Yes, I do plan to keep harping on this

As previously mentioned, recent events have reinforced my belief that journalism has gotten so bad that journalism has gotten so bad that it constitutes one of the primary threats to everything from the environment to technological progress to the democratic process. One of the reasons behind this dangerous decline is the practice of journalists uncritically reporting flattering and often factually challenged stories to maintain access to the rich, famous, and powerful.

When it came to maintaining healthy and well-informed skepticism and maintaining independence, Gawker Media had arguably the cleanest hands in 2016. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Gawker remnant Deadspin was the one to spot this egregious example of source-stroking.

Over at Sports Illustrated, you can read an article about Tom Brady’s new line of sleepwear for A Company That Makes Stretchy Workout Stuff. The article contains the following lines:

• “The TB12 Sleepwear line includes full-length shirts and pants—and a short-sleeve and shorts version—with bioceramics printed on the inside.”
• “The print, sourced from natural minerals, activates the body’s natural heat and reflects it back as far infrared energy...”
• “The line, available in both men’s [link to store for purchase] and women’s [link to store for purchase] sizes, costs between $80 to $100 [link to store for purchase].”
• “[A Company That Makes Stretchy Workout Stuff]’s bioceramic-printed sleepwear uses far infrared energy to promote recovery...”

(There are quotes in the article, mostly from people with financial stakes in you buying these products. An actual sleep expert is quoted. He does not endorse or even reference the products discussed in this article, nor the science behind said products. His contribution to this article can be summed up as saying sleep is important.)
This is an advertisement, in every aspect save the one where money changed hands in exchange for its publication. (We think. This would honestly be a lot less embarrassing for SI to run if it were sponsored content and they just forgot to label it as such.) These sorts of advertisements, where certain types of reporters eagerly type up press releases because it’s quick and easy, are everywhere.

Deadspin also sends us to this truly disturbing piece of sports related pseudoscience.

Cracked has some fun with the lottery

I suspect pretty much everyone reading this blog already knows the facts laid out here, but it's still worth watching this just to spend a bit more time with Roger.

"The New Frontier In Stadium Ripoffs"

This Deadspin piece from Drew Magary (which I somewhat reluctantly bleeped in a couple of places to keep our blog's PG rating) is a great, if infuriating, read. It also hits on some of the most ominous concerns of 2016 -- abuse of concentrated economic power (particularly involving monopolies), a willingness to subsidize the rich, growing social and journalistic acceptance of the unacceptable -- and it reminds us of how important the remnants of Gawker Media continue to be.

In case you missed it last week, the great Jason Gay over at the Wall Street Journal covered the opening of the Cowboys’ new practice facility in Frisco, Texas—a wealthy exurb located 30 miles due north of Dallas. Of course, this being the Cowboys, we’re not talking about a mere practice facility. No, this joint—christened The Star—features a high school football stadium, a health research center, a shopping center, a dining concourse, a members-only country club ($4,500 to join, plus $350 a month in dues), a hotel, a rooftop pool, a parking garage, and a fucking golf course. The total price tag for the whole development is $1.5 billion, an estimated $300 million HIGHER than the cost of the Cowboys’ stadium itself.

It will not shock you to learn that the Cowboys didn’t pay for this all by themselves. In fact, the team staged a bidding war between Frisco and Arlington (home to Jerryworld and an outrageously unnecessary future ballpark for the Texas Rangers) for the privilege of hosting The Star, with Frisco offering somewhere between $90 and $115 million to help foot the tab, with $30 million of that money coming directly from the local school district. Of course, that doesn’t factor in the potential tax breaks that Jerry Jones will probably get for charitably lending the spoiled brats of Frisco a field to play on.

This is not the first time a pro sports team has squeezed an eager town out of money for something other than a stadium. Just this year, the city of Richmond cut a $360,994 check to Dan Snyder and the Skins for the privilege of hosting the team’s summer training camp, as part of a deal in which the city built the team a $10 million facility and then, bafflingly, pays them a yearly stipend to use it. Turns out that this was not a wise investment. In order to build Snyder his training camp, the city of Richmond and the Skins conspired to seize land (oh, the irony) from a local school district, land valued at $7.5 million that could have been used to build additional school facilities, or sold off to boost revenue. Instead, it was gifted to an asshole football team that plays 100 miles away.

