The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Wondermark — by David Malki !:
  
• The DNA Industry and the Disappearing Indian: DNA, Race, and Native Rights — Aviva Chomsky for TomDispatch: In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That’s partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today’s world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them. So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it’s that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can’t be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today’s Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry’s claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
• Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn’t Just Hurt Teachers. It Hurts Students. — Nancy Bunge in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Some students understand the implications of all this. When I first told a class that one of the students would have to collect and submit the evaluations so that I couldn’t tamper with them, one of them asked, "Doesn’t that make you feel demeaned?" Another student wrote on an evaluation, "Why don’t you get off your ass and see for yourself what a great job she is doing?" And, indeed, the administration, not the students, should undertake the difficult task of appraising how well a class works. A colleague once remarked, "When we agitated for student evaluations in the ’60s, we never guessed we were handing the administration a club."
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• Education…education…education — The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies: Instead of higher education being about learning, exploration and creativity, it is increasingly becoming commodified; serving the interests of capital rather than the development of the individual for life and the benefit of society. Already, as Steve Watson notes, there is the potential for subjects that do not have a direct link to the world of work to disappear or be reconfigured for employability. And while universities struggle for funding and try to cut costs, students face the prospect of a lifetime of education debt without even the certainty of finding a good, well paying job at the end of it.
• Tom Toles for December 02, 2018:
  
• Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system — Lane Greene in Aeon: It is a delight to be able to use a good literally: when my son fell off a horse on a recent holiday, I was able to reassure my mother that ‘He literally got right back in the saddle,’ and this pleased me no end. So when people use literally to say, for example, We literally walked a million miles, I sigh a little sigh. I know that James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and many others used a figurative literally, but as a mere intensifier it’s not particularly useful or lovely, and it is particularly useful and lovely in the traditional sense, where it has no good substitute. So I do believe that when change happens in a language it can do harm. Not the end of the world, but harm.
• Evil Mansion — Phil Are Go:
  
• Urban planning is failing children and breaching their human rights – here’s what needs to be done — Jenny Wood in the Conversation: When children are asked about their favourite places to play, the playground is rarely their first choice. And most adults will often agree that they also favoured places other than the playground when they were children: parks, woods, riverbanks, fields and beaches were the places that captured imagination, not a few swings in an enclosed tarmacked space. Similarly, skateparks offer only limited recreation potential and tend to be favoured more by boys than by girls. Playgrounds often lack a range of equipment to suit children of different ages and abilities and are not always well maintained. Children also have to be able to reach the playground safely on their own, otherwise they have to be accompanied. This can limit the time children have to play outdoors and contributes further demands on the time of already pressured parents and carers. These exclusions and misunderstandings of what children really need contribute to environments that favour adults over children, and can leave children feeling disempowered, discouraged, inactive and dependent on the adults around them.
• Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Just You Wait, History Proves That Someday Liberals Will Love Donald Trump — Ted Rall:
  
• The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’ — Gavin Evans in the Guardian: Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.
• Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam — Douglas Rushkoff in Medium: The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them. […] Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.
• The Rise and Demise of RSS — Sinclair Target in Motherboard: About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology. The story of how this happened is really two stories. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Tom Toles:
  
• From brothels to independence: the neoliberalisation of (sex) work — the psuedonymous Ava Caradonna in openDemocracy: To understand how sex work has changed requires thinking through how both our labour conditions and the political economy of the industry has been transformed. We are no longer forced to hand over hefty house fees to a boss, but our overheads are now much higher. The economic risk of investment has been shifted onto the worker. At the same time, we are now required to invest nearly infinite amounts of unpaid labour into our ‘businesses’. Working hours now stretch into every waking moment and working spaces become everywhere and nowhere.
• Apple Has an Early Case of GE’s Disease — Marshall Auerback in Naked Capitalism: “Financialization”—which denotes “the increasing importance of financial markets, institutions and motives in the world economy”—manifests itself clearly in the case of Apple. It is becoming another example of an American company that is increasingly valuing financial engineering over real engineering, as its core businesses get hollowed out amid product saturation and declining global sales. Like General Electric some 25 years under Jack Welch, Apple under current CEO Tim Cook increasingly represents a microcosm of the changing role of U.S. markets as they have become less a vehicle for capital provision, more akin to a wealth recycling machine in which cash piles are used less for investment/research and development, more for share buybacks (which are tied to executive compensation, elevating the incentive for, at a minimum, quarterly short-termism and, at worst, fraud and corporate looting). All in the interests of that flawed concept of “maximizing shareholder value,” in which the company’s stock price, rather than its product line, drives corporate decisions, determines senior management compensation, and becomes the ultimate measuring stick of success. Usually, when this trend becomes ascendant, it doesn’t end well. Perhaps the adverse reaction to Apple’s recently reported earnings is the first warning of what could follow.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — By Zach Weinersmith:
  
