Relevant History

This is why Woody Allen said "I am at two with nature:" Nature Wants to Eat You

The next time you need a break, check out Ed Yong's great new blog, Nature Wants to Eat You. Terrifying carnivores were never so entertaining. (I also never knew that Nietzsche said, "When you stare into the abyss, the abyss reaches up and bites your face off." I must have been reading an out of date translation.)

End of innocence, 2011 edition

My daughter, scrolling through the new Netflix for Kids: "Spongebob Squarepants? That's NOTHING like The Pink Panther! What are they thinking??" This algorithm sucks!

She also spent about 15 minutes this morning just browsing the titles, which is disturbingly like how I watch Netflix.

The power of the social sciences

The scholar in me finds this article title hilarious, in a good way--

Can You Dig It? Some Reflections on the Sociological Problems Associated with Being Uncool

--I think because it so perfectly expresses the thing it promises to analyze.

How the West Was Won

I've been working today to Led Zeppelin's "How the West Was Won," a recording from two Southern California shows they played in 1972. I'm not sure I need more than one 24-minute version of "Dazed and Confused," but it's interesting to have one.

National Journal on "The Left-Behinds"

I went through a brief period of watching movies set in working-class British communities-- or rather, places that were working-class, and were communities, before the hollowing-out of manufacturing destroyed them. I found them depressing and somewhat incomprehensible; unfortunately, Michael Hirsh has a long, depressing article in the National Journal about the "trend toward long-term unemployment in America" that suggests that those movies are a preview of our future as well:

[In] communities laid low by the housing bubble and bust, the phenomenon can feed on itself and create a vicious cycle of disappearing jobs, declining incomes, higher foreclosures, and more layoffs.... [Cities with high structural unemployment] are the neglected collateral damage of the transformational changes made possible by unfettered free markets, globalization, and information technology. Most of the shocks were predictable, and many were predicted. U.S. policymakers, however, even more than their counterparts in other advanced countries, consistently underestimated the enduring effects those shocks would have on working families and failed to build in protec-tive buffers.

Along the way, “long-term unemployed” has increasingly become a synonym for “unwanted.” As industries die, skills atrophy, and ambition fades, especially among older workers. In a new era of jobless growth, fiscal austerity, and the relentless drive for productivity, employers get pickier about whom they hire. Workers who don’t retrain quickly at a high enough level or those who are stuck with an underwater mortgage and can’t move right away for a job opportunity quickly become long-term unemployed.

U.S. companies have grown so brazen about avoiding the long-term unemployed that many place ads for only “currently employed” applicants....

Washington, dominated by a free-market consensus ever since President Reagan’s era, has ignored that 30-year pattern. Partly as a result, reams of data show that America’s middle class has been shrinking. Among the few who has long second-guessed the Washington mind-set is Frank Levy, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who coauthored a much-cited 2007 paper concluding that labor began losing the fight to capital in the late 1970s.

“I’m not sure how much better we could have done in preserving the middle class,” he says. “But I know that, with a few exceptions like the earned income tax credit, we didn’t really try.”

Awesome. Thanks, guys who wear ties with busts of Adam Smith on them.

Quiet day in the cafe

Maybe because it's Thanksgiving week, but it's oddly quiet at Cafe Zoe, where I'm now working, as the construction crews are back digging up the Hetch Hetchy.

cafe zoe, via flickr

One of the things we believe about working at home is that it's quieter than the office, but that's only true if you don't have backhoes and giant cement machines chuffing back and forth outside your window.

"Real time" and Jóhann Jóhannsson

I'm working this morning on a section of the book about the idea of "real time"-- how the concept got started in computer science, how it's multiplied and diffused through the financial sector and Web and social media to color our perception of time, and finally how unreal it is, compared to spiritual or religious ideas about and experience of time.

I've got Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlandia blasting on the stereo, mainly because it's a pleasure to listen to something that's so beautifully crafted and passionate. Jóhannsson has turned into a hero of mine. He composes works about machines (the Ford assembly line, the IBM 1401 computer), and he's technically brilliant, but his work is lush and passionate. You get the sense listening to his best work that nothing of him is held back. That's what I want my readers to feel.

Has anyone written a history of the idea of "real time"?

Has anyone written an article on the term "real time"-- where it comes from, how it's been used in the last few decades, and what it means today? In particular, I'm interested in how and when the "realness" of things like computer network and information flows became more "real" than those of more "natural" everyday human life.

Quote of the day

Krugman reminds of the old joke about European visions of Heaven and Hell:

the euro is, in reality, essentially an Italian creation. If you were part of the dialogue in the late 80s and early 90s, it became clear that the euro was best understood as a plot by Italian technocrats to get themselves German central bankers.

This was not, it turns out, a good idea.

Oil companies use psy ops to deal with anti-fracking groups

This CNBC report on how oil companies are using Army and Marine Corps psy ops-- psychological operations-- veterans to help them defeat anti-fracking campaigns is pretty interesting.

In a session entitled “Designing a Media Relations Strategy To Overcome Concerns Surrounding Hydraulic Fracturing,” Range Resources communications director Matt Pitzarella spoke about “overcoming stakeholder concerns” about the fracking process.

“We have several former psy ops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,” Pitzarella said. “Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of psy ops in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”...

“Download the U.S. Army-slash-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency,” [manager of external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum Matt] Carmichael said. “There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.”

Given that advocacy groups here in the U.S. are interested in how social media and novel organizational forms are used in other parts of the world, it should be no surprise that corporations would look to psy ops to help counter them. After all, the field does claim to be able to deal with problems like these.

I'm sure that the importation of expertise developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and countless "small wars" in the last half century is also proof that Sharia law has now taken over in Pennsylvania oil country. Those Amish think they look so innocent...