Any team can f**k a town over to build a stadium. The new hotness is thinking of ancillary facilities besides a stadium and then f**king over a second town for THAT, too. And since Jerry Jones owns the richest team with the largest fanbase—in a wealthy area where brains and good taste aren’t at a premium—he has managed to engineer a new crown jewel of boondoggles, a standard of monstrous waste that all other teams will now aspire to.

Blacker is the new black -- more adventures in intellectual property

For the record (I started to say "just to be clear" but that didn't seem entirely appropriate), what Surrey NanoSystems and Anish Kapoor are doing seems reasonable. Vantablack is certainly suitable for patent protection and I don't think anyone's right to artistic expression is being compromised here. That said, there's definitely something 'ridiculous' (as Alex Cranz puts it in Gizmodo) about the whole debate.

Vantablack, created by the British company Surrey NanoSystems, is the blackest known substance on earth, absorbing 99.965 percent of all visible radiation. Originally just a remarkable feat of science, Vantablack has slowly rolled into production being deployed for use in the military and aerospace sector. But it was only in February of this year that Surrey NanoSystems made the substance available for other, more whimsical, uses.

Specifically, it was made available for use in artwork, and Anish Kapoor, the sculptor behind that big silvery bean in Chicago’s Millennium Park, secured the exclusive rights. According to Surrey NanoSystems, Kapoor maintains exclusivity because Vantablack “requires specialist application to achieve its aesthetic effect. In addition, the coating’s performance beyond the visible spectrum results in it being classified as a dual-use material that is subject to UK Export Control.”

What all that fancy jargon means is that Vantablack’s use in the aerospace and military industries severely limits how and why you can export it—all samples currently released for exhibition purposes (such as for a school or museum) are to be set in a glass case and only a minute amount is shipped.

Surrey NanoSystems also feels special training is required to use Vantablack for aesthetic (art) reasons, and rather than set up a training program so artists can learn to work with the pigment, just like other artists have learned to work with red hot metal or blinding lasers, Surry NanoSystems would rather train one studio—specifically Kapoor’s studio. How he jumped to the head of the class over other artists has not been revealed.

And specifically that exclusive and secretive relationship with Kapoor has left other artists pretty upset. The hashtag #SharetheBlack on Instagram and Twitter has been filled, for months, with annoyed artists and art fans.

Pushing privatization too far

This is Joseph.

This article from the New York Times, illustrates the problems of not paying for services via taxation:

Corey Statham had $46 in his pockets when he was arrested in Ramsey County, Minn., and charged with disorderly conduct. He was released two days later, and the charges were dismissed.

But the county kept $25 of Mr. Statham’s money as a “booking fee.” It returned the remaining $21 on a debit card subject to an array of fees. In the end, it cost Mr. Statham $7.25 to withdraw what was left of his money.

The argument for the card were kind of weak:

In its appeals court brief, the county said the debit cards were provided “for the convenience of the inmates,” who might find it hard to cash a check. 

It seems unclear to me why one could not return the contents of the person's wallet unmolested.  That would avoid this problem.  Or perhaps they could look into this technology called the "cash register"/  It solves the need to cash checks very effectively.

The cards themselves were riddled with fees:

He did get a debit card for the remaining $21. But there was no practical way to extract his cash without paying some kind of fee. Among them: $1.50 a week for “maintenance” of the unwanted card, starting after 36 hours; $2.75 for using an A.T.M. to withdraw money; $3 for transferring the balance to a bank account; and $1.50 for checking the balance.

Is this the sort of card agreement you would sign?  Why would we accept the state agreeing to this on behalf of the person arrested, especially after a $25 fee?

But this shows the real paradox of trying to adopt a private sector model for law enforcement.  The person being arrested is not the customer.  The society enforcing laws like "disorderly conduct" are the customers.  We have taxes to prevent free-riding -- if we, as a society, decide that we should enforce these rules then we should all contribute to the costs of enforcement.

But charging an "arrest fee" walks a very narrow line towards extortion.  What if somebody could not pay these costs?

In the case of bad conduct there is at least a argument (a bad argument but an argument) for recovering costs.  But where is the presumption of innocence here?  Furthermore, even if there is a process to recover costs (the article was unclear on this point), why does it make sense to have a complex process to return seized property.

