Do the (Uber) Hustle

There was CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick’s close and video’d encounter with one of his drivers. Then there was the Greyball “scandal-een”, in which Uber was found to have used an app (of course) to avoid ticket-giving cops. And let’s not forget the sexual discrimination charges. But from where I stand, the best Uber story of late was the one I saw this week on The Guardian.

It turns out that the “Uber way” – that “take-no-prisoners, win-at-any-cost mentality [which] has helped the company soar to market domination and a $70bn valuation” – has a downside beyond revelations about things like Greyball. It turns out that a lot of Uber employees – the real employees, not the drivers: oh, pardon, me the partners – are looking to leave. And they’re having a hard time finding new companies willing to hire them.

“People are looking to get out because they’re just sick of working for that company,” said a former Uber employee, who asked not to be identified. “A lot of them have told me that they’re having a hard time finding something new.”

At job interviews, the employee said, recruiters seem wary of Uber’s “hustle-oriented” workplace. “They have to defend themselves and say, ‘Oh, I’m not an asshole.’”

The “asshole” reputation stems directly from Uber’s corporate values, former employees and others in the tech industry said. For many, company “values” are the kind of corporate speak that rarely interferes with one’s day to day work environment. But at Uber, the emphasis on hustling, toe-stepping and meritocracy took on a more sinister aspect in the workplace (Source: The Guardian)

Well, while I have no idea how employees are compensated, I’m guessing that, with the possibility of an IPO this year, and with that cra $70B valuation, I’m sure that any employee with options is going to be hanging on. However lousy the working conditions, money does tend to talk.

But it doesn’t surprise me that employers may be a bit skittish about hiring someone from a company that has “always be hustlin’” as one of its core values.

This, of course, made me curious about what the other values are that Uber holds dear. According to a post by Sarah Shull on Sum Total:

Uber has 14 core cultural values, including vision, quality obsession, innovation, “going toe to toe with colleagues,” fierceness, execution, communication, and “super-pumpedness.” Essentially, Uber employees must have a “hustle” mindset and a do-whatever-it-takes attitude to move the company in the right direction. (Source: Sum Total)

Shull seems prety enthusiastic – pumped and fierce – about these values making Uber great, but I’m exhausted just reading them. I’m okay with having vision, and, if you take out the “obsession” bit, who can argue with quality?. Communication. Innovation. Execution. Check, check, check.

But “going toe to toe with colleagues?” I’ve certainly worked in environments where we went toe to toe on occasion. Toe-to-toed-ness builds strength! Plus it’s more or less inevitable every once in a while. But I’ll take a pass on a corporate culture that promotes it as a core value. Way too easy to turn into pure, unadulterated asshole-ishness. Ditto for fierceness. (A workplace full of Xena, Woman Warriors? No, thanks.) And super-pumpedness? I prefer a more chill place, one that has tea bags in the kitchen, not just cans of Jolt.

An employee cited in The Guardian article categorized Uber as a “Hobbesian jungle,” where getting ahead meant that someone else has to die.

Who wants to work in place where every work day is nasty, brutish and too damned long?

As with the toe-to-toe value, this kind of behavior happens even in companies that don’t encourage it. At the last company I worked at full time, during my final months, there was a really wild battle between two teams of senior execs, The Tall Guys and The Short Guys. I reported to one of The Tall Guys, and The Tall Guys were pretty much the guys I liked. (Yes, it was all guys who were playing this particular war.) And I actively disliked a couple of The Short Guys, fellows who were nasty, brutish, and short. (For those in the know, I’m thinking here of DM in particular and, to lesser degree, SP.) Alas, The Tall Guys lost, and most of them (and their loyal direct reports, self-included) were shown the door.

Back to Uber, a hiring manager interviewed in the article said that, while he would talk to candidates from Uber, he would be eyes wide open when it came to figuring out whether they were going to fit in a different type of culture.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to work with  someone who did well in that environment,” he said. “If you did well in that environment upholding those values, I probably don’t want to work with you.”

This guy wasn’t the only one. Caveat, hiring managers.

I’m not hiring, and I’m not looking. So I won’t be interviewing any Uber employees any time soon. Nor will I be applying for a job there and risk being asked how I feel about super-pumpedness. But it’s just another reason why I’m happy to be out of the game, not being fierce, not doing anyone’s corporate hustle.

Me? I’ll stick with the app on my phone, happy knowing that someone from Uber will be here shortly, and take me where I want to go for cheap.

The drivers are hustling, but, fortunately, I haven’t run into any who seemed especially super-pumped and fierce.

Thank Travis Kalanick for small blessings?

A stroll down memory lane –make that memory runway

Over the course of my long and distinguished business career, I ended up doing plenty of business travel. Oh, except for occasional periods of intense travel, I wasn’t exactly a road warrior. But I did travel enough to make me at least a semi-pro.

I came to realize very early on that business travel is decidedly unglamorous (note to self: travel stories as future blog topic). After all, my first trip was to Newark, NJ. Can’t remember who we visited – an insurance company? something to do with AT&T? But I do remember that it was cold, grey, and dreary.

My most “exciting” trips were to Amsterdam and London (a quasi-day trip, believe it or not). Other than Newark, my least exciting domestic trips were to Topeka, KS and Lynchburg, VA. But I did see a lot of the USA over the years. I regret that my trip to Frankenmuth, MI was snowed out.

I estimate that, over the years, about half of my business trips were to NYC. Fine by me! (I still get a thrill when I come in over the 59th Street Bridge.)

All those business trips – and plenty of fun trips (my husband was even more of a New York-ophile than I am)  – means that the airport I’ve logged most of my time in (other than Logan) is LaGuardia.

Of late, my preference is Amtrak, so it’s been a few years since I’ve been there, but I do fondly remember LaGuardia, even though I understand full well that the best way to describe it is to quote Bette Davis (alas, not referring to LaGuardia), “What a dump.” 

I mean that in the most affectionate of ways, but every trip in and out of LGA was pretty much a slog.

At one point, as I settled in on the shuttle  - I think it was the 7 p.m. back to Boston, but it may have been the 6:30 a.m. to LGA -  I looked around the cabin and realized that, although I recognized some of the folks as regulars (this was when I was weekly+ to NYC), everyone was pretty much indistinguishable. Men and women alike, we all had on menswear suits. We all had light khaki trench coats. We all toted oxblood-red leather briefcases. Ugh, ugh, a thousand times ugh!

The Eastern Shuttle, which was at one point the get-thee-to-NYC way to go, used to guarantee that, as long as people showed up on time for the hourly shuttle, the would put on sections to accommodate them.

My husband and I, when we first started to going to NYC – fun trips, and we went pretty often  - tried to game it so that we got on the second section, which back in the day, was a prop jet with some areas that were set up like little lounges, with comfy chairs facing each other. (All was not fun in those days. On one of our very early on trips, when we were still in our getting to know you phase, there was a bombing at LaGuardia – eleven people were killed – while we were visiting NYC, and we ended up driving home. Oddly, I remembered this as a “bomb threat,” not a bomb. I believe that, in its wake, airports stopped having lockers.)

When I traveled on business, it was generally during the prime business hours (6:30 a.m. down, 7 p.m. back), so there were always extra sessions. What they used to do when you got to the airport, was put a little colored sticker on your boarding pass. They’d then call the sections by color. On a Friday evening, there could be five or six sections, and when they called blue, half of the purples would surge forward. Ditto for red and orange. People would be screaming – “I’m a blue, not a purple,” “This is clearly red, not orange.” Not quite the last helicopter out of Saigon, but as close as I ever came.

We’d all get on, eventually, but when you see hundreds of business folks, late in the day on a rainy Friday, milling around in our menswear business suits and light khaki trench coats, jockeying for position, brandishing our oxblood red briefcases and our color-stickered boarding passes. Well, it is something of a sight.

Over time, the Eastern Shuttle got some competition. I don’t know if I ever took the Trump Shuttle, but I did take the Big Apple on occasion And People’s Express. In later days, PanAm got in on the action. Delta. Continental.

One of these airlines – was it Big Apple? – gave out “breakfast”, a tiny cold no-taste bagel or (yuck) a cold hard-boiled egg in a little plastic cup.

When the competition was intense, Eastern started really heaving up the frequent flyer miles. (Jim and I got a few upgrades and European trips out of them.) And one of the airlines did raffles. I once won a bottle of cheap champagne. Fortunately, it was on the way home. For those who won the cheap champagne on the 6:30 a.m., there was nothing to do with that cheap champagne other than leave it at the airport. I recall seeing a row of bottle lined up outside the men’s room.

