TimB

Let’s create communities from which we scarcely have to travel.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23^rd September 2020

Could it be true? That this government will bring all sales of petrol and diesel cars to an end by 2030? That it will cancel all rail franchises and replace them with a system that might actually work? Could the UK, for the first time since the internal combustion engine was invented, really be contemplating a rational transport policy? Hold your horses.

Before deconstructing it, let’s mark this moment. Both announcements might be a decade or two overdue, but we should bank them, as they’re essential steps towards a habitable nation. We don’t yet know exactly what they mean, as the government has delayed its full transport announcement until later this autumn. But so far, nothing that surrounds these positive proposals makes any sense.

If the government has a vision for transport, it appears to be plug and play. We’ll keep our existing transport system, but change the kinds of vehicles and train companies that use it. But when you have a system in which structural failure is embedded, nothing short of structural change will significantly improve it.

A switch to electric cars will reduce pollution. It won’t eliminate it, as a high proportion of the microscopic particles thrown into the air by cars, that are highly damaging to our health, arise from tyres grating on the surface of the road. Tyre wear is also by far the biggest source of microplastics pouring into our rivers and the sea. And when tyres, regardless of the engine that moves them, come to the end of their lives, we still have no means of recycling them properly.

Cars are an environmental hazard long before they leave the showroom. One estimate suggests that the carbon emissions produced in building one equate to driving it for 150,000 km. The rise in electric vehicle sales has created a rush for minerals such as lithium and copper, with devastating impacts on beautiful places. If the aim is greatly to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and replace those that remain with battery-operated models, then they will be part of the solution. But if, as a forecast by the National Grid proposes, the current fleet is replaced by 35 million electric cars, we’ll simply create another environmental disaster.

Switching power sources does nothing to address the vast amount of space the car demands, that could otherwise be used for greens, parks, playgrounds and homes. It doesn’t stop cars from carving up community, turning streets into thoroughfares and outdoor life into a mortal hazard. Electric vehicles don’t solve congestion, or the extreme lack of physical activity that contributes to our poor health.

So far, the government seems to have no interest in systemic change. It still plans to spend £27 billion on building even more roads, presumably to accommodate all those new electric cars. An analysis by Transport for Quality of Life suggests that this roadbuilding will cancel out 80% of the carbon savings from a switch to electric over the next 12 years. But everywhere, even in the government’s feted garden villages and garden towns, new developments are being built around the car. Rail policy is just as irrational. The construction of HS2, now projected to cost £106 billion, has accelerated in the past few months, destroying precious wild places along the way, though its weak business case has almost certainly been destroyed by the coronavirus.

If one thing changes permanently as a result of the pandemic, it is likely to be travel. Many people will never return to the office. The great potential of remote technologies, so long untapped, is at last being realised. Having experienced quieter cities with cleaner air, few people wish to return to the filthy past.

Like several of the world’s major cities, London is being remodelled in response. The mayor, recognising that, while fewer passengers can use public transport, a switch to cars would cause gridlock and lethal pollution, has set aside road space for cycling and walking. Greater Manchester hopes to build 1800 miles of protected pedestrian and bicycle routes. Cycling to work is described by some doctors as “the miracle pill”, massively reducing the chances of early death: if you want to save the NHS, get on your bike. But support from central government is weak, contradictory and involves a fraction of the money it is spending on new roads. The major impediment to a cycling revolution is the danger of being hit by a car.

Even a switch to bicycles (including electric bikes and scooters) is only part of the answer. Fundamentally, this is not a vehicle problem but an urban design problem. Or rather, it is an urban design problem created by our favoured vehicle. Cars have made everything bigger and further away. Paris, under its mayor Anne Hidalgo, is seeking to reverse this trend, by creating a “15-minute city”, in which districts that have been treated by transport planners as mere portals to somewhere else become self-sufficient communities, each with their own shops, parks, schools and workplaces, within a 15 minute walk of everyone’s home.

This, I believe, is the radical shift that all towns and cities need. It would transform our sense of belonging, our community life, our health and our prospects of local employment, while greatly reducing pollution, noise and danger. Transport has always been about much more than transport. The way we travel helps determine the way we live. And at the moment, locked in our metal boxes, we do not live well.

www.monbiot.com

Rumor, as in press reports, has it that Biden plans to install uber hawk Michèle Flournoy as Secretary of Defense.

The regulatory worm seems to be turning against Google in many countries, even in the U.S. where it had been hibernating.

The Biden transition team has abandoned most of the Biden campaign Covid promises, particuarly the ones that cost money.

The presidential election has not yet been called, but Joe Biden seems to have an insurmountable lead in enough states to secure victory in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, it's clear that the polls were seriously off in many states. Biden was predicted to win easily, with comfortable margins in some states that ended up nearly even and the possibility of picking up several more that he ended up losing decisively. Similarly, several Democratic Senate candidates performed well below their expected numbers.

As a result, many progressives are understandably frustrated about the second consecutive polling whiff in a presidential election year. Staggering amounts of money were wasted on campaigns that were not close at all. About $90 million went into Amy McGrath's doomed vanity campaign for Senate in Kentucky, where she lost by over 20 points — but another $108.9 million went into Jaime Harrison's campaign against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, which polls showed to be close but ended up being a 10-point loss. Something is very wrong with pollsters' methods.

What is to be done? I suggest that progressives and Democrats should sink some of their money into local research — organizations that will conduct journalism, interviews, focus groups, listening sessions, and so forth to supplement surveys and polls. That could both provide some more qualitative data to balance out untrustworthy polls, and also build up an institutional presence on the ground that will be valuable in future political fights.

Some might say that Democrats should just run on quality policy, and completely ignore the polls. And it's true, as I have argued many times previously, that Democrats tend to overrate opinion polls in making their decisions (or hide behind them when they don't want to do something that would alienate big donors). Many people do not have well-formed opinions about the issues, and can be convinced one way or another with careful messaging and strong leadership. Polls should never be dispositive, only informative.

But knowledge of public opinion must play a vital role in any kind of modern political campaign. Even in these big spending times, resources are not unlimited. A decent idea of how close races are allows organizations to prioritize their spending, while granular data about locations and demographics allows campaigns to shape their messaging and their turnout efforts. If a candidate doesn't know where he or she is stronger or weaker, or how people are reacting to arguments, it's impossible to fight tactically. Even back in the pre-polling days, political campaigns relied on union leaders, local party bosses, ward heelers, and so on to provide some crude intelligence.

Now, local research can be even more misleading than bad polls. This kind of anecdotal journalism, for instance, is often a complete joke. One must avoid the Salena Zito problem, where a journalist supposedly doing shoe leather reporting miraculously finds that everyone (that is, a bunch of Republican partisans that Zito claims are Democrats) agrees with her pro-Trump politics. More generally, one must avoid the temptation to talk one's book — shading the research to advance one's personal politics, which can happen even unconsciously.

That said, local research can capture political intelligence that even accurate survey data can miss. Structured conversations, knowledge of local relationships, or even just a feel for the local mood can provide valuable information even if it can't be programmed into a spreadsheet. For every Zito article or "Trump supporters who still support Trump" piece in The New York Times, there is work like Michael Lewis on the 2008 financial crisis in Iceland, or Sharon Lerner on "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana. Academic anthropology has developed elaborate tools for conducting ethnographic studies in an informative, fair way. (Incidentally, there are a large number of unemployed or struggling academics who would probably leap at the chance to do quality field work for a steady paycheck.)

This kind of thing is already happening in other contexts. The Federal Reserve, for instance, has access to all the best economic data available — far, far better than any poll. Yet before the pandemic struck, it organized a series of "Fed Listens" tours across the country, where Fed officials had long conversations with local business and community leaders. Ordinarily one would think this would be a silly exercise in public relations, but as Brendan Greeley reports for the Financial Times, it actually had a marked effect on Fed leaders' thinking and policy. They discovered in a visceral, intuitive way that basically no Americans are concerned about inflation, but were very concerned with jobs and incomes. It's partly why the Fed correctly moved to stimulate the economy even before the pandemic struck, and some officials are suggesting the tours should be institutionalized as part of Fed procedure. That type of knowledge and experience can make a good complement to even the best data in the world. "I've been pleasantly surprised at how meaningful they were," said Neel Kashkari, head of the Minneapolis Fed branch.

Progressives donated an absolute avalanche of money in the final stages of this election. Just in the third quarter of 2020, small donors funneled $1.5 billion through the donation portal ActBlue — nearly matching the entire total for 2018. It seems that donations are what millions of progressives are doing to relieve their intense desire to do something to fight the Republicans. And I understand why! But building some local institutions, inside or outside the Democratic Party, would give people something to do that would be more concretely useful than the marginal billionth dollar, and could easily be spun up into actual campaign work. (It seems Biden's abandonment of door knocking was likely a significant factor in his underperformance.)

There is no replacement for accurate polls. But people are going to be suspicious of pollsters for a long time, at least until they stop faceplanting for several elections in a row. In the meantime, Democrats and activist groups alike can divert just a bit of that money firehose and start opening some permanent field operations.

