Read after burning

In the tropics

2012-01-23T19:52:00.000-08:00

Malaysia now. Been following the fam around on the Chinese New Year visitation rounds, wrangling my cousin's young children, and trying to catch up on all my missing sleep.

It's hot and humid out, and the abundant greenery is being regularly pelted with tropical rain. When I first stepped off the plane, it was like stepping back in time. Leaving the canned air on the plane for Sarawak's wet night air reminded me of late flights into Nigeria as a child. And my cousins' cousin's house, where we went for fireworks that night, smelled almost exactly like expat houses in Lagos: plasticky new furniture and aircon battling against the outside heat.

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that one tropical environment - and certain human adaptations to it - reminds me of another. There are few other commonalities; Malaysia is a quite different, and considerably more developed, place.

Self-contradicting economic development policies.

2012-01-21T23:39:00.000-08:00

Two days after my run-in with the TSA, President Obama went on television to promote foreign tourism to America.

We can’t wait to seize this opportunity. As I’ve said before, I will continue to work with Congress, states, and leaders in the private sector to find ways to move this country forward. But where they can’t act or won’t act, I will. Because we want the world to know that America is open for business. And that’s why I announced steps we’re taking to promote America and make it easier for tourists to come and visit.

Bahahahahahaha. I can only read this as some sort of a sick joke after my visit to the US descended into an absurdist nightmare thanks to Kafkaesque security procedures. I am, in theory, exactly the sort of tourist the US would want to attract - reasonably affluent, interested in seeing more of the country, and from a totally safe part of the world. But my experience with the TSA has virtually ensured that I will not be traveling inside the US if I can possibly avoid it.

Other than that, tourism jobs tend to be low-productivity and low-wage - not a particularly good option for economic development.

Degrading, pointless, and stupid

2012-01-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

On my way back to California from Washington DC's Dulles International Airport, I ran afoul of the Transportation Security Agency. It was far and away my worst travel experience - while I have previously been angered and inconvenienced by America's slowly-decaying and over-capacity aviation system and the security theater practiced within it, I had not been subject to the full absurd force of that system.

Long story short: I was stopped, repeatedly searched and interrogated by the TSA, and finally told that I could not fly without FedExing my baggage home and buying new clothing. Evidently I had come in contact with "explosive materials" at some unknown place in the course of my east coast visit. (Or, more likely, I'd come into contact with one of the long list of substances that will produce a false positive - from nitrate fertilizer to glycerol soap to organic honey.) Nothing else about me was even vaguely problematic or suspicious, but because I could not explain the residue, they did not allow me to fly.

Before telling the whole story, I'd like to point out how utterly implausible it would be for me to be actually doing anything harmful or terroristic. If I had actually been making bombs, or been around people making bombs, I would have taken some basic steps to decontaminate my luggage and clothing. Furthermore, I would certainly not have opted out of a backscatter x-ray scan, as doing so triggers an automatic explosives test. Nobody is that stupid - and if they were, they would be too dumb to successfully implement a plot.

Okay, the story.

After lunch with a friend, I took the Washington DC metro and a bus to Dulles airport. I was running slightly behind time (only an hour and a half before the flight), which made me somewhat nervous, but after getting my ticket and seeing the short line for TSA screening, I figured that I was home free. No such luck.

I went through the usual rigamarole and then opted out of the backscatter x-ray, which I am not comfortable with for health and privacy reasons. I had done the exact same thing the previous week on my flight from Oakland to New York, and had no reason to expect any problems. This is where everything started turning to custard.

After the pat-down, the blue-shirted TSA officer ran a swab over his gloved hands and plugged it into an explosives-detecting machine, just as had been done in Oakland. The machine beeped and spat out a bit of (blank) paper, so I assumed that it had just malfunctioned. I prepared for a second pat-down, but didn't see any problem. And then the second swab revealed a positive test for "explosive materials" on a second machine.

They informed me that they were going to have to keep me there for further testing. I asked the officers what types of testing would be required, and how long they would take, and was told in response that they could not tell me. After a ten- or fifteen-minute wait, two TSA officers in black polo shirts showed up - they were the explosives experts. They patted me down and swabbed me again, and oversaw the unpacking, examination, and testing of every bit of luggage and clothing I had on me. (I had only carry-on baggage.) They informed me - when they saw fit to tell me anything - that everything was testing positive.

At this point, I should say that I spent most of my time here - three hours or more - without my shoes or jacket. (It was a cold night in DC, and I was standing on a tile floor.) At no point did any of the officers ask if I was comfortable, if I needed a coat, blanket, or slippers, or offer me anything to eat or drink. They did not make even a cursory effort to ensure that I wasn't physically uncomfortable.

In between rounds of testing and baggage examination, officers intermittently questioned me about my employment, my travel plans, and about any possible exposure to explosives. They did not conduct any sort of systematic interview or interrogation - instead, they just asked seemingly random questions without telling me what information they were after.

I ended up getting the same questions from a number of different people, including blue-shirted and black-shirted TSA agents, DC police officers, and (at the very end) two on-site FBI agents. I gave a consistent (and honest) set of answers: I had formerly worked for the NZ government, and I was on my way to start a job as an economics consultant. I was in the US to visit friends and family, and had been visiting friends in NY, Philadelphia and DC over the previous six days. I had not tested positive for explosives in Oakland, but I thought that I might have been contaminated either in the Russian and Turkish Baths in Manhattan (a lot of steam, possibly carrying glycerol-based lotions or scents) or when I'd been in an apartment where some people were smoking a joint. Later on, my dad speculated that the bag could have been contaminated by some fertilizer in the back of his car. All of these possible explanations were discounted by the TSA agents, and I honestly told them that I couldn't account for every environment I'd been in.

About half an hour after the explosives testers showed up, several well-dressed men in suits showed up - apparently TSA agents slightly further up the chain. At no point in this process did any agent introduce himself (they were all male except for one of the FBI agents) to me or explain their role in the process - I was left to figure that out by myself. After a while, I asked one of the suited agents what the procedure was from here, and whether I would be able to make my flight. (At this point, roughly 40 minutes remained until boarding.) He told me that he could not answer either of those questions - they were matters for people higher up the chain to decide. I also attempted to ask what they needed to know in order to clear me for flight or deny me from flying. He also refused to answer this question.

The suited men conferred with the other agents, and then had me and my belongings moved into a private screening room, where I was patted down and tested yet again in the presence of one of them. I was then left in the room without further explanation. A while later, a number of police officers showed up, and repeated the intermittent questioning that TSA officers had previously done. They would typically ask a question, go away, and then come back at random times with another question. My ID documents - US passport, NZ and California driver's licenses - were scrutinized. The police officers photographed me "for their report". (What report? Going to whom? They wouldn't answer.)

After this, the suited TSA agents got on the phone with unspecified higher-ups - allegedly, someone who could render a decision. While they were on the phone, my flight's departure time passed by, and then some. Nobody had explained to me what would happen if I was cleared to fly - would I be able to reschedule my flight? - or if I were denied clearance - would I have to buy a new ticket? could I try again tomorrow? - although there were some vague reassurances that I could rebook. (You may have noticed a consistent pattern here - i.e. they consistently refused to communicate important information to me, and did not explain anything about the process.)

At some point after this, they ran me through the backscatter x-ray machine - the very device that I'd been trying to avoid in the first place. After a bit of consultation, they turned me around and spent a quite long time patting down my back, and in particular my left shoulder-blade. I have no idea why.

The phone calls to higher-ups went on for almost two hours after I missed my flight. (I didn't have access to a phone or watch, so I'm not clear on the timing of all of this.) At the end of the process, the lead on-site agent told me that "because this incident happened in Washington DC, this had to go all the way up the chain - not quite to the President, but probably the level below that." I was not informed of the process.

After waiting for a considerable time without any information, I asked if I could get my phone - which was low on batteries - and call my parents. The TSA agent said he'd have to ask the police; the police said that it was the TSA's decision. They let me make the call. (Another thing you should have noticed by now: The people on-scene consistently either (a) did not know what they needed to do in this situation and what their roles and responsibilities were, or (b) were under instructions to not tell me.) I called them up; they were concerned and asked for a full explanation. I explained the situation, and my dad asked to speak to a TSA officer. They were willing to do that and they discussed the situation. (At this point, my dad put forth the "bag of fertilizer" explanation, but this did not seem to interest them.)

At long last, I was told that they could not clear me for flight: they "could not resolve" the explosives residue to their satisfaction. In other words, because I could not satisfactorily explain something that I had not been aware of, they couldn't let me fly. They told me that I would be able to rebook with Southwest - something that proved to be impossible as their counter had already been closed - and try again tomorrow. I then attempted to find out what I would need to do in order to fly the following day. After getting through the initial thicket of non-responses, I determined that the best thing to do would be to: (a) ship all of my luggage, except for my laptop and phone, via FedEx, and (b) buy a new set of clothing and thoroughly clean everything with rubbing alcohol. I had to do this in the middle of the night, without transportation and in some strange Virginian suburb.

I was unable to get any clear information about what the TSA would do with this incident report, or whether I would be put on some sort of a watch-list for future travel. All I was told was that I "would know I was on a watch-list if I was pulled aside for extra screening at the airport the next day." How reassuring. I also got some contact details and a half-page "comment form" that I could send to the TSA.

At that point, the two FBI agents showed up to interview me for their report. (What report? Going to whom? They wouldn't answer.) I was on the phone with my parents at the time, explaining the situation and trying to get re-booked, so my dad asked to speak to them first, which they agreed to. They asked the same basic questions that the TSA and police asked, and I gave the same (still-true) answers. They were fairly amiable, and ended up getting me a bottle of water and directing me towards a shuttle.

Up until this point, I had been extremely calm. (The TSA and FBI both commented on this.) I had played it cool, been reasonable, complied with requests, and asked politely about the process. But it was a massive strain. After the FBI agents left, I essentially broke down, and spent the next four hours alternating between crying, calling my parents, and following their instructions on how to post my luggage and buy new clothing. I could interact with people, and carry out a basic plan, but if I wasn't doing that I would break down again.

I've reported all of this in a relatively unemotional style, but I should be absolutely clear: This was a bewildering, frustrating, and ultimately humiliating process. While I found the agents on hand courteous and professional, the process itself was dehumanizing. I can laugh off a lot of trouble - and I have! - but this experience was extremely traumatic. Seeing all of my personal belongings disassembled - literally, in the case of my cell-charger - and getting repeatedly felt up by anonymous agents was shocking and disturbing, and I paid for repressing my feelings.

Ultimately, however, I was an innocent person being asked to explain something that I was not aware of. When I couldn't, the bureaucratic process penalized me. Regardless of the politeness of individual agents, it was a Kafkaesque, nightmarish process. I spent the afternoon cold, hungry, and with no idea of what was required of me. I never wanted to go through the process again.

Unfortunately, I did go through it again, the next day. I arrived three hours before my flight, got through security - complete with an apparently routine explosives test on my hands - and was all set to board and get the hell out of this bad dream. But as it turned out, there were TSA agents performing "last-minute" "random" checks at the gate. I was pulled aside and tested for explosives. In spite of my precautions, my computer and cell phone still triggered an alert.

I was assured, as I had been the previous night, that the TSA would respond quickly to ensure that I could make my flight. No hope of flying, in other words. They took their time to get to the gate, and rather than calling the agents from the previous night to get the story, repeated a number of basic tests and questions. I watched my flight leave without me, and started crying again. I was still crying when they pulled me aside to do yet another invasive pat-down. (I briefly considered stopping, but I decided that I didn't feel like it, and hoped that it would at least trouble their conscience a little bit. In any case, it's probably not the first time they've touched the genitals of an obviously distressed US citizen.)

As before, no explanations of anything procedural were offered, and I was cleared to fly after half an hour or forty minutes. Evidently I was no longer considered a threat - in spite of the fact that nothing had changed about me other than my clothes and most of my personal belongings. I told all of the agents on scene that I thought that their procedures were disgraceful and humiliating, and strongly implied that I thought they were pointless and ill-conceived. And then waited another four hours for my flight.

The connection in Chicago was delayed for a further two hours due to winds in San Francisco, and I eventually got home. Now, a day later, I'm finishing this while en route to Malaysia. When I started typing up this report, I was still mainly in shock. Now I've had a chance to process it a little bit, to start identifying the most egregious bits. To put it simply, I'm enraged and disgusted with my government. Almost nothing that was done to me actually made air travel any safer. The humiliation, frustration, and significant personal expense I incurred were largely pointless. Their chief effect was to give me a visceral taste of a phenomenon I was intellectually aware of. We've constructed an unreasonable and unaccountable security bureaucracy, and begun to apply it arbitrarily against ordinary citizens.

On the plus side, I now have a far deeper understanding of the term "Kafkaesque".

In-joke

2012-01-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

Fractals. Self-similarity. The suspicion that I'm existing in a joke being told by someone else in the future.

Dreaming, not dead

2012-01-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

Water spilled on a rock turns into a dire premonition: a thing of tentacles, dark pulpy mass at their head, slithering down into our waking life...

As I said, it was a dream, of dark, dripping stone, of a fractured voice whose vowels were impenetrable...

Other worlds are possible

2011-12-26T16:43:00.000-08:00

And in fact, we're going to be living in one sooner or later.

Currently, we have an economic system based on growth and the private accumulation of profits. (I don't think that it's sufficient to describe this as a "free market" system. For one thing, it's possible to have market exchange without either growth or profits. For another, large parts of our economy aren't governed by markets but by central planning systems of some sort - from government provision of public goods to corporations' internal allocation of resources.) However, this can't continue indefinitely.

In order to produce things (tangible or intangible), we must consume resources: energy, raw materials, food, clean air, etc. Although we have made significant gains in efficiency over the last several hundred years, and made some important moves towards better recycling and reuse of nonrenewable resources, additional production still requires additional resources. On a finite planet, the resources needed for further growth will have eventually run dry. At that point, our economic system will collapse.

[This doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Looking at the "Energy use per $1,000 GDP (constant 2005 PPP)" series from the World Development Indicators, it looks as though worldwide energy intensity of production fell by 25% from 1980 to 2009. Unfortunately, world GDP grew by 54% over the same period, so total energy use increased nonetheless. If those numbers were reversed - i.e. if resource efficiency of GDP was increasing faster than GDP growth, we could continue growing after hitting our resource limits. But even under that scenario, we'd eventually be constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, which imply that increasing order and complexity in any physical system is only possible if increasing amounts of energy are put into the system from outside it.]

These are not contestable matters; they are physical principles. However, there is a legitimate debate over how close we are to our planetary limits to growth. The matter hinges on judgments of two somewhat uncertain matters: First, how much we will be able to improve resource efficiency (e.g. by moving to renewable energy and biofuels), and second, how long we have until exhausting the planet's resources and climate. I am inclined to believe lower-bound estimates - which predict sinificant shortfalls within five or ten years - as overshooting our resource limits will have catastrophic and unpredictable consequences.

CUNY graduate student Peter Frase has written an excellent article laying out four possible economic futures for humanity. I recommend reading it. It follows up on his earlier blog post on the "anti-Star Trek economy", which would maintain current property rights regimes even after producing things had become free or arbitrarily cheap. (Some sectors of our economy already resemble this scenario - e.g. it's possible to infinitely duplicate a movie or record for almost nothing, yet intellectual property rights regimes have been maintained.)

But rather than repeat Frase's whole argument, I would rather quote an excerpt or two and then send you there. I think he does an excellent job laying out the broad choices that we will be presented with in the near future:

Much of the literature on post-capitalist economies is preoccupied with the problem of managing labor in the absence of capitalist bosses. However, I will begin by assuming that problem away, in order to better illuminate other aspects of the issue. This can be done simply by extrapolating capitalism’s tendency toward ever-increasing automation, which makes production ever-more efficient while simultaneously challenging the system’s ability to create jobs, and therefore to sustain demand for what is produced...

Taken to its logical extreme, this dynamic brings us to the point where the economy does not require human labor at all. This does not automatically bring about the end of work or of wage labor, as has been falsely predicted over and over in response to new technological developments. But it does mean that human societies will increasingly face the possibility of freeing people from involuntary labor. Whether we take that opportunity, and how we do so, will depend on two major factors, one material and one social. The first question is resource scarcity: the ability to find cheap sources of energy, to extract or recycle raw materials, and generally to depend on the Earth’s capacity to provide a high material standard of living to all. A society that has both labor-replacing technology and abundant resources can overcome scarcity in a thoroughgoing way that a society with only the first element cannot. The second question is political: what kind of society will we be? One in which all people are treated as free and equal beings, with an equal right to share in society’s wealth? Or a hierarchical order in which an elite dominates and controls the masses and their access to social resources?

There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism.

Comparative Ramones and Misfits

2011-12-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

Unsure of original source, but this is one of the two pie charts I will unconditionally condone. (TLJ is responsible for the other.) Click to expand.

Occupy militarism

2011-12-20T18:30:00.000-08:00

I've been reading lots about the Occupy movement in the US, but I've resisted commenting on it as (a) the NZ franchise is relatively small and not particularly radical by comparison and (b) I can't say much of importance that's not already being said.

I was interested to note that the West Coast occupations have moved to adopt port and infrastructure closures as one of their key tactics, starting with the general strike in Oakland and moving on to a more general port shutdown. I'll call it a case of being rapidly proven right - as at the beginning of September, I wrote two posts on port closures as a bargaining tool for working-class movements and, relatedly, the space-time of Wal-Mart. Underlying those analyses was a sense that infrastructure and distribution facilities, rather than production facilities, have become the "strategic spaces" for activism. (In short: At its height, the United Auto Workers was the leading edge of the American labor movement, as it controlled key production spaces. Since then, increasing world trade has decreased the power of industrial unions while simultaneously increasing the importance of trade infrastructure. Of course, in small trading countries like NZ, working-class movements have always sought to establish their hegemony by controlling fuel and ports - witness the 1951 waterfront dispute.)

Anyway.

I read an interesting article yesterday on the tactical innovations of the Occupy Portland group, who have been running rings around the police lately. When faced with eviction, they have turned the occupation into a mobile picket, meandering through the streets in an effort to either tire the police out or frustrate them into brutality. It's an interesting article: half of it seems to react to the political effect of mass media, while the other half takes us back to the Paris barricades of the 1800s. I thought that the language used in the article was quite revealing:

The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old- the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.

