Tag Archives: internet

Obama Just Gave the World the Perfect Guacamole Recipe

by MarianDeal Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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The internet freaked out this afternoon after the NYT suggested we put peas in our guacamole. What is this, Soviet Russia?

Then IJR‘s Justin Green tweeted at President Obummer about it and he answered!

Obama is right. Peas in guacamole is disgusting.

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Obama Just Gave the World the Perfect Guacamole Recipe

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Cell Phone or Porsche? Cable TV or First Class Travel? Quien Es Mas Macho?

by JermainFsm Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Brad DeLong, I see that Matt Bruenig has finally taken on a question that’s bugged me for years. The question, in a nutshell, is this: Adjusted for inflation, would you rather live today with an income of $30,000 or back in the 1980s with an income of $60,000?1 Would the extra income be enticing enough to persuade you to give up 300 channels of high-def TV, cell phones, and universal access to the internet?

Now, the reason for asking this question usually has something to do with how we measure inflation. If you answer no—that is, you’d prefer today’s world even with a lower income—it suggests that our inflation measures are inadequate. I mean, you’re saying that $30,000 today buys more satisfaction than $60,000 in 1980 even though these are real, inflation-adjusted numbers. In other words, people today are quite a bit better off than official figures suggest. Officially, if your income had dropped in half over the past three decades, you’d be in dire shape. But in fact, this thought experiment suggests you’re actually happier. So maybe income hasn’t dropped in half in any practical sense.

This becomes meta-meta-economic very fast, so it’s best not to get wound up in it right now. Because the thing that’s always bugged me about this question is not so much its philosophical implications, but that it asks someone today what they’d think of living in the past. But that’s rigged. I grew up in the world of today. I’m accustomed to all the gadgets at hand. The idea of giving them up naturally sounds horrible.

But that’s not the only way to think of it. How about if we asked someone in 1980 about their preference. Would you rather have twice your current income, or would you rather have better TVs, portable phones, and instant access to all the information in the world? Well, these folks aren’t accustomed to all that stuff. Sure, it sounds cool, but jeez, would I really use it much? Hmmm. I think I’ll go with the extra income.

In other words, it’s all a matter of what you’re accustomed to. If you’ve been sleeping on the ground all your life, you have no trouble sleeping on the ground. Who needs a bed? If, like me, you’ve been sleeping on a bed all your life, you’d become a wreck trying to sleep on the ground. You’d pay a considerable sum of money just for an air mattress and a blanket.

Now, if you’re still reading this, you may be nodding along a bit but nonetheless thinking that it’s all just dorm room BS. We can’t go back in time and ask people about the internet and cell phones, so what’s the point of bringing it up? There are two reasons. First, I just wish more people realized that asking this question of current consumers stacks the deck and therefore doesn’t tell us nearly as much as we think it does. Second, Matt Bruenig has come up with a clever way that kinda sorta does allow us to go back in time and ask people this question.

As he points out, we have a group of people who did indeed lead adult lives in the 80s and are still with us: senior citizens. And they can decide which technologies they want to use. So what do they choose?

Using smartphone adoption as a proxy for these people’s technological preferences, it’s clear that the people who actually lived as adults through both technological periods overwhelmingly prefer older technologies:

Judging from these people’s preferences, you’d have to conclude that, in fact, older technologies are preferable to newer technologies. You don’t need a hypothetical to determine whether living in the past was better: these are people who lived in the past and the present and clearly prefer the way they lived in the past, at least when it comes to the technologies that are supposed to have made life dramatically better (as incomes stagnated).

Now, this is obviously not a bulletproof comparison. Maybe old people just get stubborn, and that’s all there is to it. Or maybe cell phones are a bad comparison. Even (or especially) senior citizens would probably be unwilling to go back to the medical technology of 1980. Plainly this is not the final answer to the tech vs. money question.

Still, it’s an interesting approach, and it would be interesting to try to extend it. Behavioral economics tells us that people respond to losses much more strongly than gains, so asking people to give up something they like really is stacking the deck—especially if they have little conception of what the extra income in 1980 would gain them. People will always react far more intensely to a sure loss than to an offer of something new.