Literally translating to platform cedar, daisugi is a 14th- or 15th-century technique that offers an efficient, sustainable, and visually stunning approach to forestry. The method originated in Kyoto and involves pruning the branches of Kitayama cedar so that the remaining shoots grow straight upward from a platform. Rather than harvesting the entire tree for lumber, loggers can fell just the upper portions, leaving the base and root structure intact.

Although daisugi mostly is used in gardens or bonsai today, it originally was developed to combat a seedling shortage when the demand for taruki, a type of impeccably straight and knot-free lumber, was high. Because the upper shoots of Kitayama cedar can be felled every 20 years, which is far sooner than with other methods, the technique grew in popularity.

To see daisugi up close, watch this video chronicling pruning, felling, and transplanting processes. (via Kottke)

 

 

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London-based artist Barbara Franc (previously) upcycles materials that otherwise would be tossed into the recycling bin to create a quirky menagerie of metal creatures. Composed with scraps and copper wire, the lively sculptures generally are indicative of movement: owls lift a talon mid-waddle, two cats peer over their shoulders with surprised expressions, and a squirrel appears ready to scurry off.

The diversity of Franc’s creatures mimic the breadth of materials utilized. She often begins by creating a wire-netting form before attaching the found objects—which include a combination of windscreen wipers, dog leads, keys, cupboard handles, cutlery, biscuit tins, old spanners, metal clips, costume jewelry, and clock and watch pieces—that she sources from yard sales, thrift shops, builder’s dumpsters, and along the roadside as she walks. When attached to the body, logo-printed scraps form a bushy tail and chess pieces create ruffled chest feathers.

Franc notes that she creates to celebrate other species rather than out of sentimentality. “It is more about a very positive feeling of respect for the huge diversity of life on our wonderful planet and the knowledge that Life itself will always be there. Animals just symbolize that for me in an uncomplicated and direct approach as there is no human element to confuse the issue,” she says.

Purchase one of Franc’s animalistic sculptures from her shop, and follow her latest recycled pieces on Instagram.

 

Why the half-hearted Democratic Party opposition to Amy Coney Barrett should come as no surprise.

The role of Indian pharma in ensuring access to low-cost drugs is important during the age of COVID-19, and not only for developing counries.

The connection between leaf blowers and bank bailouts. by Charles Mudede
It is autumn. The leaves—red, gold, brown, and orange—are about to fall, are falling, have fallen. The fallen ones form a crunchy carpet around the tree they served during the sunny days. The leaves did with light what human-made dams do with water: convert free energy into usable energy. But during the colder days, the broad leaves of deciduous trees tend be more useless than useful, and sometimes even dangerous. Dangerous because, as we saw on Oct 13, 2020 in Seattle, autumn brings with it more wind. Because of this, the leaves become sails that, if the wind is strong enough, can uproot a whole, old, weighty tree.

Broad leaves can also break a tree like that if they catch and hold too much snow. Leaves have to go. The days are shorter and shorter. The nights are longer and longer. The grounded leaves decompose into loam. This system was doing just fine until humans found the dead leaves to be a nuisance. The deepest historical record of the rake we have is found in China. It appeared there about 1,100 years before the Romans nailed a troublemaker to a cross. But the leaves only met their match when humans introduced an economic system whose feedback loop is positive.

We have Japanese capitalism to thank for the machine that uses fossil fuel (or electricity) to blow leaves away from places where they help (a lawn) and where they don't (streets, parking lots). The leaf blower made its first big appearance in 1977, according to Wikipedia. Now, almost one million of these utterly useless and even destructive machines are sold every year in the US.

Leaf blowers did capture the media's attention for a bit during two recent democratic demonstrations, first in Hong Kong and then in Portland, Oregon.

But their political uses hardly compare to their conventional one. And here I arrive at my collecting and turning point, which is found in the word "conventional."

On the left side of American politics, the economy is often separated into two categories: the fictional economy (Wall Street) and the real economy (Main Street). The function of this distinction is to make a commonsense appeal to voters in the middle and working classes. The financial economy generates income for the rich, the labor-oriented left claims, whereas the real economy generates income for those who work hard for a living. From Bernie to Biden, what is expressed at every opportunity is a devotion to the real economy and the commitment to reduce the influence of the fictional economy on government economic policies, packages, and planning.

What is never questioned, however, is the real economy itself. It is deemed to be real because it's made of brick-and-mortar. It is deemed to be real because it produces and distributes stuff (materials) you can hold with your very own hands. Bonds, securities, derivatives—this is what Karl Marx called "fictional capital" ("paper claims on wealth"). Bankers and brokers and the like do not actually make anything, no matter how much they stretch and stretch what the economist Mariana Mazzucato calls the "production boundary."

But what is the real economy made of? Even a cursory look at main street's stuff reveals that much of it is as fictitious as fictitious capital.

The only theorist who achieved some understanding of the real economy's essential fictitiousness was the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). This understanding informed the core of a work, The Mirror of Production, that concluded his break from Marxism in 1973. From this position, he saw orthodox Marxism as too attached to the Victorian notion of progress. (The German theorist Walter Benjamin, who died in 1941, criticized Weimar-era social democracy along the same lines in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History.") Baudrillard broke the spell of the real economy by disenchanting its main fetish object: use value. With the standard understanding, what is fictional is exchange value, and what is not is use value (or usefulness). You can't eat a bond, but you can eat a loaf of bread and other consumer products sold in supermarkets.

But this way of reasoning missed an important aspect of capitalist reality: most of its goods have uses that are generally fictional.

Baudrillard:

In fact the use value of labor power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in the three orders of production, consumption, and signification.

The leaf blower. What does it do that a rake cannot? What is the actual status of its value? We also have millions of machines that burn fossil fuel to cut grass and level lawns. And there is grass itself. It's value content is entirely ornamental.

NASA:

The map shows how common lawns are across the country, despite a wide variability of climate and soils. Indeed, the scientists who produced the map estimate that more surface area is devoted to lawns than to any other single irrigated crop in the country. For example, lawns appear to cover more than three times the number of acres that irrigated corn covers. The large image shows a more detailed look at fractional lawn surface area in urban areas. In many cities, the urban core—where buildings, parking lots, and roads are densest—appears paler green.

But the leaf blower, the lawnmower, and grass are all a part of the real economy. People work ever so hard to make or grow these mostly fictitious things. Which brings me back to the word "conventional." When speaking of the side of the capitalist economy that the meat-and-potatoes left instinctively opposes, financial wealth, it's much more accurate to call it the conventional economy rather than the real economy.

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A high profile example of the train wreck called the US patent process.

Throughout lockdown in the United Kingdom, Mark Harvey, who is known for his striking equine and canine photography, shifted his focus to the avian creatures gliding above his home in the Norfolk Broads. Now part of a series titled In Flight, the exquisitely detailed shots frame common birds —including magpies, blue tits, starlings, goldfinches, great tits, coal tits, long-tailed tits, and green finches—in otherwise unseen poses: some splay out an entire wingspan, while others wrap their feathers around the front of their torsos.

Hearkening back to the methods of famed birdwatcher Victor Hasselblad, Harvey employed similar techniques to capture the dramatic shots. He used a slow, medium format with the same camera Hasselblad manufactured for the outdoor endeavor, taking just one image at a time.

Harvey just released limited edition prints of the In Flight series, which are available in a run of 15 per subject in his shop, and shares more of his striking horse and pup portraits on Instagram. (via Creative Boom)

 

Earlier this year, Malmo, Sweden-based game developer Oskar Stålberg launched Townscaper, a low-stakes video game that’s similar to Sim City without the threat of natural disaster or the need to maintain characters’ emotional wellbeing. Users only have the option to delete or build with a certain color, a function that’s controlled entirely by the algorithm. Simply drop a block and watch the system construct charming homes, towering cathedrals, and luxurious greenspaces. “No goal. No real gameplay. Just plenty of building and plenty of beauty. That’s it,” Stålberg writes.

Townscaper is currently available to download for $6, although it isn’t finished quite yet. Watch this comprehensive tutorial to get a better sense of the user experience, and follow Stålberg on Twitter to keep up with the latest developments. (via Jeroen Apers)

 

"Charles Bridge is a historic bridge that crosses the Vltava river in Prague, Czech Republic. Its construction started in 1357 under the auspices of King Charles IV, and finished in the beginning of the 15th century. The bridge replaced the old Judith Bridge built 1158–1172 that had been badly damaged by a flood in 1342. This new bridge was originally called Stone Bridge or Prague Bridge but has been "Charles Bridge" since 1870. As the only means of crossing the river Vltava (Moldau) until 1841, Charles Bridge was the most important connection between Prague Castle and the city's Old Town and adjacent areas. This "solid-land" connection made Prague important as a trade route between Eastern and Western Europe."

Very cool graphic.  Piledriver, cofferdam, waterwheel, and lots of stonework.