Speaking of the men’s room at LGA, at one point, there were some improvements going on, and they temporarily moved the ladies room to the lower floor, and relo’d the men’s room to the ladies room. I was so used to hitting the bathroom before I got on the plane, that I charged right in to my good old ladies room, only to find that it had been reconstituted as a men’s room. Oops…

That reno didn’t do all that much for the LGA look and feel. I don’t recall there was ever much by way of food – desperation fare, only – and as for shopping, maybe a place you could get a candy bar or mag. But who cared?

Anyway, most of my LaGuardia memories are fond. So I enjoyed an article I saw on Bloomberg the other day entitled “Why You Should Love America’s Worst Airport.”

Although I might not go so far as to say, as she does, that LGA is my favorite airport, but I’m pretty much with writer Claire Suddath on this. Sure, it’s always been, as she notes, “a dilapidated hellhole.” It was a dilapidated hellhole that you could get in and out of pretty darned quickly. And there’s just something about it.

Much like the city it’s a gateway to, it’s bustling, gritty, purposeful, no-nonsense, surrounding by honking yellow cabs, and exhilarating in its own way. (Hey, I even saw Barbara Bush and her daughter there once. How’s that for exhilarating?)

Now LaGuardia is in for a Glamour makeover.

Last year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the airport, began an estimated $8 billion renovation that will tear down LaGuardia’s terminals and replace them with a central hub.

They’re not adding another runway or two, which is what LaGuardia could really use.

Instead, LaGuardia will get upscale shops and eateries for travelers to check out while they wait and wait. I guess this was inevitable: There’s already a Korean barbecue truck at Los Angeles International and a bakery that makes sourdough in adorable animal shapes at San Francisco International. Most airports are owned by cities or municipal governments, and they’re rewarded financially by leasing gates to airlines and retail space to restaurants and stores. When airlines co-fund terminals, as Delta Inc. is doing at LaGuardia, they can reap some of the rental profit. Fancy terminals beget fancy retailers, who pay higher rent. It’s hard to persuade Bulgari to move into an airport without locks on every bathroom stall.

It’s been a few years since I’ve flown in or out of LaGuardia, but I hate the idea of it getting tarted up. Who needs another Wolfgang Puck fast food joint? Who wants to go shoe-shopping at an airport Johnston & Murphy?

I want the good old days, pushing and shoving to get on the blue shuttle, even though we had a purple sticker. A pack of Chuckles and a NY Mag tucked in the side of that oxblood red leather briefcase.

Yep, part of old-aging is getting nostalgic for places that probably aren’t worth getting nostalgic about.

But to think of a LaGuardia that looks like Heathrow, Frankfurt, or one of those other shopping monstrosities. Oh, boo-hoo.

Women of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bunions!

When I was in junior high school,I started wearing high heels. Not all the time. Just for things like Easter Sunday and my aunt’s wedding.The heels were three inch “spikes”. I don’t remember them as being particularly uncomfortable. Then again, I didn’t wear them all that often.

During high school, I wore heels for things like Easter Sunday and the Father-Daughter Tea at my high school. (The one and only prom I went to, I wore flats, as my date was my height.) Other than that, the shoe that went everywhere/did everything was a Bass Weejun loafer. Since I never did anything fancy, loafers mostly worked just fine.

What I wore for work depended on the job. Since most of my jobs were of the waitressing variety, my shoe of obligation and choice was the white nurses shoe, a clunky-comfy white, rubber-soled oxford tie.

Fast forward to my business career.

When I first began working in an office (mid 1970’s), women wore pumps that looked sort of like loafers, only they had a small square 1” (or so) heel and, instead of a slot for a penny, they had gold bar on them that looked like a tie clip. I had many pairs, in many colors.

When I got out of business school (1981), those pumps were still in service, augmented by a somewhat spiffier looking pump – sleeker, slightly higher heel. How many pairs of Eitenne Aigner did I own over the years? Answer: plenty. Boots, too. Those are Etienne’s to the left. (They were actually reasonable comfortable and looked a lot nicer than those loafer-clunkers.)

Somewhere along the line, really high heels crept into the work picture. Really high by my standards, anyway. That would be like the 3” spikes I wore in junior high to my aunt’s wedding.

These heels were often worn with the menswear skirt-suits and floppy bow-ties that us career gals sported. Must have looked really swell. But not as swell as the getting too and from work look: business suit, white athletic socks, and sneakers.

This is Tess from the movie “Working Girl.” Our hair might not have been that big. Our skirts might not have been that short. But the shoes and socks are right. It was an especially fine look when you were wearing black or navy opaque stockings. Then your legs looked like a race horse with their ankles wrapped.

Over the years, tech got less formal, and for the most part, when I had on a skirt, my shoes were some sort of low-heeled loafery sort of thing. One step above a flat. Comfy, and you didn’t have to do the sneaker thing.

I have a couple of pairs of heels – strictly for weddings – but they’re not all that high. I don’t think there’s anything in the closet that goes above 2 inches. Plenty high enough!

Mostly, as is befitting a women of a certain age aiming to get her 10,000 Fitbit steps in a day, I’m in comfy shoes. The more orthopedic looking, the better. (Only kidding.)

But when I’m out and about, I do see working girls (no, not that kind of working girls), and plenty of them are wearing heels.

I don’t envy them.

Those high heels may look good (especially to men), but I know from experience that they’re uncomfortable, and your feet are killing you when you kick them off. And I know from reading that they can cause all sorts of leg and foot problems later in life. Not worth it, working girls, not worth it! (And that goes for you, too, Ivanka, tip-toeing along next to your father, making sure you don’t get your heels caught in the West Lawn. Even if you can afford to have a personal chiropodist on call.)

Anyway, I was interested to see a couple of articles in The New York Times on Brit Nicola Thorp, who:

…reported to work awhile back as a temporary receptionist in the financial center here, she was shocked when her temp supervisor said her flat shoes were unacceptable. She would need to get herself shoes with heels at least two inches high. When she refused, she was sent home from the accounting firm PwC without pay. (Source: NY Times)

Not one to put her feet up when there was work to be done, Ms. Thorp:

…started a petition calling for a law that would make sure no company could ever again demand that a woman wear heels to work. The petition garnered more than 150,000 signatures, helped spur a popular backlash — dozens of professional women posted photographs of themselves on Twitter defiantly wearing flats — and prompted an inquiry overseen by two parliamentary committees. On Wednesday, more than two years after Ms. Thorp, now 28, strode into that office in her chic but sensible black flats, the committees released a report concluding that Portico, the outsourcing firm that had insisted she wear high heels,had broken the law.

(Note in defense of PwC, it was Portico that had the high-heel rule, not PwC. PwC has enough controversy on their plate, these days, thanks to the recent Oscar snafu.)

Parliament, which seems an altogether more sensible lot than our Congress, is keeping at the problem.

On Monday, more than two years after Ms. Thorp was sent home over her shoes, members of Parliament called on the government to tighten the rules so British women would never again be forced to wear high heels at the office. (Source: NY Times)

Personally, I don’t think we actually need to have a law about this.

What we really need is for women to just stop being such dedicated and foolhardy followers of fashion that they’re willing to wear shoes that are crippling them. Come on, working girls, you have nothing to lose but your bunions.

Take me home, country roads. West Virginia (mountain mama)

US News recently came out with its rankings of the best states. Even if you can get beyond the utter idiocy of decreeing that any one state is the “best”, there’s the inevitable arbitrariness of the categories and the way in which the ratings are created. That said, the ratings were not entirely specious. After all, Massachusetts was named the best state. (New England, in general, punches above its weight. NH came in second, Vermont tenth, and Connecticut twelfth. Maine (18) and Rhode Island (21) also landed above the mean.) Massachusetts, for all its flaws – weather, cost of housing – ranks high in health, education, and the overall economy. So, we’re Number One, giving those in the other 49 states let another reason to confirms their opinion that we’re a bunch of Massholes. (Yeah, but we’re apparently well-educated and healthy Massholes, thank you.)

Massachusetts may not have been the overall intuitive pick for state greatness, but it’s not exactly a surprise that affluence, education, health, and welfare matter. Thus, it’s not exactly surprising to see the list of states trailing the pack. The only outlier in the bottom ten, populated largely by southern states, was New Mexico.

While it’s not dead last – that would be Louisiana – West Virginia placed in the 41st position.

These days, what with the promise of the return of coal mining jobs, West Virginia is much in the news and on the mind.

Some of that news was an article I saw last week in the Washington Post on the economic state of West Virginia – and the truth that those mining jobs won’t be coming back any time soon, even if the EPA is shut down and the mining companies are allowed to lop off mountain tops and power-flow effluents into the state’s rivers.

The article analyzed the make up of employment in West Virginia.

Most of the industries in West Virginia have added employees since 1990. This makes sense, given that the population of the state rose from 1990 to 2015, although by a modest 50,000 people. There’s broad variance across industries, though.

