The “sport” of knocking out unsuspecting white folks has spread to England, as this video demonstrates:
Back in the states, a “youth” tried to play using a stun gun — which malfunctioned. The victim, feeling something jabbed into his side, turned and drew his .40-caliber pistol and fired a shot — through the youth’s glute.
This augmented-reality sandbox turns actual sand into a wonderful user interface for studying topography:
Tony Hsieh of Zappos is trying to make the desert bloom:
I’m speaking metaphorically. Mostly. The desert in question is the derelict remains of Downtown Las Vegas, which Hsieh is irrigating with $350 million of his own money. The results so far are impressive. (Witness these TCTV walkthroughs and interviews.) Who knows? Downtown Vegas may one day make BoCoCa and the Mission jealous.
At the same time, this is very much a business investment…of a sort. You could call it an investment in building a community where businesses can thrive, but that would be missing the larger point. To me it seems like a $350 million bet on the idea that doing good, having fun, and working more productively are not at all incompatible; that, in fact, they can reinforce one another.
Hsieh has said: “I want to be in an area where everyone feels like they can hang out all the time and where there’s not a huge distinction between working and playing.” It’s easy to mock that, in the same way non-Googlers mock Google’s campus, as an attempt to sucker people into working more for less money. But if you meet the man, as I did last week, it soon becomes clear that Hsieh is very serious about breaking down the barriers between work and play.
Granted, the results can seem faintly terrifying to introverts like me. “I’ll be honest, it’s a bit like living in a dorm,” said the rainbow-haired woman named Heidi who showed a group of us around the luxury condo building which hosts Tony’s own apartment, other members of the Zappos/Downtown Project braintrust, and “crash pads” for visitors. There are bumper-car desks, a “jungle room” with walls covered in growing plants, a podcast/TV studio, spectacular desert views, and–at least the night I was there–live penguins frolicking in the kitchen.
The new district, some two dozen city blocks and counting, will be built to maximize the number of serendipitous collisions among strangers, and would-be entrepeneurs will be measured by their Return On Community more than their return on capital. Little wonder that my more cynical friends describe Zappos and its 1500 employees as “a cult.” The fact that they refer to themselves as “The Zappos Family” doesn’t help.
But there’s a lot here that even curmudgeons can cheer. Raising the urban density from 14 to 100 people per acre. Playgrounds for children, grants for teachers, a whole new magnet school built to foster tomorrow’s entrepeneurs. A shared-car service with 100 Teslas. Down the street they’re building a cafe/theatre where you can “grab a coffee and watch a TED talk” as part of your morning ritual. (OK, I have issues with TED, but that’s a separate post.) A slew of cafes and galleries and restaurants are up and running already, and there’ll soon be a hackerspace to go with the existing fashionspace.
All this in a sprawling urban landscape dotted with sculptures built for Burning Man, an event Hsieh attends regularly. (Full disclosure: so do I.) That’s no coincidence. Burning Man is an excellent example of an environment where the barriers between work and play disintegrate — it’s a bacchanal, yes, but it’s not known as “recreational moving” for nothing. I think it’s fair to interpret the Downtown Project, and Zappos itself, as an attempt by Hsieh to instill and extend the Burner ethos into urban life and the working world.
And he’s been surprisingly successful. People may call Zappos a cult, but by almost all accounts it’s a great place to work. “If success is built on the happiness of one’s employees, then Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh might as well be teaching the class.” (Although recent Glassdoor reviews indicate that some employees are troubled by Hsieh’s new focus on the Downtown Project.)
There is no one else in the world like Marissa Mayer:
Now 38 years old, she is a wife, a mother, an engineer, and the CEO of a 30-billion-dollar company. She is a woman in an industry dominated by men. In a world where corporations are expected to serve shareholders before anyone else, she is obsessed with putting the customer experience first.
Worth at least $300 million, she isn’t afraid to show off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived in a small, suburban home with an apple tree out front, but Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel.
While rival CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google wear flip-flops, hoodies, and T-shirts, Mayer wears Oscar De La Renta on the red carpet.
Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn’t look the part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks.
Young, powerful, rich, and brilliant, Mayer is a role model for millions of women. And yet, unlike Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Mayer resists calling herself a feminist. She even infuriated working mothers across the world when she banned Yahoo employees from working from home.
Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has many enemies within her industry. They say she is robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail. They say her obsession with the user experience masks a disdain for the money-making side of the technology industry.
There is some truth to what they say.
And yet, a year after Mayer took over Yahoo, the company’s stock price was up 100 percent. Engineers wanted to work for Yahoo again. More importantly, so did sought-after startup CEOs like Tumblr founder David Karp, who agreed to sell his company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion.
Kevin Spacey discusses the economics of television pilots:
Last year 113 pilots were made. 35 of those were chosen to go to air. 13 of those were renewed, but most of those are gone now. And this year 146 pilots were shot. 56 have gone to series, but we don’t know the outcome of those yet. But the cost of these pilots was somewhere between 300 and 400 million dollars a year. That makes our House of Cards deal for two seasons look really cost effective.
What did Dorothy learn from the aftermath of The Wizard of Oz?
Latitude Engineering’s Hybrid Quadrotor UAV uses its four electric-motor-driven propellers for vertical take-off and landing and its gas-engine-driven push-prop for cruising at 40 knots:
“When you make a tilt-rotor all electric powered, you need tons of batteries if you want endurance,” Carlos explains. “If you want a high-endurance gas tilt-rotor you need (for the sake of argument) a super-charged V8 to take off, while during forward flight all you need is a tiny little inline 4 … vertical take-off and forward flight have pretty much mutually exclusive requirements when it comes to power sources.”
With the HQ, he says, “you are always flying with the correct power source for the job, VTOL or conventional flight.”
The Council for Aid to Education is positioning its Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA +, as the post-college SAT:
The 90-minute exam is based on a test that has been used by 700 schools to grade themselves and improve how well their students are learning.
The CLA + will be open to anyone — whether they are graduating from a four-year university or have taken just a series of MOOCs — and students will be allowed to show their scores to prospective employees. The test costs $35, but most schools are picking up the fee. Among schools that will use CLA + are the University of Texas system, Flagler College in Florida and Marshall University in West Virginia.
The CLA + is scored on the 1600-point scale once used by the SAT “because everyone is familiar with that,” said Chris Jackson, director of partner development at the Council for Aid to Education. Instead of measuring subject-area knowledge, it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication.
Educational Testing Service, which developed the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), is addressing the same need for a standardized non-GPA measure of academic skills with two new certificates for high scores on its Proficiency Profile, which assesses critical thinking, reading, writing and math:
Educational Testing Service was surprised to learn through a survey last spring that more than a quarter of businesses were using the GRE to evaluate job applicants, said David Payne, an ETS vice president.
We may be entering a new golden age of testing, Steve Sailer suggests — until these new tests reveal an even larger performance gap.
Deep microbes live long and slow:
Long-lived bacteria, reproducing only once every 10,000 years, have been found in rocks 2.5km (1.5 miles) below the ocean floor that are as much as 100 million years old.
Viruses and fungi have also been found.
Homeschooling and non-traditional schooling are becoming more popular in China:
According to the survey, among Chinese parents who choose to teach their kids at home, over half (54%) of them do so because they object to the teaching philosophy of traditional schools, which tends to be fairly rigid in nature. Others who choose to homeschool their kids think that in ordinary classrooms, the pace of lessons is too slow (10%) and that kids are not fully respected?7%). Another 7% said their kids were simply sick of traditional school life.
Still another 6% of parents, including a number of Christians, said they chose homeschooling for religious reasons, according to the survey.
The Hundred Years’ War brought us modern taxes and the modern state:
Prior to the Hundred Years’ War, it was expected that monarchs would finance their governments out of their own pockets, specifically, from money generated from their extensive landholdings. Imagine that the Bushes had to fund the federal government with money produced by their compound in Kennebunkport and Crawford ranch. Yes, monarchs could supplement their income with indirect taxes by tapping into the funds of all royal subjects, but this was rare and done only in exceptional, emergency circumstances. There was a medieval legal maxim that prevented permanent taxation (one that should be tattooed on the foreheads of all politicians): “With the cause having ended, the consequence must end.” That is, once the emergency was over, the tax must end too.