Sofia Crespo describes her work as the “natural history book that never was.” The Berlin-based artist uses artificial neural networks to generate illustrations that at first glance, resemble Louis Renard’s 18th Century renderings or the exotic specimens of Albertus Seba’s compendium. Upon closer inspection, though, the colorful renderings reveal unsettling combinations: two fish are conjoined with a shared fin, flower petals appear feather-like, and a study of butterflies features insects with missing wings and bizarrely formed bodies.

Titled Artificial Natural History, the ongoing project merges the desire to categorize organisms with “the very renaissance project of humanism,” Crespo says, forming a distorted series of creatures with imagined features that require a new set of biological classifications. “The specimens of the artificial natural history both celebrate and play with the seemingly endless diversity of the natural world, one that we still have very limited comprehension and awareness of,” she writes.

Crespo manufactured a similar project, Neural Zoo, that combines disparate elements of nature into composite organisms. “Our visual cortex recognizes the textures, but the brain is simultaneously aware that those elements don’t belong to any arrangement of reality that it has access to,” she says. More generally, Crespo explains her motivation behind merging artificial neural networks and natural history:

Computer vision and machine learning could offer a bridge between us and a speculative “natures” that can only be accessed through high levels of parallel computation. Starting from the level of our known reality, we could ultimately be digitizing cognitive processes and utilizing them to feed new inputs into the biological world, which feeds back into a cycle. Routines in artificial neural networks become a tool for creation, one that allows for new experiences of the familiar. Can art be reduced to the remapping of data absorbed through sensory processes?

Head to Crespo’s site to explore more of her AI-produced studies, and follow her latest pieces on Instagram.

 

Like master illusionists, bank accountants conceal losses from federal regulators, putting the whole economy at risk

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the world dices with the climate emergency, businesses and governments are starting to push funding toward technology that aims to trap planet-heating gases rather than let them saturate the atmosphere.

Carbon capture is a controversial idea, attacked as a costly distraction from stopping emissions occurring in the first place.

But last month, the International Energy Agency said it was an imperative part of the mix, warning that it would be “virtually impossible” for the world to hit climate targets without capturing and storing emissions generated from factories, power plants, transportation, and other sources. The transition to renewable energy, such as solar and wind, would not cut emissions in time, the IEA said.

In an eye-catching recent deal, a consortium including Amazon and Microsoft invested in CarbonCure Technologies, a Canadian firm seeking to slash the carbon dioxide emissions of concrete. Producing cement, the key ingredient in concrete, creates so much CO2 that if the industry were a country, only China and the United States would emit more over the course of a year.

CarbonCure works with nearly 300 concrete producers to inject captured CO2 into their product. The injected gas chemically transforms into limestone, reinforcing the concrete. Amazon will use the concrete in its buildings, including its vast new headquarters in Virginia.

Currently, CarbonCure is injecting CO2 normally used in products such as carbonated drinks, but hopes to “close the loop” by capturing it from cement production in order to reduce global concrete emissions by 500 million metric tons by the end of the decade.

“The funding from Amazon will be critical to rapidly scale up the solution we’ve developed,” said Christie Gamble, the director of sustainability at CarbonCure. To make a significant dent in pollution, emissions from concrete will have to be captured, or new non-concrete materials will need to be used on a vast scale, even as countries such as China and India rapidly build new infrastructure.

“Is that possible? Absolutely. Will it be challenging? You bet,” said Gamble on the prospects for capturing carbon from concrete production. “This investment is one that indicates a huge amount of optimism of what is possible.”

This broad sweep of technology can be split roughly into two types — air conditioner-like machines that can suck CO2 directly from the air; and infrastructure that captures emissions at source and stores them, usually underground.

Carbon capture is still in its infancy — there are only about 20 projects in commercial use worldwide, according to the IEA — but billions of dollars in investment is flowing into the sector. Microsoft has announced a “moonshot” climate plan that will involve direct air capture of CO2 and biomass energy carbon capture and storage, where wood chips are burned and the resulting carbon is injected into rock formations.

Norway is launching a full-scale carbon capture and storage project, named Longship after the Viking vessels, while a direct air capture project for the Permian Basin in the southwestern United States is doubling in size and aims to suck up 1 million tons of CO2 a year. The U.S. government is pitching in, recently awarding $72 million to two dozen different carbon capture initiatives.

“We are at a tipping point and no one knows quite how it will tip,” said Klaus Lackner, an Arizona State University expert in the field who invented “mechanical trees” that remove CO2 from the air. Lackner said the world was likely to surge beyond the 1.5 degree C (2.7 degree F) global heating limit set out in the Paris climate agreement. “We are living in an overshoot world where 1.5 degrees C will be missed,” he said. “We are going to have to step harder on the brakes and we are going to have to get carbon back.”

But many environmentalists are not keen on an idea that would burnish the green credentials of fossil fuel companies by installing carbon capture technology on power plants. “Carbon capture and storage is not a solution to the climate crisis, it is part of the problem,” said Karen Orenstein, the climate and energy programme director at Friends of the Earth. “This extraordinarily expensive pipe dream is just false rhetoric propagated by the fossil fuel industry in an attempt to save itself.”

Critics point to the example of Petra Nova, a $1 billion flagship carbon capture project in Texas that was mothballed this year after the crashing price of oil made it economically unviable (supporters of the project note that it captured 92 percent of the CO2 that passed through it, exceeding expectations).

Lackner said that retrofitting aging “zombie” power plants with carbon capture units was often pointless, with renewables waiting in the wings to replace fossil fuels. The technology should instead be used, he said, for stubbornly persistent pollution coming from shipping, aviation, and trucks that could not easily be removed by the shift to cleaner energy.

“Scaling up is the issue and so it needs investment and it needs regulation,” Lackner said. “We’ve ignored the problem and now we are in a hole. We have to stop digging but we have to fill the hole up, too.”

Lackner said the industrial capacity for widespread carbon capture exists, but it required political will. “Much like … sewage in the 18th century, we don’t see the value of cleaning up a mess until it hurts us,” he said. “There’s going to be irreversible harm: Species are going to go extinct, seas will rise, and we won’t be able to unmelt glaciers. We will get there, the question is how much collateral damage we will do on the way.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Carbon capture ‘moonshot’ moves closer as billions of dollars pour in on Oct 10, 2020.

Photographer Shin Noguchi (previously), who lives in Kamakura and works throughout Tokyo, has a knack for capturing snapshots of the unusual, baffling, and quirky activities of passersby. A single image often is imbued with layers of serendipity, with one framing both a woman in an elaborate gown and a dazed baby, while another features a screaming child and a man splayed on a public staircase in the background.

Taken around Japan, the photographs appear as objective shots, glimpsing candid moments that are enigmatic and sometimes humorous. “Street photography always projects the “truth”. The “truth” that I talk about isn’t necessarily that I can see, but they also exist in society, in street, in people’s life. and I always try to capture this reality beyond my own values and viewpoint/perspective,” he says in a statement.

One-hundred-thirty of Noguchi’s photographs are compiled in a forthcoming monograph, In Color In Japan, which is currently available for pre-order. The book was printed in two editions, a black and a white, and the former contains an extra, unique image that’s never been shown before and won’t be reproduced in another format. Follow Noguchi on Instagram to see his latest shots from the streets of Japan.

 

Over the past few years, I have all but stopped using Facebook. There were several reasons for doing so, but a big one was that I kept getting gross right-wing content stuffed into my news feed, no matter what pages I followed or who my friends were. Life is too short to wade through idiotic Jordan Peterson videos so I can feel depressed about how many people I know from high school are now openly racist.

But the truly noxious nature of Facebook has become even more clear in recent months. The platform has become a gigantic factory of extremist conspiracy theories and genocidal hatred — part of a general trend in which right-wing publications and political campaigns have come to dominate the site — all while bleeding traditional journalism to death.

Facebook, in short, is destroying America.

Last week, Russell Brandom at The Verge reported that several people had notified Facebook that a right-wing militia group called Kenosha Guards had been making violent threats on the platform in advance of the alleged murders committed by a Trump-supporting teenager. Content moderators did nothing about it. On Monday, President Trump repeated a ludicrous fake story that antifa had loaded a whole plane to go and disrupt the Republican National Convention — which turns out to have come from a months-old viral Facebook post, just one of many similar freakouts over wholly imaginary "antifa supersoldiers." Conspiracy lunacy about coronavirus and QAnon have also spread like wildfire on the platform in recent months.

This kind of thing doesn't only happen in the United States, either. A United Nations report found that the company played a "determining role" in the attempted genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar, as extremists used the platform to coordinate and spread virulent hatred. A study of Germany found that where Facebook use was just one standard deviation above the average, racist attacks on refugees jumped by about half.

Now, it is not the case that Facebook is incapable of policing certain kinds of content. It stamps out pornography almost instantaneously, using tens of thousands of content moderators, because porn is a threat to Facebook's family-friendly brand and hence profits. (Incidentally, these moderators are horribly exploited, and experience serious trauma from all the nightmarish things they are forced to witness day after day. Facebook recently agreed to a $52 million settlement in compensation for moderators developing PTSD on the job.)

