The Third Is a Russian Utopian With a Notebook

1. The US military did not think about the sustainability of the bases it built in Afghanistan.

"Even with a base full of troops, Safi couldn’t afford to maintain it, he said, claiming the facilities are too costly to run. Everything the Americans left requires power, he said, even bathroom door locks his troops have replaced with ordinary padlocks. Despite $2 billion in U.S.-funded power projects, Afghanistan’s grid remains underdeveloped and unreliable, and bases often depend on electric generators to power lights, heaters and other equipment. For just one of the big tents now rotting in Zombieland, the Americans would burn about 80 gallons of fuel a night, said Safi, who spent hours one January morning searching room to room in his headquarters for a working heater. 'Where are Afghans supposed to get that much fuel?' Safi asked. He said later: 'The Americans, money has no value for them.'"

2. This podcast is like if you took every 5IT and fed them into a neural network and had it spit out a show designed just for us.

"At a low point in the Cold War, three men walk into a bureaucrat’s office at Gosteleradio, the state broadcaster of the Soviet Union. Two are Americans: an astronaut, and a researcher of psychic phenomena. The third is a Russian utopian with a notebook full of phone numbers he’s not supposed to know. The three want approval for something that’s never been tried before: a two-way, simultaneous satellite link between the enemy empires of the US and USSR."

3. It's easy to make fun of this, but show me the web software that will still be mostly running in 38 years.

"In San Francisco the assessor uses a Cobol-based system called AS-400, whose welcome screen reads, 'COPYRIGHT IBM CORP., 1980, 2009.' As the city tax rolls jumped 22 percentover two years, workers were struggling to keep track of the changes on their ancient systems. At one point they fell three years behind. It’s a 'lot of manual work' just to perform basic functions, Chu says. Searches that should seem simple take much longer because of the system’s quirks. If a resident contacts the agency saying her house should have a different assessed value, a worker has to look up the block and identification number that’s technically taxed; there’s no way to filter by address."

4. What if the War on Poverty is remembered as a failure precisely because it tried to do the right thing?

"In line with many contemporary accounts and retrospectives, our analysis suggests that OEO funding generated backlash and appeared to hurt Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s—especially relating to the politics of race in the South. Unlike the New Deal, which engendered good will for decades, the War on Poverty generated resentments—and, in the shorter term, votes for Republicans in areas with more potential African American voters. Given Johnson’s ambition to recreate Roosevelt’s style and political reputation, the differences between the political economy of the New Deal and War and Poverty are perhaps surprising. But just days after Kennedy’s assassination, a staffer advised Johnson to focus on small, popular policy proposals instead of bold—and divisive—goals like civil rights. Johnson responded, 'What the hell’s the presidency for?' The OEO’s focus on fighting poverty and racial discrimination—over politics as usual—is consistent with this humanitarian vision. The quantitative picture that emerges from our analysis is that the War on Poverty was a sincere attempt, albeit an underfunded one, to champion change."

5. Completely brilliant piece by Ian Bogost on a recent AI art show and the startup behind it.

"Judged as Banksy or Hirst might be, Elgammal’s most art-worthy work might be the Artrendex start-up itself, not the pigment-print portraits that its technology has output. Elgammal doesn’t treat his commercial venture like a secret, but he also doesn’t surface it as a beneficiary of his supposedly earnest solo gallery show. He’s argued that AI-made images constitute a kind of conceptual art, but conceptualists tend to privilege process over product or to make the process as visible as the product."

+1: I wrote about the development of a new servant economy.

"The widening gap between the new American aristocracy and everyone else is what drives both the supply and demand of Uber-for-X companies. The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, 'For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.' Domestic servants—to walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what Americans think of as 'the middle class,' servants became far less common, even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans worked lengthened. What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people."

YOY: Keep Fit Over the Radio!

[the third is a Russian utopian with a notebook]