Heavy infantry is a group of soldiers marching in a column or a phalanx that are armed with weaponry for hand to hand, close quarters combat. Heavy infantry function as a unit, not individual soldiers. Their operational strength is dependent upon maintaining the integrity of that unit. Riot police are heavy infantry. They will always form a line and advance as a unit.

Light infantry are armed with ranged weapons for assault from a distance. Light infantry operate as individuals that are free to roam at a distance and fire upon the opposition with ranged weapons. Cops firing tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, bean bag rounds, etc. are light infantry. They remain to the rear of the phalanx of riot cops (heavy infantry) and depend upon the riot cops maintaining a secure front and flanks to provide them a secure area of operations.

Protesters function fluidly as either light or heavy infantry. Their mass, because it is lacking in organization, functions as a phalanx, having no flanks or rear. Lack of organization gives that mass the option of moving in whichever direction it feels like, at any given time. If protesters all move to the right, the entire group and supporting officers has to shift to that flank. While the protesters can retreat quickly, the police can only advance as fast as their light infantry, supporting staff can follow and maintain a secure rear (if the mass of protesters were to run to the next block over and quickly loop around to the rear of the riot cops, the organization of the cops would be reduced to chaos). If that police cannot assemble with a front to oppose protesters, they are useless. The integrity of that tactic is compromised, and unable to maintain internal organization, the cops revert to individuals engaging in acts of brutality, which eventually winds up on the evening news and they lose the battle regardless of whether they clear the park or not.

Until the invocation of the evening news in the last sentence, this excerpt could have been drawn from, say, Friedrich Engels' meditations on the tactics employed in Paris uprisings, and the effect of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris, which replaced maze-like slum alleyways with boulevards that would allow artillery to be deployed against urban uprisings. I'm not sure whether or not this linguistic echo is of any importance; whether it suggests anything deeper about our historical moment.

Paranoid time pt. 2

2011-12-14T02:24:00.000-08:00

Finished Gravity's Rainbow after a months-long transit through its weird pages. I can already tell that I will be rereading it relatively soon.

This passage, which arrived at the beginning of the last surge of reading, resonated:

Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination - not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge....

I tell people that to the extent that I am a paranoid, I have arrived there through literature rather than the usual vectors, religion and politics. I have learned paranoia (of the form described above) from Julio Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, Warren Ellis, Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss. And sometimes research is sometimes a little bit too much like insanity for me to be totally at ease in its presence.

Idyllic summer Sundays

2011-12-10T22:45:00.000-08:00

Wake up somewhere in between early and late; hang around making pancakes before going to buy loads of juicy oranges at the farmers' market. Settle in for a bit of motorcycle maintenance and random dithering around in the afternoon. Eat the ciabatta that I baked the previous day; decide that it's the best I've yet made. Drink mate. Go down to the harbor for a quick pre-dinner swim, encountering jellyfish and a stingray in the process. Sit on the beach for a while reading, then motorcycle back home and boast about the excellence of my day on the internet.

Speaking of boasting, Mammoth has posted another chunk of my MA. Go check it out - it's on Dharavi and the multiplicities of globalization.

The purpose of the DRP is to globalize Mumbai; to create the sorts of “internationally competitive” living spaces and commercial areas required by globally-mobile businesses and workers in the “knowledge economy”. But this program ignores Dharavi’s actually-existing ties to the broader urban and global economies. The slum houses a wide range of informal enterprises that are integrated into globally disaggregated assembly lines through subcontracting arrangements. While we tend to think of slums as a form of low-income housing, Dharavi’s economic role is at least as important. Its living spaces often double as informal and unregulated production spaces – like many slums, it is a “spontaneous” form of mixed-use design [13].

DSGibberish

2011-12-05T23:39:00.000-08:00

I don't ordinarily comment on NZ politics, and I'm going to be (barely) breaking that rule today. Fortunately, it's much more of a point about economic forecasting.

Via a couple of sources, I see that the Treasury has downgraded its future growth forecasts in light of the impending Eurozone crackup. This will of course affect NZ's future economic state - and in particular its fiscal state, which depends rather heavily upon an as-yet-illusory post-recession surge of growth:

Prime Minister John Key has shrugged off Treasury's cut in the growth forecast saying it is ''not overly dramatic''.

Treasury has lowered its growth forecasts from 3.4 per cent to 3 per cent for 2013 and warned of cuts to government revenue as the European crisis rumbles on.

Dim-Post is fulminating against this apparent cock-up in a rather uncharacteristic fashion:

Right. So just to recap: Treasury made these very optimistic growth predictions in the 2011 budget, and everyone said they were delusional. But Treasury stood by their forecasts, and a month out from the election they repeated their insanely optimistic outlook in the PREFU.

The government and opposition parties based all of their fiscal policies on the Treasury forecasts. Both main parties claimed they’d get the country back into surplus in a few years, because of all the additional revenue from all that economic growth. Jobs weren’t a big topic of debate in this election, because Treasury promised us that all the growth would create 170,000 new jobs!

Now here we are, just over a week after the election and whaddya know? Treasury has announced they were too optimistic. Growth is going to be less than they said it would a month ago – even though nothing substantive has changed since then. The European crisis didn’t just emerge on Sunday the 27th.

This looks an awful lot like a government department conspiring to defraud the country during an election campaign. If it ain’t that then it’s gross incompetence.

Coincidentally, I just took a look at the Treasury's recent history of economic forecasting. I suspected, with moderately good reason, that their forecasting models aren't any good at predicting shocks to the economy. e.g. financial crises, which have been all the rage lately. My suspicion was that Treasury forecasts had run off the rails in recent years.

It was fairly simple to check this - I plugged forecasts from 2000 to 2011 into a spreadsheet along with GDP growth statistics from those years. (Figures from Stats NZ National Accounts tables and the Treasury. Underlying data available here in a Google Spreadsheet.) Played around with the numbers a bit, and got some interesting graphs (in hideous form, due to the fact that OpenOffice's graphing software was coded by Satan):

This graph is pretty straightforward and tells a quite interesting story. The black line is real GDP growth. As you can see, the purple line - Treasury's May estimates of GDP growth in the current year - is a fairly accurate forecast of growth. So Treasury can figure out what's happening at the present moment. Yay.

The dashed green line - which represents Treasury's forecasts for the following year - seems to be a reasonably good predictor of actual growth. It tends to get the overall momentum right but often predict the wrong level of growth. Meanwhile, the remaining two dotted lines - forecasts for the year after next, and the year after that - are laughably wrong. In 2006 and 2007, Treasury didn't predict the recession that would occur in 2009. (Looking behind the scenes, this might actually be a case of garbage-in-garbage-out. DSGE models tend to assume that the economy will continue functioning at a certain "equilibrium" level of growth unless perturbed by outside factors, and that it will return to the growth trend relatively quickly after any disturbances. I suspect that this means that it will almost always predict around 3% growth two years hence.)

Also of interest is the following scatter plot, which shows the relationship between predictions made in the May forecast and the December update:

In short, the two tend to agree closely on present-year growth estimates, as shown by the tight scatter around the trend line for the blue points. However, there's not a very strong relationship between the two forecasts of growth in the following year - look at the much wider variation around the trend line for the purple points.

And May and December forecasts for expected growth two years hence - i.e. this year's forecasts for growth in 2013 - are almost totally uncorrelated. There are often large variations between the two forecasts; this one was only noticed due to the potential for economic crisis. That is what is at work here - a forecasting model with a rather poor recent record of predictions beyond the following year - not a Treasury conspiracy. Dim-Post has missed the point, in spectacular fashion.

Stockton

2011-12-05T00:47:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a bit about edge cities and exurbs lately. In early 2009, I began to suspect that there were deep connections between the latest (last?) frontier of suburban fringe development, rising oil prices, and a housing-bubble-led financial crisis. To the extent that oil prices are going to stay perpetually high, the American model of dispersed urban development subsidized by cheap gasoline will not be viable. To the extent that our current financial system is built upon (speculative) housing investment, it will not be able to resume its normal (marginally non-parasitic) role without suburban growth.

In other words, it's not an accident that the housing market crashed when oil prices rose drastically in 2008.

The NY Times had a very good article on "the death of the fringe suburbs" the other week. However, it roots this phenomenon in changing consumer tastes much more than resource scarcity:

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

I'm not totally comfortable with this analysis, but there it is on the op-ed page of a major paper.

Meanwhile, Alex Schafran at Polis Blog has an excellent response that examines the unpleasant racial dimension of foreclosure in the Bay Area's fringe. He takes us through an impressive array of data that shows that African-Americans spent the last 20 years migrating out of the inner city and into outer suburbs that are now consumed with foreclosure and cut off from cheap transit. I won't bogart his maps but I do want to quote his conclusion:

I agree that sprawl was a bad idea, that growth on the fringe helped bring the economy down and that urban centers are the heart of our global future. We've known this since suburbanization began in earnest two generations ago. But we failed to stop it.

Now the "fringe" in Northern California alone is home to millions. And in the 24 Bay Area cities in the 50/5000 club, almost half a million of the 850,000 residents are not white. These are generally hard-working families who followed the same suburban path the white masses went down a generation or two ago — except much farther from city centers and with worse debt, less job security and no real mass transit. This is a generational raw deal hatched at every scale of our urban development.

The foreclosure crisis is a national tragedy that hand-wringing about the failures of sprawl will not undo. Predicting the "death of the fringe suburb" is reminiscent of the harmful language used to describe cities in the days before urban renewal, when we labeled the neighborhoods of the working classes and communities of color as "slums" and "ghettos," bulldozing what we could and redlining the rest. This massive and exceptionally racist failure of urban policy in the post-war era laid the groundwork for this crisis more than a half century ago. While we were busy destroying inner cities and building nice suburbs, we denied African Americans the right to move out as well.

Sprawl is now a lived reality for the exceptionally diverse community once called the American middle class. We must deal with what we have wrought where we have wrought it, not call for a demise that would heap further misery upon communities that certainly do not deserve it, no matter how much we wish it had happened some other way.

The good news is that we can prevent the slum-ification of the Stocktons of the Bay if we choose to. There are deep problems with the urban design of most of these new suburban developments. (I grew up down the road, after all.) They're amenable to automobility and social isolation in some pretty fundamental ways: difficult to walk around, difficult to get from home to work to school to shops, difficult to put efficient transit networks through.

However, if you buy my underlying analysis - that rising oil prices, rather than changing tastes, have thrown these areas into crisis - it's possible to design interventions to halt or reverse their economic decline. So you'd be looking at doing some pretty obvious things - extending full BART service to Stockton, densifying downtown areas and supporting future mixed-use development, fostering bus networks and cycleways, etc - to reduce oil-dependence in the exurbs.

Pure gold

2011-12-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

BW alerts me to a brilliant piece of NY Times travel journalism on Wellington:

Back on Cuba Street while the dance troupe was still shaking those leg warmers, we struck up a conversation with a truck driver who paints and a construction worker who makes films. (In the less-modest United States, they’d be a painter who drives a truck and a filmmaker who works construction.) Both avowed that Wellington was by far the most avant-garde city in all of New Zealand, and to prove it, they decided to find us the kind of cool bar that could be found only here.

First, they tried Havana Bar off a side street in two connected colorful, Cuban-style shacks, but despite its lively atmosphere and available tables our friends immediately pronounced it “dead.” We finally ended up at a place called Mighty Mighty, where the band was playing psychobilly rock. We perused the drinks menu, which was hidden in a vintage record sleeve, and observed the wildly decked-out patrons, some dressed in afro wigs and others in lederhosen.

My wife and I looked at each other, and then at our impromptu guides, their point well and truly made: Wellington is cool. We get it now.

It's hard to tell where to start with this over-the-top monstrosity. The city isn't that mind-blowing, although the Mighty Mighty is as good a bar as you'll find anywhere.

Also, I just want to highlight this bit out again:

...we struck up a conversation with a truck driver who paints and a construction worker who makes films. (In the less-modest United States, they’d be a painter who drives a truck and a filmmaker who works construction.)

I think what they actually just discovered is not that NZ is down-to-earth but that NYC is pretentious...

An avian incident

2011-12-01T02:37:00.000-08:00

The sun is shining in Wellington, and the city's doing its best approximation of summer, so I went down to take a swim in the harbor. Water's still chilly and everyone thinks I'm insane for doing so. But it was good.

After getting out, I lay down to eat an orange and read some Pynchon (having rediscovered my momentum with Gravity's Rainbow). Because I had stayed out too late dancing on Saturday to wake up in time for the Sunday market, I've had to settle for distinctly inferior supermarket oranges this week. They're mealier and have nightmarishly thick rinds. So as I was eating the orange, I kept having to peel off bits of rind that I had failed to separate in my initial peeling.

A flock of seagulls accumulated downwind of me. Although seagulls don't actually eat orange rind, they curiously pecked at each scrap I tossed away before losing interest. The number of gulls steadily rose in spite of the complete lack of edible rewards. They started squabbling over premium positions and chasing each other around. Eventually, they went airborne, and I had a cloud of three or four gulls flapping against the stiff northerly in a holding pattern above my head. Eying up my orange with their beady prehistoric eyes.

Point that thing somewhere else

2011-11-26T18:01:00.000-08:00

Saw The Clean play on Friday... they melted my face. In the last few years, I've seen some really good performances by reunited punk bands from the 80s, but this was undoubtedly the best. (Better than Gang of Four, better than Wire.) They opened up with a weird, jamming version of At The Bottom and got better from there. Reunion bands tend to fall into one of two traps: either they lurch through out-of-practice renditions of their hits, or they play new material that's unfamiliar to most of the audience. The Clean avoided both. They revived searing numbers like Point That Thing Somewhere Else and Fish, updating them in small ways to fit alongside later, more melodic songs like 2009's In the Dreamlife U Need a Rubber Soul. And yeah, as it was a 30th anniversary gig for the reborn Flying Nun label, they played Tally Ho! as an encore.

So I liked it.

Because they were playing on the eve of the election, they threw out a few comments about politics. They won't have been happy with the result, and nor am I. But regardless of how the voting went down, I'm encouraged to know that people like the Kilgour brothers - and Chris Knox, who can't speak these days but nonetheless expresses similar views - are basically on the same page as me, politically. They're the ones who know how to create new things rather than just stripping them off and selling them down.

Go out and vote

2011-11-25T18:26:00.000-08:00

New Zealand elections are today and I voted a bit earlier. Due to one of those sensible but weird quicks of NZ law, I can't legally publish anything that might (a) influence other people's vote or (b) speculate on the outcome, so I won't.

I'm often - or even usually - quite unhappy with the result of elections, but I always enjoy voting. Hannah Arendt once observed that in a representative democracy, the people get to vote one day every two (or three, etc) years, before handing over democracy to their elected representatives. That is a bit of an oversimplification: democracy doesn't begin or end at the ballot box, and citizens' influence over their government can be exercised continually and in multitudinous fashions. Nevertheless, a vote, and a day to vote in, is not something to be taken lightly.

"I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet."

Graven mistake

2011-11-25T05:14:00.000-08:00

I have unwittingly committed myself to a lifetime of explaining Moby-Dick to people...

Debt-citizenship and scalar politics

2011-11-21T02:53:00.000-08:00

From an excellent article by Alex Gourevitch on debt-financed citizenship:

We have been living in a society where debts, rather than rights, have been the major means for accessing basic social goods like housing, education, and health care. That social model was built around the assumption that while real incomes stagnated and the state did not directly provide many basic goods through universal entitlements, cheap credit would do the trick instead. High finance was inextricably intertwined with the privileges of citizenship. This was not a very good social model.

One of the key ideas around which my master's thesis turned was the idea of the "rescaling of political economy". I meant a number of things by this, but I think two are especially crucial. First, economic activity has been reorganized. Rather than being organized within the nation-state, it flows across territorial boundaries and agglomerates within cities and regions. Second, and relatedly, citizenship and political rights are also slipping out of their old national containers. (You wouldn't necessarily conclude this by looking at the erection of border fences and the tightening of immigration requirements in many places. But consider it another way - the fact that these policies exist is in itself an admission that nation-states are failing to contain citizenship.)

Quite often, as Gourevitch writes, the guarantees of citizenship are not being administered directly, by territorial states, but indirectly through interventions in financial markets. He discusses those specific interventions, and the problems with them, more thoroughly than I want to here. I want to talk about housing.

As part of the post-World War II political settlement, most governments committed to the idea that access to housing was a right that should accrue to all citizens. (This was written into that most technocratically utopian of documents, the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.) Most rich countries then proceeded to deliver housing directly to their citizens - in part by subsidizing private home-ownership (e.g. through low-interest mortgages from state-owned mortgage providers) and in part by constructing state housing. A bevy of laws and regulations were developed to increase access to housing. Low-income countries also deployed similar measures, but they were not as broadly successful. (As this failure coincided with the start of mass urbanization in much of the developing world, it would have far-reaching consequences.)

In short, in the post-WWII political economy, the right of citizens to housing was totally circumscribed within the nation-state. Compare that to the situation today.

In the US, at least, home ownership is the predominant means of housing people. (It is also at the center of a decade-long financial bubble and bust, and the predominant means of saving for retirement, but let's not go there right now.) Both parties have encouraged the expansion of home ownership, and the federal government subsidizes mortgage interest payments (through tax deductions) in order to make it more attractive to people.

Fundamentally, however, buying a home requires citizens to interact not with the state but with large banks. As part of the drive towards debt-financed citizenship, social housing has fallen by the wayside and federal mortgage lenders have been privatized (although not without the withdrawal of an implicit government guarantee). In order to get a mortgage, you have to have a good credit rating, which means building up a good "credit history" by steadily borrowing and repaying money on credit cards.

In other words, you don't truly have the right to housing - remember, a fundamental human right - anymore unless you have regularly transacted with banks (and indebted yourself to them). What a weird situation! There are, effectively, invisible cables stringing together the most local of affairs (finding a home) with complex, global financial markets. This is the rescaling of the political economy. It's happening within your home and there are protests going on about it in most major cities.

Sonicly speaking

2011-11-18T22:02:00.000-08:00

I blame Tom. But Rob Tyner had a hellova voice.