Anyway, more like this, please. For example, how about turning this around. Which would you prefer: (a) a doubling of your income right now, or (b) a world with driverless cars, internet chips implanted in your brain, and vacation flights to the moon? For a lot of people, this would not be an obvious choice at all.

1Note that this question is normally asked with bigger numbers: say, $50,000 vs. $100,000. I lowered it because I think it makes a difference. $30,000 really starts to make you think, doesn’t it?

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Cell Phone or Porsche? Cable TV or First Class Travel? Quien Es Mas Macho?

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Friday Cat Blogging Counterpoint: I Don’t Care About Your Cute Cat

by KristinMHHH Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some remarkable writers, thinkers, and Friends of Kevin to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today, in the spirit of open debate, we interrupt our regularly scheduled cat blogging for a counterpoint by writer, editor, podcaster, speaker, chartisan, newsletterer, and former MoJoer Ann Friedman.

I don’t like cats. And it’s even worse than you think: I don’t like dogs, either. In fact, I have virtually no interest in animals at all—even eating them. I am really happy that you are comforted by the presence of your dog. I am thrilled that you and your cat “rescued each other.” But, no, I do not want to cuddle with or even see photos of your pet. And please don’t bother sending me that video of baby red pandas cuddling each other or a lion reuniting with its long-lost human pal.

I feel nothing.

On this point, especially among my feminist peers on the internet, I am in the minority. In honor of the man who pioneered Friday cat blogging, I’m going to reckon with the fact that I am just not very interested in furry creatures. The last time I wrote about this was seven years ago, in ancient internet times when I was a blogger for Feministing and dared to do some “Friday anti-catblogging.” The commenters weren’t having it. “I honestly think that there is a valuable conversation to be had about the correlation of cat-hating with misogyny,” one wrote.

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Friday Cat Blogging Counterpoint: I Don’t Care About Your Cute Cat

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Which Tech Companies Are the Greenest?

by PercySpangler Posted on May 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“It’s not easy being green” is a tired cliché, but it’s still particularly true if you are a giant technology company. Even Apple, Facebook, and Google—the best of the bunch, according to a new report from Greenpeace—will have to put in serious additional effort to fully shift to clean energy, especially in terms of lobbying at the state and local level. And the industry laggards, which include Amazon and eBay, have that much further to go.

Here’s how Greenpeace categorizes the tech giants:

Greenpeace

Energy efficiency in traditional appliances keeps improving, but our demand for energy is boosted by new technologies. In particular, companies that manufacture mobile devices and provide services like email, social networking, cloud storage, and streaming video have to contend with constantly escalating demand for data storage.

At the same time, being eco-friendly is important to many of those same companies—or at least important to their public image. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft all dropped out of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) last year because of bad publicity around the right-wing corporatist group’s opposition to action on climate change. But tech giants will need to do a lot more than quit dirty lobbying groups, Greenpeace argues; they’ll need to actually get involved in the political sphere on behalf of clean energy solutions.

First, the good news is that some tech companies are making respectable efforts to power their operations through clean energy sources. Google has invested heavily in solar energy, and Apple announced just yesterday that it’s expanding its renewable programs to manufacturing facilities in China. But in many cases, the issue is not whether companies have good intentions but whether clean energy is available to them.

Here are a few key quotes from the Greenpeace report:

Apple continues to lead the charge in powering its corner of the internet with renewable energy even as it continues to rapidly expand. All three of its data center expansions announced in the past year will be powered with renewable energy.
Google continues to match Apple in deploying renewable energy with its expansion in some markets, but its march toward 100 percent renewable energy is increasingly under threat by monopoly utilities for several data centers including those in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Singapore and Taiwan.