The biggest loss was in manufacturing, where the state lost 35,000 jobs. In mining, it shed about 13,000. But that was more than made up for by jobs in health care and social assistance. Those jobs increased by 60,000. Jobs in leisure and hospitality increased by 30,000. Those are giant shifts — and reflect similar shifts nationally.

Manufacturing made up 13.1 percent of jobs in West Virginia in 1990. In December, it made up 6.1 percent. Mining and logging jobs fell from 5.4 percent of state employment to 2.7 percent. Health care and social assistance jumped from 10 percent in 1990 — less than manufacturing — to 16.1 percent at the end of last year. Leisure and hospitality moved from 7.6 to 10 percent of the jobs in the state. (Source: Washington Post)

The article didn’t get into any WV vs. US comparisons, but this to me looks pretty much like what’s happened across the country over the last few decades. Most states never had the proportion of mining jobs that West Virginia had. Massachusetts grit job lore, for one, is Gloucester fisherman. It’s immigrant girl in the Lowell spinning mill. It’s not soot-faced miners dying of black lunch disease or getting crushed in cave-ins. But even though the proportion of miners in West Virginia in 1990 was far higher than it is today, it wasn’t al that high. (5.4%) 

But, somehow, during the election, the loss of coal mining jobs became the proxy for the swap out of “guy jobs” like coal mining and industrial manufacturing for softer (“girl jobs”) in services and tourism. And the fact that globalization and technology have upended the job scene, something that’s been going on for decades, not just for the past eight years.

In truth, there are ways in which states can transition to a more modern economy by replacing manufacturing (and coal-mining) jobs with better work in industries like technology, healthcare, and financial services. Massachusetts started doing this way back in the day, even before manufacturing jobs were being off-shored. When the textile and shoe mills went south in search of cheaper labor (mostl to states that appear regularly in the bottom 10 of best states lists), Massachusetts replaced those jobs with something better. Which is not to say that, for individuals, there was not plenty of dislocation. It’s just that, at the aggregate level, the state was better off. Much like the US economy is, in a macro sense, better off than it used to be. It’s just that, at the micro level, there are lot of people who are worse off under the new economic order than they were when they were risking life, lung, and limb to work in jobs like coal miner.

With automation, things may get worse before they get better for the little guy without much by way of skills, or for the white collar worker who’s not willing or able to continuously remake themselves to keep up. Just wait until all those autonomous trucks hit the highways. Or robots take over more construction jobs.

It ain’t going to be pretty.

But that’s all abstract.

We sure could use a national conversation about what people are going to do.

Unfortunately, this past election cycle, one side seemed to gloss oer the concerns and plight of those coal miners, while the other made ridiculous promises about the restoration of their jobs to the way things were in the glory days of John L. Lewis.

I’m sure if you live in (and love) West Virginia, it’s more John Denver singing, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” than it is “We’re #41!” But if West Virginia’s going to move up in those ridiculous rankings, it better start thinking beyond coal mining making a glorious reappearance.

That piece of Jesus toast is about to lose it’s eBay value

Recently, I made a pledge on Kickstarter. The pledge was to ADIFF, a design firm that focuses on creating clothing for those living in refugee camps. I wouldn’t have heard about ADIFF if its founder, a talented young designer named Angela Luna, wasn’t a graduate of Nazareth Academy, my niece Molly’s now-defunct alma mater. Angela more than raised the $60K she was looking, and it’s hard not to love her project. As a graduate of Parson’s School, she could have become yet another young designer aiming for the runway or the red carpet. Instead, she’s trying to make a diff – a big diff.

Compare and contrast Angela’s work of the heart and the soul with another Kickstarter project I stumbled on: Toasteroid.

Toasteroid is NOT just a toaster. An ordinary toaster turns bread brown and that’s the ONLY thing a toaster can do. Toasteroid can be your personal Weather Forecaster, Private Messenger, and Doodle Pad. It can do all of the above with simple commands from your smartphone and still make the most perfect piece of toast you’ve ever had.

As with ADIFF, Toasteroid exceeded its goal. They were looking for $150K and, at last look, had raised $187K so that someone can realize their dream of having a message from a loved one printed on their toast. Or get the weather forecast. Because it’s just so hard to look it up on Intellicast. Or, god forbid, stick your head out the window and figure it out for yourself.

I suspect that for every Angela Luna doing good, there are a dozen doing silly.

Honestly, isn’t there something better that these creative types could spend their time cooking – make that toasting – up?

I guess I’ve become such a no-humor grump that I just don’t see the purpose of something that you’d use once or twice as a gag. Or maybe a few times if you had kids who wanted to see Elsa or Spidey printed on their toast.

Okay, every innovation can’t be a jacket for refugees, but still…

Even though I didn’t have kids, I do recognize that fun with food can be, well, fun. For holidays, my mother decorated cakes. Not in any super, fancy-arse, someone-would-pay-for-it way, but by frosting a cake with white icing, and then adding, say, Kelly green shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day smoothed on with a knife, and approximating the look of a shamrock. Or throw on some cherries for Washington’s Birthday. (As a child maraschino cherry addict, an iced chocolate cake with cherries on it was the cherry bomb.) So, yeah, fun with food.

But do we really need smart toasters that do dumb things?

I want better innovation angels…

I will give the Toasteroid folks this: their toaster is attractive. I never thought I’d make this argument: isn’t it enough to be good looking? Does everything have to be smart, too?

The one upside I can see to Toasteroid is that those lunatics who were seeing the face of Jesus in their toast, and offering it up on eBay to lunatics with money to burn, will be out of luck. Oh, I suppose they’ll still be discovering the random Madonna in the Cupcake, or whatever it is that people see in things. (Me, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to wedge out the ham-pink-with-white-swirls tile square in the bathroom that looked to me like a very young Bonnie Prince Charlie, with his big ol’ tam-o-shanter, hugging his dog. Imagine what I could have gotten for that on eBay. If eBay had existed, and if my parents hadn’t killed me for destroying the bathroom tile.)

Maybe I’m just jealous because there’s no one to send me a Merry Breakfast wish to pop up on my slice of pumpernickel. Readers who knew my late husband will be amused by the thought of Jim sending me a toasty billet doux from his smartphone. If, indeed, he’d had a smartphone. Not that I would have been sending him a message in return. What would it have been? The latest deals on frequent flyer miles? The IS/LM curve? (Jim was an economist.) And I’m sure it would have worked just swell on the crappy gluten-free bread he ate, which – holey-moley – was full of holes after it sat there for a few days. Will Toasteroid mind the gaps that I’m sure still exist in gluten-free bread? Gluten does serve more purpose than just making bread taste like bread.

Enough Monday morning grump.

I must away to toast an English muffin – and how would Toasteroid handle it? It will not have a super-hero on it, the weather forecast, a love note…But it will serve its purpose.

As will Angela Luna’s jacket. Now there’s a purpose!

Congratulations, Angela! You’re doing this Naz aunt proud!

 

The AI geniuses are going to figure it out for us. Phew…

I’m not holding my breath waiting for the arrival of the singularity – the point where some computer, chock full of AI, starts feeling its oats, and runaway technology takes over are starts doing things like manipulating elections, screwing with the stock market, wiping out the grid, and goading all the self-driving vehicles into playing bumper car. Or whatever pops into its artificially intelligent mind. There’ll be no holding it back, because the computer will have gotten so much smarter and more generally competent that we humans are.

The singular awfulness of the singularity may or may not occur in my lifetime. But if it does, I hope it instructs whatever intelligent device sitting on my nightstand, or embedded in my forearm, to do the singularity equivalent of blowing the poison, instantly killing dart into my carotid artery. Kind of like the blowguns the “natives” were armed with in Tarzan movies. Because while I know plenty of computers that are smarter than people – my phone is more intelligent (EQ and IQ) than half the ninnies on “reality” TV, let alone a goodly proportion of those commenting on Boston Globe articles – I don’t want to be around when computers surpass all of us when it comes to sentience, empathy, and wit.

But that’s just me.

Fortunately, I can pack up all my singularity-related cares and woe, now that the big mahoffs of the AI world (40 of them, anyway) have gotten together at an event called “Envisioning and Addressing Adverse AI Outcomes” to figure things out.

Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords. Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, see king a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen -- and how to stop it. (Source: Bloomberg)

Given that this is the 21st century, the event did a bit of gamifying, asking participants to submit entries describing (within reason and plausible short-term technology) the worst thing that could happen if they – I mean it – takes over. The winning ideas were discussed at panels composed of experts, who debated what would be the best thing to do if their worst-case scenario happened.

I have to say that this sounds like a nerdfest par excellence. Almost makes me wish I were an AI expert…

Artificial kidding aside, there are some pretty nasty AI possibilities out there.