Voting criteria

2011-11-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

As usual, SF author Charlie Stross has a way with words:

I just want a party to vote for whose three guiding principles are (a) maximize individual liberty, (b) minimize the Gini coefficient, and (c) protect the commons. Yes, I am aware that these three goals are orthogonal and often conflict with one another: that's why it requires an ongoing process of negotiation rather than an ideologically-driven damn-the-torpedoes race to the goal.

These are, basically, the criteria on which I vote. Three additional thoughts:

1. I have a more expansive (and somewhat different) notion of individual liberty than many people. I care more about the ability to think, associate, express oneself, and access information freely than I do about the ability to have a low marginal tax rate. As I've written before, I find intellectual and social choice far more compelling and enlivening than consumer choice.

2. The Gini coefficient measures the level of economic inequality in a society. It's important to reduce because there is quite a lot of evidence that higher levels of inequality produce worse outcomes for everyone - in terms of health, crime, happiness, and even economic growth and financial crises. It's easier to have a decent society when there are not large gaps between rich and poor.

3. The commons - a term that includes things like a clean environment, science and knowledge, public space, and infrastructure - are important because we all benefit from having access to them, but we cannot individually own them. Safeguarding them requires a government that is willing and able to keep them in trust for us and future generations.

Books that kill you

2011-11-15T00:26:00.000-08:00

The other week I met a woman who worked at Booktrack, a startup business that makes ebooks with associated audio tracks. She was, essentially, composing incidental music for entire books - the current project being chunks of the New Testament.

I had heard of this earlier, and predictably dismissed it as a notion that was unlikely to catch on. (Of course, I often listen to music while reading, but I prefer fortuitous coincidences to design.) And I'm still not sure about the whole deal.

I don't think it's ambitious enough. A truly immersive reading experience would go far beyond mere visuals and audio. There is the potential to create books that affect your physical surroundings, your relations with others, or to drive you insane or even kill you. (To the extent that books do not already serve these functions.)

I am thinking here of Milorad Pavic's The Dictionary of the Khazars, which contained mention of a book (also entitled The Dictionary of the Khazars) that was printed in poisonous ink. As it was read, the poison seeped in through readers' skin; after a certain number of pages, they died.

(The book itself had a curious death: It fell into the hands of an illiterate man, who tore out its pages to skim fat off his soup. As he limited his daily poison intake this way, he destroyed the book without dying. And, of course, attempts to reconstruct the Dictionary were repeatedly thwarted by devils, which brings a whole new meaning to an immersive reading experience - but I digress.)

We could imagine constructing similar, although slightly more innocuous, books. For example, imagine reading a book impregnated with hallucinogens: as you read, your brain functioning would change and react to the text in unexpected ways. Using modern pharmacological techniques, it could even be possible to layer a book with multiple drugs that acted (as the incidental music being composed by the Booktrack people did) to emphasize certain passages or add emotional tone to certain passages.

Of course, the irony here is that we could not manufacture such a thing in digital format. Paper itself would have to be the delivery mechanism.

The history of straws

2011-11-11T20:29:00.000-08:00

I ran into this infographic the other day. (Full version here, although it's not really fantastic.) For the most part, the story it tells is well-known to me. But take a look at 2,400BC, when ancient Sumerians invented the drinking straw in order to filter out particulate matter from their brew.

This means that my intermittent obsession with drinking beer through straws (and devising longer and more complex straws for this purpose) has some historical logic to it.

System D

2011-11-05T21:34:00.000-07:00

There is a lot more that could and should be said about this article on the growth of informal economies. It's a basically optimistic article, and I'm not sure optimism is an entirely appropriate response, as informal employment is growing in large part because economic distress is on the rise all around the world.

But on the other hand, the whole thing has got some sort of interesting energy to it. It's always worth remembering that there is more ingenuity and creativity on any level of human society than can be contained by our social structures.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

On Greek democracy

2011-11-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

So the big economic news this week is that Greece - which is suffering from both a severe recession and extremely high levels of public debt - was offered a bailout from the EU, on the condition of carrying out further painful spending cuts and tax increases. The Greek government at first accepted the bailout package, then reversed course and promised to hold a referendum on the unpopular measure, then reversed course again and canceled the referendum under pressure from other European countries.

(That's the summary version; I'm not going to bother finding all the links or getting all the facts exactly right.)

So why do we care about this?

A lot of the reporting on this issue has focused on the economic crisis at hand. It asks whether the euro (and the European economic institutions underpinning it/dependent on it) is now more likely to break up, and whether we can expect systemic chaos as a result. But there are in fact two crises at hand - an economic one, sure, but also a political crisis. And to a significant degree, Greece has to choose between the two: in other words, it has to decide whether it wants to destroy the euro, or destroy the legitimacy of its government (and possibly Greek democracy in general).

This situation is partially analogous to that of Argentina following its 2001 financial crisis, as some of the economic factors are the same, and there is a similar risk of the total delegitimization of representative government. But it's got much wider implications.

First, the economic side. Without getting into the fine details, the problem is not simply that Greece has a relatively costly (and poorly funded due to widespread tax corruption) government, or even that it is in a deeper recession than other European countries. The problem is that it has these problems while sharing a currency with Germany.

In extremely broad terms, Greece has found that its societywide cost of production - the amount that it spends to maintain its workforce - is too high. Wages in the public sector are high, wages in the private sector are effectively subsidized by widespread tax dodging, and the retirement age is quite low. The overall effect is that the country's economically uncompetitive - companies don't want to manufacture things there because it can be done cheaper elsewhere, and so on and so forth.

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, these costs weren't really apparent because (a) there was a lot of money being loaned out at low interest rates for stupid reasons, and (b) the Greek government had been conspiring to conceal the state of the public debt. Events since then have come as a shock to average Greek people.

The public debt situation is basically related - the Greek government has been borrowing to maintain a high living standard for its people - but has been worsened considerably by the financial crisis. For one, countries' budget deficits normally increase in times of recession, as tax revenues go down and spending on unemployment insurance increases. For another, costs of borrowing have risen, with the result that the government is close to the point where it can't afford to pay the interest on its debt.

These things are problematic, but they only amount to a crisis due to Greece's membership in the euro. If the country still had an independent currency, its economy would be able to adjust in a much less painful fashion. It would be able to restore competitiveness simply by devaluing its exchange rate, which would make Greek exports cheaper elsewhere. Furthermore, as long as the government had been borrowing money in its own currency, it would have the option of reducing its indebtedness by increasing the inflation rate. (Alternatively, it could do as Argentina did and refuse to pay onerous debts. After all, lenders charge interest to compensate them for the risk they are running by handing over their money to someone else - it's only fair that they justify that interest by losing some money here and there.)

None of these options are available while Greece is in the euro. It's stuck with austerity instead - the solution that doesn't really solve anything. Two successive governments have attempted to restore their country's economic competitiveness and reduce debt by cutting public spending, cutting wages, and raising taxes. This has only thrown the country deeper into recession, and hasn't even done much to reduce public borrowing. Furthermore, it's been socially costly - people don't like it when they are told they have to give up their jobs, their pay, and their access to necessary services in order to fix a problem they weren't responsible for creating. Riots and demonstrations have been breaking out continually for the last year.

It's pretty clear that further austerity will be massively unpopular. But, as I have mentioned, the only real alternatives require Greece to either exit the euro or repudiate its debts. (Or both.) When Argentina was faced with a somewhat similar situation in 2001, that's what it did, and the country went on to have a pretty good decade. However, if Greece were to do so it would destroy the euro. Other countries in similar peril - Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, etc, etc - would be tempted to do the same thing. It would be chaotic and ugly, would probably destroy a lot of banks, and have unpredictable but probably bad results for the global economy.

But setting aside the economic dimension, it's fairly clear that accepting the bailout and undertaking further austerity measures will rapidly destroy the legitimacy of the Greek state. The two main political parties have implemented austerity and are committed to continuing the beatings until morale improves. As a result, the Greek people can't actually expect elections - the means by which they are supposed to express their opinions - to deliver the policies that they want. If that continues for too long, representative democracy itself will come into disrepute, and the political situation in Greece may take an unpredictably bad turn.

This is not an abstract concern. Over the last two decades, we've all been taught that we're living in Fukuyama's "end of history", and that our present institutions - market economies, representative democracies - are stable social forms. But we can't assume that will always be true. Countries don't always stay democratic. Greece has had two recent periods of military rule - one immediately following World War II, and a seven-year reign of terror following a military coup in 1967. There's no reason why that couldn't happen again - and there are actually gangs of fascists and anarchists recruiting at the moment.

Greece needs to hold a referendum on the bailout in order to avoid a political crisis. After the referendum was initially announced, a number of top military officers resigned; speculation has been that they were threatening a coup if austerity continued. We shouldn't be complacent about this risk, even if a vote against austerity would increase the likelihood that the euro breaks up. That could be bad, but my time in Argentina taught me that the cost of executions, torture, and disappearances is far higher and far worse than any purely economic costs.

Or, to paraphrase something I read that said all this more efficiently: Financial markets plunge in response to a promise let citizens vote on economic policy; practically an admission that the interests of the banks are incompatible with democracy.

Or, in purely personal terms, my reaction to waking up far too early and with a mild hangover was to make pancakes and write about Greece. I think this is just my way of reminding myself that although I do a convincing impersonation of an economist, I'm actually a political economist at heart.

A weekend of bacteria

2011-10-29T23:29:00.001-07:00

There's something really unusual about yeast. I think I like it.

Pride no longer has definition

2011-10-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

It's the final game of the Rugby World Cup tonight - New Zealand v. France at Eden Park. The All Blacks are generally considered the world's best rugby team, but they've only won once before, in the inaugural edition. Which, coincidentally, was also played in Eden Park against France. Nonetheless, Kiwis are not confident, as Les Bleus have beaten the All Blacks in two previous tournaments. And there's a nasty suspicion going around that they have been sandbagging previous matches to lull us into a false sense of security.

Anyway.

During the umpteen weeks of the tournament, the country's experienced an unusual profusion of flags. Unlike Americans, who ritualistically hang out the stars and stripes, Kiwis are not prone to displaying national pride with the banner. (The de facto symbol of nationalism seems to be the shape of the islands themselves, which became a common motif on t-shirts and in tattoos during the last decade.) But for the last month and a half, flags have abounded: miniature ones flying from car windows, flag bunting in shop windows and offices, flags hung out in public places.

The interesting thing about the collective display is that actual New Zealand flags make up a tiny minority of the total. For the most part, New Zealanders seeking to publicly back the All Blacks have flown a banner based on the country's sporting garb - i.e. a black flag with a white fern-leaf slashed through the center. I suspect that this is mostly due to the indistinguishable ugliness of the official flag, but it might have a lasting effect on the long-running debate over changing our flag.

Equally interesting are the other flags being flown. Many of the countries playing in the tournament have diaspora populations in NZ. It's been common to see cars flying the South African, Samoan, or Tongan flags; moreso in Auckland than Wellington. Irish and Scottish flags are also quite common, but I've seen almost no British or Australian emblems in spite of the fact that those countries are two of the biggest sources of immigrants. (There also aren't as many tino rangatiratanga flags as I would have expected, but perhaps that's because both Maori and pakeha feel as though they can be represented by the silver fern flag.) Many cars have two flags - one for country of origin, one for New Zealand.

I often argue that New Zealand's national identity is a very young thing, and that it's changing rapidly as a result. It's not yet very clear what it means to be a New Zealander. My grandparents and parents all grew up learning that they were just an antipodean branch of the British people. That notion is (literally) displayed in the official flag - the Union Jack occupies the upper left corner, and the Southern Cross constellation the rest. But judging by the flags displayed during the Rugby World Cup, public attitudes have progressed faster than heraldry.

In a way, I'll be sorry when the event is over. Post-colonial nations often have a painful time talking about origin and identity, but New Zealanders have been cheerfully putting those issues on display throughout the tournament. Large sporting events often turn into jingoistic displays of national might, but in this case our identity issues have spawned an exploratory carnival instead.

Applied cognitive mapping

2011-10-22T04:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think that we need to give up on all the political economy and admit that our only hope of understanding the world is through literature about labyrinths and conspiracies. This is one of those days: I read an item in the New Scientist on a network analysis of global corporate ownership. It revealed a more centralized ownership structure than even the most paranoid of paranoids would have suspected:

From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

This corporate structure hasn't arisen from some grand conspiracy (although it has probably been helped along the way by a myriad of picayune conspiracies, corruptions, and anti-competitive practices). Nor is its existence proof that the 147 companies are engaged in some grand conspiracy.

The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

Confirmation bias

2011-10-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

‎"Proverbs for Paranoids 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."
-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 255.

Strangely enough, the third of Slothrop's proverbs applies not just to conspiracy theorists but to researchers in general. It's just that they disagree on what the "wrong questions" are.

Can't buy red ink

2011-10-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

Via zunguzungu, Slavoj Zizek is giving a timely greatest-hits rendition at the Occupy Wall Street protests:

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink…

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare.

Relatedly, I've always thought that the American polis suffers from the lack of what Gramsci called "organic intellectuals", or people who are able to publicly articulate the (practical and theoretical) dilemmas of the majority of people while remaining connected with them. Politics, media, and academia in the US are all predominantly elite games; playing them effectively cuts one off from much of the rest of society. The elite conversation is essentially hermetic, and there are no outside voices. I suspect that there will be some shake-up in the coming years.

New Zealand's soil infrascape

2011-10-12T01:32:00.001-07:00

Some semi-connected notes for potential research.

1. People commonly assume that NZ is an ideal natural environment for growing things, due to perceptions that it is covered alternately with lush bush and plentiful sheep and cattle. This assumption is only partly true. Historically, NZ did have quite fertile soil due to the fertilising effect of abundant native bird life and volcanoes; however, some essential nutrients were missing and the topsoil cover is extremely thin due to the the geological newness of the place. Within fifty years or so of European settlement, the soil's natural fertility was used up and it became necessary to supplement it. (The NZ farm sector is highly capital-intensive and R&D-dependent.)

2. Furthermore, NZ in its pre-human state would not have been capable of sustaining human life. When the ancestors of the modern Maori landed in the mid-1200s, they found an amazing richness of easily-killed protein (seals on the beach, moa in the bush) but few natural sources of carbohydrates. However, the Polynesians were masters at introducing biodiversity to islands - they traveled with all the organisms they needed to live. Only six of their fourteen staple vegetables would grow in NZ's temperate climate, and their main carbohydrate - kumara - only grew in the far north and the Canterbury plains.

Their typical method of cultivating kumara was to clear bush by burning it, and then plant in the ashes. However, the soil's nutrients were used up within a couple of seasons, and so they would have to burn more land. It took a quite long time for bush and soil to regenerate; the first thing to reappear in place of kumara was bracken fern. As population pressures increased, the Maori began to use fern roots as a carbohydrate source, which explained the extremely worn molars in human remains. (They also wiped out the moa and several other native bird species.)

3. European settlement replicated the same basic pattern - bush clearance, farming of introduced species, and soil exhaustion - except that they (we?) weren't pushed into alternatives with diminishing returns due to the ability to draw upon a much larger, temperate-climate biota and more diverse sources of energy and nutrients. Farming here relies upon (a) introduced species, including not just the cattle and sheep but the grass they graze on and the earthworms that maintain the soil conditions for the grass, and (b) regular replenishment of soil nutrients through aerial topdressing of phosphates and nitrate fertiliser. There have been a range of perverse consequences - the destruction of water quality is one, but my favorite example is the gorse bushes that have proliferated throughout the bush. They look almost habituated to the landscape (and with such attractive yellow flowers!), but they were originally introduced for hedgerows before running wild. Bill Gallagher invented the electric fence to corral stock instead.

On the other hand, introduced and native species occasionally produce unexpectedly positive results - for example, it turns out that when introduced honeybees pollinate manuka (teatrees) instead of clover, the resulting honey has antibacterial properties. Efforts by overseas companies to commercialise this piece of fortuitous biology have been at times opposed by Maori, including through the WAI 262 Treaty of Waitangi claim to indigenous biodiversity.

4. I'd like to write specifically about my great-grandfather's project - bringing dairy farming to the farthest of the far north. After World War 1 (and, more specifically, losing his right arm at Passchendaele), he got a land grant of several hundred acres from the government at Houhoura, opposite Ninety Mile Beach at the tip of the country. Geologically, this is strange territory: Cape Reinga, at the extreme tip, is solid rock connected to the main chunk of the north island by what is essentially a large sandspit. There is no solid land until a depth of perhaps 60 meters. When James Cook voyaged around the country, he described the area as a desert; it wasn't considered fit for farming in the early 1900s. Harry Lamb innovated considerably: irrigating the land by drilling wells, working with a government scientist to test out new fertilisers in the sandy soil, and doing a number of less interesting things like singlehandedly (literally) clearing the scrub. By the time he died, dairy farming was well-established in the area, and the dunes all along the sandspit had been stabilised by pine forest plantations.

Owning the labyrinth

2011-10-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

Of interest, from an intriguing article about the end of the Haussmannian logic of urban social control:

‘Owning the streets’ has more to do with rapidly and unexpectedly navigating than blocking or barricading them.

Perhaps it's time to dust off the paper I wrote on slums as potential future battlegrounds. The events of the last year have borne out some of its analyses (but not all). I think I turned out to be right about the difficulties modern urban spaces pose for police or military responses to protests and activism.

I freely admit that I was wrong about the prospect for new political movements arising from within the chaotic quarters of developing-world cities. I'm happy to be wrong about that.

We'll come back for...

2011-10-10T00:13:00.000-07:00

This song has been on my mind lately:

Caught at the pub

2011-10-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

Last night was a fantastic night for talking bollocks. I woke up realizing that not only had I had a great time, seen a lot of friends, caught two good bands, and imbibed a responsibly irresponsible amount, I had spent more of the evening laughing and saying intentionally stupid things than I have in a while.

Personal highlights:

"Sheep are highly adapted to the cold. For example, penguins are a species of sheep."

"My horoscope said that I need to drink lots of absinthe this week!" (Fact!)

My explanation for why you couldn't find any bands with more than 2 drummers. And my "solution" to this nonexistent problem: a legal requirement that all bands have the same number of drummers and guitarists. "So you could still have the Clash, but they would have to have three drummers." Ben's reaction: "You don't understand music."

Pulling a random guy with a big grey beard out of the crowd and asking him whether he was on the Argentinean rugby team. (He wasn't.)

"We need to legalize dwarf-tossing to be competitive with Australia! All our dwarfs are emigrating for higher wages in the west Australian dwarf-tossing bars!"