I think some serious thought about these decisions would be sensible.  

You can’t condemn the outcome and condone the process

There are lots of people in this country (arguably a plurality) who are deeply disturbed by the results of this election. We have had more than our share of dire predictions and frightening analogies, but what we have not had nearly enough of it is serious discussion of the process that brought us here. This is in no small part because the figures in the media who have the most influence over the conversation are generally the ones with the most culpability for what just happened.

While virtually everyone was caught off guard by just how badly things went wrong, a number of us tried our best to call out the bad practices and declining standards that brought us here. I won’t list the specifics now -- if you’d like a taste, just search this blog for the terms like “journalism,” “Trump,” and “the New York Times” -- but I will say that the list is long and damning.

Put bluntly, journalism has gotten so bad that it constitutes a clear and present danger to the republic. It misinforms the public, promotes bad science and technology, distorts markets, comforts the comfortable, afflicts the afflicted, and, as mentioned before, undermines the democratic process. Until we demand and get better from the profession, things are only going to get worse.

The coolest part is when it makes its own planes

Joseph had a serious and rather depressing post scheduled for today, but I'm going to push it back to 2017. For the rest of this year I'm going to step back, take a deep breath, and watch things like paper plane machine guns.

From our good friends at Gizmodo:

Stick 200 sheets of A5 paper into the back of this machine gun and instead of firing bullets when you pull the trigger, it will unleash a barrage of up to 120 paper airplanes every minute.

The war on data heats up

We've been writing about for a long time. What we're seeing now is, in many ways, the logical conclusion of what we were writing about, but I had always assumed we'd come to our senses before this.



Sophie Kleeman writing for Gizmodo:

Over the weekend, our President-elect fingered South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney to lead the Office of Management and Budget. If confirmed, Mulvaney will wield a significant amount of power over virtually every federal agency—and that should make anyone who values science very, very uneasy.

...

Mulvaney’s track record blends in quite nicely: He thinks climate change is a myth, and he has consistently voted against pro-environmental bills. He also voted for a bill that prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, and questioned the nthe logical ee,  d for federal funding for Zika research.

There is one key difference between Mulvaney and the rest of Trump’s team of appointments, however. Rather than limiting his damage to one individual agency, Mulvaney gets to defecate on all of them.  

The Office of Management and Budget is the largest arm of the executive office of the president, and possesses a correspondingly huge amount of power. It helps develop and execute the federal budget, oversees agency performance and management, and reviews “all significant federal regulations by executive agencies.”
For someone who will soon lord over government funding and the agencies that depend on it, Mulvaney is almost religiously opposed to federal spending. The New York Times notes that he’s totally cool with being part of the “Shutdown Caucus,” because of his “willingness to shut the government down” rather than raise the debt limit. He’s also continuously advocated for cuts to federal spending, and has repeatedly butted heads with his own party on spending issues.

All of this spells bad news for federal agencies and programs in general, but particularly those in the science, health, and environmental realms. Trump and his lackeys have already made clear their opposition to funding entire fields of scientific research—Bob Walker, a senior adviser, even suggested scrapping NASA’s Earth science division. Combine this staggering level of disregard with Mulvaney’s belt-tightening approach to federal spending, and the prospects for government-funded science research appear dimmer by the day.
...

“The White House Office of Management and Budget is central to good government—including its role overseeing science-based public health, safety and environmental protections,” Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said in a statement. “[Mulvaney] has backed legislation to change the regulatory process in ways that would give an even stronger influence to industry, increase political interference and undermine science-based decision-making.”

Chief among Rosenberg’s concerns is Mulvaney’s support for bills like the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015, which would “[create] a commission tasked with eliminating and revising outdated and redundant federal regulations.” Notably, the bill was intent on protecting business interests, and was championed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, among others.

While slashing “outdated and redundant federal regulations” may sound prudent on the surface, Rosenberg, a former regulator, says it’s often a smokescreen that can be used to block policy measures protecting public health and the environment.

“You can’t overturn the Clean Air Act, so you just mess up the process [by which it’s implemented],” Rosenberg told Gizmodo. He likened it to the battle over reproductive rights: There may not be enough support to overturn Roe v. Wade (yet), but that hasn’t stopped state legislators from inserting procedural roadblocks at every other step of the way.