The possibility of intelligent, automated cyber attacks is the one that most worries John Launchbury, who directs one of the offices at the U.S.'s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Kathleen Fisher, chairwoman of the computer science department at Tufts University, who led that session. What happens if someone constructs a cyber weapon designed to hide itself and evade all attempts to dismantle it? Now imagine it spreads beyond its intended target to the broader internet. Think Stuxnet, the computer virus created to attack the Iranian nuclear program that got out in the wild, but stealthier and more autonomous.

"We're talking about malware on steroids that is AI-enabled," said Fisher, who is an expert in programming languages. Fisher presented her scenario under a slide bearing the words "What could possibly go wrong?" which could have also served as a tagline for the whole event.

Malware on steroids? And here I was worrying about the phishing expedition that followed my recent encounter with UPS’s chat support.

Anyway, I will sleep more easily tonight knowing that there are a bunch of AI geniuses who are going to figure it all out before it’s too late.

How much is that doggy in the window? Read the fine print and find out.

The best place to get a puppy is, of course, a shelter. Or a breeder. But sometimes people go to pet stores. Which is what Californian Dawn Sabins did when she wanted a new dog. The golden that she purchased set her back $2,400 – more than she’d planned on, but what price doggy love?

The odd part came a few weeks later, when she and her husband were going over their credit reports and saw a $5,800 charge from a company they’d never heard of.

The Sabins had bought their new dog, Tucker, with financing offered at the pet store through a company called Wags Lending, which assigned the contract to an Oceanside, California-based firm that collects on consumer debt. But when Dawn tracked down a customer service rep at that firm, Monterey Financial Services Inc., she learned she didn’t own the dog after all. (Source: Bloomberg)

Turns out, Dawn hadn’t actually bought the dog; she was leasing it. And, failing to read the fine print, she was on the hook for nearly three years worth of monthly payments to the tune of $165.06. After 34 months, she had the option to buy the dog for two months rent. If she skipped a payment, the repo dog catcher could come and repossess it. And if the pooch pooched out on the family, by, say, catching the car it was chasing, they were responsible “for an early repayment charge.”

If they saw the lease through to the end, they would have paid the equivalent of more than 70 percent in annualized interest—nearly twice what most credit card lenders charge.

On its own, this would have been plenty bad, but the Sabins’ dog turned out to be too much for them. So Dawn did what any modern consumer would do. After selling the dog, she lodged her complaints online, where she found plenty of company among others who, without quite understanding what they were getting into, had gotten sucked into rent-a-pup or rent-a-kitty schemes.

I know, I know.

Caveat emptor, don’t buy anything other than a house or a car that you can’t really afford to pay for outright, and make sure to read any contract before you sign on the dotted line.

Still, I feel bad for those who got sucked in by Wags Lending, the brainchild of Dusty Wunderlich. (I will note that Dusty and Wunderlich - translation: whimsical – both make pretty good pet names.) Wunderlich is CEO of Bristlecone Holdings, operator of Wags, wearer of ostrich cowboy boots, fan of Ayn Rand, and someone dedicated to “improving the lives of subprime borrowers” all the time “living in a Postmodern culture while maintaining my old American West roots and Christian values.”

Sounds more Ayn Rand than Christian. But definitely postmodern.

Anway, Bristlecone – and I suspect many of his clientele feel like they’ve swallowed one, after dealing with one of his businesses – isn’t just into pet lending. He writes:

…leases against furniture, wedding dresses, hearing aids, and custom auto rims. In a little more than three years, his company has originated 66,000 leases for just over $100 million. He once worked out a plan to lease cattle to dairy farmers, though plummeting commodity prices soured the economics. (He got far enough to decide that if a cow gave birth during the terms of the lease, the lessee got to keep the calf.) In another idea that never reached the market, he explored lease financing for funerals.

“We like niches where we’re dealing with emotional borrowers,” Wunderlich said.

Emotional borrowers who get themselves on the hook for outlandish fees so that they can get custom auto rims (what’s wrong with plastic?) or fancy breed dogs (what’s wrong with shelter mutt?)?

How non-wonderful, and non-wunderlich, to make your living preying on emotional borrowers, most of whom can’t afford what they’re borrowing for.

Anyway, the full article is definitely worth a full read, if only to remind you about the abysmal level of financial literacy that’s alive and well across this great land of ours. Apparently no one learned anything from the mortgage crisis. And, hey, a dog is a lot lower-cost an item to get your credit and your life in a tangle over than is a house.

Of course, I can sympathize with someone who wants a dog.

It’s just that, if you’re a bit down on your cash, you really do need to go beyond asking how much is that doggy in the window. You need to take out your calculator (there’s probably one on your fancy smartphone) and figure out just what that doggy’s going to cost you over the life of the contract. And then you can take this bit of advice: forget Wags Lending and get thee to an animal shelter.

Finery for our fine feathered friends

When I’m out and about, I see plenty of dogs wearing clothing – mostly, based on my completely non-scientific survey – the decked-out pooches are French bulldogs and lapdogs. The big dawgs in the ‘hood seem to do better in the cold. That or might makes right, and they resist letting their owners dress them up. I’ve never met a pup who was too proud to beg, but I’ve known plenty who prefer not to become the object of potential ridicule.

None of the dog outfits I’ve seen look homemade, by the way – they’re definitely store bought.

I do know that there are also folks who dress their cats up, but I don’t see them out walking on Boston Common.

Until I saw an article in the Boston Globe, however, I was not aware that there’s such a thing as clothing for chickens.

I was aware that there are people who get together and craft up – knitting or crocheting – outfits for the needy. For years my mother and her cronies made blankies, sweaters, and bonnets for poor newborns. They took a look of pride in their work, and churned out all sorts of sets not just in pink and blue, but themed for the season. Late October outfits had jack-o-lanterns on them. Christmas meant red and green. And the lucky kiddoes born around St. Patrick’s Day got outfits covered in shamrocks.

A group of knitters in Milton, Mass. had been doing work that was very similar to the crafting of my mother’s crew: making their wares for need kids and craft fairs. But then they heard that some local chickens who lived in their ‘hood could use a little knitware: 

…especially a tiny rooster native to Malaysia named Prince Peep, who shivers in all New England seasons – [and] really could use some protection from the cold. [So] the plucky women hopped right on the chick-knit task.

“We are very anxious to help any community, including chickens,” said knitter Nancy Kearns. (Source: Boston Globe.)

I was not surprised to learn that the ladies found their patterns in England. After all, the Brits are known for their affection for members of the animal kingdom, not to mention their general eccentricities. And England can get pretty damp and chilly.

They translated it into American knitting jargon, and, in about a month, produced a dozen chicken sweaters in assorted sizes and colors.

The chickens live under some pretty good conditions – by chicken standards – at the Wakefield Estate, a non-profit that:

… holds various workshops in topics ranging from archaeology to mushroom growing, and enlists the nearby Thacher Montessori School to run the estate’s chicken coop as an ongoing lesson in animal care and business management.

I’m reading between the chicken-scratched lines here and guessing that the chickens are free range, not trapped in cages with their beaks cut off, not plumped up on breast-bloating steroids. Plus they’re being allowed to die a natural chicken death, and not murder on the assembling line on the way to becoming boneless, skinless breasts. 

The chickens at Wakefield could use the sweaters because some of them are imports.. Like Prince Peep. After all, there’s very little commonality between the climate of Malaysia and that of New England, even when we do get the odd and freakish 70 degree day in February. Plus they molt, which means thing can get pretty chill, wherever they come from.

Anyway, I got a real kick when I read about the chicken knitters.

There are, I’m sure, plenty of other chickens in need. So a shout out to the most talented knitter I know, my sister Kath, who packs a wonderful combination of technical skill, creativity, color sense, and over all good taste. (Not like chickens that taste good. I’m talking really good taste.) So how about it, Kath, I bet you could whip up a few really nifty chicken sweaters. Just sayin’….

Most days, it’s probably pretty good to be Brian Cullinan

Most days, it’s probably a pretty good thing to be Brian Cullinan. He’s a big mucket-y muck at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and, for the past four years, he’s been Mr. Limelight with respect to the super-big-deal-security-hush-hush-what’s-in-the-envelope at the Oscars. He’s the one who just the other day was boasting about PwC’s fail-safe process for making sure that the awards are awarded flawlessly. Only he and one other PwC bigwig knew who the winners were before the big reveals.

And then there was Monday evening…

If it had been a regular old Oscar-y Monday evening, Cullinan would have been swanning around in his tux, getting up somewhat close and somewhat personal with Hollywood royalty, and basking in the glow that all was well with the 83 year relationship with The Academy. Which is almost as long as the Oscars have been in existence.