Me: (Telling Tom about some horrible thought I'd recently had.)
Tom: You should really bottle that up.
Me: Yes! And sell it as a perfume!
Tom: That wasn't quite my meaning.

I went on to describe how I wanted to market a perfume called "Destruction". It would smell like hitting rocks with sledgehammers.

Thought I saw Thomas Pynchon at the end of the bar

2011-10-05T02:55:00.000-07:00

This week, Rob Brezsny wants me to know that:

There is a slight chance the following scenario will soon come to pass: A psychic will reveal that you have a mutant liver that can actually thrive on alcohol, and you will then get drunk on absinthe every day for two weeks, and by the end of this grace period, you will have been freed of 55 percent of the lingering guilt you've carried around for years, plus you will care 40 percent less about what people think of you.

So I guess it's absinthe on Friday...

Fecal politics

2011-10-02T01:11:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Rob Holmes over at Mammoth, who published a piece of my MA research on his excellent site, I've been mentioned in The Atlantic Magazine's Cities blog. This is super cool!

Here's the original post:

Fecal politics relies upon information generated by and for slum-dwellers, testing and legitimizing new or existing uses of urban space. Appadurai describes it as “a politics of show-and-tell”, in which slum-dwellers “claim, refine, and define certain ways of doing things in spaces they already control and then use these practices to show donors, city officials, and other activists that their ‘precedents’ are good ones and encourage such actors to invest further in them.” The Alliance’s projects invariably employ community knowledge of the daily challenges of slum living – particularly in terms of housing quality and access to water and sanitation – to devise ways of improving their lives. As Burra, Patel, and Kerr note, this is appropriate given that slum-dwellers are the people who actually build cities...

And here is Nate Berg's gloss on my article:

It's easy for Americans to take the wide availability of public restrooms for granted, but open defecation is one of the most pressing public health issues facing the world’s developing cities. The excellent Mammoth recently published a great story looking extensively at the problem, which has social, political, physical, and infrastructural aspects.

My MA research is promising to pay more dividends than expected - it's really neat to get to write a bit more about a topic I'm so fascinated with. May even get to give a presentation on cities and globalization to some people at the Ministry of Economic Development, where I'm currently on contract. Nice to be get a chance to bring some issues up!

Addendum: Warren Ellis linked to me. Warren Fucking Ellis!

Linear park

2011-09-26T02:57:00.000-07:00

One thing I noticed about central Auckland was that virtually all of its public parks are located in steep gullies or on volcanic cones. Basque Park, near where I lived, is beautiful but seldom-used due as it resembles a steep-sided bowl. Myers Park, alongside Queen Street, sees a lot of pedestrian traffic but was still gulchy. Even the Domain is largely situated on the side of a hill. Mt Eden and One Tree Hill are volcanic craters. And so on and so forth. All the relatively flat land, and much that isn't, has been built up.

Unlike Wellington, Auckland doesn't have large, easily-accessible green spaces in the middle of the city, although it's bordered on the west by the Waitakere Ranges and on the east by the Waitemata Harbour conservation areas. It could do with more greenery in the middle, honestly. The problem - or the challenge - is that all the space is already filled in.

After a trip to New York, SNN shared some pictures of the High Line, a stretch of elevated railway that had been converted into an aerial park:

It is, I think, fairly easy to convert transport infrastructure into park space (and vice versa, if you're so perversely inclined). I suspect that central Auckland has too much tarmac, and poorly planned tarmac at that. At this point, I think that people have caught onto the notion of induced traffic - i.e. that car use expands until a state of optimal traffic-jam is reached regardless of how many additional lanes you build. Fortunately, the converse also seems to be true, which means that converting carefully-chosen streets into pedestrian-only spaces doesn't do any harm. Consequently, "Sous les paves, le plage" seems to have moved from radical slogan to practicable policy. It would be possible to greenerize central Auckland by converting some streets into linear parks.

The long-term plans coming out of the new Auckland City Council actually appear to be heading in this direction. As Auckland Transport Blog discusses in more detail, the City Centre Masterplan has a strong focus on creating more pedestrian space (bordered by trees and plant life). Exciting to read, but watch out for really cheesy 3-D renderings, e.g.:

Revealed preference

2011-09-23T03:29:00.001-07:00

Or: Blogging as discovery mechanism.

An old friend of mine used to counsel me to judge others' intentions not by what they said but by what they did. If their words and actions were not consistent with each other, it was probably because they were lying to you and/or themselves. She was describing an idea that economists call revealed preference - i.e. spending habits speak louder than words. I've always found this to be an interesting and useful notion.

People my age often spend a great deal of time navel-gazing (and sometimes also naval-gazing if they live by the ocean). Fair enough. If you're lucky, you will have arrived in your mid-twenties with a bit of work experience, a bit of education, and a bit of travel. You will have had a chance to try out a few things, a few places, and think a little bit about them. So you end up asking a lot of unanswerable questions like: "What am I really interested in?" or "What should I do with my life?"

This is fine for what it is, but it tends to take up a lot of time that could be put to more interesting use. (Chicken rearing, long-distance ocean swimming, reading novels, writing novels, motorcycle maintenance, learning to weld, etc, etc.) What we need is a machine that could give us answers to these thorny questions. I am about to explain how to build such a machine.

The theory of revealed preference suggests that you can learn a lot about what you really want to do by observing how you spend your time and energy. But as any physicist will tell you, the act of observing something changes it. You can't just think constantly about what you're doing, as you will probably then conclude that what you want to do with your time is think obsessively about your own thought process, and then we're right back at Step 1 or possibly the mental asylum. You need a way to unconsciously record your thought process.

In other words, you need a blog or something similar. (A diary, art portfolio, scrapbook, stack of newspaper clippings, whatever.) For the last six years, I've been sitting down here every couple of days and writing down some thought that's recently passed through my brain. I had assumed that this was a relatively random process - and it mostly was, as my interests are eclectic. But when I began cataloging all the interesting things I'd written here (at JL's instigation), I quickly realized that there were some common themes. A constellation of five or six related topics in political economy emerged. (And also a surprising quantity of writing - a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that I've written 30-40,000 words on these subjects over the past year and a half. Roughly equivalent in length to my master's thesis.) I was able to scan through it all and arrive at an amazingly clear idea of what my research and work interests actually are.

It is not hard to build your own machine for revealing your preferences. If you're wondering what they are, I encourage you to do so.

Make things, travel, enjoy

2011-09-19T02:57:00.000-07:00

One of the dilemmas that life seems ready to throw my way is this: what should I do with money? Over the past year, I've had roughly enough to live on - a bit less covered by borrowing or thrift, a bit more spent on slightly nicer food and the occasional excursion. But now that seems ready to change.

Usually, when people get more money, they use it to buy more things. But the complete list of things I own and value highly is very short: brain, physical health, books, hard drive contents, motorcycle, cowboy boots, Swanndri coat, and a few small items of sentimental importance. With the exception of the books, it all fits on the back of the bike. I'd need considerably more to live comfortably, but at the same time I've realized that it's easy to become entrapped by possessions. My general reaction to getting more money is not to have more but to do more.

I used to simply drink up the surplus, turning it all into beer, wine, whisky, and eventually piss and headaches. These days, I find that prospect vaguely dissatisfying.

One of the lessons I've learned from a good friend is that it's easier to do interesting things when you're busy. And that's basically what I plan to do. I want to make things and test out all the weird ideas I've got. I want to get down to writing down the thoughts that I have not yet written down. I want to put my time and cash into traveling around and seeing things that I haven't seen before.

Poet, printer, pampheteer, pagan, pretender to the Polish throne!

2011-09-18T18:19:00.001-07:00

More Wikipedia. I've been reading fiction lately, but in the past few days I've been turning to Wikipedia articles about history. Possibly, I think, because human history is almost certainly weirder than any fiction we could imagine. (Although I appreciate the attempts made by authors like Thomas Pynchon and Neal Stephenson to keep up with the strangeness.)

One of my favorite articles of clothing in high school (along with the duct-taped jeans and tall, floppy felt hat with flames printed on it) was a Rasputin Music shirt that described the infamous Russian mystic as "Profligate. Panderer. Prophet. The Protomartyr of Punk!"

However, I think that this line from a Wikipedia biography on a New Zealand writer unintentionally rivals the alliterative greatness of that description:

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk (1903–1997), poet, private printer, pamphleteer, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne...

This is a picture of Potocki. He looks a bit like Nick Cave, except less evil:

The strangeness of Cold War proxy conflicts

2011-09-17T12:54:00.001-07:00

These paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on the Angolan Civil War illustrate it nicely, I think:

By 1986, Angola began to assume a more central role in the Cold War, with both the Soviet Union, Cuba and other East bloc nations enhancing support for the MPLA government, and American conservatives beginning to elevate their support for Savimbi's UNITA. Savimbi developed close relations with influential American conservatives, who saw Savimbi as a key ally in the U.S. effort to oppose and rollback Soviet-backed, non-democratic governments around the world. The conflict quickly escalated, with both Washington and Moscow seeing it as a critical strategic conflict in the Cold War.

The Soviet Union gave an additional $1 billion in aid to the Angolan government and Cuba sent an additional 2,000 troops to the 35,000-strong force in Angola to protect Chevron oil platforms in 1986. Savimbi had called Chevron's presence in Angola, already protected by Cuban troops, a "target" for UNITA in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine on January 31.

In short, troops from communist countries were being used to defend the interests of an American oil company against US-backed guerrillas. Even by the murky standards of Cold War politics, that's astoundingly weird. And as was usual in these kinds of post-independence conflicts in Africa, the two warring sides shared basically the same goals and ideologies, but nonetheless attracted support from Cuba and the USSR (on one side), and the US, South Africa, and communist China (on the other).

Money as a social relation

2011-09-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'd most like to do is to teach a university course on money. I'd deal not with the practical side of finance but with the historical side. How and why did money emerge? We take this thing, this medium of exchange, for granted, but in spite of its central role in our social ecosystem, it is anything but natural. (Furthermore, its form and function has mutated significantly in recent centuries.)

Anthropologist David Graeber presents one fantastically good answer in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He's given a couple of interviews to Naked Capitalism (one, two) that are worth reading. Broadly speaking, his argument is that money didn't emerge from barter-based trading (as commonly assumed by economists), but as a method of quantifying and paying debts owed to others. In particular, it was developed to allow for accurate compensation for legal wrongs. (Money originated as blood money, in short.)

Graeber's work is fascinating for a number of reasons, but what strikes me as most important is that it reminds us of the true character of money. The common assumption is that money is just a means of accounting for things, or a simple device for constructing equivalences between two different things. But it's not - it is, and always has been, a social relation. It is a measure of account, but of accounts between people.

Due to the expansion of the cash nexus in recent centuries, money is now the primary means through which humans interact. It's also a tremendous source of anxiety, pressure, and dysfunction. (In German, "guilt" and "debt" share a common etymology.) One of the other reasons I appreciated Graeber's anthropologist's-eye-view on the history of money is that he turns up a variety of other alternative social relations - varied forms of exchange, varied forms of money. I was particularly taken with this example from the second interview:

The second example is the Gunwinngu of West Arnhem land in Australia, famous for entertaining neighbors in rituals of ceremonial barter called the dzamalag. Here the threat of actual violence seems much more distant. The region is also united by both a complex marriage system and local specialization, each group producing their own trade product that they barter with the others.

In the 1940s, an anthropologist, Ronald Berndt, described one dzamalag ritual, where one group in possession of imported cloth swapped their wares with another, noted for the manufacture of serrated spears. Here too it begins as strangers, after initial negotiations, are invited to the hosts’ camp, and the men begin singing and dancing, in this case accompanied by a didjeridu. Women from the hosts’ side then come, pick out one of the men, give him a piece of cloth, and then start punching him and pulling off his clothes, finally dragging him off to the surrounding bush to have sex, while he feigns reluctance, whereon the man gives her a small gift of beads or tobacco. Gradually, all the women select partners, their husbands urging them on, whereupon the women from the other side start the process in reverse, re-obtaining many of the beads and tobacco obtained by their own husbands. The entire ceremony culminates as the visitors’ men-folk perform a coordinated dance, pretending to threaten their hosts with the spears, but finally, instead, handing the spears over to the hosts’ womenfolk, declaring: “We do not need to spear you, since we already have!” [9]

In other words, the Gunwinngu manage to take all the most thrilling elements in the Nambikwara encounters—the threat of violence, the opportunity for sexual intrigue—and turn it into an entertaining game (one that, the ethnographer remarks, is considered enormous fun for everyone involved). In such a situation, one would have to assume obtaining the optimal cloth-for-spears ratio is the last thing on most participants’ minds.

Rather than investing their exchanges and meetings with guilt and anxiety, the Gunwinngu have instilled them with libidinous energy and playfulness. It sounds fun. I don't want to sound too situationist here, but wouldn't it be nice to think that we could do something equally utopian...

Citizenship and sanitation

2011-09-13T01:29:00.000-07:00

Or: That's what I was saying!

Sheela Patel (SPARC) eloquently expresses my current thinking on democracy and slums:

Water and sanitation represent the most clear and obvious amenities that link cities citizens, their local government and national state. Cites must provide water and sanitation to all their citizens and this is part of their most fundamental requirement and the cities’ responsibilities. My message at the World Water Week 2011 is that the existing deficit in sanitation is very obvious and clearly one of the unachieved MGD goals. It reflects the real deficit in governance, since for the poorest in the city, inclusion and concern about them gets reflected in whether they get access to these amenities.

In part, this is a scalar issue: people live within cities (or, more accurately, within neighborhoods and boroughs of cities), but most of the institutions responsible for delivering then water and flushing away their shit operate on a larger scale - national, or even global depending upon funding relations. To ensure service delivery, city residents must be able to get their interests and concerns heard at larger scales. This is what (representative) democracy is supposed to accomplish; unfortunately, it's often as dysfunctional as essential infrastructures

Ten years

2011-09-11T04:03:00.000-07:00

9/11/11. Hmmm. In a way, most of my formative years have been lived in the shadow of this event, but not in a direct or straightforward way.

I was talking to SNN a week or two ago; he was about to take a trip out to NYC to visit friends. He said that when he was living in New Jersey as a kid, he went up to the observation deck on the south tower of the WTC - so he was expecting it to be strange to see NYC without that landmark.

I realized at that point that I wasn't actually aware of the towers' existence until the day they were blown up.

9/11 was a unifying moment for Americans, but I found it weirdly alienating. This awful thing had happened to a city to which most Americans have a deep emotional or cultural connection, and I just wasn't able to situate it in relation to me. (A cousin was living there at the time; that was as close as I got.) It was like hearing about a bombing in Mumbai or Nairobi: terrible, but remote.

But at the same time, it exploded the contradictions coexisting within my own identity. I was American at a time in which most of us were slipping easily from grief to rage, but I was also a citizen of the world in a non-trivial sense (NZ heritage, Nigerian childhood), and that gave me a sense of perspective. When the drumbeat for war in Iraq was intensifying in 2002 and 2003, I was genuinely distressed by the lust for retribution, blood, and death that had appeared in America. I couldn't understand why people were so eager to avenge one wrong by committing an even bigger one.

It's hard to be an American under those conditions. I don't think it's gotten any easier in the ten years since.

Pay, productivity, and intellectual consistency

2011-09-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for a way to understand changes to American society over the last few decades, this chart (from the New York Times) would be a good start:

The full graphic adds a great deal of information about the consequences for income inequality and debt - definitely take a look. But rather than discuss those relationships, I want to make a philosophical point.

Quite often, you will hear conservatives and libertarians object to policies that reduce inequality on grounds of fairness. For example, they claim that higher top marginal tax rates are unfair, as they prevent certain people - the rich - from keeping all of the money they earn by working harder or smarter. Pay should reflect productivity, they say, and we shouldn't penalize people for being more productive.

But if you make that argument, the above chart presents a major problem. Over the last three decades, American workers have, on average, become massively more productive. An 80% increase! But hourly compensation has barely risen - a scanty 8% increase. This hardly seems fair. If conservatives and libertarians were serious about their principles, they'd be up in arms about this - after all, it appears that America's contemporary political economy prevents workers from reaping the benefits of working harder or smarter. And unlike top tax rates, this is an issue that affects 95% of American workers, rather than just the 5% at the top. So where's the furore?

The space-time of Walmart

2011-09-04T02:47:00.001-07:00

An addendum to my recent post on Walmart: It's worth specifying precisely why Walmart is so vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions.

Everybody knows that Walmart's core principle is low prices. It's less obvious how they make money doing so. Most people suspect that they manage to be profitable through the super-exploitation of Asian workers and refusal to pay a living wage to their American employees. Not quite - the majority of the savings they make through these strategies are passed on to consumers. On average, Walmart earns quite low profit margins on most of their goods. Nonetheless, they make a huge amount of money.

Let's go back and examine just what a capitalist enterprise (like Walmart) does, using a bit of somewhat disreputable but conceptually useful analysis from Marx. In the abstract, a business made money by exchanging money for certain commodities (land, labor, raw materials, etc) that it combined and then (hopefully) exchanged for more money than it started with. This was what Marx called the M-C-M' cycle. (Where does the profit - the additional money at the end - come from? Marx claimed that it was from paying workers less per hour than they produced in value during that time. Other people have different answers; regardless, it's not really germane to my point here.)

Walmart is in the business of M-C-M'. It buys goods from its suppliers and pays people to put them on shelves (the M-C part of the cycle), where they are then bought by shoppers (the C-M' part). Because it is a low-margin retailer, M' is not much greater than M. It makes large profits by minimizing the time in between the M-C and the C-M' parts of the cycle. Essentially, Walmart's goal is to keep its capital in constant circulation, churning through M-C-M' as many times as possible in a year. As Jesse LeCavalier's article on Walmart's logistics notes, its inventory is turned over as frequently as once a day. Goods on shelves are not earning money, so it has evolved an infrastructural network (comprising ports, trucking, distribution centers, telecommunications, and data centers) to ensure that they are produced and delivered precisely when they are needed and no sooner.

The more rapidly the company can sell and replace its inventory, the more rapidly its relatively tiny per-item profit margins can add up. In that sense, Walmart's profitability rests upon its control of time within its network. But because its control of time relies upon the regular and predictable operation of key pieces of infrastructure, this is also a crucial vulnerability. And that's where we have to start talking about the Ports of LA and the National Labor Relations Act.