But the company is much more reluctant to police extremist political content for two reasons. First, tech platforms have long wanted to pretend as though they were above politics or regulation. They are, in fact, private dictatorships where company executives can and do regulate speech however they want, but this is an uncomfortable thing to admit when it comes to political content. Conservatives have taken advantage of this reluctance to get Facebook to bend over backwards to appease the right by constantly screaming tendentious lies about how it is biased against them, in much the same way as they bullied mainstream press outlets to do the same years ago.

Second, the company brass is increasingly openly reactionary. Former Bush administration staffer Joel Kaplan is Facebook's vice president of global public policy, and he pushes the same argument that it would be unfair to conservatives to shut down conspiracy garbage (implicitly conceding that most of that kind of junk is on the right, but never mind). The company's head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, was previously a militant anti-teacher union activist who happily endorsed Betsy DeVos' campaign to gut and privatize public education. After the 2016 election, Facebook rewrote its internal rules to allow Trump to lie on its platform. Peter Thiel, the pro-Trump billionaire who secretly used his money to destroy a publication he didn't like, and is openly against democracy, is also on the Facebook board, where he argues against fact-checking political ads.

As a result, Facebook is now ludicrously dominated by right-wing content farms. As Kevin Roose reports at the New York Times, over one week in August, right-wing personality Ben Shapiro got more interactions than "the main pages of ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR combined." Breitbart gets more likes than every Democratic member of the Senate put together. According to a Twitter account that documents the best-performing Facebook posts every day, other conservative figures like Dan Bongino and Franklin Graham are regularly at or near the top.

All these right-wing ghouls are very good at gaming the Facebook algorithm, but it simply cannot be the case that their operations — generally skeleton crews surrounding a celebrity or two, that do almost no originally reporting — are actually out-competing huge news organizations with dozens of expert social media employees. On the one hand, as John Whitehouse outlines in detail for Media Matters, Facebook shovels free attention to right-wing sources by selecting right-wing garbage as fact-checkers or "trusted sources," and directly boosting conservative content. On the other, Facebook exempts right-wing publishers from its own content standards, thus allowing them to win by cheating. As Judd Legum reports, Shapiro openly games the platform's algorithm through the use of multiple front pages that all coordinate to promote his content (and he probably isn't the only one doing this). This is a violation of Facebook's terms of service, but the company lets him get away with it, just as it forgave other right-wing accounts like Diamond and Silk, PragerU, Breitbart, and Charlie Kirk for flagrantly violating its misinformation policy. (Incidentally, Diamond and Silk had the top-performing post in the country on Tuesday.) On the contrary, Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac report at Buzzfeed News that when a Facebook engineer compiled evidence that the company was giving preferential treatment to right-wing content, he was fired.

Finally, Facebook is destroying journalism in this country. The online advertising oligopoly consisting of Facebook, Google, and Amazon have snapped up 70 percent of the digital advertising market, and as a result, all but the biggest media companies are being strangled — a fifth of all newspapers have closed over the last 15 years, and most of those that remain have slashed their staff. Today, half of all American counties have only one (usually eviscerated) paper, and 200 have no paper at all.

At the recent House hearing involving all the Big Tech barons, Facebook stood out for the relative pointlessness of its core product. Amazon and Google may be ruthless and increasingly dysfunctional monopolists, but you actually can buy just about any product imaginable on the former and find just about any piece of information on the latter. Apple may exploit laborers in poorer countries and abuse its walled garden app store, but its phones are reliably some of the best you can buy. But Facebook is at best a sort of online White Pages that would be extremely easy to replace. If it were to vanish tomorrow, dozens of similar products would spring up the following day providing the exact same service — the ability to talk to your friends and family. We had online forums 20 years ago, and they were straight-up better than Facebook — at least they didn't seem to give you clinical depression.

That's what the government of Australia should keep in mind as it considers a law that would force Facebook to share revenue with publishers for being able to profit off their content. That threat to its monopoly profits naturally led the company to make a thuggish threat that it would forbid Australians from posting news articles about their country if it passed.

The government's response should be "bring it on." The company's refusal would open up space for an Australian Facebook replacement that wouldn't be so poisonous to local journalism, and could even compete worldwide by not being a propaganda arm of global fascism. I would join up immediately.

Seattle finds itself where Pittsburgh was in the 1970s and where Detroit was in the 1960s. by Charles Mudede
Bryan Corliss's analysis of Boeing's threat to leave the Puget Sound and concentrate the production of its 787 Dreamliner planes in South Carolina gets things mostly wrong.

This fact is surprising because Corliss writes for Leeham News and Analysis, a blog that covers "key developments in aerospace, principally of the 'Big Four' OEMs – Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier and Embraer." You would, therefore, expect Corliss to have a better picture of the situation. He does, however, open his piece, "Pontifications: Boeing in Washington: Here We Go Again," by making the valid point that Boeing has a long history of threatening to pull the plug on the region and the state.

He begins making this point by apparently referencing a tune by The Smiths ("Stop me if you’ve heard this one..."), and then goes on to say:

Pundits are saying Boeing is going to leave Puget Sound, leaving behind the hollow husk of a company doomed to wither and die on the vine.

Just like they did in 2003, in 2009, in 2013 and 2016.

Seattle-area political economist and author T.M. Sell, in fact, traces the company’s first threat to leave clear back to the 1920s, when company executives got into a fight with the Seattle City Council over building new roads to connect downtown with the airport we now call Boeing Field.

Boeing said it would pack up and move to southern California, if Seattle didn’t cooperate.

“Like rain in winter, this is a regular feature of the Puget Sound emotional landscape,” Sell opined back in 2009.

In the past, Corliss claims, the governors would do everything possible to keep Boeing happy ("job-training, infrastructure improvement, regulatory streamlining, tax relief"), but this time around the state to too tied up with COVID-19-related problems to do the usual song and dance for Boeing's execs. Corliss thinks the solution for this bad state of affairs is to better fund a government office that does this singing and dancing 24/7. The head of this office must have the power that CEOs recognize and respect, and also answer directly to the governor. Do this, and Boeing will soon be all "top of the morning" to the Puget Sound.

The problem with this analysis and its conclusion is it makes no historical sense.

On February 11, 1941, the German economist Rudolf Hilferding was murdered by Nazis. Just under a year before his death, he published an article called, "State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy." In this piece, we find a passage that will help us better understand why Boeing is likely to concentrate plane production in South Carolina: "History, this 'best of all Marxists,' has taught us differently."

What does this mean? History is a one-of-a-kind Marxist? It is simply this: The starting point of historical analysis is class conflict. A history of Boeing's threats to Seattle and its region, its departure to Chicago in 2001, and its opening of production facilities in South Carolina in 2009 make no sense whatsoever if seen from the perspective of an underfunded government office. The explanation that matters is to be found in a class-conflict perspective.

What Seattle is experiencing today has been experienced by former industrial cities, namely Detroit and Pittsburgh. The former primarily produced cars for the post-war middle-class that emerged after the US government made huge investments in the suburbs. The latter made steel for national consumption. My research for a soon-to-be-posted essay that has "What Detroit's Autonomous Zones Can Tell Us About Seattle and CHOP" as its point of departure, and that concerns Hamtramck, a city within the city of Detroit, led me to a superb work of historical analysis by Thomas J. Sugrue. It's called The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Its key point is that the deindustrialization of Detroit did not begin in the 1970s, as many believe, but actually at the peak of the city's economic greatness, the second half of the 1940s.

At around this time, the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler) began to relocate factories from the city to the suburbs and other states with cheaper labor and weaker unions.

Sugrue writes:

...Motown lost more than 300,000 auto industry jobs, beginning in the late 1940s. The process of deindustrialization that I describe in The Origins of the Urban Crisis occurred steadily and relentlessly, following a path that led to the suburbs, to the rural Midwest, to the Sunbelt, to Canada and Mexico, and also overseas, as car manufacturers and suppliers searched for cheap labor, low taxes, and lax regulations.

The problem for executives at the Big Three was militant labor unions, one of which, UAW Local 600, had become so radical that it racially integrated its members. That was far enough.

There were (and still are) two weapons against union power: capital mobility and automation. The former leads to globalization, the latter to what many mistake as historical progress. But we are not really moving forward. We are going nowhere. We are on what the social theorist Moishe Postone describes as a "treadmill." Machines are only advanced because capital must constantly set back labor.

"Between 1950 and 1956," writes Sugrue, "124 manufacturing firms located on the green fields of Detroit’s suburbs; 55 of them had moved out of Detroit"; on top of that, Ford set up an “Automation Department” in 1947. Ford had to deal with UAW Local 600, which dominated its massive Ford River Rouge plant and was the "largest employer of blacks in the Detroit area." The solidarity of black and white workers is trouble enough, but black workers at this plant overwhelmingly supported the "left-wing caucus of the UAW." White workers tended to be more cautious. In the end, both black and white workers lost the struggle with the executives, and the city was plunged into a decline like no other. But there is hope in the "husk" (what's left) of Detroit (the subject of an essay I promise to finish in October).