And then, there was the big OOPS moment.

God knows, most of us have had them at work. It’s just that ours aren’t televised to tens of millions of viewers.

Amazingly, I actually was watching the show when the mistaken announcement of Best Picture was made.

I say amazingly, because I think this is the only time in my life I’ve watched the Academy Awards in its entirety. It’s one of the few times in my life I’ve watched any of it. This year, the only film that was up for anything was Florence Foster Jenkins. (Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress for her eponymous role.) But I’m never all that interested. What got me to tune in was to see what kind of digs at Trump would be made. I’m not a big Jimmy Kimmel fan, but I think he was doing a pretty good job. And there were enough barbs – direct or oblique – directed at the Tweeter in Chief to keep me entertained.

So I was still with when the culminating award was made.

Just after Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had fumbled their way through announcing Best Picture, and as the presumed winners from La-La Land took to the stage for their moment of glory and started thanking their blue-eyed wives (one actually did specify the color of his wife’s eyes) and grammar school teachers, I saw some guys who looked like Secret Service start making their moves. My first thought was that there was some security threat, and that the muscle was about to clear the stage. Now that would have been something.

But what had happened was the Cullinan had handed Warren Beatty the wrong envelope. Instead of the one containing the name of the Best Picture winner, he was given the duplicate of the one for Best Actress, which had minutes before been awarded to Emma Stone for her role in La-La Land.

Beatty was clearly befuddled, and pretty much realized he had to wrong envelope. So he handed it off to Dunaway to see what she made of it. Well, old Faye went ahead and, spotting the words “La-La Land” on the Emma Stone, announced that La-La Land had won. (As one of my friends said as we were discussing why neither Beatty nor Dunaway had the presence of mind to say, “hey, this is the wrong envelope,” these folks are used to being handed a script, not thinking or taking charge.)

Anyway, all Hollywood hell then broke lose before the “real” winner – Moonlight – was announced.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, this is no big deal.

Sure, people do a lot of betting on the winners. And winning does translate into box office and better gigs. But it’s just the movies, for crying out loud, not real life.

But because this is Hollywood, it somehow matters more.

And this year it seemed to matter a lot more, because La-La Land was a throwback paean to old, white, Singin’ in the Rain Hollywood, while Moonlight chronicles the coming of age of a poor black guy from the mean streets of Miami.

Anyway, the mistake was quickly rectified.

Some ruffled feathers: the La-La Land folks who’d embarrassingly given their acceptance speeches. Old Faye and old Warren for being kind of dopey (and too vain to wear glasses). The august Academy itself for having made the envelopes more difficult to read this year. But most of the crap came down on the head of Brian Cullinan, the culprit who had handed Warren Beatty the wrong envelope.

I’m actually glad that if someone had to take the blame – and props because the person who had to take the blame seems to have been the person who actually goofed up - it was a head guy, not some little underling.

As it turned out, Cullinan was tweeting a few minutes before the mix-up – tweeting a picture of Emma Stone backstage just after she’d won her Oscar. (Note to Cullinan: if you’re the man next year, hand your phone to one of your underlings, and let that person do the intra-show tweeting.) So Cullinan took his eye off the prize, and goofed up big time.

I suspect nothing will bad will happen to Cullinan, other than the humiliation factor. He’s too high up and, thus, protected (he’s some sort of super-partner). And, truthfully, the mistake is pretty damned petty when you consider the real problems of the world.

So nothing will happen to Cullinan. Unless, of course, the Academy gets their shorts in a knot about this regrettable event, goes full frontal fiasco, and replaces PwC with E&Y or some other firm. But I wouldn’t bet on that happening.

I’m guessing that the big outcome will be that PwC will tone down some of the advertising about how the Academy has so trusted them over the years…

(Is it just me, or isn’t it more impressive when a really big and respected corporation trusts them with their accounting than when the Motion Picture Academy trusts them with tallying some votes?)

Meanwhile, I will note that, predictably, the Tweeter in Chief’s response to the screw up was that it occurred because there was altogether too much focus on politics during the show. Sad, he told Breitbart. Sad.

Me? I’m sad that a) he’s talking to Breitbart; and b) that he can’t help making everything about himself.

Oh, and I now have Moonlight, Manchester-by-the-Sea, and Lion on my to-watch list.

PSA for UPS customers: beware of phishing after a LiveChat session

I bow to no man or woman when it comes to the level of misery I’ve encountered when the online whatever I’ve ordered is coming UPS. Oh, most of the time it works out okay. I pay for MyChoice, which lets me direct packages to the UPS Store around the corner. I don’t have to worry about being around to receive a delivery, and I don’t need to worry about it being left on the doorstep on a well-traveled street that thousands of people walk by on the average day. (A couple of years ago, I devoted a screed post to just one of my experiences with UPS. That sinking feeling I always get when the package is coming via UPS…)

I really do want to like UPS. A kabillion people work for them, the pay and bennies are supposed to be good, and the UPS folks I’ve dealt with have been almost uniformly pretty darned good. So I honestly don’t want them to be replaced by robots and drones. Cross my heart and hope to die trying to take delivery of an online order.

My most recent experience with UPS occurred last week.

I had ordered some clothing from a new place and – ugh – saw that they used UPS all the way. Fingers crossed, I directed the package to be delivered to the UPS Store on Charles Street. But when I hadn’t received any notification, I tried to track it down.

For some mysterious reason, it could not be delivered to Charles Street, so UPS made a (bad) decision to try to bring it directly to my place. Door locked. No one home. Package now in some infinite loop that I can’t figure out.

While this should have been simple enough - I mean, there is all that scanning and tracking technology out there – I ended up on multiple phone calls (mostly in which I was, admittedly and apologetically, venting my spleen). And on multiple chat sessions via UPS LiveChat.

Shortly after the first chat session, I received an email ostensibly from “UPS My Choice”, but really from some scam artists at <ups20@rnmk.com> telling me:

You shouldn't have to worry about whether or not you'll be home when your package arrives.  UPS My Choice membership offers you an option that helps you manage your most valuable commodity--your time.

Click here to learn how to take control of your deliveries.

Despite my pique – which was considerable – I cannily recognized a fishing expedition when I saw one. (Thanks in part, I suppose, to the quarterly security eLearning training that one of my clients requires me to go through so that I can use their email and other systems.)

So, I did not “click here”. After all, I already am a UPS My Choice subscriber. And if ever a URL looked phony – Russkie, even – it would be rnmk.com. A quick google confirmed that they do a lot of customer support phishing aimed at a number of well-known companies. (No info on UPS, however.)

But it would have been easy enough to click through. And if I hadn’t already been a UPS My Choicer, I could have easily signed up and given them my credit card info, etc.

Good little citizen of the world that I am, I forwarded the email off to the UPS Fraud Protection address listed on the UPS site. And received this in response:

Thank you for forwarding this information to us. The e-mail you received is not a legitimate UPS communication, nor was it sent through or by our system.

Our UPS fraud group is aware of this malicious e-mail. Please do not select any links or open any attachments in the e-mail as they may contain a virus. Since UPS has all of the information we need, we recommend that you permanently delete the e-mail.

We appreciate you taking the time to make sure we were aware of the situation. 

Same thing happened after my second chat session: the bogus email, followed by my passing it along to UPS.

But here’s my question to UPS:

If you’re aware that customers using your chat support are being sent phishing emails, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE AN AUTOMATIC WARNING e-MAIL SENT OUT TO THEM WHEN THEY INITIATE A CHAT SESSION. Something along the lines of what to do when you get an email from @rnmk.com. Don’t click, delete it, report it to us.

You know you’ve been hacked, UPS. It seems to me that it would be easy enough to let your customers know that they’re potential victims of a scam.

Maybe they don’t want to admit that they’ve been hacked, but still.

I’m sure that some of their customers have been suckered. I could easily have been.

I’m ticked off enough about the package problema. Image how I’d feel if I’d given my credit card number to one of Vladimir Putin’s cronies?

This year’s swag bag. (Who wouldn’t want to be nominated for best supporting whatever?)

In keeping with my annual tradition, I will probably not watch the Academy Awards on Sunday night. I’ve never really been enamored with the show. Even in the prime of my movie-going days, I rarely watched it. These days, I rarely go to the movies, so don’t really have any horses in the race. I’ll be a hometown honey and root for “Manchester By the Sea”, which is on my to-watch list, just as last year, I was rooting for “Spotlight”. (Double reason there, of course: Boston setting, and, given my Catholic upbringing, a topic of supreme interest.) I did turn the Oscars on at the last moment and did see “Spotlight” win, which was gratifying – I yelped - mostly because of the topic. And in part because it was the only nominated film I’d seen. Anyway, the Academy Awards aren’t really my thing. On the other hand…

In keeping with my annual tradition, I will be commenting on the swag  bag, which is provided to the nominees for best/best supporting actor and actress, and best director, so that everyone takes home some sort of consolation prize, even if they don’t win the golden statue.(Or at least the major “everyones”. No swag bag for the Best Use of Black & White Cinematography in a Full-Length Documentary Not Made in the US of A.)

