the heebie jeebies.
And I remember reading somewhere that Christopher Wren (the new St Paul’s Cathedral) and Robert Hooke (him of the law of elasticity, and also architect) conceived of the post-Fire, rebuilt London as a landscape of mega-instruments, buildings simultaneously for people and also for the scientific contemplation of nature.
So maybe that would be the song of our cities, if only we could hear it.
I recently read
The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by
Jonathan Tepper and
Denise Hearn. For a decade or two now I’ve felt the economy is over-concentrated and
in recent years I’ve been super-concerned about concentration of market power in the Big-Tech sector where I’ve earned my
living. Reading this book has reinforced that concern and been very helpful in introducing new angles on how to think about
monopoly. The issue is central to the travails and triumphs of 21st-century Capitalism and if you care about that, you might
want to read it too.
Where I stand
I believe that de-monopolization is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for getting us out of our current socioeconomic turmoil. In particular, I’d go after Big
Tech. The functions that are provided by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be provided by at least twenty
different companies.
I hope to dig into a few of them, with specifics, in a series of blog posts, given time and energy.
A few juicy outtakes
I don’t necessarily agree 100% with all of these, but they are thought-provoking.
“X companies control Y% of the US market in Z.”
X=2, Y=90, Z=beer
X=4, Y=almost all, Z=airlines
X=5, Y=50, Z=banks
X=2, Y=90, Z=health insurers in many states
X=1, Y=75%, Z=fast Internet, most places in the US
X=3, Y=70, Z=pesticides
X=3, Y=80, Z=seed corn.
“[Warren Buffet,] when asked at an annual meeting what his ideal business was, he argued it was one that had ‘High pricing power, a
monopoly.’”
“Given the lack of any new entrants into most industries, it should be no surprise that companies are getting larger and
older. The average age of public companies in the United States is currently 18 years old, up from 12 years old in 1996. In real
terms, the average company in the economy has become three times larger during the past two decades.25 Not only do we have
fewer, older companies, but they are also capturing almost all the profits. In 1995 the top 100 companies accounted for 53% of
all income from publicly traded firms, but by 2015, they captured a whopping 84% of all profits.26 Like Oliver Twist asking for
more, there is little left for smaller companies after the big ones eat their fill.”
“The tech giants love startups, but in the same way that lions love feasting on lifeless carcasses of gazelles.”
“Since Reagan, no president has enforced the spirit or the letter of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. It doesn't matter what
party has controlled Congress or the presidency, there has been no difference in policy toward industrial concentration. In
fact, the budgets for antitrust enforcement have steadily shrunk with each passing president.”
“High markups matter a great deal in the inequality debate because they are tightly correlated with lower wages for workers.”
“Monopolies – not big businesses – are the enemy of competition. Big is neither beautiful nor ugly.”
“The easiest rule of thumb is that industries of fewer than six players should not be allowed to merge.”
Useful: Numbers and stories
In the first part of the book Tepper and Hearn establish that the economy is over-concentrated, demonstrating it with lots of
facts and figures. There is a wealth of anecodotal case studies illustrating the practical
ill-effects of this concentration.
Useful: Big-tech drill-down
They dive especially deep on concentration in Big Tech: Amazon’s retail, Google’s search, Facebook’s demographic
sorting. Little of this was news to me, but for those who haven’t spent decades in the tech trenches, or who harbor any
remaining illusions that this business is on the side of the little guy, the stories are valuable.
Useful: The German narrative
After WWII, it turns out that the Allies felt the massive pre-war concentration of the German economy had been a
significant factor in the rise of the Nazis. So in the reconstruction of Germany, they made a deliberate attempt to keep that
sort of monopolization
from happening again. I don’t know if they were right about the rise of the Nazis, but history seems to have shown them right
about designing economies; this economic structure has served Germany very well.
Useful: Post-consumerism
In recent times, the US has as a matter of policy gated all antitrust litigation on a single factor: Are consumer prices
raised unduly? Tepper and Hearn argue convincingly that this is wrong on many levels. One of them is ethical: Humans are more
than just consumers, and undue monopolization damages the human experience of life along many non-consumer axes.
Boring: Patents and trademarks
Yes, the modern IP regime is damaging and dysfunctional, but we already knew that, and this is not really essential to
understanding monopolization. This chapter should just be dropped.
Useful: Regulation and lobbying
Most progressives, including me, are big fans of public regulation of businesses. Unfortunately, there is a strong case to
be made that monopolies use regulatory arbitrage to crush potential competition and retain their steely grip. This is
facilitated by massive lobbying efforts, the de-facto corruption that infests more or less all the capitals of the developed
world.
Not only can you lobby for a regulatory structure that favors your company’s position, at some level a high volume of
regulation becomes a qualitative advantage for big companies against small ones, because they can afford to hire the lawyers and
compliance people to play the game, while startups can’t.
Useful: Cross-shareholding
When a small group of investors are investors in all the leading players in any given industry, this increases everyone’s
incentive to carve the space up in a nice little orderly monopoly without any of that nasty profit-destroying competition.
Evidence is not scarce.
Wrong: On Piketty
Tepper and Hearn go on a side-trip to explain why Thomas Piketty was wrong, but bizarrely begin by asserting “We have yet to
meet anyone who has read the entire book. We're not making that up. Professor Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematics professor, did a
study of bookmarks on Kindle e-books and found that almost no one made it past 26 pages in Piketty's book.” Um, wrong, I
did. And, with the exception of the final section where Piketty introduces his proposed solutions to the problem, it’s not even
heavy going.
I assume Tepper and Hearn’s “anyone” includes Tepper and Hearn, so I think it’s fair to pretty well blow off their discursion
on growth and inequality, since to begin with their assertion about what Piketty claims is nowhere near what I encountered when
I read it. Anyhow, no biggie, it’s just one little section. And then they go on to agree with Piketty’s finding that inequality
has empirically been increasing continuously and strongly, and provide a bunch of useful data graphs.
Useful: Recommendations
Tepper and Hearn finish up with a series of how-do-we-fix-this recommendations. I’m not going to copy that many of them in
here because if you care, you should read their damn book already.
But they make a crucial meta-point: Anti-monopoly regulations
need to be clear and simple, and based on principles, as opposed to complex rules.
Next steps
Simple: Let’s start by breaking up a few banks and big-techs and agribusiness empires. This book probably isn’t the reason
why, but public perception has swung strongly against The BigCos. At this point in history they’re soft targets and
the rewards to all of us from doing this are potentially huge. (By the way, this includes their shareholders.)
The best time to have done this would have been ten years ago. The next best time is now.
Ben Werdmüller
AliceAvizandum on Twitter.
Fefes Blog.