Walmart, the Ports of LA, and sympathy strikes

2011-09-02T00:57:00.000-07:00

Or: Infrastructure, legislature, unionization.

Two generations ago, the Big Three carmakers were America's largest private-sector employers. Due to strong union membership and the compact between management and labor, wages and benefits were high enough to foster the growth of a mass middle class. Today, Walmart is the nation's largest private employer, and the middle class is in full-scale decline. Walmart's business model relies upon three things: cheap manufacturing labor in Asia, cheap retail labor in the US, and infrastructures and distribution networks to connect the two. In order to hold down wages at its stores, it isolates its workers and ruthlessly clamps down on any unionization attempts.

No Walmart in the U.S. has been successfully unionized, and earlier efforts to form committees of workers sank under management pressure. New hires receive anti-union indoctrination and the company sends barnstormers to stores showing signs of unrest.

When meat-cutters at one Texas store voted union, the corporation moved to pre-cut meat. Canadian stores that organized were simply closed. Between 1998 and 2003 the National Labor Relations Board brought 41 charges against Walmart for illegally firing union supporters.
[...]
Walmart once bragged about its union-bashing, but in the 15 countries where the company has stores, the U.S. is now the only one without a single union location.

In South Africa, for example, unions and government got Walmart to promise to recognize the union at a competitor chain it wants to acquire.

There's no particular reason why retail jobs have to lack dignity and offer poor wages. In certain respects, they are more amenable to being humanized than the manufacturing work that they are replacing: they offer more varied work, contact with people, and autonomy than a job operating a machine in a factory. Furthermore, they are not inherently low-skilled or low-productivity jobs. Knowledgeable, engaged workers are better at matching up customers with products (and thereby increasing sales) - just think of the difference between talking with an employee at an independent bookseller versus one at a large chain! Likewise, changes in technology and business organization are continually making retail workers more productive, and it would not be inconceivable to divert part of these gains to wages. But at the moment, big-box retail is an unfair and demoralizing experience, and the policies used by Walmart and other large retailers are a large part of the reason. While the UAW helped build the American middle class, Walmart has contributed to the emergence of a "precariat" (Loic Wacquant) living economically tenuous existences.

Under current labor law (and enforcement), Walmart holds all the cards. They can intimidate workers who attempt to organize (or even talk or meet in non-approved fashions), divide them with variable work schedules, fire organizers, and, in the extreme case, close down departments or stores that are on the verge of signing union cards. They are able to use their geographic flexibility (in terms of store location) and massive bargaining power to roll over their workers, who are multitudinous but atomistic. Most unionization efforts in the private sector face similar challenges, as falling transport/ICT costs and lowered trade barriers have made it much easier for firms to simply relocate rather than pay higher wages.

But that is not to say that all elements of Walmart's supply chain are equally footloose. There are fixed elements within this network of free-floating nodes. Its individual stores, warehouses and suppliers can all be swept away in the event of a challenge to its low-wage model, but it cannot so easily dispose of the infrastructure tying them together. In Jesse LeCavalier's excellent piece on Walmart's logistics networks (via mammoth, he discusses the extraordinary scope and size of the whole enterprise:

Walmart’s generic buildings and the environments that result have saturated the United States. Nationwide its network comprises five retail categories: 861 discount stores sell variety goods; 2,664 supercenters sell variety goods plus food; 153 neighborhood markets sell only food; four "marketside" stores are being tested (as a version of the convenience store); and 602 Sam’s Clubs operate as members’ only warehouses, similar to Costco...

At each location, if all works as planned, inventory cycles through several times a day. In this sense the stores are designed to function more as valves regulating flow than as reservoirs capturing it: they are containers, to be sure, but they are also conduits. And because the distribution system is so tightly coordinated, the store designs can minimize areas for stock and maximize floor space for retail. And not only are the products themselves always on the move: Walmart's system itself is also always transforming — at different scales and speeds — as new stores are built and (sometimes) existing ones vacated. [18] For Walmart, real estate too is a logistical practice. The stores and distribution centers are strategically located to optimize the flow of goods; they form a dynamic and expanding network whose locations are calculated in miles and minutes. Walmart executives thus abstract territory much as barcodes abstract merchandise. In other words, the nation’s largest company sees its territory essentially as a data field over which “all those numbers” are monitored, tracked, allocated and redirected in pursuit of market coverage.

Walmart's distribution centers, which are as important as their stores, are hybrid structures — part architecture, part infrastructure — whose locations are determined by corporate growth strategies. By the end of 2008, Walmart’s domestic distribution network consisted of more than 100,000 suppliers, 147 distribution centers, two data centers, the U.S. transportation infrastructure (mostly the publicly funded highway system), 7,200 tractors, 53,000 trailers, 7,950 drivers, and more than 85,000 employees. [19] The largest centers comprise the core of this system — DC 6094 outside Bentonville, for example, covers more than 1.2 million square feet and turns over 90 percent of its contents every 24 hours. They are also highly automated, with goods in constant motion, guided by electronically controlled actuators and conveyors, and monitored by employees wearing earpieces and scanners connected to central computers in Bentonville.

LeCavalier discusses this in a section entitled "Territory", but it could just as easily be titled "Temporality". In order to maximize its profit-making capability, Walmart uses a revolutionary system of "just-in-time" inventory control to ensure that goods spend the minimum amount of time in warehouses and on shelves before being sold. As the above excerpt emphasizes, the smooth, continual flow of goods is necessary for the operation of the whole system. Their control of time rests upon their control of the movement of goods through various transport infrastructures: the "publicly funded highway system" and the "part infrastructural" distribution centers mentioned by LeCavalier, but also ports. To be more specific: the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Walmart's distribution networks are anchored in San Pedro, which ships 40 percent of US trade, and the majority of imports from Asia. Goods coming into LA are then moved by interstate highway to massive distribution centers and then to individual stores. (Deborah Richmond provides a much fuller discussion of these networks in her excellent chapter on "Distribution" in The Infrastructural City.)

The Ports of LA are also heavily unionized and known for innovative and progressive labor action - for example, their Green Ports initiative, which is benefiting both working conditions and local air quality. In that case, they used their leverage to change the rules trucking companies were operating under, requiring them to hire their poorly-paid "independent contractors" as employees:

Those are the seeds of a quiet but hugely significant labor-green combined effort to upend the harbor trucking business at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Their goal is to replace 15,000 old and dirty trucks with cleaner 2007 models. The problem they've encountered is that most of those trucks are owned by drivers—most of them Latino immigrants—who make about $12 an hour. These are independent contractors at the bottom of the harbor food chain, and they can't afford to upgrade their own rigs. And so a coalition of labor and environmental groups is pushing for the port authorities to change the rules: Trucking companies will be allowed to operate within the ports' gates only if their vehicles meet strict new pollution standards—and if they hire their drivers as employees, with the attendant benefits.

The port union is capable of effecting change due to its relatively stable and important position. If they strike - refuse to move goods off ships and onto trucks and trains - many economic activities that rely upon global trade shudder to a halt. There are no easy options for routing around the Ports of LA, either: other West Coast ports lack the capacity, and it's not possible to conjure up a new port. The infrastructure (and distribution networks) tied up in the port is relatively persistent and resistant to rapid substitution. And while it would not be impossible to break the union, the local balance of political forces and the relative strength of unions within LA would make it exceeding difficult.

So where am I going with all this? Back to legislation.

In a far-sighted article on Daily Kos, Jake McIntyre argues that progressives must go back to the future on labor law reform, and re-legislate the Norris-LaGuardia Act and National Labor Relations Act passed in the 1930s.

A seldom-appreciated fact about the New Deal is that unions were not strong at the outset. In the late 1920s, union density was even lower than the present day. However, Norris-LaGuardia (1932), which prevented courts from placing injunctions on striking workers, and the NLRA (1935), a comprehensive framework for union representation, strengthened the hand of workers immensely. The 1948 Taft-Hartley Act essentially reversed these legislative gains by removing unions' most effective organizing and bargaining tactics. In particular, it banned "secondary strikes", a key mechanism for extending union representation:

Where a "strike," as we usually think about it today, is what labor lawyers call a "primary strike"–that is, workers withholding their labor from their own employer–solidarity (or "sympathy," or "secondary") strikes involve workers who strike to support a primary strike. Burns gives an example of employees of an auto parts manufacturer who strike their employer, and who then see Teamsters refuse to transport the parts, and the UAW refuse to build cars with the parts. Without the secondary strikes, the parts manufacturer would likely be able to hire scab replacements, continue production and continue to sell its parts. But the secondary strikes would deny the manufacturer the ability to through the strike, and pressure it into dealing with its employees.

It is fairly easy to see how a relatively small legislative change could be used to unionize Walmart (and big-box retail in general). If McIntyre's ambitious plan for labor law reform is enacted, and if secondary strikes are re-legalized, the union at the Ports of LA would suddenly have the ability to bargain with Walmart for union representation in its stores. If, for example, a unionization campaign at a Walmart store ended in the (illegal) firing of organizers or the closure of the store itself - standard tactics at present - dockworkers would have the option of conducting a sympathy strike, and refusing to move cargo for Walmart. Because stores turn over their inventory so rapidly - on a daily basis - the company can't necessarily handle such a disruption. It could move freight to other ports, but the unions there would also have the option of striking. At that point, the economic calculus would be drastically different for Walmart: it would have to work with its employees rather than intimidating them. And maybe then it would be possible to shop at one of their stores without feeling grimy.

The Waitakeres

2011-08-31T23:58:00.001-07:00

Spent the afternoon running out in the Waitakeres, where I covered over half of Arthur Lydiard's favorite Sunday deathmarch. The Waiatarua circuit begins in New Lynn (my father's boyhood home) and works its way up the West Coast Road. A brutal hill is climbed, and then things level off for a while before the descent down Scenic Drive, which overlooks the Manukau Harbour. While the first and final miles now run through suburbia, the hillier sections wind through the bush.

The full 22-mile route had been known to reduce future Olympic medalists to tears. I did not attempt that. Instead, I cut off half of the big hill. Unfortunately, I also took a few wrong turns on the flat bits, which resulted in me (a) running it backwards and (b) going further than I expected to. I went up Scenic Drive, cut over on Carter Road, and came back down West Coast Road for a total of 14.5 miles. I ran in and out of several rain showers and generally felt great on the ascent. Then the downhill section turned my legs to rubber and the last few miles felt like a ghastly deathmarch. It took me almost two hours, which isn't actually too bad of a pace.

Doing redistricting right for a change

2011-08-31T04:12:00.000-07:00

One of the more egregious traditions in American politics is partisan redistricting, or gerrymandering. Essentially, a census is taken every decade, at which point state governments must draw new districts for Congress and state legislatures. The results are usually geographically perverse, as the party in power consolidates its power by concentrating groups of its own voters and dividing others.

California recently passed several ballot initiatives to end this practice by delegating the redistricting process to an independent nonpartisan commission. A lot of liberals were pretty skeptical about this, as it was being pushed by Schwarzenegger and seemed like a transparent attempt to prevent Democrats from taking advantage in 2010. (I had some heated debates with my mom on this topic.) I supported it, because I had paid closer attention to the proposed instructions for the commission than to its partisan makeup. It was charged with drawing districts that were:

Equally sized

In compliance with the Voting Rights Act

Contiguous and geographically compact

Respectful of urban boundaries and communities of interest

The last two criteria were crucial. As far as I can tell, the main effect of non-contiguous and non-compact districts is to disempower progressive politics. Generally speaking, conservatism (of the hyper-individualistic American variety) thrives in a socially atomistic environment. When districts slice and dice communities apart, it's that much more difficult to organize people towards electoral change. At the same time, politicians have less of a connection with many of the people they are representing, making it easier for them to ignore the needs of their most vulnerable constituents. (This is exacerbated by the fact that the average Congressional district encloses roughly half a million people.)

The final redistricting maps have now been released. The LA Times has a nice tool for comparing 2001 and 2011 districts. (And the effects are not at all bad for the Democrats, who are expected to gain seats due to demographic trends and Republican racism. Ironically, Republicans are now trying to eliminate the commission.)

To get a sense of why the new redistricting system is a good thing, I'd like to compare the old and new Congressional District 11, where I still vote. (I am registered as an absentee voter in Danville.) Here's the 2001 map.

The first thing to say about this district is that it's conservative by California standards. It strings together wealthy suburbanites (living between the Danville and Pleasanton dots on the northeastern peninsula of the district) with agricultural communities out near Lodi and in Santa Clara county. Since 2006, it's been represented by a Democrat, but only due to the Republican incumbent's legendary corruption and two successive Democratic wave elections.

Electoral politics aside, this district map is gibberish. Its sole purpose is to ensure a Republican-leaning seat in the otherwise solidly liberal Bay Area. First of all, transportation. There are no direct links between Danville and Lodi, and in order to get to the southernmost end of the district it is necessary to go through Silicon Valley. While living there, I was hardly aware of the other places making up the district. Different communities within it have hardly any common interests. I always thought of myself as an inhabitant of the East Bay, while the rural east is more identified with the Central Valley.

The 2011 map is a massive improvement for a number of reasons.

There are large variations in income and race throughout this district, as it fuses the wealthy Walnut Creek-Danville axis with the Richmond ghetto and growing Hispanic populations in Concord. However, it's easy to imagine it as a single place due to the fact that it is compact and well-connected by transport infrastructure. Freeways link up the whole eastern side of the district, and the BART train runs from Orinda to Pittsburg. Although it's not shown on the map, there is a quite good and well-trafficked road through the hills between Lafayette and San Pablo.

There are many shared interests within the region. The eastern side is clustered around Mount Diablo, which gives those communities a common interest in preserving that open space. Much of the district draws water from the same reservoirs (in the hills between Lafayette and San Pablo). Both Richmond and the Delta towns have large oil refineries within them, and Chevron (headquartered slightly to the south in San Ramon) is a major employer in Walnut Creek-Danville. (Yes, there is a strange contrast between the Bay Area's environmentalism and its oil operations.) People living throughout the region rely upon BART to get to work or get around the Bay.

And the important thing is that this isn't just a random improvement to a single district. (Those can occasionally happen under the gerrymandering system.) If you look at any of the new district maps, they're a vast improvement over the old ones. I'm not as familiar with the specifics of any single other area, but I would imagine a similar tale could be told in most places.

Self-explanatory

2011-08-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

The invaluable Auckland Transport Blog posts this brilliant visual explanation of the case for buses and bicycles.

Racing like a bastard

2011-08-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

I used to show up to races with a gutsful of butterflies and poor judgment of pace, running too fast early on and rigging up at the end. Sometimes, I lucked into the right level of fitness or the right race tactics. A few years later, I taught myself how to stand on the starting-line with icy-cold blood and a pack of leashed-up mental hobgoblins. I wasn't at the front of most races, but I'd learned how to turn in consistent performances.

Most of us are not going to be winning most races; our competitive instincts are directed towards maximizing our placing or minimizing our times. These notes are intended to help do those things, probably at your local 5k or 10k road race.

Nobody wins a race in the first half, but it's very easy to lose them there. Generally, people are excited to be racing, and so they will start races far too fast and gradually die off in the latter stages. You should always be prepared to devour their souls when they do.

My rule of thumb is to run the first half of the race at what feels like a relaxed pace. It'll actually be faster than it feels, because you're excited too. Be mentally prepared to increase your effort in the second half of the race. This will be painful, but if you've planned right you'll be passing runners throughout the race. Your glee at conquest will be equivalent to their despair, providing an invaluable mental boost.

The general plan will need to be varied depending upon the course terrain. If it's got a hilly section late in the race, and you're better on the flats, you may need to get into a better position before the hills.

In order to carry out this plan, it helps to have a good sense of your current fitness. The easiest way to acquire this is to race more often - potentially unpleasant trial and error, of course. The best way to maximize your place and minimize your time is to run an the race at a relatively constant pace.

Finally, being passed at the end can put a frustrating pall on what was otherwise an enjoyable race; this is not to be tolerated. Conversely, going into high gear to chase down one last runner is a joyous experience. You will need to be mentally and physically prepared to sprint to the finish if needed. I recommend ending your runs with a series of short, relaxed sprints - say, six 50 meter sprints - with short jogs in between. This will teach you to run fast when tired, to the detriment of your opponents. Show no mercy.

Shame on blue

2011-08-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

...shame on me for not mentioning this before. My long-term infatuation with Fugazi collided with my more recent appreciation of the Wu-Tang Clan (via their horror-themed offshoot Gravediggaz). Just when it seemed like my iPod was doing nothing but spinning from "1-800 Suicide" to "(Re)Provisional" and back again, Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy devised a cunning way for me to listen to them both at once. I'm not normally big on mashups, but I think this one is straight brilliant. Rather than simply laying one record over another, they re-engineer songs from both groups' catalogs. Fugazi's tense, boxed-in energy brings out the panicked, paranoid side of Wu-Tang's lyrics.

Wugazi: 13 Chambers can be downloaded for free. (Here's a track by track breakdown.) Because there is nothing better than hearing the last verses of "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide" cut in backed by the main riff from "Waiting Room". Here comes the drastic... just like... a tactic, attack it, attackin', ATTACKIN'! Face: Melted.

For reflection on beer

2011-08-17T20:28:00.001-07:00

Beer has been an industrial commodity for so long that it no longer seems an organic substance.

(From a New Yorker article on American craft-brewing. To be paired with a discussion of the New Zealand beer industry, filtered through thoughts about the old Lion Brewery I occasionally run by.)

From pre- to post-Fordism

2011-08-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

Auckland retains many more traces of its industrial heritage than Wellington does, and as a consequence a few hypotheses about New Zealand's industrialization have been fermenting away in the back of my mind over the past six months. (In Wellington, the paint factories of Miramar have been converted into film studios, and the car plants shuttered. Auckland central, on the other hand, is still dotted with little workshop districts, often now home to print shops and gyms, the old rail yard at the bottom of Ponsonby tenuously remains, and the view south from One Tree Hill contains expanses of the "giant shed" factory-space favored by the country's industrialists.)