This year’s swag assortment -  valued at roughly $200K (taxable) -  includes a CPR Anytime kit. First, shouldn’t it be the CPR Anywhere kit? Wouldn’t that be the appeal? That you’d have it whenever you need it? Because “anytime” isn’t when you need it. The only time you need it is if you or someone nearby have heart failure. Anyway (anywhere, anytime), it seems to me that this is an item that you might want to have on hand at the award ceremony, given that someone could throw a big one when they do or don’t hear their name called. But the swag bags are delivered to the nominees ahead of time, so they’d have to lug it with them to the show – not easy for the actresses tottering down the red carpet in 7 inch heels, and wearing gowns that don’t exactly come with deep pockets.

Another swag bag item is a box of personalized Crayolas. Now this is a low cost item, but how fun. I just checked, and you can pick the colors you want in our box of 64. I was delighted to see old favorites like Sky Blue and Blue Violet are still available. And Raw Sienna, which I never used, but liked the name of. But Crayola is getting as tricky as everyone else with their naming schemes: Granny Smith Apple, Asparagus, Macaroni and Cheese. Timberwolf. Tickle Me Pink. (Sounds like an O.P.I. nail polish color.) You can also put your name on the crayons, and your picture on the box. Don’t know if the actors/actresses have to do the heavy lifting of color choice and headshot upload. Maybe that’s what assistants are for.

Another one of the lower-end gifts in the bad is a pack of sweat-absorbing patches – just press on and you’re good to no-sweat go. There used to be something called underarm shields that you sewed into your good dresses and sweaters to protect them from unseemly and destructive perspiration, but the Dandi Patches seem a lot easier. But who really needs them? Isn’t sweating good for you?

There’s also some type of pelvic floor exercise thing-y. (And I wasn’t even aware that men did pelvic floor exercises.) And, especially nice for the losers, a wooden box containing 40 cards on which positive quotes are printed. Perhaps they can consult their Stewart Smalley Affirmations which doing their pelvic floor exercises. If they don’t want to bother with the kegel kit, but want to get down on the floor, the swag bag includes a cellulite massage mat. Or you can just forget your pelvis and cellulite, and sit around grazing through your box of pithy quotes while munching on pecans from the jar that’s made its way into the swag bag.

The real goodies are, of course, the trips.

A five-night holiday to Kōloa Landing, a luxurious resort on Hawaii's Kauai island is included, costing around $1,150 a night, along with a week at Golden Door, an exclusive California spa where a "Classic Women's Week" costs around $8,850.

If the nominee prefers a European adventure, then a three-night stay in a suite at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo on Lake Como is also on offer, which retails at around $1,400 a night, before taxes. Also in the swag bag are three nights in the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento, where a suite costs upwards of $700 a night. (Source: NBC News)

There’s also a jaunt to something called the Lost Coast Ranch, a private mansion where the non-winner and 9 guests can hang out for a  3 night stay. At a value of $40K, this is the priciest item in the bag.)

The swag bags came about 15 years ago, in response to Bette Midler’s grousing about going home empty handed. Since then, an outfit called Distinctive Assets has been putting them together. For those who populate the bag, it’s pretty good marketing publicity. Or, as Distinctive Assets would have it:

“We give the bag out to acknowledge a job well done. Celebs are just people and they love getting a gift,” founder of Distinctive Assets Lash Fary told Fox News. (Source: Fox News)

Just people? Just people!

I don’t believe that for a New York minute.

I suspect the only thing we have in common is that a stay at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo sounds good to us common folk, too. The pelvic floor exercise tracker? The box of quotes? You can keep them. And I can buy my own jar of pecans, thank you.

The rich are different from you and me. Yes, they have more money to spend on survival.

My husband and I used to watch a “reality’ show called Doomsday Preppers, which focused on folks who acted on their fears – the grid goes down; California gets hit with the big one and sloughs off into the ocean; the feds seize their guns; Sharia law takes hold; carnage moves from the inner city to rural America (hmmm: sounds like a certain someone’s dystopic inaugural address) – and stockpiled guns, canned goods, toilet paper, etc. so they’d be all prepped for doomsday. Some folks on the show planned to shelter in place, guns poking out the turrets in their steel-encased houses. Others had armored vehicles in which they planned to get away to their safe houses in the woods. And some lived in remote fortresses, ready to live off the land. I remember who had even built himself a machine for making bullets.

While the preppers were assiduously making sure they had a lifetime supply of canned green beans and shampoo, or were prepared to make their own (or make do without), I don’t recall any of them making sure they had a full library, or collection of CDs. Me? Once I saw who was planning on surviving whatever nasty bit was going to take life-as-we-know-it out, and nary a one seemed to want to have books around, I pretty much decided that my preference would be to be sitting fat, dumb and happy at ground zero of whatever nasty bit was about to hit. Sure, I do hope that there are some monks in Ireland who are going to survive in their clochans and preserve the written word. But I’d just as soon not wait around to see whether they’d transcribed the complete works of Jane Austen and Anthony Powell, or Fifty Shades of Grey.

Anyway, whatever cataclysm comes our society’s way, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to survive anything that’s so dire that it would have justified doomsday prepping.

But apparently there are plenty of uber-wealthy folks who do want to survive. They’re not hand-crafting bullet-making machines. But they’re nonetheless doing some doomsday prepping.

The founder of Reddit, Steve Huffman, had laser surgery.

“If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.” (Source: New Yorker)

Huffman also has “a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

And Huffman’s not alone.

…in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters [than the nutters on Doomsday Preppers], taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.

Antonio García Martínez, who made his coin at Facebook, bought island property in the Pacific Northwest, and has it stocked.

“I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”  

He deliberately chose a survival site that wasn’t totally isolated, so that he could form a militia with likeminded others so that he can successfully “ride out the apocalypse.”

My question, of course, is you ride out the apocalypse – then what? It’s not like you’ll go back to dim sum in San Francisco.

Silicon Valley boys are hording gold, bitcoins, cryptocurrency. Bitcoins? Cryptocurrency? That’s going to survive the apocalypse.

More practically, IMHO, they’re investing in real estate and keeping their helicopters gassed up. They’re armed – some with guns and ammo, others with bows and arrows.

And, unlike most of those profiled on Doomsday Preppers, these guys are 1 per-centers, society’s winners. They’re educated. They’re affluent. They’re not so much worried about tsunami as they are financial meltdown or societal/political breakdown.

Interestingly after its Doomsday Preppers show took off, National Geographic (the network it ran on) sponsored a survey that:

…found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).

Sure hope that the sixty percent are right. I would like to get the opportunity to spend at least some of my 401(k). As for the tech preppers, they’re not bound by the constraints of a 401(k). They’ve got serious coin to spend on their survival.

Yishan Wong is an alum of both Facebook and Reddit. He says:

“The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”

…The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth. (Southwestern Connecticut is first.) “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” [Linkedin’s Reid] Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”

Among the fifty percent of the Silicon billionaires who aren’t prepping is PayPal founder Max Levchin.

“It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared.” 

A number of the Silicon preppers – and there are estimates that half of the Silicon billionaires have some sort of what’s called “apocalypse insurance” - are thinking New Zealand. (I will note that there’s an East Coast ritzy prepping cohort as well.) Other well to do preppers are investing in luxury “condos” built in de-commissioned bomb silos in the Midwest.

Me? I’ll be sitting in my home sweet home with the covers pulled over my head. And it really doesn’t matter to me whether those who are going to survive are the tin-foil brigade with their bullet-making machines, or the Silicon big boys with their New Zealand getaways and their helicopter, sitting their gassed and read to go. Include me out!

Don’t bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to Grandma Moses

The other day, I was talking with a friend whose mother is 95. Her mother is ready to go. She’s not only ready to go. She wants to go. Ninety-two was the last age when she felt good and enjoyed her life. That was about the time when one of her sons died, so there’s no surprise there. But now her life is a lot of aches, pains, and sadness. She’s ready. She’s not sitting around pissing and moaning. She’s a good-humored old Irish lady who’s still got all her marbles. Pain aside, she lives comfortably with one of her daughters, and enjoys the company and affection of her children and grandchildren. But she’s in pain most of the time (arthritis in her back), and the pain-killers aren’t killing her pain.