A similar structure of events can be found in Pittsburgh, whose economic history is of great interest to me because all but one of the plays in August Wilson's American Century Cycle are set in the Hill District, which was to Pittsburgh what the Central District was to Seattle, a deeply rooted black neighborhood. The city's economic rise and decline is described in John Hinshaw's Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century, which is well-researched but does not have the richness and depth of Sugrue's book. As the title of Hinshaw's historical analysis makes clear, "class struggle" played the key role in transforming Pittsburgh from an industrial city to a post-industrial one. The steel plants moved to national and international places that had cheaper wages.

In the language of post-Keynesian economics, this practice is called "wage arbitrage." We call a move arbitrage if a speculator or entrepreneur takes advantage of prices that are far below normal or standard prices. Meaning, the speculator or entrepreneur is simply avoiding paying the actual value of something. The labor in "right-to-work" states like South Carolina is undervalued, and this is why Boeing opened plants in that state. Eventually, the value of labor there will rise to a position that's close to normal standards, and the American plane manufacturer will have to open a plant in, say, South Africa.

What history tells us is that Boeing has been in a long struggle with its workers. But because the company's kind of business is capital intensive, it could only move at a very slow pace. Car production can pull the plug on the city much faster than plane production can. This slowness has presented analysts of the industry with the illusion of Boeing's permanence, the illusion that its threats can easily be dismissed. It's too costly for the Chicago-based corporation to abandon so much physical and human capital. But Boeing is not a state-owned enterprise. It's a hardcore business, and all businesses want their profits to grow. As inhuman as this logic is, it really does come down to that, which is why explaining the current threat cycle by way of the state's inability to adequately stroke the "big — and often fragile – egos" of CEOs is nothing but bizarre. Any psychological explanation that excludes the profit motive is worthless.

So, Seattle finds itself where Pittsburgh was in the 1970s and Detroit in the 1960s. The city is about to lose a central part of its industrial base. Today, Pittsburgh, the "Steel City," has no steel plants at all. Its economy is directed at health care services, a tech sector, and higher education. Detroit is much more interesting than Pittsburgh because capital there is still relatively weak, and this has created the ideal condition for immigrants and artists. But Seattle is in a strange situation. It became much more than Pittsburgh (it's now second only to the Bay Area as a tech hub) while the foundation of its twenty-century economy, plane production, was still in place. But this is because the aeronautical industry is inherently much slower than those industries that once defined Detroit and Pittsburgh.

Seattle will finally become fully post-industrial in the third decade of the third millennium.

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What Antoni Gaudí began in 1882, Etsuro Sotoo aims to finish: the Sagrada Família as a divine conversation between artists

By Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

In the 2010 midterms, Democrats were routed because they did not completely fix the Great Recession. Obama economic adviser Larry Summers deliberately lowballed the Recovery Act stimulus in 2009, and Obama himself pivoted to austerity by early 2010. As a result, unemployment was nearly 10 percent on Election Day that year, and the Democrats were swept at the federal and state levels. In the words of Obama, it was a "shellacking."

Biden adviser Ted Kaufman, who is in charge of Joe Biden's transition team, signaled in comments to the Wall Street Journal that a Biden administration may make the exact same mistake again. "When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare," he said. "When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit … forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited."

As a factual matter, Kaufman is grotesquely mistaken on at least two levels. The economy will still be in a deep hole next year, and I have argued before, so long as the economy is below capacity, the American government can borrow without limit. The pantry is not "bare" — on the contrary, bond markets are howling for the government to issue more debt so there will be a goodly supply of safe assets. Second, even if one is worried about the national debt, it is self-defeating to try to cut it down before full employment is reached. As none other than Larry Summers demonstrated in a paper with economist Brad DeLong after his Recovery Act faceplant, borrowing to stimulate during a recession literally more than pays for itself by preventing economic damage and boosting future tax revenue.

The most important fact about economic policy over the last 12 years, learned at a terrible cost in both Europe and the U.S., is this: Austerity during a recession makes everything worse.

All this is truly unfortunate to hear from Kaufman, who is one of the more progressive advisers on Biden's team, and served well in Biden's Senate seat for two years attacking Wall Street corruption. But unless this kind of thinking is stamped out immediately, a Biden administration will make Democrats lose the 2022 midterms just like they did in 2010.

In January, Robert Williams, an African-American man, was wrongfully arrested due to an inaccurate facial recognition algorithm, a computerized approach that analyzes human faces and identifies them by comparison to database images of known people. He was handcuffed and arrested in front of his family by Detroit police without being told why, then jailed overnight after the police took mugshots, fingerprints, and a DNA sample.

The next day, detectives showed Williams a surveillance video image of an African-American man standing in a store that sells watches. It immediately became clear that he was not Williams. Detailing his arrest in the Washington Post, Williams wrote, “The cops looked at each other. I heard one say that ‘the computer must have gotten it wrong.’” Williams learned that in investigating a theft from the store, a facial recognition system had tagged his driver’s license photo as matching the surveillance image. But the next steps, where investigators first confirm the match, then seek more evidence for an arrest, were poorly done and Williams was brought in. He had to spend 30 hours in jail and post a $1,000 bond before he was freed.

HORRIBLE MISTAKE: In 2019, Sri Lankan police, using a facial recognition system, wrongly identified Amara Majeed (above), a college student from Maryland, as a suspect in a terrorist bombing. In a press conference, Majeed said, “I received so many death threats because of this horrible mistake, so many people just calling for me to be hanged and all of these horrible, horrible acts.”AP Photo / The Baltimore Sun, Algerina Perna

What makes the Williams arrest unique is that it received public attention, reports the American Civil Liberties Union.1 With over 4,000 police departments using facial recognition, it is virtually certain that other people have been wrongly implicated in crimes. In 2019, Amara Majeed, a Brown University student, was falsely identified by facial recognition as a suspect in a terrorist bombing in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan police retracted the mistake, but not before Majeed received death threats. Even if a person goes free, his or her personal data remains listed among criminal records unless special steps are taken to expunge it.

Recent studies from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2 have confirmed that computer facial recognition is less accurate at matching African-American faces than Caucasian ones. One reason for the discrepancy is the lack of non-Caucasian faces in datasets from which computer algorithms form a match. The poor representation of people of color from around the world, and their range of facial features and skin shades, creates what researchers have called a “demographic bias” built into the technology.

Facial recognition technology has widespread effects through its association with broad surveillance and massive stores of photographs. In the 1920s, investigators began wiretapping telephones to trace criminal activities. In the 1970s, analog closed-circuit television added remote visual monitoring of people. But digital methods vastly expand the power and scale of surveillance through cameras linked to the Internet and police departments. Ubiquitous in homes, businesses, and public spaces, a billion cameras are projected to be placed in over 50 countries by 2021, one for every eight people on Earth.

To identify suspects, the FBI and police compare images from surveillance cameras and other sources to photo databases. These contain some criminal mugshots, but the bulk of the images comes from non-criminal sources such as passports and state driver’s license compilations; that is, the databases mostly expose ordinary, generally innocent citizens to criminal investigation. This approach grew after 9/11, when the United States government proposed Total Information Awareness, a global program to collect data about people and identify them by various means, including facial recognition. Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology asserts that half of American adults, 117 million people, appear in databases accessible to police.3 In 2019, testimony before the U.S. House Oversight Committee revealed that the FBI can scan 640 million photos for facial matching.4

“The cops looked at each other. I heard one say that ‘the computer must have gotten it wrong.’ ”

The FBI and police scan these masses of photos through computer programs that digitize them for identification. An important thread in developing this technology began with the American mathematician and AI pioneer Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Bledsoe. In 1959, he and a colleague invented a machine to recognize alphanumeric characters, then went on to facial recognition.

Their first idea was to analyze a character, say the letter “A,” by overlaying it onto a rectangular array of pixels. Each pixel received a binary 1 or 0 depending on whether or not it contained part of the image. The pixels were sampled in adjacent groups called “n-tuples” to account for the spatial relations among them. Further manipulation produced a set of binary digits embodying the letter “A.” This process found and stored the bits and a resulting unique score for every character; then an unknown character was identified by comparing its score to the values in memory. The method worked, correctly recognizing up to 95 percent of handwritten and printed numerals.

N-tuples, however, did poorly for the intricacies of a face, whose appearance also varies with illumination, tilt of the head, facial expression, and the subject’s age. Bledsoe’s team turned instead to human operators who measured characteristic parameters from photographs of faces, such as the distance between the pupils of the eyes or from top to bottom of an ear.5 In 1967, the researchers showed that a computer using stored facial measurements from several thousand photographs reduced by 99 percent the number of images a person would have to sift through to match a new photo. Then in 1973, Japanese computer scientist Takeo Kanade automated the entire process with a computer program that extracted eyes, mouth, and so on, from an image of a face without human intervention.

Bledsoe’s foundational facial recognition work was funded by the Department of Defense, or according to some evidence, the CIA, either of which would have limited his freedom to publish his results.5 But early this year, writer Shaun Raviv described in Wired what he learned from examining Bledsoe’s life and an archive of his work given to the University of Texas after Bledsoe’s death in 1995.6 The recognition experiments, Raviv reported, began with a database of photos of 400 male Caucasians. In the archive, Raviv saw no references to women or people or color, or images of them in dozens of marked-up photos that must represent Bledsoe’s facial measurements.