• An algorithm a day will keep the doctor at bay — David Mitchell being charming in That Utterly Charming Newspaper: "In the UK, we are spending £97bn of public money on treating disease and only £8bn preventing it,” the health secretary Matt Hancock said last week. “You don’t have to be an economist to see those numbers don’t stack up.” But Matt Hancock actually is an economist, so how does he know? […] And obviously they do stack up. As in, you could stack them up – you could add them together. They probably are stacked up in various summaries of government spending: stacked up under the heading “Health”. You don’t have to be an economist to see that if you stacked them up, that would make £105bn. I don’t think he means that, though. I think maybe he means that £97bn is much more than £8bn. His point may simply be that you don’t have to be an economist to see that 97 is a larger number than eight. If so, I heartily agree and my only quibble is why, even with Britain’s rising life expectancy, for which Matt Hancock is doubtless keen to take credit, he considered that assertion worth the time it took to express. To be fair, I think what he’s getting at is that, if we spent more than £8bn on preventing illness, maybe we wouldn’t need to spend as much as £97bn treating it. Unfortunately, though, you don’t have to be an economist to know whether that contention stacks up. In fact, you have to be something else. You need a completely different type of expertise.
• End intellectual property — Samir Chopra in Aeon: The phrase ‘intellectual property’ was first used in a legal decision in 1845 and acquired formal heft in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialised agency of the United Nations that represents and protects the commercial interests of holders of copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. The ubiquitous use of ‘intellectual property’ began in the digital era of production, reproduction and distribution of cultural and technical artifacts. As a new political economy appeared, so did a new commercial and legal rhetoric. ‘Intellectual property’, a central term in that new discourse, is a culturally damaging and easily weaponised notion. Its use should be resisted.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A Brief History of Everything That Happened Because of George H.W. Bush’s Insecurity — Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone includes this thing I did not know, or am too senile to recall: Bush once sent a poor black kid to a real prison for real years for the crime of being a political prop. In the summer of 1989, while vacationing avec speedboat in his Kennebunkport, Maine, estate, Bush came up with the brilliant idea, or at least acceded to one dreamed up by aides. He would do a live address to the country while holding up a bag of crack that had been sold just outside the White House. The idea was to show that crack could “be bought anywhere.” The problem was, nobody sold crack in Lafayette Square near the White House, which is where Bush aides wanted the crack found. There is a long backstory here that involves administration officials tasking the DEA with securing a bust near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They ended up having an undercover agent contact an 18-year-old named Keith Jackson from a poor neighborhood in southeast Washington. He was asked to bring his wares to the White House. […] The federal judge in the case, Stanley Sporkin, wanted desperately to not impose a stiff sentence on Jackson, but — in a problem none of the Bush aides who cooked up this dumb scheme thought of — mandatory sentencing laws handcuffed Sporkin. So the kid was sentenced to 10 years (he was later paroled). Sporkin, a former CIA general counsel appointed by Reagan, suggested Jackson ask Bush for a pardon: “He used you, in the sense of making a big drug speech… But he’s a decent man, a man of great compassion. Maybe he can find a way to reduce at least some of that sentence.” Bush blew that off and instead issued pardons to six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Day in 1992.
• Progressives to Conservatives: You Hate Liberals For All The Wrong Reasons — Ted Rall:
  