Then there’s my friend N, who’s in her late-eighties and is also ready to go. (She has told her friends that she anticipates that her death will be soon.) She doesn’t have any pain free days since a nightmare spill in which she broke her wrist. But they don’t want her to take anything too strong for the pain, fearing that she’ll become addicted. N isn’t afraid of becoming addicted. She’d just like the pain to let up while she runs out the last while of her life.

Last spring, my neighbor J died. He spent the last week or so of his life in a nursing home, but he was living at home (with a 24/7 home care aide the last couple of years) until his 99th birthday. But his last few years were pretty miserable. He was praying to die, and spent much of his day moaning. J went into a nursing home shortly after a couple of us heard a new tone in his moaning – it was beginning to sound physical, not existential. After speaking with his home care aide, I alerted J’s landlord, who called J’s West Coast daughter,the Visiting Nurses Association and the VA. They sprung into action and brought J to a nursing home, where his pain was better managed (so we heard) for his last few days.

Isn’t there a better way to manage the pain of the elderly? Well, since that could be me in a few short decades, I’ve got a vested interest in the answer here. So I’m delighted to hear that there is, in fact, a better way.

Medical marijuana is coming to the rescue.

One 98 year old in a NYC nursing home takes a little green pill full of cannabis oil.

Then Ms. [Ruth] Brunn, who has neuropathy, settles back in her wheelchair and waits for the jabbing pain in her shoulders, arms and hands to ebb.

“I don’t feel high or stoned,” she said. “All I know is I feel better when I take this.” (Source: NY Times)

Ms. Brunn, who has been able to stop taking morphine because of her use of marijuana, is not alone.

From retirement communities to nursing homes, older Americans are increasingly turning to marijuana for relief from aches and pains. Many have embraced it as an alternative to powerful drugs like morphine, saying that marijuana is less addictive, with fewer side effects.

It’s used for a lot of achy and pain-y problems: neuopathy, muscle spasms, Parkinson’s. Pot may also help with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Toking up, or popping a greenie, may be something new and weird for the older-elders, who came of age during the cigarette and good stiff drink era, but the boomers should be right at home when we start rolling in mass numbers into nursing homes. After all, rolling a joint is like riding a bicycle, isn’t it. (Do Zig-Zag papers still exist?)

There are both medical and legal concerns about elder use of marijuana.

Medically, there are some who believe that “marijuana could possibly make them [old folks] confused, dizzy or more likely to fall.” Not to be too cute about it, but they may already be confused, dizzy and more likely to fall than they used to be. Maybe toking up (or washing down) will help them relax and better cope with their pain. More research, please.

As for legal issues, while a lot of states have legalized marijuana, there are some concerns that the feds could crack down on it being dispensed in institutions that accept Medicare or Medicaid payments. Which would pretty much be most nursing homes, I would think. So far, it hasn’t happened, but you never know what can happen when there’s a new incumbent. Things could get bad enough for the old folks if mass deportations begin, given the population that provides a lot of the heart and muscle when it comes to elder care. I would hope that when the human element has been deported and replaced by robots, our elders will still be able to bliss out a bit, without the feds going haywire.

To get around the potential legal hurdles, some nursing homes are turning a blind eye to MJ use by their residents. They don’t help dispense it, but if someone’s using, they take a more or less ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach.

Like pretty much everyone else I know, I want to die in my sleep the day before (or the day after, at the very latest) I learn that I will be institutionalized and bed-ridden. But if medical marijuana can postpone that date, or – just in case I get stuck – make those final institutionalized, bed-ridden days a bit easier to withstand, well, don’t bogart that joint, my friend. Pass it over to me.

 

 

Snowtime

As a non-skier, I don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s happening at the ski resorts. But they do talk about it on the weather news, and the sense I’m getting is that this is a pretty good year, snow-wise, for New England. We’re not getting whited-out like we did in 2015, but it’s not the snow-drought we experienced last year, either, when, if not for snowmaking machines, folks would have been skiing on rock face.

Overall, however, as the world gets warmer, snowfall has become less predictable and skiing seasons in most of the places where people want to ski have grown shorter.

Since the 1970s the duration of the snow season, averaged over the northern hemisphere, has declined by five days a decade, according to the European Environment Agency. Huge regional variation exists, however, both in Europe and elsewhere. Californian slopes that were unable to open in recent years because of snow shortages had to close at the start of 2017 because too much of the stuff had fallen. (Source: The Economist)

What is bad luck for some (in this case, Mother Earth, and the ski resorts that now have to pay for what they used to get for free) presents an opportunity for others, namely, those who produce snowmaking equipment. 

The Economist article – those Euro-centrics! – only cites European companies, one of which (TechnoAlpin) claims to have roughly 50% of global market share. Not that I know anything about the snowmaking industry, but whenever I hear 50% market share, one of my eyebrows goes up. But whatever.

I’m going to do my bit to boost American greatness by giving a shout out to our native snowmakers. So let’s give it up for:

Victor, New York’s own Ratnik, makers of the Sky Giant Snow Gun, and the Mid-Energy Triple Baby Snow Giant High Capacity Tower. How much fun must it be to get to name your product a Triple Baby Snow Giant. (On the other hand, for some folks, the idea of a Triple Baby Snow Giant might be nightmare-inducing.)

Ratnik has its Babies, but Snowmakers (Snow Machines, Inc.) has Kids. You can get a Super Polecat, a Silent Polecat, or a Kid Polecat. A Viking or a Kid Viking. A Super Wizzard or a Kid Wizzard. (And you thought the only company in Midland, Michigan, was Dow Chemical.)

HKD used to be USA! USA! Then it went and merged with a Canadian outfit. But their US presence is in Natick, Mass. So they get a nod here, even if they don’t have Babies or Kids, just devils (Diablos) or angels (Halos).

I’m glad that these companies are making stuff, and that they’re making stuff in America. (At least I think they are.) I like that they make cannons and guns that have nothing to do with killing people, but are making skiers and snowboarders happy.

But with the upside of more demand for snowmaking equipment due to warmer temps, there’s a big downside: snow turns to slush, and then outright water, when the temps get above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I am well familiar with this, as the snow on the roof of the building next store is seeping through my ceiling whenever we have a melty-day.

Anyway, because of this – warming temps, not the leak in the flashing next door - snowmaking companies plow a fair amount of money into R&D. I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Too many snowboarders and skiers out there who’ll be piste off if they don’t.

Just in time for Presidents’ Day

Every few years, C-SPAN conducts a survey of historians, asking them to rate all past presidents. Here’s the methodology:

C-SPAN's academic advisors devised a survey in which participants used a one ("not effective") to ten ("very effective") scale to rate each president on ten qualities of presidential leadership: "Public Persuasion," "Crisis Leadership," "Economic Management," "Moral Authority," "International Relations," "Administrative Skills," "Relations with Congress," "Vision/Setting An Agenda," "Pursued Equal Justice for All," and "Performance Within the Context of His Times." Surveys were distributed to historians, biographers, and other professional observers of the presidency, drawn from a database of C-SPAN's programming, augmented by suggestions from the academic advisors. (Source: C-SPAN)

Before I get into the results – every bit as exciting as Adele vs. Beyoncé at the Grammies, or whether LaLa Land will sweep the Oscars – I’m actually wondering where they found 91 people (even in this vast country) who are actually capable of rating all 44 presidents on each of those categories. Come on, William Henry Harrison was only in office for 31 days before he died of pneumonia. And you’re telling me that there are 91 historians who can rate him on “Crisis Leadership” and “Relations with Congress?” And are there really 91 historians who can tell the difference between John Tyler and Zachary Taylor? Apparently, they were able to discern enough differences to rank Zachary Taylor 31, and John Tyler 39.

Here, from Politico, are the full rankings:

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
4. Teddy Roosevelt
5. Dwight Eisenhower
6. Harry Truman
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. John F. Kennedy
9. Ronald Reagan
10. Lyndon Johnson
11. Woodrow Wilson
12. Barack Obama
13. James Monroe
14. James Polk
15. Bill Clinton
16. William McKinley
17. James Madison
18. Andrew Jackson
19. John Adams
20. George H.W. Bush
21. John Q. Adams
22. Ulysses Grant
23. Grover Cleveland
24. William Taft
25. Gerald Ford
26. Jimmy Carter
27. Calvin Coolidge
28. Richard Nixon
29. James Garfield
30. Benjamin Harrison
31. Zachary Taylor
32. Rutherford Hayes
33. George W. Bush
34. Martin Van Buren
35. Chester Arthur
36. Herbert Hoover
37. Millard Fillmore
38. William Harrison
39. John Tyler
40. Warren Harding
41. Franklin Pierce
42. Andrew Johnson
43. James Buchanan

(Note that there have been 44 presidencies, making the incumbent #45, but Grover Cleveland had two separate terms, so he nabbed two numbers, but is only ranked once.)