One thing that is fairly clear: With the exception of a few industries, New Zealand has never contained large-scale "Fordist" industry as seen in countries such as the US, Germany and Japan. (And now China.) Fordism, which was first developed in the American car industry, was based around standardized mass production and mass consumption. Think, for example, of Ford's River Rouge Complex, a 1.5 square mile industrial site that at its peak employed 100,000 people and integrated every part of the car production process. It never happened here. This was mostly due to the difficulties of finding a "mass consumer" in a small, remote country. (However, I suspect that historical ties to British industry, which came to Fordism relatively late and temporarily, also factored.)

New Zealand manufacturing firms have always been small - most are better described as workshops than factories. The largest workplace in the country, the NZ Steel plant in Glenbrook, currently employs around 1100 people. In second place is the aluminium smelter at Bluff, which employs over 900. (The country has achieved impressive scale in dairy production - including the world's largest dairy plant - but this industry is predominantly rural and not particularly job-rich.) Along with breweries - a topic I'd like to write about later given that I'm living down the road from the defunct Khyber Pass brewery - they represent the narrow height of large-scale industry in NZ.

Inventories of New Zealand inventors usually note that many of them started out making things in their backyard sheds. It's worth noting that most did not expand their production spaces far beyond that.

In a discussion of the country's curation of its past, the invaluable Bat, Bean, Beam directs us to the Foxton Flax Stripper Museum, one of "several layers of early colonial and industrial pasts". Flax-stripping was an important early industry, although it went into fatal decline in the 1930s:

Phormium Tenax (commonly known as "harakeke" or "native flax") has played an important part in the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand, for inside the long green leaves of this plant there lies a strong white fibre, suitable for the manufacture of cordage and textiles. The Maori people utilized this fibre for hundreds of years, extracting it from the leaf with a mussel shell and preparing it for weaving or plaiting by a slow and laborious process of scraping, washing and beating.

Most flax mills were small in size, containing only one or two strippers. However, they were an important source of employment, for each stripper provided work for 20-25 men. Flax leaves were cut by hand in the swamp, tied in bundles, carted to the mills. The processed fibre was then pressed into bales, tied with ropes and carted to the nearest port or railway station for transport to market. Most of the fibre was exported to Australia, Britain and North America, where it was manufactured into rope and twine, but a small quantity was also spun into cordage within New Zealand.

The largest flax mills in New Zealand (containing between four and seven strippers) were erected in the Manawatu region, which became the centre of the flax milling industry after the year 1890.

What is most striking about the industry, and typical of many of the country's extractive industries, is that it never achieved scale in any phase of the manufacturing process. Individual flax mills were tiny, and they didn't feed into any larger industrial units in NZ. By Fordist standards, NZ industry was tiny, fragmented, and inefficient.

The odd thing is that this might not actually be a bad thing in the long run. By the 1980s, Fordist industry in developed countries was on decline, due to a geographical shift of production to more efficient plants in east and southeast Asia and the increasing emphasis on "eclectic" and small-scale production. At the same time, the best profit opportunities had shifted from industrial production to consumer finance and information technology, which underpinned increasingly diverse consumption habits. If the country missed out on Fordism, that's not necessarily something to be mourned or corrected. Rather, the previous experience with picayune production sites and variegated production might prove highly adaptable to post-Fordist conditions.

Current reading: Open City

2011-08-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

It is a season for fiction: one of life's little luxuries right now is that I have spare time to read novels. Of course, I've lost my favorite new-fiction discovery device (literature classes), so I'm asking around, casting a wide net, keeping a little notebook to write down titles. On the advice of Al K, I've just started reading Open City by Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole. It's a walking-around-thinking-about-everything kind of book.

I shouldn't have been surprised when an excerpt on the flap of the cover crystallized some of my current thinking about Nigeria, which I have childhood memories that I am always picking over from an adult's perspective.

The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with outsize intensity.

Crossing over

2011-08-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

2010 wasn't so great, but I'm better now.

It's strange to say that. When you're in the depths of misery, I mean, really low down, you forget which way is up. You end up doing things that seem like they'll help you get better, but which actually worsen matters. Or you turn self-destructive and start to dig downward. And then one day, over a course of several months, things improve. You stop listening to suicide anthems by Why? and pick up something ramshackle but hopeful about maybe-not-love-but-definitely-sex by Beat Happening. Wipe out the last set of associations on your trusty CVB records and get down to making some new ones.

Now I'm happy.

It's also strange to say that. It seems to be an outlook rather than a passing state of mind. Life's not going to be simple or easy in the near future, and I'll need to make some hard choices, but things seem basically okay. I know which people will stick with me (enough, it turns out), and I have a pretty good idea of what I want out of life. (As I was saying to a friend the other day, the minimum requirements are friends, family, and a reasonably interesting job that leaves me with enough time and money to get outside, read and write, and DIY whenever I want to. It's not rocket surgery.) And if nothing great comes up in the immediate future, I think things will still be okay. I can always reduce my belongings down to a couple of small bags, get on the back of the bike, and spend a few months traveling around, sleeping under tarps and cooking outside, and doing a lot of tramping to fill in the days. Of course, the weather's not great for it right now: It was snowing in Auckland yesterday...

Positive/negative

2011-08-13T21:14:00.001-07:00

Things I enjoyed about running ten miles to the MJ Savage Memorial and back on a cold, blustery winter day:

The sight of a sailboat heeled over on an upwind tack on the harbour; the brilliant clear light shining off the sea; the unexpectedly verdant slopes of Rangitoto.

Having to lean into the wind to keep from being blown off course.

Adding several miles of impromptu speed workout by letting a man on rollerblades pass me, surging past him, and then jogging until he caught up again. Not sure if he liked the game as much as I did.

The sight from the memorial; thinking about MJ Savage; reflecting that in his position I would have preferred to be memorialized in a watchtower, something that allows people to climb up and see far, rather than an obelisk, which people can only gaze up at.

The teenager sitting chainsmoking cigarettes in a black hearse with numberplates that read: "RU DEAD". The symbolism is killing me, compadre!

Things I did not enjoy about the experience:

The realization that I probably hadn't run this far in several years; the nasty suspicion that my mucous membranes were conspiring to fill my throat and lungs with thick sludge.

The unfortunate confluence of gale-force winds and a hailstorm on the way back.

The resulting shrinkage.

I'd probably do it again.

Brief reflections on skydiving

2011-08-12T03:03:00.001-07:00

It is necessary to say something on this matter. First of all, all thanks and praise to SNN, whose generosity made it possible for me to jump out of an airplane from three miles up. Wheee!

Most people report some sort of trepidation or fright when faced with this prospect. The most surreal part of the experience for me was the almost total lack of fear. It simply did not factor in any of the preparatory stages, and proceeded to be absent throughout the plane ride. Nor did it make an appearance when I was finally facing an open door and a step out into the void. Most of the way down, I was thinking about how much air was rushing into my lungs when I held my mouth open and how awesome the onrushing patchwork of farms looked from above. I am immune to fear.

Things to do

2011-08-12T02:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's vacation is today's unemployment; a geographical shift necessitates an attitudinal one.

Part of me fervently wishes that I had not come back, that I had arranged my affairs differently and stayed in California just a little bit longer. I could have gone farming in Sonoma with K for a few months and looked for work in Silicon Valley. It certainly seemed like an enjoyably plausible idea at the time. (There is no reason why it wouldn't be plausible in six months or a year.)

The other part of me, the flinty rational bit that isn't swayed by sunshine, techno-optimism and bikini tops, knows that there are reasons I've come back here. New Zealand's a strange little island nation, but it's as beautiful as California (albeit with too much verdant green for my taste at times) and hideous in novel ways (giant shed architecture as opposed to the strip-mall superhighway deathscape). I realized in the last few weeks that I'll always be a Californian at heart, too much in love with the expansive freaky weirdness at the core of the golden dream to ever give it up, but I've gotten closer to understanding NZ, which also counts for something. And there are things that I can do here that I can't there: the small size of the place means that it's easier to come to grips with in theory and practice. Making a difference is easier, because there is less to be made different.

There are concrete things that I want to do. I need a job. (I have some ideas about what type of job, and a few leads.) I have some new writing projects to get underway. I have longer term prospects to consider. I have places to go and people to see. Life, in all of its varied antipodean forms, unfurls in front of me.

On returning

2011-08-07T18:53:00.000-07:00

Everything David Lowery sung about California is true, and I have felt at times like I'm living in a Pynchon novel. But the vacation's over and I'm winging my way back to NZ, sunburnt and happily tired.

Thesis conclusion

2011-07-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

Literally three weeks before handing in my thesis, I realized that I was essentially writing about the connection between citizenship and housing. I'd come around to this point through a circuitous route that encompassed everything from a theoretical examination of deterritorialization and rescaling of political and economic life under globalization to case studies of urban change in India to a far-reaching examination of the post-liberalization Indian economy. But there it was: a fantastic thesis topic that arrived too late to do anything about it. So I turned it into a brief conclusion to the whole thesis. Such is research (and life in general).

I think this incident is indicative of the ways in which I succeeded as well as failed in my MA. On the one hand, my aim at the outset was an exploratory one - to familiarize myself with the field and to generate some interesting questions for further research. On the other, the submitted work was somewhat lacking in focus, and circled around the most vital questions rather than tightly centering in on them. If this thesis is seen as an intermediate input rather than an end product, it can probably be judged a success; if not, at least it's well-written.

Here's a draft of the conclusion. I'm not sure if it's the final instance or not.

Conclusion

This thesis has developed an account of the relationship between globalization and slum growth and upgrading in developing-world cities. In order to do so, it examined several cases of urban change within India, situating them within globalization-related mutations to urban political economies and then drawing connections back to a broader theoretical account of denationalization and reterritorialization within network society. In order to do so, it employed a framework drawn from Castells' 1983 investigation of urban social movements, The City and the Grassroots. It is worth revisiting the central features of his approach. It conceives of city spaces – from slums to business districts – as the products of particular urban meanings. In other words, housing availability and shelter deprivation within Indian cities is related to the goals that those cities have been assigned to accomplish both with respect to their inhabitants and within wider networks of trade and finance. Furthermore, urban meanings are constantly being contested by various grassroots and elite groups that use the city. These groups are seeking to establish their right to the city.

This concept, as originally developed by Lefebvre, refers to the rights of urban residents to appropriate urban space for their own uses, including housing, and the right to participate in its production (see Purcell 2001, 2003). Those who live in the city, he argued should be the ones who control its meaning. They should have access to land and housing, rather than being consigned to illegal or quasi-legal slum settlements, and play a role in decisions about redevelopment and urban upgrading, rather then being displaced in the process. In that sense, the cases of urban change examined in the second chapter were strongly linked to the right to the city. They showed different actors negotiating access and control of urban spaces within globalizing political economies.

The right to the city ultimately leads back to citizenship, a concept that lies at the heart of political science. In many respects, national citizenship is embedded within housing. To claim many of the rights and services available to a nation’s citizens – from voting registration to subsidies for basic necessities – Indian citizens must be able to prove their legal residency within a city or town. For those living within slums, this is often difficult due to the fact that they often lack tenure security or are squatting on government or private land. As a result, shelter deprivation is associated with an inability to participate within political society as a full citizen. (See also Holston and Appadurai 1996.)

When groups attempt to change urban meaning by securing housing for themselves, they are also engaged in struggles to obtain political recognition. According to theorists Appadurai (2000, 2002), Chatterjee (2004) and Benjamin (2008), shelter activism within urban India is associated with shifting notions of citizenship and political society. Appadurai’s “deep democracy”, Chatterjee’s “political society” and Benjamin’s “occupancy urbanism” are all arenas for the contestation of both slum space and the rights of those living within slums. Consequently, the various attempts to alter urban space examined within this thesis – ranging from community-led slum upgrading to the construction of globally competitive new towns – also entail the restructuring of citizenship within Indian cities.

However, this has taken place in a fundamentally different context to the one examined by Castells. Urban social movements in 1960s-1970s Paris, Madrid, San Francisco and Latin America were far less exposed to the “logic of flows” than their counterparts in today's globalizing Indian cities. Denationalization, reterritorialization, and time-space compression have deeply reshaped the context in which urban change takes place. Urban politics has become “porous” to a variety of globalized influences. This is apparent in each of the cases of urban change examined by this thesis. They reflect the emergence of new actors within its cities, including foreign construction firms participating in urban development projects, the new middle classes employed in IT production, and networked housing activists, and to the shifting status and identity of groups such as informal-sector workers and women homeworkers that were present prior to liberalization. Each of these groups has sought to establish its right to the city. At the grassroots level, this has taken place through slum upgrading projects and precedent-setting interventions to regularize the status of those living within them. At the elite level, it has entailed the development of new city spaces and the redevelopment of existing spaces to accommodate the needs of globally-mobile investment and IT production.

Consequently, this thesis sheds some light on the denationalization of citizenship, which Sassen touches upon in Territory, Authority, Rights. She observes that “the significance of the city today is as a setting for engendering new types of citizenship practices and new types of incompletely formalized political subjects” (Sassen 2006: 315). India’s experience with slums and globalization suggests that new forms of citizenship are deeply linked to shelter issues in developing-world cities. The claims made on city space by various groups are also claims to citizenship. Indian cities are the sites for multiple types of new citizenship practices, as suggested by the variety of actors and interests emerging in the wake of liberalization. If the outcomes of globalization on slum growth are apparently contradictory, it is because India's cities are sites for multiple and contradictory new forms of citizenship.

Yarrrr!

2011-07-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday: A strong contender for the title of "Best Day Ever".

Austerity or preference?

2011-07-22T10:27:00.001-07:00

While riding on BART the other day, I had a sudden realization: What it means to be a rich country is to be able to do more or less anything that you collectively desire. A country like the United States - or New Zealand, although its per capita GDP is a bit more than half as large - can pay for anything that it wants. Of course, some choices might be unwise or appalling (the Iraq war springs to mind), but the important thing is that meaningful choices exist.

Just keep this in mind when you hear politicians crying poverty, saying that we can no longer afford to pay for welfare systems, education, health, or housing. Austerity is not a necessity; it is a preference. In a couple of days, Obama and Congressional Republicans are likely to reach a deal that cuts future government debt by slashing the last remaining New Deal and Great Society programs and steadfastly avoiding upper-income tax increases. Governments in Europe and (sadly) New Zealand have also implemented such devil's bargains. But it's important to remember that they aren't compelled to do these things. There is no reason why we cannot have the same things - income and housing security, health care, free universal education, etc - that our parents enjoyed growing up in much less prosperous societies. Today, our representatives are choosing to pursue other goals instead.

Oh, you best bet I got some cunning plans

2011-07-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

I got my thesis back from the book-binders today - a small place with a bunch of ancient machines for ruling, scoring, and binding paper. I stayed a while to talk to one of the guys working there: it's pretty cool stuff! I'm always fascinated by old technology. It also got me thinking: if print shops and binding shops are viable businesses - with modern copy machines or hand-operated presses from the 1950s and before - then why wouldn't a 3D-printing shop intended for rapid prototyping of industrial designs be viable? I think that I will be buying a basic 3D printer when I get a job. That might actually be something that I could get in on the ground floor of down here.

I have a lot of ideas that have been kicking around the back of my head over the last six months, and I'm enjoying the chance to start trying some of them out. I've got a couple of new blog projects that I am getting underway right now. And of course a trip to California (to see where those old days have gone).

Anyway. I got the bound copies and took them around the relevant university offices to get them signed off. At the last stop, the Politics department office, I noticed that there were several other theses on the desk. And, what was worse, they were more than twice as thick as mine. At this point, all of my paranoid fears about not being able to complete the damn thing came back - did I misread the requirements and write half as many words as I needed? Fortunately, a closer examination revealed that the gross disparity was merely due to my use of double-sided printing to save paper.

I ended up with 35,000 words of thesis, or just under 40,000 counting references and front matter. I'm still a bit incredulous at the fact that I actually managed to complete this. Although I finished most of the actual research and writing two weeks ago, I still had to revise it in a rush, which entailed rewriting or re-ordering virtually every paragraph, writing framing sections for each chapter, and deleting approximately 15,000 words. My original estimate was that it would take a month to do this properly. I felt like I got it 95% done in two weeks without much sleep. As I could barely type straight on Wednesday afternoon, I suspect that the abstract doesn't make much sense.

The accumulated stress and sleep deprivation produced a somewhat aberrant set of behaviors - nothing that unusual, I suppose, but more twistedly ebullient than I normally experience. I'm glad it's over.

Death sprint

2011-07-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

In twelve hours I will hand in my masters thesis for binding. I'm tying off loose ends and writing odd bits here and there, but the thing is done. It's extremely strange feeling to be almost finished with something that took me a year to conceptualize, research, and write. I've had nine hours of sleep over the last two days and I am not going to sleep tonight. I have detailed (and lengthy) plans about what beers I will drink after finishing.

The only thing I can compare this feeling to - the weird mixture of exhaustion and elation - is the video below. It shows two triathletes barreling to the finish line. As they ascend towards the finish, neither one giving an inch, their legs give out from underneath them. They don't dive across the finish line so much as simultaneously collapse onto it.

That's what this is like.

Thoughts on public utilities

2011-07-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

...from science fiction:

There had to be a way of making it better and sleeker and cheaper... or maybe it was something so big that no one could run it at a profit. Maybe it was like the Post Office, maybe the profit turned up spread around the rest of society.
(Terry Pratchett, Going Postal)

I like this as a way of thinking about the economics of public goods. Quite often, we assume that the point of a utility is to concentrate profits by producing dividends to shareholders, rather than to disperse them across society. In other words, properly-run utilities should be socialized in a double sense - first, by ensuring collective ownership, and second, by ensuring that the dividends are not financial but social. Cheaper communication lets people talk more and strengthens friendships and civil society, cheaper power keeps us warm on cold nights, and so on and so forth.

(Incidentally, Terry Pratchett's follow-up to this book, Making Money is one of the best explanations of fiat currency that I've read.)

I have seen the future, and it sinters

2011-07-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

Via BLDGBLOG, this incredible video of a 3D printer that runs entirely on solar energy and sand. It blows my mind:

Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter Project from Markus Kayser on Vimeo.

The objects produced are crude yet serviceable: they are already at a similar level of craftsmanship to most sandstone carvings. It is easy to imagine this device being scaled up and used to build whole habitats out of nothing more than sand and sun. Perhaps the desert will not bloom, but oh my it will build.

(The same link also contains a video of a parabolic mirror being used to melt rock.)