And here are some challenges the report lays out:

Amazon’s adoption of a 100 percent renewable energy goal, while potentially significant, lacks basic transparency and, unlike similar commitments from Apple, Facebook or Google, does not yet appear to be guiding Amazon’s investment decisions toward renewable energy and away from coal.
The rapid rise of streaming video is driving significant growth in our online footprint, and in power-hungry data centers and network infrastructure needed to deliver it.
Microsoft has slipped further behind Apple and Google in the race to build a green internet, as its cloud footprint continues to undergo massive growth in an attempt to catch up with Amazon, but has not kept pace with Apple and Google in terms of its supply of renewable electricity.

The underlying problem in many cases is that dirty energy-dependent utility monopolies are providing the electricity for massive, and growing, data centers. If these utilities use coal or natural gas, then by extension so do the tech companies with data centers in their service areas. Meeting data-storage demand without burning more fossil fuels will not be easy. Greenpeace writes:

Big data’s massive growth is expected to continue with the emergence of cheap smartphones: nearly 80 percent of the planet’s adult population will be connected to the internet by 2020, and the total number of devices connected to the internet will be roughly twice the global population by 2018. Internet traffic from mobile devices increased 69 percent in 2014 alone with the rapid increase of video streaming to mobile devices, and mobile traffic will exceed what is delivered over wired connections by 2018.

There are different ways to increase renewable energy supply at data centers. The first, of course, is simply to generate clean power on site with solar panels or wind turbines. Apple is already doing this and other companies are following its lead. But data centers require so much energy that they won’t generally be able to cover most of their needs that way. Other free-market approaches include power purchase agreements, in which the tech companies can make a deal with a clean energy supplier, and “green tariffs,” in which they agree to buy 100 percent clean power from the local utility at a price premium.

To get all their energy from renewables, though, will require tech companies to engage in policy debates. Greenpeace writes:

In many markets, companies’ ability to power with renewable energy will remain severely limited without policy changes. Even in more liberalized markets, it behooves companies to advocate for policies that will green the broader grid, narrowing the ground that they need to cover to power with 100 percent renewable energy. Companies can and must become advocates with the regulators and policymakers who ultimately have the power to change markets in ways that will allow companies to achieve their renewable energy goals. State policymakers covet data center investments, offering significant tax incentives to companies to lure them into their borders. Companies could compel a similar race to the top on renewable energy.

There were a few instances last year of tech companies lobbying for clean energy policies—Google submitted comments in favor of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, and several major tech firms signed the “Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles” calling on state regulators and utilities to expand access to renewable energy.

Greenpeace argues that tech companies particularly need to get engaged in state and local politics, forming an effective counterweight to the fossil fuel and right-wing interest group money that has swayed state legislative races and outcomes in recent years. Last year, Facebook and Microsoft submitted comments to the Iowa Utilities Board in favor of distributed electricity generation, but that was a relatively isolated event. That sort of activism needs to become routine.

In North Carolina, for example, Greenpeace notes that it’s illegal to buy renewable energy from a third party instead of buying whatever dirty energy is offered by state monopoly Duke Energy. The same state legislature that is offering tax incentives to attract data centers is considering changing that law. Tech companies should tell North Carolina that doing so is a precondition to getting any data centers located there, Greenpeace argues. Similarly, Virginia has a harsh cap on third-party clean power purchases, and the State Corporation Commission is due to review that rule this year.

You can be sure that the utilities, the Koch brothers, Art Pope, and Americans for Prosperity will be involved in these fights. If clean energy supporters are not, they will be over before they have begun. To really be green, tech companies need to put their muscle into this fight.

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Which Tech Companies Are the Greenest?

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Friday Cat Blogging – May 1 2015

by CristinBKY Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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With Kevin concentrating on his cancer treatment, we’ve rounded up some big writers to keep things rolling on the blog by contributing posts in his honor. But let’s be honest: nothing’s bigger on the internet than cats. So in addition to appearances from Hopper and Hilbert, we’re taking this chance to introduce you to some other cats behind the people at Mother Jones.

Today, that’s Olga, who lives in Oakland with Lynnea Wool, our senior staff accountant. Among many other things, Lynnea is responsible for (full disclosure) making sure I get my paycheck. So I’d better blog carefully.

Olga was the runt of a litter of Himalayan Persians when Lynnea adopted her one fine day seven years ago. Since then, they’ve had many happy moments. She just loves to have her armpits scratched:

For a special treat, her cat-mom will put a small piece of cheese—the stinkier the better—straight on her tongue.

This longhair needs regular trims, and I was very impressed to hear about Lynnea’s method. While Olga’s sleeping on her side, Lynnea will cut one half. Olga wakes up looking something like Two-Face, and roams around like that until Lynnea happens to catch her sleeping on her other side. Wish we had a picture of that! But you’ll have to agree this one’s a pretty good consolation prize:

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Friday Cat Blogging – May 1 2015

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The Houston Rockets Fired Their Social Media Person for an Emoji Joke

by ElisaWolfe Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday night, the Houston Rockets played their intrastate rivals the Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the NBA playoffs. Late in the game, the official Houston Rockets Twitter account sent out the following:

Screenshot via Deadspin

The internet being the stupid place that it is, a thousand crybabies immediately began to cry. Oh pray for the emoji horse! How dare the stupid Twitter account joke about horse slaughter! Wah wah wah!

The internet is a place where people cry about bullshit. If outrage is a currency—and it is—then the online market is drowning in counterfeits. People like to feign outrage because it allows them to demonstrate their humanity and show the world that they feel things strongly and people like to sleep with people who feel things strongly. Outrage allows people to define themselves in opposition to something, which is much easier than defining yourself on your own.

The Rockets went on to win the game (and thus the series) but not before the tweet was deleted. Today we learned that simply taking the tweet down and apologizing wasn’t enough. The Rockets fired the dude who tweeted it, their social media manager Chad Shanks!

This is such bullshit. Emoji violence lost this dude his job. EMOJI VIOLENCE. Like, who was really outraged by this? Were you? Of course you weren’t. You are smart and normal and very attractive and people like you. But let’s pretend you were outraged by it. Here is my question: What outraged you about it? Did you not know that horses get shot when they are lame? Of course you knew it. Everyone knows that! Here’s what I know about horses:

They are beautiful.
We don’t eat them.
For thousands of years they were second only to our legs when it came to helping humans get around.
Now they’re sort of ridden recreationally.
Also we race them.
They have shoes.
They get shot when they are lame.

Is merely mentioning the reality that horses are shot when they are lame outrageous? If you are outraged by the fact that horses are shot when they are lame, be outraged about the fact that horses are shot when they are lame, not someone remarking on the fact that horses are shot when they are lame.

In conclusion:

The Houston Rockets are cowards.

The Los Angeles Lakers are the best team in sports.

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The Houston Rockets Fired Their Social Media Person for an Emoji Joke

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Can This Social Network Make You Less Anxious?

by UhoceeFornachon Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rob Morris started his PhD in media arts and sciences at MIT without having taken a single computer science class—”which, in retrospect, was really one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done,” he says. Scrambling to keep up with classmates who had far more coding experience, he found himself spending a lot of time on Stack Overflow, an online forum where programmers help each other write and debug code. He got better, but he couldn’t stop stressing out about what he saw as his inferior skills. Then he had an idea: “Just as we can get a crowd of people to help us find and fix bugs in our code, perhaps we can get people to help us fix bugs in our thinking.”

That insight led Morris to develop Panoply, an online tool that crowdsources treatment for depression and anxiety, which he’s now turning into a consumer app. (Currently the app, which is called Koko, is invite-only; prospective users can sign up here.) People with depression and anxiety often have irrational thought patterns that cause them to perceive normal situations in a distorted, often negative way. To break those thought patterns, Panoply relies on a technique that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal.

When a user is upset—say she’s lost her job and she doesn’t feel like she’ll ever find another one, or her roommate walked past without saying hi and she thinks he’s angry at her—she posts a description of the situation as she perceives it. Then other users point out specific ways in which she might be falling into distorted patterns of thinking and try to help her reframe the situation. Maybe the right job just hasn’t come along yet; maybe the roommate had a bad day at work and just doesn’t feel like talking.