Since Bledsoe’s original research, other techniques have arisen, supported by more powerful computers and bigger databases to develop and test algorithms. Now the introduction of AI methods is bringing about the latest changes; but the bias that comes from the lack of diversity in Bledsoe’s formative datasets still appears, and for much the same reason, in these advanced methods.

For years, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has invited producers of facial recognition algorithms to submit them for testing. In 2019, NIST presented its analysis of 189 algorithms from 99 mostly commercial developers.7 These were checked against federal databases with 18 million images of 8.5 million people for general accuracy and across different demographic groups, in two applications: 1:1 matching, where a face is compared to a stored image for verification, as in confirming the validity of a passport, and 1:n matching, where a face is compared to a whole dataset, typically to find a criminal suspect. For each algorithm, the researchers determined the number of false negatives, where a face that should be matched to one in the database is not, and false positives, where a face is matched to the wrong one.

The data show that facial recognition has improved significantly. The rate of failing to match a submitted face to one in the database dropped from 4 percent in 2014 to only 0.2 percent by 2018. Newer algorithms were also less sensitive to the variations in facial appearance that plagued early efforts. The NIST researchers ascribe these gains to an “industrial revolution” in facial recognition, the adoption of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN).

One test yielded a false positive rate 63 times higher for African faces than for European ones.

A neural network is a computing system that can be taught to carry out certain tasks, somewhat like the connected neurons in a biological brain. A CNN mimics human visual perception. In our brains, neurons in specialized regions of the visual cortex register certain general elements in what the eyes see, such as the edges of objects, lines tilted at particular angles, and color. The brain assembles these results into a meaningful whole that allows a person, for example, to quickly recognize a friend even under obscured or varied conditions.

As in the n-tuple method, in a CNN the pixels forming an image are analyzed in spatially adjacent clumps, but succeeding stages provide deeper analysis. Like the regions in the brain, each stage seeks different types of general pictorial elements like those the brain finds, rather than seeking the eyes, nose, and so on. The mathematically manipulated results are passed on and augmented through the stages, finally producing an integrated representation of a face. Crucially, this is achieved by first exposing the CNN to a large dataset of varied facial images. This “trains” the system to develop a comprehensive approach to analyzing faces.

Within NIST’s testing, CNN-based algorithms performed best; but overall, the algorithms differed in how well they identified people of different races, sexes, and ages. These results echo earlier studies of 1:1 matching and are the first to explore demographic effects in 1:n matching. Errors in each application yield different undesirable outcomes. A false positive in a 1:1 search can allow unauthorized access; a false positive in a 1:n search for a criminal suspect puts the subject at risk for unwarranted accusations.

In 1:n matching, the NIST data show that the most accurate algorithms are also the most reliable across demographic groups. Less proficient ones give higher rates of false positives for African-American females compared to African-American males, and to white males and females, in an FBI database of 1.6 million mugshots. For 1:1 matching, some algorithms falsely matched African-American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than Caucasian ones. Notably, however, some algorithms from Asian countries gave fewer false positives for Asians than for Caucasians. This, the report notes, shows that the degree of diversity in a training dataset may strongly affect the demographic performance of a CNN.

“Facial recognition should not be used to deprive people of liberty.”

Other research has more fully explored how lack of diversity affects the training of a neural network. In 2012, B.F. Klare and A.K. Jain at Michigan State University and colleagues tested 1:1 facial matching against police mugshots.8 Different types of algorithms they examined were all less accurate for African-American faces than white or Hispanic ones. One algorithm studied was a neural network defined by its training dataset. The researchers found that the resulting fits to African-Americans improved when this dataset was limited to African-American faces, and in a nod to diversity, also improved when the training dataset had equal numbers of African-American, Hispanic and white faces.

This suggests how to make biased training databases more equitable. In one recent demonstration, researchers at the biometrics company Onfido made a demographically unbalanced dataset less biased.9 Its facial images came from different continents in varying proportions, such as 0.5 percent from Africa compared to 61 percent from Europe. This yielded a false positive rate 63 times higher for African faces than for European ones. But when the researchers used statistical methods to train with more African faces than their small numbers alone would provide, the discrepancy was reduced to a factor of 2.5, a sign of future possibilities.

But according to biometrician Patrick Grother, lead scientist for the NIST report, serious police action should require more than just a match from an algorithm. He explained that an algorithm actually returns a list of likely candidates. In the ideal next step, an investigator seeking suspects must confirm that there is a good match within this list. Only then would the detective seek other evidence like eyewitnesses or forensic data to justify arresting and charging the subject. The fact that a “no match” from a human investigator can overturn a wrong machine identification should be reassuring, but that came too late to save Williams from false arrest and its repercussions.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor at American University Washington College of Law who studies technology and civil rights. Responding to my query, he wrote that “facial recognition should not be used to deprive people of liberty.” It is “too dangerous a tool to be used in an unregulated way. Williams’ case is a signal to stop the ad hoc adoption of facial recognition before an injustice occurs that cannot be undone.”

Repairing the flaws in facial recognition technology will not be easy within a complex landscape that includes dozens of producers of the software with varying levels of bias, and thousands of law enforcement agencies that can choose any of these algorithms. Maybe only a federal effort to establish standards and regulate compliance to them would be necessary before we no longer have a Robert Williams, a member of any minority group, or any citizen unjustly experience a night in jail or worse.

Sidney Perkowitz, Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus at Emory University, has written about police algorithms and is working on a book about them. His latest books are Physics: A Very Short Introduction and Real Scientists Don’t Wear Ties.

References

1. Garvie, C. The untold number of people implicated in crimes they didn’t commit because of face recognition. aclu.org/news (2020).

2. Buolamwini, J. & Gebru, T. Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81, 1-15 (2008).

3. Garvie, C., Bedoya, A., & Frankle, J. The perpetual line-up. Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology (2016).

4. Melton, M. Government Watchdog Questions FBI On Its 640-Million-Photo Facial Recognition Database. Forbes (2019).

5. Boyer, R.S. (Ed.) Automated Reasoning: Essay in Honor of Woody Bledsoe Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands (1991).

6. Raviv, S. The Secret History of Facial Recognition. Wired (2020).

7. Grother, P., Ngan, M., & Hanaoka, K. Face recognition vendor test. National Institute of Standards and Technology (2018).

8. Klare, B.F., Burge, M.J., Klontz, J.C., Vorder Bruegge, R.W., & Jain, A.K. Face recognition performance: Role of demographic information. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 7, 1789-1801 (2012).

9. Bruveris, M., Mortazavian, P., Gietema, J., & Mahadevan, M. Reducing geographic performance differentials for face recognition. arXiv (2020). Retrieved from DOI: 2002.12093

Lead image: greenbutterfly /Shutterstock

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Living on a heating planet always comes with some ironies. For one thing, the people who are most to blame for global warming (the rich and powerful) are also shielded from its worst effects. Meanwhile, airlines push fossil-fuel burning tourist flights to see Antarctica’s melting ice, and cruise companies hype energy-intensive trips to see polar bears in the Arctic before they’re gone.

The latest plan by ConocoPhillips may top them all. The Houston-based energy giant plans to produce 590 million barrels of oil from a massive drilling project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. But climate change is melting the ground in the reserve so fast that the company may be forced to use chilling devices to keep the ground beneath roads and drilling pads frozen.

Yes, you read that right: An oil company is prepared to freeze melting permafrost in order to keep extracting oil. And it just so happens that ConocoPhillips is ranked 21st among the 100 companies responsible for most of humanity’s carbon emissions over the past several decades.

Cooling devices known as thermosiphons aren’t new. They’ve been used in Alaska for decades to protect roads and houses built on melting and subsiding ground. Long tubes half-buried in the ground, they contain an evaporating gas that transports heat out of the ground into the cooler air. But as the Arctic heats up — it’s currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet — they might become a more common tool of oil companies desperate to extract more fossil fuels, which will, in turn, heat things up even more.

According to a final environmental impact statement released last week by the Bureau of Land Management, temperatures in Alaska are expected to increase between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, endangering the normally frozen soils known as permafrost that hold billions of tons of ancient organic carbon. If permafrost melts across the Arctic, it could create a dangerous climate “feedback loop,” in which carbon released from the permafrost spurs warming, which in turn melts more permafrost … and so on.

ConocoPhillips has pledged to use thermosiphons as well as thick gravel roads to protect melting permafrost, while acknowledging that the drilling project itself could endanger the delicate soil. That risk, however, doesn’t appear to be holding back the Bureau of Land Management, which is expected to move ahead on the project after a 30-day comment period. A spokesperson for the BLM told Bloomberg Law that oil drilling is “vital” to meeting America’s energy needs.