• The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative — Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: [Max] Boot wrote a sad column about the yellow vests. He wondered why people on the left, right and in between were mocking a piece he wrote 18 months ago, in which he said, “America needs its own Macron — a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool.” Macron has a 23 percent approval rating, Paris seems to be on fire, and people are even spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe. How, Boot asked, could all this be happening to such a cool politician? When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled. What’s wrong with elitism? Don’t we all want the best at the helm? You wouldn’t want an un-elite airline pilot, would you? This was the Spinal Tap version of neoliberalism: what’s wrong with being elite? The inability of pundits to make sense of the plummeting popularity of “centrism” is a long-developing story in the West. Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular.
• ‘Eat The Rich’: Still a Popular Idea in French Uprisings, Especially With the Yellow Vests — Christopher Dickey in the Daily Beast: The leaderless demonstrators trashing French cities or standing by watching while anarchist and fascist and for-the-hell-of-it casseurs do the job for them, have put forth long lists of inchoate demands about which there’s no consensus. But one big issue does remain that has resonance with the wider masses. They want Macron to reimpose a wealth tax on top of France’s already very high income taxes. Although the revenues from the “solidarity tax on fortunes,” known as the ISF, might go to good social causes, that’s not the reason for its political importance. It’s a popular idea because it’s punitive. French society was traditionally, famously jealous of wealth, and angered by it, long before the current problems of inequality created by global financial markets. As Dana Kennedy pointed out in The Daily Beast last week, for centuries the vast peasant population of France lived in horrible conditions. There was a long history of pitchfork-wielding popular uprisings against an indolent aristocracy, and by the time of the Enlightenment, that popular anger was turning against bourgeois merchants as well.
• The Paris ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests Show the Flaws of Capitalism — Caroline Haskins, Motherboard: This is a problem with climate negotiations generally: the policies that are supposed to mitigate damage in the present and future and protect the world’s most vulnerable are negotiated by people who are largely immune to the short-term material concerns of living paycheck-to-paycheck, and the long-term material concerns of climate change are purely theoretical to them, given their economic status. That’s why the policies that end up coming into practice don’t consider the urgency and immediacy of the material, life-and-death concerns of the working class. The working class is asked to sacrifice now, and upper classes, meanwhile, are rarely asked to make many material sacrifices at all.
• Constant anxiety of benefit sanctions is toxic for mental health of disabled people — Danny Taggart, Ewen Speed, and Jaimini Mehta in the Conversation precis their new report for Inclusion London: One man, Charlie, who participated in our study, described how a sanction left him with no food or electricity on Christmas day, leading to a suicide attempt and mental breakdown […] The sanction actually pushed him further away from work. He said that he now has a problem going into the Job Centre: “Because of the damage that the benefit sanction did to me.” Part of the rationale is based on a psychological theory known as behavioural economics, which uses a range of nudges to encourage people to make more rational choices. So-called “nudge theory” has been used to encourage behaviour change in areas such as paying tax on time and organ donation. But in the context of welfare support, the use of incentives take the form of perverse and punitive incentives. Perverse, because they can require disabled people to understate their qualifications to obtain any form of employment. The same man told us the Job Centre staff told him to remove his degree from his CV so that he wouldn’t appear overqualified for the jobs they told him to apply for. He said it had a real impact on his feeling of self-worth. […] The incentives are punitive because they leave disabled people in a state of constant dread, feeling worried all of the time, whether they are sanctioned or not.
• Corporate-Funded Judicial Boot Camp Made Sitting Federal Judges More Conservative — David Dayen at the Intercept: In 1976, the Law and Economics Center, a corporate-funded academic organization now housed at George Mason University, began holding an intensive, all-expenses-paid, two- to three-week economics seminar for federal judges in Plantation Island, Florida. Organized by conservative economist Henry Manne, the Economics Institute for Federal Judges featured some of America’s most renowned professors teaching classical economic theories that could be applied to the courtroom. Though controversial in its day, the seminar recurred until 1999, and at its peak, over 40 percent of all federal judges had attended. According to a new working paper by three researchers, this indoctrination into law and economics — which emphasized cost-benefit analysis and economic efficiency; warned of the downsides of union protections and environmental regulations; and found benefits to deterrence — had a quantifiable effect on future rulings. Judges who attended Manne’s seminars rendered more conservative verdicts in economics cases. They were more likely to rule against the National Labor Relations Board or the Environmental Protection Agency. They employed more economics language in their rulings, according to a linguistic analysis. And they imposed harsher prison sentences, particularly after receiving more discretion to set terms in 2005.