6 years

2011-07-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

As of today, I've been writing here for six years. A lot has changed during that time, but not everything. (I didn't expect that the US would have spent an entire decade in Afghanistan, for example.)

Here's one thing that should have changed but, sadly, probably never will at this point. Glenn Greenwald reports:

In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder -- under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House -- announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., "good-faith" torturers). The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a "preliminary review" to determine if a full investigation was warranted -- in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

Yesterday, it was announced that this "preliminary review" by the prosecutor assigned to conduct it, U.S. Attorney John Durham, is now complete, and -- exactly as one would expect -- even this category of criminals has been almost entirely protected, meaning a total legal whitewash for the Bush torture regime...

This makes me feel sick and angry. I thought that in November 2008 we were electing someone who would uphold the rule of law rather that protecting those who had brutally violated human rights.

Department of vehicular irony

2011-07-04T14:12:00.001-07:00

Civil disobedience turns into an object lesson, and I am not sure if it is sad or stupid:

In New York, it's a state law that all motorcyclist wear helmets. Opposed to this motorcycle-helmet law, a group of riders put on a protest near Syracuse Sunday.

As the men rode their motorcycles without helmets in protest, one bare-headed rider suffered a crash, striking his head on the roadway. New York State Police reported the man involved in the crash, Philip Contos, 55, died from the injuries.

I am not an especially safety-conscious person on the whole: I think we'd be better off with more hazardous playground toys and less airport security checks. I own a motorcycle, and that's not exactly the safest activity. But all the same, I can't argue against taking reasonable precautions. One of the most blitheringly obvious ones in existence is proper motorcycle gear, including a good helmet. I believe in the sander test. One of these days, no matter how confident you are in your riding skills, you will be unseated, and at that point your face may end up sliding along the pavement. I know that at that point I'd rather have a full-face helmet on than years of reconstructive surgery (or worse).

Now that I think of it, I probably spent more effort on deciding what type of gear to buy than I did on deciding what type of bike to buy. Because as much as I love riding, I realize that it involves traveling really fast without the protective steel and glass of a car. I researched helmets pretty comprehensively, looking at the pros and cons of different designs and safety certifications. And I also looked at the arguments against wearing helmets. They seemed to rest on a few dodgy uses of statistics (people with helmets die too! so they must be equally bad) and a kind of hubristic notion that not wearing a helmet would improve their situational awareness to the point where they won't crash. The FIGJAM mentality (fuck I'm good, just ask me) is sometimes disproven by massive head trauma.

A different kind of indolence

2011-06-29T23:14:00.001-07:00

A while back, I realized that I have a rather peculiar kind of intellectual laziness. Most people, when confronted with a need to be (or seem) well-informed about a topic that they are nor particularly familiar with, will do one of two things: Either reason from ignorance (i.e. speculate or make shit up), or generalize from anecdotes (i.e. base conclusion on unrepresentative data). This is, of course, intellectually lazy. It's okay for casual conversation, but not necessarily for public discourse on important things. Nevertheless, it happens.

I've got a slightly more advanced method of being indolent. Whenever I don't know much about a topic, my immediate instinct is to go straight to statistical abstracts and see what the numbers say. Because I'm familiar with most of the common online sources of useful cross-national statistics, this is much faster and easier than, say, going and reading books or academic papers on the subject. It has the virtue of allowing me to quickly reject some of the obviously wrong perspectives, but it's not always very illuminating about the reasons why things happen. But as it's a subtle form of intellectual laziness compared to the obvious ones mentioned above, it sometimes flies under the radar.

Scheduling

2011-06-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

The three R's: Running, writing, and reptiliation.

Too much horror business

2011-06-26T01:03:00.000-07:00

Research for my post-thesis zombie movie marathon has turned up a few great bits of Youtube. Highlights thus far include "Send more paramedics" and "BRAINS... MORE BRAINS!" from Return of the Living Dead's surprisingly articulate yet greedily wasteful undead freaks. Also the classic zombie v. shark scene from Zombi 2, featuring a fake zombie and a real shark. And the whole absurd trailer for the Plaga Zombie: Zona Mutante, which is actually fairly similar to the above clip now that I think of it. And, ecclesiastically speaking, "I kick arse for the LORD!" from Braindead and the maniac street preacher being attacked while wearing a sandwich-board reading "THE END IS NEAR" from the epic Zombieland intro.

The above clip, which agglomerates all of Bruce Campbell's screams from the three Evil Dead films, is interesting in part because it reveals that 2 percent of the series' total running time is taken up by him screaming.

The mechanics of obsession

2011-06-23T19:34:00.001-07:00

This has been a very strange few months.

Five or six weeks ago, I was panicking. It was a numbers problem: While I had recently figured out how my master's thesis would fit together conceptually, the amount of writing (and, often, background work assembling evidence and arguments) I had remaining seemed insurmountable. I'm quantitatively-minded, so I broke it down as follows:

40,000 words (or roughly 160 pages) required in an MA.

Approximately 10,000 words completed to date.

Two months remaining (what the hell did I do with the previous nine?).

500 words a day were needed in order to even reach the necessary length. And even if I managed to work at that (seemingly herculean) pace, it would leave me no time for editing and revising.

Conclusion? Totally screwed.

Then I went and got some intermediate deadlines from my advisor - a process that I wish I'd begun in earnest six months ago, even if I had to throw out three-quarters of whatever I'd written. And so begins the descent into madness. My diet, sleep patterns, and exercise all suffered badly as I focused singlemindedly on the task at hand. I became far too familiar with bargain-basement energy drinks with names like "SKULL", "DEMON", and "MONSTER". (They all taste medicinal and require me to have a beer to take the edge off the resulting caffeine jitters.)

And I wrote, at an increasingly furious pace. A 17,000 word chapter drafted in two weeks (representing an average of 1,200 words a night). A short break to grade essays. Another chapter - this one only 13,000 words but considerably more focused - in the following two weeks. And suddenly, I was done. Not in the sense of having a completed work of scholarly genius that I could hand in before going to the bar with a clear conscience. (I do not think that mythical entity will emerge from this process.) But I had succeeded in writing 40,000 words that cover, in approximate fashion, the topic that I'd set out to examine.

Obviously, many of these words will have to be revised, rewritten, replaced, or simply deleted; I will have to add in a great many transitional paragraphs and concluding statements and so on and so forth. I'm going to need to choose between several options for introducing the topic, and write a conclusion. But, contrary to my pessimistic fears, I have almost three weeks left to do those things. Time will continue bending and stretching until things are at an approximate stopping place. And at that point, it will be time for as much alcohol, running/hiking and zombie films as I can handle.

Olympic ground swimming

2011-06-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

This should be a real sport:

Watch the whole thing for the explosive ending! Afterward, the competitors enjoy some energy drinks and a little good-natured ribbing.

The Australian ground swimmer's name is Ian Soda, whilst the UK has put forward its most ferocious competitor: Hot Raymond.

Fictitious commodities strike back

2011-06-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

Karl Polanyi once wrote that labour (along with land and money) was a "fictitious commodity". By this, he meant that labour markets did not (and could not) operate in the same efficient, equilibrium-seeking manner as markets in legumes or laptops. Due to one central fact: labour, the subdivided and sold-off intervals of human life, is not produced for the market with the expectation of profit. Its supply cannot be diminished or scrapped in response to falling prices.

However, the United States has found a cunning way to circumvent this seeming contradiction: it has also provided health care, which is essential for the maintenance of life, through markets. Consequently, one's continued healthy existence is connected with employment (or at least, employment that is well-paid and productive enough to come with health benefits). Being downsized from your job can also downsize your entire existence. The functioning of the market continues apace.

Fortunately for the actual human beings involved in this very profitable system, there are still some areas of social life left uncolonized by market logic:

James Richard Verone woke up June 9 with a sense of anticipation.

He took a shower.

Ironed his shirt.

Hailed a cab.

Then robbed a bank.

He wasn’t especially nervous. If anything, Verone said he was excited to finally execute his plan to gain access to free medical care.

This is not a good sign

2011-06-16T02:34:00.001-07:00

Sitting in the computer labs this evening, trying to write and drinking a cup of tea. When it's finished, I turn over the (plastic) mug and look at the underside, which is stamped with the words:

MELAMINE WARE
MADE IN CHINA

For reference, melamine is a synthetic material produced in large quantities in China. It is also highly toxic and has been the subject of several poisoned-food scandals. Needless to say, I am now a little paranoid.

Fucking hell.

The politics of shit

2011-06-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

This is what I am writing about today:

In India, where distance from one’s own excrement can be seen as the virtual marker of class distinction, the poor, for too long having lived literally in their own shit, are finding ways to place some distance between their waste and themselves. The toilet exhibitions are a transgressive display of this fecal politics, itself a critical material feature of deep democracy.
(Arjun Appadurai, "Deep Democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics" (2002), p. 39)

The filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, the auteur of the toilet documentary Bumbay, told a startled interviewer that in Bombay "half the population doesn't have a toilet to shit in, so they shit outside. That's five million people. If they shit half a kilo each, that's two and a half kilos of shit each morning."
(Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006), p. 142)

A timely reminder of the intimate, material dimension of slums.

That's the way you do it

2011-06-14T04:17:00.000-07:00

My favorite excerpt from Ernest Hemingway's greatest moments:

During a 1931 fishing trip on his boat, the Pilar, Hemingway uses a Thompson submachine gun to fend off sharks intent on scavenging his catch -- a 500-pound tuna -- before he can hoist it onto the boat. He ends up shooting himself in both legs trying to sink a man-size mako.

Ol' Ernest had resolved to convert that tuna into tuna melts, god dammit, and he wasn't going to let a few sharks stop him. Apparently he bought the gun after losing a large marlin to sharks; machine-gunning makos was a regular occurrence on his fishing trips. He also once used hand grenades to destroy a shark. Evidently he also felt that hand grenades were an essential piece of fishing tackle.

Best American state flags

2011-06-10T00:23:00.000-07:00

That's why flags are such ugly things that they should never touch the ground. - Fugazi

Apropos of nothing, here is a list of my top five favorite state flags, in no particular order. I'm not usually a fan of flags - the designs are usually banal or hideous, and I've had a gutsful of flag-waving jingoism over the last decade. But you can often find quite interesting flags at the subnational level, where there's a bit more room for bizarre experiments. So without any further ado, The Top Five:

Arizona: BOOM. That's an atomic sunset!

California: Because we're all about this awesome fucking golden bear. That we hunted to extinction a century ago.

New Mexico: Classy, unique, and, most importantly, bright yellow. March into battle under this standard and your enemies will have to look away and rub their eyes. You can kill them while they are still blinking.

Washington: Just in case you forgot what the state's called, here's a visual reminder.

Vermont: Visually, somewhat crowded, but I like it because it effectively captures everything there is to know about the state. Deer, maple trees, purple hills, haystacks, and, that's right bitches, motherfucking COWS.

There were some states that almost made the cut, but didn't quite due to what I can only assume were some last-minute additions put in to satisfy State Senator Fuckleton or some similar variety of moron. The Runners-Up:

Oregon: Almost ran away with it, but made a fatal heraldic mistake by only displaying the beaver on the back of the state flag. Bad move guys; everyone knows that an animal this comedic should be placed front and center.

Wyoming: You couldn't imagine a better - or more intimidating - design for a state flag ("Check out the lumbering meat-bulldozers that used to inhabit this great state before we killed the shit out of most of them!"). And then they ruin it by dropping their hideous state seal down in the middle of the resplendent bison.

And, as always, it is necessary to mention that there is also a worst state flag. Mississippi loses this one, by an incredibly wide margin, for its combination of sheer dullness (blue, white, and red stripes; real original!) with an unabashed symbol of slavery.

Lately listening

2011-06-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

Just some old fashioned rock and roll.

Bad Brains - "Justice Keepers":

[It's not quite "Pay to Cum" in terms of blistering ferocity, or "Sacred Love" in terms of sludgy heaviness. But it's worth listening for the first ten seconds alone, with HR's otherworldly voice lurching in over the drums a second ahead of the guitar.]

Grinderman - "Worm Tamer":

[The second to last line - "You know my baby calls me the Loch Ness monster; two great big humps and then I'm gone" - cracks me up every time I hear this song.]

Earth doom watch

2011-06-08T21:12:00.001-07:00

The latest news on carbon emissions suggests that the earth's climate is fucked. The Guardian:

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially "dangerous climate change" – is likely to be just "a nice Utopia", according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

"I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions," Birol told the Guardian. "It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say."
[...]
The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year's emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree.

Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. "I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one," said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on energy.

You probably didn't see this news reported - because politicians don't give a shit, the media could care less, and powerful business interests are making a lot of money off the destruction of our climate. There are some very powerful people who don't want you to start caring about this (until it's too late). But make no mistake: this is more or less the most alarming news imaginable. In the absence of political will and coordination, global recession was basically our last best hope for avoiding a climate catastrophe. And that hope has just been proven baseless.

Simply put, we are running out of time to avoid catastrophic climate change. As the article details, most of our emission sources are already locked in place - the coal-fired power plants have been built, the cars have been bought (and the trains and buses haven't), the subdivisions have been planned, etc, etc. We are losing our last chance to switch to a different course. This is a fucking nightmare. And we are going to feel its effects within our lifetimes.

Animal kingdom

2011-06-07T14:44:00.000-07:00

A trip to the zoo encourages me to reflect upon my system of classifying animals. The most famous example of such a taxonomy is, of course, Borges' "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy". It divides the animal kingdom into fourteen categories:

Those that belong to the emperor

Embalmed ones

Those that are trained

Suckling pigs

Mermaids (or Sirens)

Fabulous ones

Stray dogs

Those that are included in this classification

Those that tremble as if they were mad

Innumerable ones

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

Et cetera

Those that have just broken the flower vase

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

Being of a simpler mind, I have a much simpler taxonomy. While walking the zoo, I found that I was dividing the diverse species inhabiting it into three main categories, or four if you also count the residual category of animals that could not be readily classified into the above three groups:

Animals to be ridden or otherwise sat upon

Those that, being soft-furred or otherwise appealing, could be petted or used as accessories for eveningwear

Tender animals to be eaten

I spent a long while near the Galapagos tortoise enclosure: the old man, his shell crusty and covered in scrapes, pawed at the ground for a while before extruding his long, moray-like neck and looking intently at me. I looked back at him, thinking that I would really enjoy taking him home and using him as a gradual steed and semi-mobile coffee table.

Precious metals

2011-05-30T04:36:00.000-07:00

Or: I do not think that policy means what you think it does.

H refers me to an odd bit of news from Utah, where the body politic is apparently braindead. Their state government has passed a law that permits commemorative coins stamped in gold or silver to be redeemed at participating merchants:

Utah has passed a law intended to encourage residents to use gold or silver coins made by the Mint as cash, but with their value based on the weight of the precious metals in them, not the face value — if, that is, they can find a merchant willing to accept the coins on that basis.

The legislation, called the Legal Tender Act of 2011, was inspired in part by Tea Party supporters, some of whom believe that the dollar should be backed by gold or silver and that Obama administration policies could cause a currency collapse. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. Several other states, including Minnesota, Idaho and Georgia, have considered similar laws.

A short history lesson: Until the 1930s, the US used the "gold standard" as the basis for its currency - meaning that the cost of an ounce of gold was fixed at a certain, unchanging dollar value. Every dollar issued had to be "backed" by gold held in reserve by the federal government. As a result, the government had no control over monetary policy - in a crisis, it couldn't increase the money supply to support aggregate demand. (This inflexibility was, in fact, one of the main causes of the Great Depression, which is why the gold standard was abandoned during that period.)

Flash forward to today, when we have a right-wing movement that has lost all contact with reality and is casting about for any and all reason to attack a president whose presidency they see as wholly illegitimate. And one of the things that they seize upon is the idea that he is "debasing" the American currency by recklessly "printing money". In order to maintain the "purity" of the greenback against the rapacious appetites of a crypto-Kenyan-Islamo-socialist, they begin advocating a return to the gold standard. (Until I wrote that sentence, I did not fully realize that there was an aspect of racialized sexual fear connected to current conservative views on monetary policy. Hmmm.) Hence this law.

Even leaving aside the fact that its main supporters sound like paranoid schizophrenics ("They say that it is just a beginning, that one day soon Utah might mint its own coins, that retailers could have scales for weighing precious metals and that a state defense force could be formed to guard warehouses where the new money would be made and stored."), this law is nonsensical on its face. It does the exact opposite of what they think it does. Rather than reestablishing the principle of having a currency backed by precious metals, it reinforces the underlying principle of a fiat currency. Essentially, it allows commemorative coins to be exchanged at the current market value - which, of course, continually fluctuates against the dollar. Doesn't sound like a gold standard to me.

Idiots.

Where did that come from?

2011-05-28T05:20:00.001-07:00

Just tonight, I realized that despite differences in stature and ethnicity, my cousin Dan looks remarkably like me in some ways. We have very similar smiles.

Short-form movie review

2011-05-26T18:19:00.001-07:00

Death Race 2000: A film where the feel-good happy ending consists of the President of the United States running over a reporter.

419

2011-05-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

Via zunguzungu, I ran across a great article on the underemployed talent in Nigeria: "The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment. Having grown up there, the contours of the story are familiar to me: innovativeness and initiative are more or less evenly distributed over the planet, but the opportunities to use those talents are extremely unevenly distributed.

Ever since he could remember, Ibrahim Boakye had a knack for understanding how things worked. There were things he could just do that no other kids– let alone adults– could understand. By the time he was five-years-old everyone had stopped questioning it, and neighbors were calling on him to fix their broken toasters, irons, or anything that was the least bit mechanical.

By his early teens, he was getting things out of the dump and fixing them for fun. Soon after that, he was teaching himself to code. He’s made an outsized living no one in his family could have anticipated by outsmarting other people on computers ever since. It’s never been about money or even in those early days about doing good deeds around the neighborhood. He gets an intoxicating rush from solving the hardest technical problem he can find and from knowing that he’s the best.

As I sat in a hotel lobby in Lagos listening to his story, I couldn’t help being reminded of Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide fame. Levchin grew up in Soviet Russia and had the same knack, that same innate ability to understand how machines worked. He learned to code on whatever he could find– calculators, pen and paper, old Soviet microcomputers. When his family moved to America, he rebuilt things he found in dumpsters too. Watching the nightly news on a old black-and-white TV helped teach him English.