The Trump Administration has pushed Arctic drilling wherever possible: On Monday, the Interior Department finalized a plan to allow oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

As the once-frigid poles of the planet warm up, expect to see more bumps in the road for fossil fuel development. Melting ice has made it easier for fossil fuel tankers to ferry natural gas across the Arctic, but offshore drilling has been stymied by a lack of ice to build roads and platforms on. Maybe, if fossil fuel companies don’t want to deal with melting ice, they could just … not drill for oil?

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The irony: ConocoPhillips hopes to freeze thawing permafrost to drill more oil on Aug 19, 2020.

talesfromweirdland:

Art by Mœbius for his 1986 CRYSTAL SAGA portfolio.

An economics of the future will have to reanimate the concepts of the Physiocrates. by Charles Mudede
Look at all of this corn blown down by a storm that showed the farmers of Iowa no mercy on Monday, August 10.

If we use the Shona word for "no," we can imagine a farmer looking at a field after the "thunderstorm complex known as derecho" had passed, see his old baseball cap, his worn-out jeans, his dusty boots, his untucked shirt flapping in the wind, and hear him saying to himself, with his lips barely moving and cracked by the long and hot summer, "Iowa, iowa, iowa, iowa."

Washington Post:

The destructive storms laid siege to more than 10 million acres of Iowa’s corn and soybean crop, devastating farmers and capping off what has already been a difficult few years of farming for many.

Up to 43 percent of the state’s corn and soybean crop has suffered damage from the storms, a severe blow to a $10 billion industry that’s central to the Hawkeye State’s economy. The magnitude of the battered vegetation was even visible on the same weather satellites used to track Monday’s violent thunderstorms.

What is interesting here is the value of the destroyed crops. What was the flattened corn worth? What kind of money did the Iowan farmers have in mind before the derecho, a Spanish word that shares a root (directus) and its meaning with the English word "direct"? Direct blow, direct destruction, direct losses. The value question is important to think about because it reminds one of the only school of economic thought that kept it real, the Physiocrates.

#LunesDeClásicos | Construyendo la economía con el 'Tableau Economique' de Quesnay (1758) ~> http://t.co/89OkAczzPZ pic.twitter.com/uriWr5xJkD
— Cartográfica (@cartograficamx) October 13, 2015

The Physiocratic movement had its leader and founder in a French doctor named François Quesnay. The program he initiated near the middle of the 18th century placed agriculture at the center of the economic world. According to this view, which the Physiocates described in a simple but influential model called the Tableau économique, only farmers were productive. The rest—kings, courtiers, soldiers, merchants, manufacturers—were sterile.

If you recognize a similarity between this conception of the economy with the long-established scheme of ecology (it identifies plants as the primary producers in an ecosystem), you are certainly on to something. The Physiocrats not only believed the farmers created value, but, more importantly, also surplus value, which is why they stressed the importance of the capitalist farmer. The wealth of a nation would rapidly expand if it broke with peasant production and shifted to that of the farmer.

Ronald L. Meek makes this point in his masterpiece of 1963, The Economics of Physiocracy. He writes that
"fermiers, i.e. farmers... exercised entrepreneurial functions. These fermiers often possessed considerable capital, and their methods of cultivation were frequently superior to those of the metayers and poor peasants."

Later in the book, Meek writes:

[The Physiocrats] pinned their hopes quite largely on the new class of fermiers, the men of substance whose entrepreneurial activities were already beginning to make certain of the northern provinces relatively prosperous. Agricultural entrepreneurs were the main agents of agricultural reform, and government policy should be aimed in particular at stimulating and encouraging them.

The Physiocrats wanted the government to leave the farmer alone. Let them grow the food. And let society grow with their wealth. They called this demand for farmer autonomy laissez-faire.

If we jump to 2017, we find the economist Mariana Mazzucato introducing her readers to the concept of a production boundary in the third section, "Meet the Production Boundary," of the introduction to her book, The Value of Everything. Her idea here is that the financial sector, to justify its prominent place in the economy, expanded the "production boundary" to include financial services. Those on Wall Street or in conventional banks and shadow banks were as productive as factory workers, people who made things that had a concrete use value. But back in 1776, it was none other than Adam Smith who challenged the Physiocratic conception of the economy by expanding the boundary of production to include factory work. For Adam Smith, it was the aristocratic class and their servants and soldiers who were sterile.

Even the Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg insisted, in her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), on the backwardness of the view that "agricultural labour is the only kind of labour which is productive," and praised Adam Smith, classified as a bourgeois economist, for making a "decisive advance... in proclaiming every kind of labour as productive, thus revealing the creation of surplus value in manufacture as well as in agriculture."

And now we arrive at the point I want to make, and how the woes of the Iowa farms play a role in this point. If we look at the Physiocratic concept of not just the production boundary but also the surplus value generated by the agricultural entrepreneur, we find that it is a real thing. It is the stuff of photosynthesis. Plants use the air around them and the light falling on them to produce nutritious bio-products. They are, in the language of ecology, autotrophs. You can't make a chair or car if you have nothing to eat. You can't be human or dog without autotrophs. Our value and surplus value begins with with the exploitation of vegetables. If we have this image in mind, we can see how value and surplus value leapt from the real of the fields to the fictions of culture. Surplus value in the condition of culture is realized as profits. (Forgive me using that word, culture. I know very well it is related to cultivation, to farming. I know. I know. But let's move on.)

By the time finance is included in the boundary of production, all meaning of surplus value as thing in the world is lost. It's now a hyper-culture of value inflation that's as unreal as the nation of Uqbar and the planet of Tlön in Jorge Luis Borges's short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

Most the Iowan farmers owe debts. Much of the surplus value of their crops is not in the actual crops but is securitized and transcoded as radio waves that bounce back and fourth from the ground to satellites that connect the markets of the world. The largest irrigated crop in the US is not something humans can even eat. It is grass. And this grass is often tied to the one financial asset a member of the middle class can own, a house. The real is certainly somewhere in the capitalist economy, but it's so tiny.

My feeling, however, is that an economics of the future will have to reanimate the concepts of the Physiocrates. This renewed economics will bring the inputs of nature into the production scheme. Energy and its sources will become the key function of production (for the neoclassical school and Marxists, it is capital and labor.) The first economist of note to head in this direction is certainly the post-Keynesian, Steve Keen.

The role of energy in production. Completely ignored by standard production functions in economic models by all schools of thought. Until is fixed, economics defies the Laws of Thermodynamics. And no-one defies the Laws of Thermodynamics https://t.co/XD8dibBesi
— Steve Keen (@ProfSteveKeen) February 22, 2019

Before anything else, I consider my myself a neo-Physiocrat. That said, I will leave this post with a passage from Riccardo Bellofiore's close examination of the ideas Piero Sraffa expounded in his economics classes at Cambridge University in the 1920s, Sraffa after Marx: An Open Issue:

It is however in these months that we see the beginning of Sraffa’s reconstructive theoretical effort based on physical real costs. In a note on the ‘degenerazione del concetto di costo e valore’ (degeneration of the notion of cost and value) he writes: It was only Petty + the Physiocrats who had the right notion of cost as ‘loaf of bread’. Then somebody started measuring it in labour, as every day’s labour requires the same amount of food. Then they proceeded to regard cost as actually an amount of labour. Then A. Smith interpreted labour as the ‘the toil and trouble’ which is the ‘real cost’ and the ‘hardship’. Then this was by Ricardo brought back to labour, but not far back enough, and Marx went only as back as Ricardo. Then Senior invented Abstinence. And Cairnes unified all the costs (work, abstinence + risk) as sacrifice.

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Peeking through peach blossoms or nestled into a snowy landscape, the tiny shops that Lee Me Kyeoung renders are found across South Korea, from Mokpo to Jeju and Seoul to Gapyeong. The artist already has spent decades speaking with the store owners and weaving their stories into her delicate paintings as part of her ongoing A Small Store series. Her most recent works encapsulate the experience of standing in front of the establishments by capturing every detail: the multicolored goods evenly stacked, advertisements posted in the windows, bikes parked out front, and the sloping tiled roofs.

Me Kyeoung’s work recently culminated in a book detailing the still-open locations for those interested in visiting the shops in person. The prolific artist also shares updates on future exhibitions, in addition to photographs of the original stores she visits, on Instagram.

 

The Haskell Elephant in the Room

Many blog posts about Haskell often discuss the latest advances in our compiler, research in type systems and clever new ideas that make the Haskell language such a fun and inspiring tool. However, if you peel back the curtain on a lot of what we do as functional programmers you see the economic machinery that shapes everything we do and informs the problems we chose to spend our cycles on. While the last few years have seen enormous progress and excitement, there is an enormous elephant in the room that we’ve collectively chosen not to discuss.

For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury ICO schemes in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development. This has been a double edged sword in that it has created jobs and allowed a lot of questionable ICO money and funds of dubious origin into the language ecosystem without a lot of questions being asked. It is time to ask that question. Does the deal with the devil come at too high a price?

What is happening?