But that legal rule would be consigned to the dustbin of history with the Hundred Years War. As you might imagine, financing a war over generations is quite expensive. Paying for armies to pillage and rape for decades doesn’t come cheap. Thus, given the duration and intensity of the war, direct taxes became a routine part of life. It was as if governments now existed in a state of permanent emergency. To give you an example of the change, during the reign of Henry III of England, which lasted almost 50 years from 1216 to 1272, direct taxes were levied only 5 times, an average of once a decade. However, during the reign of Edward III of England, which also lasted 50 years from 1327 to 1377, direct taxes were levied 27 times, more than every 2 years.
So the next time you make out that check to the IRS, you can thank a war fought for the French crown 560 years ago.
No one in modern America becomes a criminal because he needs a crust of bread, like Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean, or because honest enterprise is too narrow to contain his genius, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. Nor do they turn to crime because guns are too easily available.
At least that’s what Weapons Man says while looking at the recent New York gun-running indictment:
Let’s take a wander through a subset of the fine fellows listed on this indictment, seeing as how they’re suddenly in trouble with the law. If they are upstanding folks corrupted by the easy availability of guns, the Mayor is probably right about the causes of crime. If they are career gangbangers and hardened prestoopniks, then we are probably right.
If the accused were all New Yorkers it would be very hard to gain any information on them; New York law favors criminals over victims and the public. Fortunately, the accused in the case are not all from New York; one is a Maryland citizen and some are from the Carolinas. There were separate SC and NC source rings, as well as the NY distribution ring. North Carolina in particular makes finding offender records easy. Just go to the search page. So we did. and we’ll make the NC defendants the experimental population. The accused are mostly young men and women (20 to 29 years old). What are the odds they have a criminal record so soon?
Pretty good, it turns out. Damn near unity.
The NC ring or “Walker Conspiracy” involved Walter Walker, who traveled from NC to NY with guns, and two rings of co-conspirators: one in New York on the demand side, and one in North Carolina in the supply side. This graphic shows a précis of the conspiracy. You’re welcome to reuse it if credit is given.
Tajammal Sharief Brown is a fine fellow, surely. His mom named him after that building in Indiastan or someplace; it’s not her fault she couldn’t spell it. Taj is 20, according to his inmate record in North Carolina, and he’s got not one but ten felony convictions (and one lonely misdemeanor). They should hook a generator up to the revolving door at his prison and let his comings and goings keep the lights on. To be sure, it did take the state a while to lock him up, even when he burst on the scene firing a gun in a robbery at age 16 or 17 or so (actually, he might have already had a sealed juvie record. So might all these guys).
Iesha Carmichael appears clean in NC. This makes sense as her function in the conspiracy was straw purchaser. Straws did not produce a significant number of the NC guns, at least not directly; except for 10 guns from Carmichael, they came to Walker through his felon associated.
Tarell Flow is a felon, but has not previously been incarcerated in his native NC. His one felony conviction was for possession of cannabis in 2010, but that’s not a felony until you get to 10 pounds, or for the charge he faced, between 50 and 2,000 pounds. He’s 26.
Even though Chris Hill is a resident of SC, he was involved in the NC ring, and Hill shows up in the NC offender data. He is a career violent criminal with two stints in prison for a half dozen felonies: burglaries, larcenies, and the ever popular shooting at people, as well as similar misdemeanors when he was down in the minor leagues. (Apparently “assault pointing gun” is a misdemeanor in NC, and he just got two months for that one).
Jeremiah D. McDougald is a career violent criminal, a bank robber whose decade-long rap sheet includes “Assault on female” and “Possession of Weapon of Mass Destruction.” He’s also known in NC as Jeremiah McKoy.
Cordero “Dero” Rollins s a career thief and burglar, with many felony and misdemeanor raps. He’s 25.
Christopher Seagraves has been going up the river for years, and always seems to be a felon in possession of a firearm when he goes before the court. At 26 he is a grand old man of court and cellblock. He was just released at the end of last April after serving a manslaughter rap, the latest of five felony convictions.
Walter Walker is a convicted felon, to be specific, a drug dealer.
When you think about it, it’s hardly a shock that the people operating an interstate conspiracy to smuggle guns to criminals are, well, criminals. We suspect that close analysis of the NY and SC réseaux of this little logistics project wound find that they, too, are mostly felons with a well-beten path to their states’ houses of corrections.
Why are any of these people out of prison?