The Big Three (as historian Douglas Brinkley calls them) are no surprise. Lincoln and FDR are my two personal favorites, which is kind of like saying that my favorite movies are Casablanca and The Godfather.

Obama had a pretty good showing, all things considered. He lost most of his ground (ranked 39th) because of his relations with a fractious Congress, and got his highest marks for Public Persuasion (ranked 10th), Economic Management (8th), Moral Authority (7th), and Pursuit of Equal Justice for All (3rd). On that final point, Obama was bested only by Lincoln (1st) and LBJ (2nd). (Here’s the link to the the full, category by category, rankings.)

Of all the presidents of my lifetime, Obama is definitely my favorite, but he’s not in the same league as The Big Three.

And then there’s the bottom of the barrel, James Buchanan, who was rated dead last in most categories, and achieved his highest ranking – 41st – for Administrative Skills.

Off the top of my head, I would have said Warren Harding (40th) was the worst. Or Andrew Johnson (42nd). Either of these gentlemen would have gotten my nod only because the incumbent is not yet in the mix. But James Buchanan? I know absolutely nothing about him,other than that he was the president before Lincoln. So I googled, and found that he apparently earned his reputation by pooh-poohing the importance of arguments over territorial slavery and may, in fact, have done some SCOTUS tampering around the Dred Scott decision.

Buchanan has been ranked among the three worst presidents in every poll and survey conducted since 1948 and in the past decade, and replaced Harding as the usual last-place finisher in these studies. (Source: National Constitution Center)

Looks like C-SPAN does their rankings whenever there’s a change in office. They’ve done three so far. Who knows, they may be conducting their next one any day now. I’d say that Buchanan supporters have reason for cautious optimism.

Anyway, Happy Presidents’ Day.

Food, glorious expired food

A number of months after my husband died (which, sigh, was 3 years ago today), I rounded up some of his gluten free foods and attempted to drop them off at a local food bank. Alas, I was turned away because these items – all completely non-perishable – were a couple of days past their use-by date. I guess it might be demeaning for someone picking up food from a food bank to be given expired food. But,r ealistically speaking, there was NOTHING wrong with any of this stuff (pretty much soups and a packaged “risotto” that was one of the few things that tasted good to Jim during the final stages of his life). And my thinking was that someone with celiac disease might appreciate getting food that would work for them.

Anyway, I took the food back home and used it myself. It was fine – even if it was a few months past the whatever it was date on the can/box. Don’t we occasionally read about folks who open a can of something or other, fifty years after the bought it, and find – yummers – that it’s still good? I seem to remember a Civil War ration can being unearthed and can-opened when I was a kid. And someone ate it and declared it fine.

Certainly, there are foods that go bad. Like milk.

The store that’s closest to me is one I seldom patronize. A few months ago, I needed milk, it was getting late, I didn’t want to schlep to one of my preferred stores, so I stopped in at my local. I’ve lived in this hood for over 40 years, so I knew enough to check the dates. Hmmm. I couldn’t find a pint of 2% that was younger than 2 weeks expired. I took a pass.

Similarly, I always look at the expiry date on bread, yogurt, fresh-squeezed OJ, and packaged salad greens, reaching way back on the shelf to get the furthest date out. Fresh is better than not-so-fresh.

Thanks to my fancy-arse fridge, those greens last well by the best-by date. Yogurt, I know, is good well beyond whatever date is stamped on the cover. As for milk, well, I use the sniff test. If it’s a day-or-so beyond, I’ll take a whiff. If it doesn’t smell sour, and if there’s nothing solid chunking around in it, it’s on the cereal. (Or, I guess, I could make a sour milk chocolate cake, which I haven’t had in years. Got the recipe here somewhere…)

Completely rotten fruits and veggies go down the disposal. If there’s just a bad part, I’ll cut it off and go ahead and eat the rest. Mold on bread: gone! In my experience, in a loaf of bread where one slice has mold, the rest of the slices will tend to smell a bit off. But if the bread is just stale, well, dealer’s choice.

Same with a lot of food stuffs: slightly stale ain’t going to kill you.

Use common sense. Which is how us Baby Boomers grew up.

As for drugs, I usually have aspirin and some sort of cold and flu whatever around. When I go to use them, which is not all that often, I invariably find that they’re expired. I then go online, and most of the time, I find that they’re fine. Now, if you’re taking something life saving – like insulin – you have to be more careful. But for general purpose OTC stuff, the potency may somewhat deteriorate, but most of it still works up to a point well beyond what’s indicated.

But, basically, I really don’t know what those dates are supposed to mean. Which apparently places me in the majority of my fellow Americans, or so I learned from a recent article in the Washington Post (which you may need to be a subscriber to access). But help is on the way.

On Wednesday, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the two largest trade groups for the grocery industry,announced that they’ve adopted standardized, voluntary regulations to clear up what product date labels mean. Where manufacturers now use any of 10 separate label phrases, ranging from “expires on” to “better if used by,” they’ll now be encouraged to use only two: “Use By” and “Best if Used By.”

The former is a safety designation, meant to indicate when perishable foods are no longer good. “Best if Used By” is a quality descriptor — a subjective guess of when the manufacturer thinks the product should be consumed for peak flavor.

That's what most "use-by" dates indicate now, though studies have shown that many consumers believe they signal whether a product is okay to eat. In fact, it's totally fine to eat a product even well after its so-called expiration date. (Source: WaPo)

At least I have figured out not to be duped into deciding that something is unsafe to eat based on a date stamp. But what a con on the part of manufacturers this has been, if people are tossing out all of this perfectly good food.

Anyway, it looks like the simplification of the food expiration info will be a good thing. We’ll just have to remember the “Use By” is about safety. Wouldn’t it be better if they changed it to “Safe if Used By” or “Do Not Use After This Date.” Just saying. I’m sure I’ll keep using my visual inspection, sniff, and taste test. It’s worked so far!

And what are we to make of the different standards in other countries?

My niece Molly is studying in Ireland, and sent a picture of a mound of 1,000 year old butter from Cork. Looks more like a biscuit to me, but what do I know? All I can say is I will no longer worry when I can’t find the expiration date on my tub of Kerry Gold (butter that tastes like what butter should taste like, whatever its age)

Ark of the Arfs

I’ve been on a couple of flights where pets have been onboard. A few years ago, my sister Kath and I were flying back to Boston from Florida, and we kept hearing this yipping noise. We actually thought it was someone with Tourette’s. But when we were disembarking, we watched as the woman a few rows ahead of us took a pet carrier out from under the seat in front of her and freed up the furry little head of her mop-mop dog Charlie.

The other pet experience I had was even more memorable. On a flight home from a business trip to Cleveland, a passenger took over one of the two toilets on the plane so that she could try to calm down her howler monkey. That monkey wasn’t having any of the calming down, and all I can say is that they don’t call them howler monkeys for nothing.

Anyway, whether yipping under the seat or howling in the rest room, a traveling pet is a lot better off in the cabin than it would be in the cargo hold. Honestly, it’s hard to think of a more disturbing experience for one of our furry friends than being cooped up in a cage in a cold, dark, and noisy space for a few hours. Traveling in the cabin if you’re a human flying steerage isn’t exactly a picnic, but at least we all know what we’re getting into: no leg room, bad or no food (not sure which is worse), the person in front of you reclining with his head in your lap, the kid behind you kicking, etc. The thought of how the animals have to travel. The horror!

While not much is happening on the in-flight end of the pet travel continuum – unless you’re willing to spring for a private plane – there is something that will make man’s best friend, as well as other members of the animal kingdom, more comfortable while they’re hanging out pre or post-flight at the airport.

The Ark at JFK, a new, $65 million facility in a 178,000-square-foot warehouse, is one step toward improving the latter [i.e., non-flight] experience. It will have a splash pool, overnight kennels, and pre-flight micro-chipping services to track your animals. Eventually, this first-of-its-kind service in the U.S. will feature an in-house pet spa, too.(Source: Bloomberg)

The JFK location is the key here, as one of the main services is helping dogs clear customs.(Is there extreme vetting for pooches?) It will also take care of the animals during layovers and see them through the boarding process.

I was going to say that I wished there were something similar for humans. But, silly me. It’s the First Class or Frequent Flyer lounge. I have been in enough of those to say that it really does make a difference to be able to lounge around, in a comfy chair, without having to fight off every else looking to use a plug. You’re away from the hoi polloi waiting for your flight to be called, and you get to the gate through the secret entrance.

The Ark at JFK's equine component will have stables for importing and exporting racehorses, show horses, and polo ponies, all of which follow relatively predictable schedules.

An aviary is also in the works.

I’m not all that fond of birds as pets. And I don’t know any horses. But I’m happy that there’ll be some more creature comforts from the canine creatures who do so very much to make human life worth living.