A study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research this week suggests that Panoply’s engagement tactics—and its overall approach to improving mental health—are effective. Of 166 study participants who had previously exhibited symptoms of depression, those who spent three weeks using Panoply for at least 25 minutes a week ended up significantly less depressed and better at cognitive reappraisal than those who spent three weeks doing an expressive writing exercise, a typical treatment for depression.

Morris teamed up with Stephen Schueller, a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University, to design Panoply. But he has his own background in psychology: He majored in it as an undergraduate at Princeton, and he briefly worked in a clinic after college. He says he came to MIT knowing that he wanted to use technology to educate people about psychological health, especially people who wouldn’t or couldn’t seek traditional therapy.

A screenshot of Panoply. (Click to enlarge) Courtesy of MIT

Panoply wasn’t Morris’ first approach. “Being at the MIT Media Lab, you’re surrounded by so many crazy futuristic toys,” he says. “There’s a group next to mine that just has all these robots walking around and interacting with people. Of course I thought, I can steal one of those robots and create a robot therapist that follows you around.” He settled on creating a social network instead when he realized that copying the addictive qualities of Facebook and Twitter could solve a problem with existing mental health apps: There’s nothing to keep users coming back day after day. “They feel a bit like homework,” he says.

Like other social networks, Panoply pings users every time someone comments on one of their posts. Morris hopes the community-building aspect of the site will keep people engaged. “It’s a really powerful feeling to spend a few minutes thinking really hard about how to write two to three sentences to help someone and then finding out that you made someone feel better,” he says.

Still, Morris says he plans to roll out the mobile app slowly, in part so that he can ensure it won’t be plagued by trolls. He already has some safeguards in place. Every time someone posts a response, Mechanical Turk workers get paid a penny each to determine whether it passes certain criteria before it goes live. In addition, algorithms search the text of each post and quarantine those that feature potentially offensive words or phrases.

Even though the study of Panoply focused on depression symptoms, Morris says he doesn’t want to pigeonhole his app as “a depression app.” He prefers the term “stress-reduction app,” because he worries that stigma around the word “depression” will drive potential users away. He wants people to feel like they can use the app even if they don’t have a diagnosed mental health condition, if they’re just having a bad day. “I think in our society we spend a ton of attention on fitness and how to eat,” he says. “Not so much on emotional well-being.”

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Can This Social Network Make You Less Anxious?

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This Democratic Congresswoman Wants the FBI to Take on Gamergate

by BiancaEmmer Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Congress’ next target: the often-vitriolic online movement known as Gamergate. On Tuesday Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), backed by the National Organization for Women and the Human Rights Campaign, asked her House colleagues to join her in demanding tighter enforcement of cyber-stalking and online harassment laws.

The Violence Against Women Act gives the federal government the authority to prosecute individuals who send violent threats over the internet, but actual convictions are hard to come by—the Department of Justice has prosecuted just 10 people for cyberstalking between 2010 and 2013. (In a long reported piece for Pacific Standard last year, the writer Amanda Hess detailed the near-impossibility of getting any level of law enforcement to investigate online threats.) “If we step up prosecuting these cases and enforce the federal laws that are already on the books, cyber-stalking—and the severity and quantity of threats that are made— we hope will be reduced,” Clark tells Mother Jones.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who replaced now-Sen. Ed Markey in a 2013 special election, began looking for ways to take on internet harassment after discovering last fall that Brianna Wu, a video game developer who has become a target of so-called “GamerGate” trolls, lived in her district. Wu has received more than three dozen death threats over the last five months—including one, posted to YouTube, in which a knife-wielding man bragged about getting in a car crash on the way to Wu’s house to kill her. Clark got in touch with Wu, and then with the FBI. (Wu had committed the grave sin of suggesting that tech could be a more hospitable place for women.)

In many cases, Clark found that social media networks and private sites were ambivalent about addressing the threats delivered via their platforms too. “When Brianna Wu had to pull out of a gaming conference called PAX East just last month, the folks who were running the site for that said that a bomb threat did not violate their user policy,” Clark says. Her proposal wouldn’t have any effect on how private companies police their users, although she hopes companies—and trolls— will take harassment more seriously once law enforcement does. “What we’re hoping to do is change the culture around accepting these threats of death, of dismemberment, of great physical harm, as mere hoaxes, and really start to think of them in the violence they’re perpetrating and the economic harm that they’re doing,” she adds.