For Levchin, it was also about the thrill. He once got in trouble with the FBI for cracking video game codes for a Chicago crime boss. He didn’t really think about the fact that he was doing something illegal, he just loved the challenge. And like Boakye, he’s made an outsized living no one in his family could have anticipated by outsmarting other people on computers ever since. His rush also comes from solving the hardest technical problem he can find, and from knowing that he is the best.

But there’s a big difference between the two. Levchin immigrated to the US at 16, went to University of Illinois and was inspired by the example of Marc Andreessen. He moved to Silicon Valley at the best possible time for an aggressive, insanely-competitive coder to move to Silicon Valley. A company as complex and lasting as PayPal was hardly all luck and timing, but Levchin took advantage of being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people, most notably PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

By contrast, Boakye grew up in a poor section of Lagos. In a way, his timing was also serendipitous: The Internet’s emergence in Nigeria breathed new life into an old national scam: The 419 letter. And a new generation was making hay out of the naiveté of millions of new Internet users. For Nigeria’s massive unemployed population– some fifty million people today– this was every bit the gold rush that Silicon Valley was in the 1990s. And the “entrepreneurs” concocting these schemes late night after the doors were locked in Nigeria’s Internet cafes needed a brilliant coder who was more motivated the bigger the challenge. Boakye was one of the best in the country.

Some people are angered by the 419 scams; others are merely irritated at the inbox clutter, or amused by the grammar. But I don't see them in a wholly negative light: I like to think of them as remittances by other means. They're a good example of how ingenuity will out, regardless of the circumstances. In a very real sense, cities like Lagos are actually hotbeds of entrepreneurialism - simply because, as Manuel Castells pointed out, there is no alternative:

Paradoxically, we could say that the only occupational situation which is almost non-existent in a dependent society is unemployment because, strictly speaking, unemployment (that is, the absence of a regularly paid labour activity) is a 'privilege' of advanced capitalist countries, as well as of a tiny labour aristocracy of developing countries, strong enough to obtain 'unemployment insurance'. The average person in Venezuela, Mexico, Chile and Peru, cannot live without working - something must be done to earn money to survive. And, in fact, everybody does some kind of work although only a minority receives a regular paycheck.
(Manuel Castells (1983), The City and the Grassroots, p. 183.)

However, I think that we can and should do better. Most of the activities people engage in to survive in the cities of the developing world are not particularly remunerative. Some - like 419 scamming - are not even very socially beneficial. The world's squandering a lot of brilliance in African slums - and, for that matter, at day labor centers in California. Right now, for every Max Levchin that succeeds, often improving our lives in the process, there are probably dozens of Ibrahim Boakyes. We can't really afford to keep doing this.

I am aware that this is a principle without a policy - I have some thoughts on the latter, but they will probably have to wait.

The unseen sea

2011-05-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

A friend showed me this. The location isn't specified, but I identified it instantly: Fog washing across the San Francisco Bay, moving in big tidal rushes up and over the Berkeley Hills. I am sitting in the computer labs on a Saturday night, trying to write, watching this - and a fireworks show just visible out the window - instead. I miss the landscape.

(Formerly) unlawful search and seizure

2011-05-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Fourth Amendment, which provides protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, has just been gutted. The Supreme Court just handed down an 8-1 decision that found that police officers can enter your property without a warrant when they suspect that there is an urgent need to do so in order to prevent evidence being destroyed. The case in question:

Police officers following a suspect into an apartment complex in Lexington, Ky., don’t know which apartment their man has entered. But wafting through one of the closed apartment doors is the familiar odor of marijuana. The smell provides reason to believe criminal activity is afoot, probable cause for a warrant to search the apartment.

Do the police stake out the apartment and go for a warrant? No, they do not. Instead, they bang on the door, shouting, “Police, police, police.” No response — at least, no verbal response. From behind the door the officers hear the sound of “people inside moving” and objects “being moved.” Aha! Evidence may be about to be destroyed. Announcing that they are coming in, the officers kick in the door and find not the man they were looking for, but three other people, one of whom is smoking marijuana. More marijuana, along with cocaine, is in plain view.

The decision held that this sort of search was entirely permissible, as the police suspected that evidence was being destroyed, and because the inhabitants would have been within their rights to refuse a search. The fact that the police could have obtained a warrant for the search without much trouble was completely irrelevant:

What the court held, in an opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., is that warrantless entry to prevent the destruction of evidence is justified as long as the police “did not create the exigency by engaging or threatening to engage in conduct that violates the Fourth Amendment.”

Here, according to the court, all the police did was knock on the door, something that is “no more than any private citizen might do.” (But didn’t the police break the door down and barge in — hardly something one would expect to follow a neighborly knock? Well, yes, but that was after the “exigency” arose, after they heard the scurrying.)

According to Justice Alito, “Whether the person who knocks on the door and requests the opportunity to speak is a police officer or a private citizen, the occupant has no obligation to open the door or to speak.” In other words, the occupants of the apartment not only had a right to tell the police to go away, they almost had a constitutional obligation to do so, because “occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame for the warrantless exigent-circumstances search that may ensue.”

Read the whole article. Words cannot suffice. This is an appalling ruling from the court. In practical terms, it means that we no longer have the expectation of a right to privacy within our own homes whenever a police officer is around.

Oh, and know your rights. If a police officer bangs on your door shouting "Police! Police!", you are under no obligation to let them in without a warrant. ASK THEM if they have such a thing, and if they say no, REFUSE them entry and INSIST that you want to see a lawyer before speaking with them. You are within your rights to do so - although the police are no longer required to inform you of those rights due to an earlier Supreme Court decision.

Of course, if they really want to get in, they will circumvent your refusal to grant entry by concocting some sort of "exigency", such as the sounds of "people moving" used to justify entry in this case.

Depressing statistic of the day

2011-05-18T15:40:00.001-07:00

...academia edition.

Oh god, there are so many depressing statistics out there. This one is especially bad.

I am currently working as a teaching assistant for a political economy course at the University of Auckland. I am responsible for a bunch of grading and organizing a one-hour discussion section every week. It probably amounts to about 10 hours of work a week - roughly a quarter of a full-time job - and pays enough to cover most of my living expenses. (The rest are covered by an allowance from the NZ government, which makes me love this place even more.) I belong to a union.

If I was doing this fulltime - i.e. tutoring four courses a term, three terms a year - it would amount to an annual salary of roughly NZ$53,500. (At current exchange rates, roughly US$42,000.) Not bad pay, in other words.

Now compare. If I weren't studying towards an MA here, there's a reasonable chance I would gone to the City University of New York to get a PhD. As is the case here, I probably would have funded my education partially through teaching - as adjunct faculty somewhere within the large CUNY system. After seven years or so, I would earn a PhD, which would qualify me mainly for... more adjunct teaching. Half of the classes at CUNY are now taught by adjuncts. According to the CUNY Adjunct Project, a full-time adjunct professor at CUNY could expect to earn a salarly of $24,600. Per course, that's only slightly more than half of what I earn here, and for a significantly greater amount of responsibility. It is also slightly below the living wage in New York City.

It's just another example of American workers getting totally screwed, even if they are well-qualified and hard-working.

It makes a good point

2011-05-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

One of the consequences of my brother's sojourn in Denmark is that I have been asked to advise him on a paper he's writing on the Norse gods. This is of course rather abstruse to me as I know little about pagans. But the upside to it is that he showed me this image:

It certainly presents a compelling argument.

California vowel shift

2011-05-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

This obscure chart is a map of Californians' vowel pronunciation. It explains something that has been confusing me for some time: Why do so many of my vowels sound the same? There seems to be a particular issue with pairs of words like tall/toll, pall/poll, trawl/troll, etc, which I pronounce identically. I don't think this is a problem, but some other people have complained in the past. As it turns out it's perfectly normal and the mockery was uncalled for. It's part of what's called the "caught/cot merger":

The sound change causes the vowel in caught, talk, and small to be pronounced like the vowel in cot, rock, and doll, so that cot and caught, for example, become homophones, and the two vowels merge into a single phoneme. The change does not affect a vowel followed by /r/, so barn and born remain distinct, and starring and warring do not rhyme.
[...]
Possible homophone sets for speakers with the merger include (with the word corresponding to cot in non-merged dialects being listed first): bobble/bauble, bock/balk, body/bawdy, bot/bought, clod/Claude-clawed, collar/caller, cock/caulk, chock/chalk, don/dawn, fond/fawned, holler/hauler, hottie/haughty, knotty/naughty, Moll/maul-mall, mod/Maud, nod/gnawed, not-knot/naught, odd/awed, Oz/awes, pod/pawed, pol-Poll/Paul-pall-pawl, popper/pauper, pond/pawned, rot/wrought, sod/sawed, stock/stalk, tock/talk, tot/taut-taught and wok/walk.

The merger is a part of California English, the history of which is quite fascinating. It's a hybrid of multiple hybrid accents, spawned by a century and a half of migration. (Did you know that Valley Girl accents originated with migrants from the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas? Neither did I.) Also, hella hella hella hella.

The $300 house

2011-05-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

JT sent me an interesting article on shelter issues from the Economist. It concerns an idea floated in the Harvard Business Review: Why not "apply the world’s best business thinking to housing the poor" by developing a cheap, livable packaged house?

The houses should be built of mass-produced materials tough enough to protect their inhabitants from a hostile world. They should be equipped with the basics of civilised life, including water filters and solar panels. They should be “improvable”, so that families can adapt them to their needs. And they should cost no more than $300.

Mr Govindarajan admits that the $300 figure was partly an attention-grabbing device. But he also argues that it has a certain logic. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, has calculated that the average value of the houses of people who have just escaped from poverty is $370. Tata Motors has also demonstrated the value of having a fixed figure to aim at: the company would have found it more difficult to produce the Tata Nano if it had simply been trying to produce a “cheap” car rather than a “one lakh” car (about $2,200).
[...]
These thinkers, like the advocates of the $300 house, must solve three huge problems to succeed. They must persuade big companies that they can make money out of cheap homes, because only they can achieve the economies of scale needed to hit the target price. They need to ensure sufficient access to microloans: $300 is a huge investment for a family of squatters living on a couple of dollars a day. And they need to overcome the obstacle that most slum-dwellers have weak or non-existent property rights. There is no point in offering people the chance to buy a cleverly designed house if they have no title to the land they occupy. Solving these problems will in turn demand a high degree of co-operation between people who do not always get on: companies and NGOs, designers and emerging-world governments.

This is an intriguing idea - or at any rate, it's an idea that reveals a lot about the intractable challenges of housing the billion or so living in slums in the developing world. What this is, basically, is an attempt to turn unmet housing needs into a business problem, to solve them through the development and sale of new technology. This is basically a good thing. At the moment, businessmen spend far more time catering for elite consumption desires rather than addressing the pressing needs at the bottom of the pyramid. Even if it is somewhat presumptuous to assume that solutions can only be developed by the "best business brains", rather than the people who are already living (although not well) in houses that cost less than an iPod.

But the most important paragraph in the piece is the last one I've quoted, which lightly glosses over the barriers faced to actually building hundreds of millions of $300 houses. Most notably, who will pay for the prefab houses, and where can they actually be built? These aren't problems to be solved by businesses; I'd suggest that they are essentially political problems. Conditions in slums could definitely be improved by new, cheaper product lines. But the fundamental problem is that the people living within them - who often constitute a plurality or even majority of their city - lack the capacity to shape and remake their habitat. They lack the "right to the city" (Henri Lefebvre/David Harvey) or the kind of "deep democracy" (Arjun Appadurai) that would enable them to reorganize urban space to suit their needs. (By contrast, wealthy developers and transnational capital have this capacity in droves.)

In the words of David Harvey,

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.

Technological improvement - such as the proposed $300 house - can help to reshape cities. But it's only one part of a larger process of collective political action. Put in other terms, it is possible to imagine a world in which houses are available for $300, but hundreds of millions are not yet housed. But that would be inconceivable in a world in which those millions were politically empowered.

The horror in squid

2011-05-10T07:22:00.001-07:00

The fools! The mad, rash fools! Charlie Stross informs me that NASA is now sending squids into space:

The last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor will be both manned and squidded...

“The Squids in Space project is a cohesive effort in which the full range of NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium supported categories work together on an experiment destined to fly on what will be the last flight of space shuttle Endeavour,” said Florida Space Grant Consortium Director Jaydeep Mukherjee. “This team, which is composed of Florida colleges and high school students and led by University of Florida PhD research scientist Jamie Foster, will connect the three tiers of education in an experiment studying the effects of microgravity on squid embryos.”

It may sound like an innocuous science experiment, but only to those that are not aware of the fathomless horrors lurking in the Outer Dark. Amorphous tentacled monstrosities awaiting their return to Earth with glacial intelligence. They call to us in our nightmares. Perhaps they called to the high school students - lab-coated junior mystics - to request suitable Earthly forms to be sent into the vacuum.

Mike Mignola's Gothic sensibilities show us the horror lurking at the end of the rocket-trail. An image from Hellboy: Conquerer Worm dramatizes what's at stake (click to enlarge):

One cannot just blithely play with the future of human existence like this - except, of course, when it comes to carbon emissions and climate change.

Trouble in dreams

2011-05-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

At last! A novel variety of nightmare. I feel as though a breakthrough has been made. Of course, the actual content of the dream was grotesque and horrifying, but that's beside the point.

Will the future ever look like it used to?

2011-05-05T01:13:00.001-07:00

Via T, a gallery of abandoned Yugoslavian monuments: vast, concrete edifices that have fallen into ruin with the loss of their political-economic context (Yugoslavia's non-aligned communism, and, indeed, Yugoslavia itself). I find them hauntingly beautiful.

Looking through these ruins, I feel a sense of loss. Not for communism itself, which was a ghastly and inhuman system, but for the utopian moment within it. Ideologically, and hence often aesthetically, it had to orient itself towards the future, towards the dynamic potential of the classless society. Something greater than the continual meshing and occasional grinding of the gears of individual self-interest: the realization of human potential. It was not able to deliver on that promise. But in the process of failing, it left behind a number of absurd monuments, artistically striving towards something that now seems alien.

Perhaps these sculptures are best experienced as ruins. Perhaps decay softens their inhuman and tyrannical facets. Perhaps the dust settling upon yesterday's vision of tomorrow allows us to view it with fond nostalgia. Or maybe we need that impulse back; maybe we've been living too long with the promise that tomorrow will be exactly like today, except with either a bit more material abundance or slightly fewer irreplaceable resources and ecosystems (depending upon who you ask). I'm not saying that we should pressure-wash Yugoslavia's monuments and boldly strive for their yesteryear utopia. But perhaps we should blow the dust off the utopian impulse, reactivate our "secret heliotropism" and start striving to turn toward the shattered sun rising in the sky of history.

Tornado!

2011-05-02T21:10:00.001-07:00

This afternoon, a tornado struck a mall in Auckland's North Shore. Here it can be seen destroying a roof and hurling it into the sky:

I am going to venture a speculation that New Zealand's prevailing form of architecture (the giant shed-like building) is not the best suited to withstand such weather patterns. Here is an example of one common building material, a tin roofing sheet, mangled and blown across a car park:

Addendum: Short video, with profane commentary from office workers:

Their remarks also shed light upon some other distinctive features of kiwi home and garden: "What the hell is that? That's a trampoline! Up there, there's a trampoline. Hey, there's another one over there. Oh my god, there goes another trampoline!" Evidently New Zealanders' favorite backyard toy, with its low mass, hard metal frame, and large surface area, is well-suited to inclusion in a lethal cloud of swirling debris.

May Day

2011-05-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

A day late in New Zealand but still the right time in the US. (Not that May Day resonates much in the States.) It seems appropriate to put up a bit of Pete Seeger (heard here with Tom Glazer, Hally Wood Faulk and Ronnie Gilbert on "Talking Union" in 1947):

It's a message that doesn't get heard enough these days. But it needs to be: As Seeger sings, unions have been responsible for the creation of the middle class by ensuring that workers get a fair share of what they produce. Today, we can coast on those accomplishments even if we don't belong to a union, but it's not going to last. Attempts to destroy the vestiges of union strength in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana are, basically, an attempt to destroy Americans' chance for a decent life.

Addendum: As this list from Calitics shows, virtually every good thing that's happened in the workplace over the last century and a half has come as a result of union campaigns.

The horror in sex ed

2011-04-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

The above short film, Late Bloomer, which was an official selection at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, is a wonderful take on the ridiculousness of sex ed classes. I remember the last state-sponsored attempt to teach me the ways of the world: the class was taught by a batty old biology teacher who was almost certainly more concerned with the welfare of the ducks in the local ponds than with the sexual health of her proteges. Other classes were taught by a cast of conscripted PE teachers: essentially, those too slow-witted to escape the responsibility. Their already-unhealthy attitude towards teen physiology and morale did not create a salubrious environment. This being California slightly before abstinence teaching was imposed by the Bush administration, we were treated to all the classic awkward discussions of penis-in-vagina and banana unfurling practice on bananas.

This film enacts that process, narrated in the hysterical tone of HP Lovecraft - a man whose writings display visceral revulsion at sex and sexual organs. The ending is somewhat reminiscent of Borges' "Sect of the Phoenix".

Live action Mario Kart

2011-04-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

Never been much for LARPing - while beating people with giant foam swords is a great idea, the costumes and backstories sound like too much trouble. But this event sounds like an incredible time. It's Bring Your Own Big Wheel 2011, but it might as well be described as a live action form of Mario Kart:

I am going to have to consider moving back to the Bay solely in order to experience next year's edition. It seems comically enjoyable in the extreme.

Sightings

2011-04-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

An Easter vacation in the Hokianga with a friend. The sights were seen, and the amusements were patronized. Tidal blowholes, sand-dune boarding, giant kauri and waterfalls, uncommonly delicious food, early mornings and early nights brought on by the changing pattern of sunlight. I have sighted my favorite bumper sticker yet: it read "Shalom, y'all" in both the Latin and Hebrew alphabets. And also an alarmingly Lovecraftian piece of driftwood: a log festooned with hundreds of dying mollusks, each attached to the timber by an articulated purple tendril, and gently opening and closing to reveal a brace of tentacles. Innocent sea-life, or harbinger of the Elder Gods' return from their slumber?

Hit the north!

2011-04-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

Going to the Hokianga for Easter.