More than half of all 2013 high school graduates in the U.S. took the ACT exam, which assesses proficiency in English, reading, math and science:
Nearly two-thirds of test-takers failed to achieve two or more of the four benchmarks for college readiness, and on the test’s science section, just over a third of students met the benchmark.
Nearly two-thirds of test-takers failed to achieve two or more of the four benchmarks for college readiness, and on the test’s science section, just over a third of students met the benchmark.
[...]
Nearly 75% of 2013 high school graduates who took the ACT college readiness exam aren’t fully prepared for college, according to a new report by the organization that administers the test.
This is only alarming if you think all or most high school graduates should be able to handle college-level work.
What is a mayor’s job? Ensuring freedom from fear, Myron Magnet says:
For New Yorkers of my generation, a keynote of our youth was fear. Deserted streets at night felt as ominous as a film noir, and if footsteps echoed behind you, they rang with menace. As you neared your apartment building’s entrance, your heart pounded as you fumbled to get your key at the ready, so you could unlock the front door and slam it behind you, before an unseen mugger could run up and push into the lobby behind you, as happened once to me — and I still don’t want to talk about it. This typical mugger’s trick befell one of my Morningside Heights neighbors, a bank computer programmer, much less lucky than I: his assailant didn’t just rob but also killed him.
Home, when you got there, was a mini-fortress. We had triple locks on our doors, and we were expert in the competing merits of the different varieties — the deadbolt, the Segal (though debates raged on the most pick-proof cylinder), and the top-of-the-line Fox Police Lock, with its four-foot steel bar wedging the door shut from a steel-lined hole in the floor. We had steel accordion-grates over any window that opened onto a fire escape. The fire department deemed them illegal, but our fear of death by fire was nil compared with our fear of death by housebreaker — all the more so, for me, when I found an inexplicable hatchet one morning on my seventh-floor fire escape. Still, all the locks in the world availed naught for a friend of mine mugged at gunpoint late one night on the Upper West Side. The robber emptied his wallet, saw from his ID that he lived just up Broadway, forced him to march there and unlock his door, tied him up, and stole everything he could bundle into the sheets stolen from his victim’s bed.
Late one night, unsettling sounds drew me to my apartment window. In the street below, a large black man fiercely swung a length of two-by-four at another, much smaller white man. Thwack! “Why are you doing this to me?” the victim cried. Thwack! “Why are you doing this to me?” The police came minutes after I called them, but a lot of damage can happen in a minute. Some years later, returning from the action thrills of the newest James Bond movie, I saw the flash of police-car lights and a crowd in the street outside my building, too thick to see what was happening. Entering my apartment, I found my wife and her sister with chairs drawn up to the dining-room window, watching spellbound as a rubber-gloved forensic cop bagged evidence, while the janitor of the building across the street hosed away the blood of a man just shot to death by the drug dealer he’d tried to cheat.
A New York–born friend says that for him, the emblem of those days was the drug gang he’d pass on his daily walk across the scraggly dust bowl that neglected Central Park had become. He’d give the dealers a hard, law-and-order stare as he strode by, as if to say, “You can’t do this in my park.” But they would return a stare so murderously malevolent that they soon cowed him into dropping his eyes as he passed. It’s their park now, he concluded ruefully. On the street, too, and especially on the subway, we all studiously avoided eye contact. Who knew? — some maniac or monster might interpret a look as a challenge and answer with a knife or a box cutter. As for the dirt-caked, tangle-bearded homeless people — mostly deinstitutionalized or never-institutionalized madmen — they might be harmless, but one of them would push somebody in front of a subway regularly enough that you couldn’t be sure. So they’d make the adrenaline flow.
When taking a walk, you knew to carry as little cash as you might need, but not so little that a mugger, enraged at the paucity of his take, would punish you with violence. The official police message was: Never resist, never talk back, or else the robber might decide that he had to hurt you. It was easy pickings for the thieves, while the law-abiding felt like eunuchs. Reader, you cannot imagine the secret, guilty glee of New Yorkers when four young men tried to mug a skinny nerd on the subway in 1984, and, saying that he had five dollars for each of them, Bernhard Goetz stood up, reached into his pocket — for his gun — and shot them all.
So you can picture my incredulity when I read a New York Times story reporting that young New Yorkers now don’t know what a mugging is.
Shane Parrish shares 34 insights from Nassim Taleb: