Posts Tagged ‘Nixon’
“The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue”*…
Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.
But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free…
The political economy of bullshit– and thoughts on a remedy: “The Truth is Paywalled But the Lies are Free.”
On a related (and somewhat complicating) note, see also “It is possible to compete with the New York Times. Here’s how,” the source of the image above.
* Edward R. Murrow
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As we do like Diogenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that President Richard M. Nixon resigned, as a result of the Watergate scandal— which was itself, of course, in large measure the result of (expensive) investigatory journalism of the highest quality.
Nixon departing the White House after his resignation (source)
“Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?”*…
After a characteristically-clear explanation of the ways in which the “monopoly practice” concerns around Google, Amazon, and the other on-line giants are different from those the U.S. has traditionally tried to manage– they limit/manage choice– the ever-illuminating Tim O’Reilly argues for a fresh approach to anti-trust:
So how are we therefore best to decide if these Big Tech platforms need to be regulated?
In one famous exchange, Bill Gates, the founder and former CEO of Microsoft, told Chamath Palihapitiya, the one-time head of the Facebook platform:
“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
Given this understanding of the role of a platform, regulators should be looking to measure whether companies like Amazon or Google are continuing to provide opportunity for their ecosystem of suppliers, or if they’re increasing their own returns at the expense of that ecosystem.
Rather than just asking whether consumers benefit in the short term from the companies’ actions, regulators should be looking at the long-term health of the marketplace of suppliers—they are the real source of that consumer benefit, not the platforms alone. Have Amazon, Apple, or Google
earned
their profits, or are they coming from monopolistic rents?
How might we know whether a company operating an algorithmically managed marketplace is extracting rents rather than simply taking a reasonable cut for the services it provides? The first sign may not be that it is raising prices for consumers, but that it is taking a larger percentage from its suppliers, or competing unfairly with them.
Before antitrust authorities look to remedies like breaking up these companies, a good first step would be to require disclosure of information about the growth and health of the supply side of their marketplaces. The statistics about the growth of its third-party marketplace that Bezos trumpeted in his shareholder letter tell only half the story. The questions to ask are who profits, by how much, and how that allocation of rewards is changing over time…
Data is the currency of these companies. It should also be the currency of those looking to regulate them. You cannot regulate what you don’t understand. The algorithms that these companies use may be defended as trade secrets, but their outcomes should be open to inspection.
An important read: “Antitrust regulators are using the wrong tools to break up Big Tech.”
* Molly Ivins
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As we bust trusts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski had subpoenaed the tapes as part of on-going impeachment proceedings; the White House had sued to quash; and the decision is widely viewed as a crucial precedent limiting the power of any U.S. president to claim executive privilege.
“Where there is power, there is resistance”*…
There’s a long history of incorporating food into political protest (Boston Tea Party, anyone?), with written record dating all the way back to the early-’60s CE, when Vespasian, a proconsulate in Africa and a future emperor of Rome, was apparently so unpopular for his economic policies that he was pelted with turnips by the local populace. Although this time-honored tradition has never truly fallen out of fashion, recent years have seen a resurgence in the hurling of foodstuff — particularly eggs, like the one wielded by the teenager known as “Egg Boy,” who cracked one on the head of an Australian politician who blamed immigration for the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand — and now we’ve arrived at milkshakes.
So how exactly does a person choose the perfect food for a protest? Mind you, this isn’t something we recommend you do — lobbing food at someone could constitute battery or assault — but it’s worth considering what makes a good food projectile, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end. Or maybe you’re like us and what you really want is simply to learn…
[Following is] a list of historic protest foods, ranked using the following criteria:
Convenience: How easy is it to acquire and carry this object without suspicion?
Cost: Will hurling this object be the real-life equivalent of the “money with wings” emoji?
Accuracy: How precise of a projectile does this object make, taking into consideration properties like drag, gravity, thrust, and lift?
Messiness: Does the object splatter, stain, or otherwise necessitate cleanup that’s a pain in the ass?
Smell: How much will the physical memory of the act linger in the nostrils, following the target the rest of the day like an unfriendly ghost?
Symbolic or historical resonance: Does the object represent something greater, or reference a long tradition of throwing said object?
Humiliation: While admittedly ambiguous, this last attribute can be summed up as: “You know it when you see it.”…
The ultimate act of dissent? “Milkshakes, Eggs, and Other Throwable Protest Foods, Ranked”
See also: “Milkshaking.”
*
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As we shop with care, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that an 18½-minute gap appeared in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
According to President Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings when she made “a terrible mistake” during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device’s pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to 18 1⁄2 minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.
The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in. Nixon claimed not to know the topic or topics discussed during the gap.[19] Haldeman’s notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel…
Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration, dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch”, resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation… [source]
Rosemary Woods, attempting to illustrate “The Rosemary Stretch”
“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to”*…
Early in the morning on Sunday, 28 August, the German artist Anselm Kiefer’s 35,000sq. m studio and warehouse space in Croissy-Beaubourg, about 25km west of Paris, was burgled and robbed, as first reported by the French daily newspaper Le Parisien. The thieves are suspected of cutting through wire cages and making off with a ten-tonne lead sculpture of stacks of books—valued at €1.3m—and 12 tonnes of raw marble, worth around €1m…
More heaviness at “Anselm Kiefer’s studio robbed of 12 tonnes of raw marble and €1.3m lead sculpture.”
* Jean-Luc Godard
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As we recheck our locks, we might note that this is a big day in the history of crime…
On this date in 1935, Huey Long, Louisiana Senator and past-Governor (and inspiration for Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men), was shot in the Louisiana state capitol building; he died 30 hours later. Called a demagogue by critics, the populist leader was a larger-than-life figure who boasted that he bought legislators “like sacks of potatoes, shuffled them like a deck of cards.”
Long in the State house, flanked by the armed guards with whom he traveled
And on this date in 1974, President Gerald Ford offered his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, “a full, free, and absolute pardon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in” during Nixon’s Presidency.
The mechanics of minority rule…
In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green).
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals…
“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.
“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan said. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”
Read the full story at Physorg.com.
As we dress for the Tea Party, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that President Richard M. Nixon released subpoenaed White House recordings after being ordered to do so by the Supreme Court… well, sort of: six days later, on August 6, the White House released another tape, recorded days after the Watergate Break-in, on which it was clear that the President knew of the burglary and conspired in the cover-up. Nixon resigned on August 8.
Nixon departing the White House after his resignation (source)
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