Cryptocurrency is not a traditional business in any sense. The basic economic structure of a business is a group of people who exchange their goods or services for money. For example, your traditional software consulting business sells your time and expertise to clients to write software for them. Your ecommerce website provides a marketplace to sell physical goods. Your local coffee shops sells you wifi under the guise of coffee. However cryptocurrency companies do not produce anything, instead they offer synthetic financial products which are marketed to the generic public as investments. These “investments” are not tied directly to economic activity, these are what economists call non-productive assets. The value of these assets is only determined by what other people are willing to pay for them. This has created a giant ecosystem in which products aren’t traded on any investment fundamentals but on the hope to sell them off to a “greater fool”.

This is not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen markets with this kind of structure early in the early history of the development of modern market economies. We saw this with Wildcat banking in the 1800s in which frontier banks would issue massive amounts of new worthless currencies supposedly backed by other securities. Another variation occurred in the 20s with widespread Ponzi schemes where new investor money was used to pay out earlier investors. And again in the 80s with the rise of boiler rooms that would massive volumes of penny stocks and municipal bonds to the public with inflated promises of returns. The history of finance is full of scams and cryptocurrency is simply the latest iteration in a long line of frauds.

Normally these frauds are recognized for what they are quite quickly and the courts and regulatory bodies can clean up the mess and rectify the damages to those who have been misled. However this new type of scam is particularly nefarious in that it has found a way to decentralise operations and move the trading operations to offshore entities. Following the money on these companies leads to these deeply layered networks of shell entities across Lichtenstein, Isle of Man, and the Cayman Islands which are set up to be immune to prosecution while still being able to funnel money across less reputable actors in these jurisdictions.

How is it happening?

These companies could not be set up in countries with financial regulators because what they are offering would be blatantly illegal to offer to the general public. Instead we’ve seen this metastasize across the world to form what are effectively digital gambling sites, in which unsophisticated investors trade unregulated products on markets that are directly manipulated by exchanges with no oversight. Most of the traded volume on these sites is directly manipulated by the exchange itself with no transparency or guarantees of market conditions. If these dodgy exchanges steal your funds, you have absolutely no legal recourse. Not surprisingly this has attracted an enormous amount of interest from global criminals and market manipulation is allowed to run wild allowing massive extraction of wealth from unsuspecting users.

The duplicitous story of these financial product offerings appeals to a lot of software engineers on a pure technical level. There are indeed massive inefficiencies in the financial system that could be addressed by the use of better technologies. And even in the most progressive countries it is undeniable that there exists an ambient level of corruption and fraud, which has especially hurt a younger generation who come of age in the financial crisis. However cryptocurrency does not provide any technical answers to the inefficiencies since its entire existence is purely predicated on the appeal as a speculative investment first and not on its efficacy to transmit value. The insidious mechanism embedded inside of crypto is that as investment it has a negative expected return. In this negative sum game each early investor mathematically needs to onboard more investors or inflate the price of the asset. The mechanism that has risen to achcieve this is creation of what is effectively a new religious movement deeply entangled with fringe economic theories and right wing conspiracies, whose purpose is to onboard new followers.

New religious movements like the cryptocult provide a psychological and philosophical framework that provides sense-making for a world that seems hostile and out of their control. The crypto movement fits all the textbook criteria, it provides a mechanism for determining an in-crowd and an out-crowd (no-coiners vs bitcoiners). It gives a framework for assessing the virtue of other followers based on their faith (HODLing) in the cause. It offers simple answers to complex issues in economics and monetary policy. It gives a linguistic framework of “thought-terminating clichés” and acronyms to quell dissent. It gives a mechanism of social control in which one can acquire influence and status in exchange proselytizing and onboarding more followers to buy tokens. It makes miraculous promises of wealth, not derived from effort but from faith. It presents an eschatological narrative of retributive justice about the end-times of the global financial system, in which the true believers will be reborn with a new life in an anarcho-capitalist utopia. And most importantly, it gives people a sense of a community, hope and belonging which is a powerful force that can be exploited by charismatic leaders. David Golumbia’s excellent book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism outlines the rabbit-hole effect that this ecosystem is having on software engineers onboarding them into deeper forms of right-wing extremism.

by Charles Mudede
This is the question I asked Governor Jay Inslee during a Stranger Election Control Board meeting on July 1: Has Washington considered running a large budget deficit during and after the pandemic? Inslee, predictably, said the state was required by law to maintain a balanced budget. He also said this as if it were the most obvious thing to say. The state should keep its books in order in the way the moon must orbit the earth. But prior to 2012, there was no balanced budget law in the State of Washington. None. It was just a feeling and nothing more. This feeling only become an official thing because Republicans in Olympia felt it strongly. But what you will never find in this undying feeling is anything that has to do with actual economic logic.

Here are two Republicans letting that old balanced budget feeling flow between them in a 2016 Seattle Times op-ed:

The Legislature spent months developing a state-budget update that was projected to balance for the current spending cycle as well as the next. We did so because thinking long term puts Washington in a better position to address and enhance our priorities next year when we write a new budget. Also, it’s required by law... Why look out into the future? The future of education, health care and public safety in Washington depends on keeping our fiscal house in order.

This statement, and the entire op-ed, has no objective value like the moon or a stone. There is no time in the entire history of capitalist economics (or, simply, economics) that "fiscal order" has improved the climate for business and investment and job creation.

This may surprise many, but it is what it is: a hard fact. The talk about balanced budgets is much like grooming. A human says it to another human for the same reason a baboon picks at the fur of another baboon: to produced the feeling of a common bond. But grooming is a bit better than this budget balance talk because it at least removes little parasites. All the talk about fiscal responsibility begins and ends with a feeling.

From (PDF) Washington State Citizen's Guide to the Budget of 2019:

Prior to 2012, neither state law nor the state Constitution required the state budget to be balanced. In 2012, the Legislature enacted a law requiring the state Operating Budget to be balanced for the current two year fiscal period. The law also requires the projected state Operating Budget to be balanced for the following two-year period, based on current estimates for state revenues and the projected cost of maintaining the current level of state programs and services. Together, these two requirements are often referred to as the "Budget Outlook" or the "Four Year Balanced Budget."

This law needs to go. It was madness to have it in the first place, now its existence borders on criminal. Washington State will exit the pandemic with a huge deficit. And any cuts to fill this deficit will only make things worse. More people will be thrown out of work, business will dry up, and the circulation of money will go into slow motion. Indeed, this is the part of business cycle that only a few readers of economics understand with any depth. Profits, in the conventional sense, only appear when businesses spend money. This is the essence of Michal Kalecki's observation: "The workers spend what they get, and capitalists get what they spend." What did he mean by this?

In the 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Polish economist Kalecki determined in a series of brilliantly lucid papers about the nature and features of the business cycle that the expenditure of capitalists or entrepreneurs was the source of profits. During a boom, the owners of capital spend only because in the past they made a profit; this is the source of their expectation of future profits. And when they spend, these profits make an appearance and investment moves into the future. From a macroeconimic level, capitalists "get what they spend."

The distinction between past and future provided Kalecki's general theory (formulated mostly in mathematical equations) with a temporal dimension, a lag between the decision to invest and making an investment. The problem with a slump is that capitalists cannot overcome this lag because the past during a downturn has in it no profits. The remedy for a capitalist slump then is the creation of a past that has profits. The invented past that will induce future investments, the source of private profits, is government spending. Nothing else will work.

In fact, that is how the entire US capitalist economy works. (This was not the case, however, with the workings of the capitalism that invented the balanced budget story and feeling, Victorian capitalism.) The US government is constantly inventing past profits by way of its huge military budget. This is how Kalecki put it with exceptional conciseness in a note found in the Collected Works of Michal Kalecki: Volume VII: Studies in Applied Economics 1940-1967.

Today [the 1960s] the [government made] ‘external markets’ in this particular form are of even greater significance for expanded reproduction than at the time when Rosa Luxemburg propounded her theory [1910s]. The high degree of utilization of resources resulting in fact from these government-made ‘external markets’ has a paradoxical impact upon Western economic theory. It creates an atmosphere favourable to the construction of models for the growth of laissez-faire capitalist economies unperturbed by the long-run problem of effective demand.

Read that passage carefully and you see how it dismembers orthodox economics with the precision that Cook Ding cuts up an ox. It also shows capitalism cannot function without "external markets" (or invented profits, as I call them) provided by the state.

The power to go it alone is not there for business. Pure private enterprise has no way out of this present slump. Fiscal order can only make life unnecessarily miserable for millions of Washingtonians. Inslee and lawmakers must blow to bits this balanced budget crap and begin spending like never before on very big, very grand transportation and environmental projects. Only then will business begin to believe in itself (profits in the past), and invest in future profits.

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A stunning 3D virtual tour from the Egyptian Tourism Authority takes viewers deep into the heavily detailed tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses VI. Named Tomb KV9, the underground structure has a long corridor leading down to the now-broken sarcophagus, and both walls and the ceiling are inscribed with writings from ancient Egyptian texts and astronomical renderings. The fifth ruler of the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt, Ramesses VI’s reign lasted for about eight years in the 12th century BC. In 1898, his tomb was cleared by Georges Émile Jules Daressy who stole a portion of the sarcophagus, which then was acquired by the British Museum. (via Twisted Sifter)