As Clark sees it, cracking down on harassment isn’t just about public safety and peace-of-mind—it’s about dollars and cents. “We are hearing from women that they are losing wages, they are losing opportunities, speaking engagements, they are incurring legal fees, and having to hire online protective services at their own cost,” she says. “Now that so much of our commerce is done online and a presence on social media is required for many professions, we really see this as an economic toll for women as well as a personal one.”

Right on cue, Clark herself became a magnet for abuse after publishing an op-ed on the subject on Wednesday. (Angry Twitter users told the congresswoman to drink bleach and expressed their desire to attack her, among other things.) But as a member of Congress, she knows she can get an audience with law enforcement if she ever feels truly threatened. “We’re really hoping that that is going to be available for anybody who is using the internet,” she says.

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This Democratic Congresswoman Wants the FBI to Take on Gamergate

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Some Llamas Escaped and Went on a High-Speed Chase and It Was Amazing

by PattiFuentes Posted on February 26, 2015

Mother Jones

Llamas! Arizona! Internet!

This is a recipe for delight!

Anyway, I don’t know any details about this story other than llamas escaped (presumably from some sort of pen?) in Arizona and then they ran free and a chase began and the world was caught up in it, man, and it was like the ’60s in Europe and people were riding Vespas and falling in love and hair was blowing in the wind and hot people were wearing leather jackets and berets and some were smoking to signify their rebellious nature and everyone was singing rock and roll and saying “Viva la llama!”

Okay, a lot of that didn’t happen but the llamas did escape and there was a chase and it was amazing. Then they were caught.

Watch the entire wonderful epic below:

Bye bye Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to levee

but the levee was dry

and good ol’ boys were drinking

whiskey and rye, singing

“they caught the llamas.”

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Some Llamas Escaped and Went on a High-Speed Chase and It Was Amazing

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Google Can Do Well With Its New Communications Products, But Only If It Acts Like a Genuine Startup

by MarylouMuo Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Fung tells us that Google is making a “serious play in the communications space,” featuring an aggressive strategy that includes rollouts of new products like ultra-fast internet service, new smartphones, and even wireless service:

Google’s investments in telecom pit the company against some of the largest voice and Internet providers around. But Google has a key advantage: It doesn’t make its money from Internet service subscribers. That’s why it will be able to drive down prices for consumers, to adopt business practices that would be unsustainable for other carriers and to influence Washington policy debates in surprising ways.

“This is a multilayered strategy,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president for the consumer group Public Knowledge. “Even if Google only makes 10 percent profit margin on its fiber and wireless offerings, that’s enough for it to be successful and to achieve the desired result of driving more use of its applications.”

This isn’t quite right. Or maybe I should say it’s only half right. It’s true that these new services will probably help Google increase sales of its core products, thus offsetting low margins in the communications space. But that’s not the real reason Google can afford to do this. The real reason is that Google is a new entrant, which means that entering these new businesses doesn’t force it to cannibalize any of its current businesses.

This is the key problem that kills old companies when new technology hits the street. Every cheap new widget they sell means one less expensive old widget they sell, and very few companies have the stones to just accept reality and really dive into the new widgets regardless. So they sell the new widgets, but only half-heartedly. They defeature them. They limit their sales channels. They don’t spend enough on marketing. Meanwhile, a startup with no such issues eats their lunch because their new widgets are their main business and they just sell the hell out of them.

That’s Google’s big advantage in this space. The fact that entering the telecom business might—might!—boost sales of other Google products is great, but it’s just a bonus, and not one they should be thinking too hard about. In fact, if their new products are tailored too tightly as mere helpers for their old product lines, they could end up in the same position as all those old dinosaur companies that couldn’t quite put their hearts into new tech. That road is well trod, and it’s usually a pretty grim one.

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Google Can Do Well With Its New Communications Products, But Only If It Acts Like a Genuine Startup

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