If Soylent actually were people, it would probably be easier on the digestion

Both in blogging and conversation, I can't think of a topic with which I've managed to offend more people than Soylent. I can't help but wonder if some of the fans who sprang to the product's defense later regretted their purchase. 

Eve Peyser writing for Gizmodo:

As you may recall, Soylent ended up recalling its Food Bar a month after releasing it when Gizmodo reported that it was causing customers to have “uncontrollable diarrhea” and vomiting, sending some to the emergency room. Soon after, Soylent halted sales of the 1.6 version of its powdered formula after people reported similar symptoms. The company eventually concluded it was the high-tech algal flour in the bars and powder that caused the illness, and vowed to remove it from future products.

Now that I think of it, maybe all tech reporters should be satirists

[I really need to get around to watching that show]

If you follow the tech industry or the discussions about employment and the treatment of workers, you definitely need to be following Dan Lyons, best known these days as a writer for the satirical show  Silicon Valley. Lyons is sharp and insightful and funny as hell and he does a great job cutting through the bullshit of the Augean Stables of today's tech journalism:

Making hiring and firing decisions based on age is illegal, but age discrimination is rampant in the tech industry, and everyone knows it, and everyone seems to accept it. What other industry operates like this? What would the world be like if doctors, lawyers, or airline pilots — or anyone, really, other than professional athletes — had to accept the idea that their career would end at age 40, or 50?

The standard defenses of this practice make no sense in terms of business

One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that older people simply can’t keep up. Veteran coders don’t know the latest programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. There’s no reason why a 50-year-old engineer can’t learn a new programming language. And frankly, most coding work isn’t rocket science.

What’s more, most jobs in tech companies don’t actually involve technology. During my time at HubSpot fewer than 100 of the company’s 500 employees were software developers. The vast majority worked in marketing, sales, and customer support. Those jobs don’t require any special degree or extensive training. Anyone, at any age, could do them.

The actual reasons do make business sense, but they aren't what you'd call pretty [emphasis added].

People born after 1980 do not possess some special gene that the rest of us lack. But Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders somehow seem to believe this is the case. I suspect the truth is that tech startups prefer young workers because they will work longer hours and can be paid less.

Age discrimination is just the beginning.

Twenty years ago, when venture capitalists invested in young founders, they usually insisted that founders team up with older, seasoned executives to provide “adult supervision.” Lately the conventional wisdom has been that it’s better to let young founders go it alone. The consequences have been predictably disastrous. Young male founders hire young male employees, and spend huge money building kooky office frat houses.

In the tech industry the practice of bros hiring bros is known as “culture fit,” and it’s presented as a good thing. The problem with “culture fit” is that unless you’re a twenty-something white person, you don’t fit. People of a certain age, people of color, and women — most of us, in other words — are often unwelcome. This huge, dynamic industry, which is generating so much wealth, has walled itself off from most of the workforce, telling millions of people that they cannot participate. This situation obviously shortchanges a lot of workers, but it also hurts tech companies by depriving them of talent.

Age bias goes hand-in-hand with other forms of bias. HubSpot had many female employees, but few in top management positions. The company was run (and still is) mostly by white men. As far as I could tell, there were no African-American employees. Once, after sitting through a company all-hands meeting and being stunned by the ocean of white faces, I wrote to a woman in HR asking if the company had any statistics on diversity. HubSpot prided itself on possessing numbers for everything, and being a “data-driven organization.” I received a terse reply: “No. Why?”

Hiring by “culture fit” has a way of crowding out hiring by competence. Partially as a result, it is disturbingly easy to find multi-billion dollar tech companies with high level executives who are dumb as a big ol' box of rocks.

I lasted 20 months at HubSpot. My time there was filled with incidents in which colleagues demonstrated they shared Halligan’s low regard for older workers. After I left the company, I announced I was writing a memoir about my experience as a 50-something guy trying to work in startup land. Apparently some of the company’s executives freaked out about what might be in the book, and they did something so crazy that I still almost can't believe it.

According to the FBI, which investigated, these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. No criminal charges have been filed, but the hacking, extortion, and ensuing cover-up raised questions about HubSpot’s culture and the trustworthiness of its leadership. HubSpot's board fired the CMO, and sanctioned Halligan, the CEO. A vice president resigned before the board could decide whether to terminate him. The board still won't tell me what happened.

The wonderful thing about age discrimination is that eventually we all get a chance to share the experience

[Following up on our previous piece on Dan Lyons.]

Though ageism has started getting more coverage, It is still almost invariably presented as a problem for the old (keeping in mind that, in this context, “old” is very much a relative term). This is a deeply flawed framework for what should be fairly obvious reasons. When it comes to discrimination, all of the other protected classes are more or less permanent – – your race, religion, sexual orientation, gender will generally stay with you for life – – but, barring sudden death, all of us will go through all classifications of age.

We therefore need to approach this problem in terms of overall career paths. If we do, it becomes apparent that, not only are younger workers also victims of age discrimination, they very well may be baring the brunt of it in today's employment market. Those younger employees are the ones turning in 60 hour weeks for less money than they merit as part of an implicit contract that will almost certainly be broken.

We have undermined the concept of deferred compensation – – often suggesting that the employee who expects the employer to make good on agreements is greedy and possibly dishonest – – while clinging to models that implicitly and sometimes explicitly rely on the idea that hard work and loyalty now will translate into rewards in the future.

If anything, the notion of "paying your dues" is even more entrenched in today's attitudes toward work. New employees are often expected to put in what would have been considered impossible hours. Freelancers are routinely expected to deliver professional level products for little or no money. Everyone is expected to borrow money to finance their own job training. All of these things are based on an implicit investment model.

But these sacrifices have come to look less and less like an investment over the past three or so decades, particularly compared to the 50s and 60s, when getting an education and/or putting in your time almost guaranteed a comfortable and stable middle-class lifestyle. Partly as a reaction to the upheavals of the 30s and 40s, the Postwar Era saw a wide array of institutional, regulatory, and cultural guarantees that these investments would be made good in the long term.

Now, nearly all of these guarantees have broken down. In terms of individual employers, there is no longer any pressure, official or unofficial, to show loyalty towards workers. Journalists now routinely portray calls for job security as protections for the "lazy" and treat as unreasonable and selfish the notion that employees have a right to collect agreed-upon pensions. In terms of overall industries, age discrimination violates the implicit contract of "paying dues." Rather than your hard work and sacrifices translating to a better job in the future, they translate to no job at all.

The 50-year-old engineer who can't get a position in the tech sector is a victim of age discrimination. So is the 29-year-old with huge college loans to repay who is about to discover he or she will be much less employable in six years. The only difference is, one of them doesn't know it yet.

Happy XKCDmas

"Albert and Pogo's Christmas" by Walt Kelly

Bad reporting continues

This is Joseph

This is . . . remarkable:

Indeed Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

Of course matters are not helped by this reporting from the Los Angeles Times:

After North Carolina lawmakers refused to repeal House Bill 2, the law that curbs legal protections for LGBT people and has cost the state millions of dollars in boycotts and lost jobs, Democrats and Republicans took to a predictable pattern: blaming each other for the unraveling of the deal. 

This is the lead sentence.  Just how does the opposition party factor into this in any sensible way?  Do the Republicans not currently have the Governor and a super-majority of seats in the legislature?  Have they not been willing to pass other laws on short notice? 

The Los Angeles Times then has this quote:

“It may have been doomed from the beginning,” said Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., who noted that many rural Republicans, who face re-election next year, would face outrage from their constituents if they repealed HB2. “It started off with both sides wanting a pound of flesh from the other side, and it just went downhill from there.”

Look, there is a lot of blame to give to Democrats, over a great many bad decisions that have been made in the past few decades.  But I am not sure how this works as the lead for the story -- the most important element of the story is that both sides blame each other?  Even the New York Times did better.  Clearly, if repealing HB2 had been a priority for the current administration then they could have done so, with no Democrat interference.  How does a "blame both sides" narrative work here?  One side could have done this repeal, all by themselves.  Sure, it is possible that the opposition was not helpful, but I find this sort of reporting very misleading.  Even when one side is shut out from power, it is blamed for not somehow not  . . . inspiring? . . . the governing party? 

Christmas Greetings from Slumberland

From the great Winsor McCay.