Every visit to India, I shamelessly ask my mother to make some of my favorite dishes. Of course, everything that she cooked was divine. But, even there, we all had our own favorites.
A few years ago, I asked if she could make keppa-dosai (கேப்பை தோசை). Mother's reply was not what I expected. She said that it was not easy as it was when we were young to get the needed keppai. And the couple of times she tried, apparently it did not pass her quality standards.
It has been a long, long time--decades actually--since I had keppa-dosai. Some day, when I am old, maybe I will have a moment like in Ratatouille!
It is millet that I am talking about. Yep, millet. As kids, my brother and I loved drinking Ragimalt, which was an industrial millet concoction that was a much better alternative to Bournvita. My grandmother thought it was hilarious that we were so much into what she referred to as keppai-kanji (கேப்பை கஞ்சி).
That millet was in India long before the "English vegetables" arrived. Long before the polished white rice. Long before granulated white sugar.
In the process of rapidly modernizing, we are also rapidly losing our agrobiodiversity; it is declining in many countries:
Generally, agrobiodiversity is significantly lower in wealthy nations,
where the industrial food system pushes toward genetic uniformity.
The wealthier we get, the more we gravitate towards inexpensive sources of calories, continuing along the direction in which we started moving ever since we invented agriculture.
Global shifts of urbanization, migration, markets and climate can
potentially be compatible with agrobiodiversity, but other powerful
forces are undermining it. The imperatives of producing food at lower
cost and higher yield clash with efforts to raise high-quality food and
protect the environment. The future of agrobiodiversity hangs in the
balance.
I am always struck by how a person's death upends life as they know it for the immediate family, while the rest of us merrily carry on with our lives without any interruptions. Every death is perhaps also a reminder of how truly irrelevant we are right here on earth, leave alone in the cosmos whose vastness we cannot even imagine.
This being the month to honor the Native American heritage, the shittiest president ever decided to call a few of them to the White House, positioned them in front of another shitty president who is even called "Indian Killer" ... and then goes on to further insult Native Americans!
Yet another proud moment for his 63 million voters!
Let’s recognize his motives and not obsess over his cynical behavior as
if he’s devaluing the office of the presidency. He isn’t. He is
devaluing himself. We’ve said before that Trump as president is no role
model. He was disrespectful as a candidate too.
Years ago, an older friend who was married to an European, remarked about an aspect of the male-female relationship that did not exist in my old country nor in the adopted one. "Harmless flirtation" at parties and at places of work is very European, he said. Of course, the European flirtation that he referred to was in the married context, where people are in committed relationships.
Having been raised in a culture where girls and boys, and women and men, lived socially separate lives, and as one curious about how different societies around the world dealt with issues like this, I found all these to be fascinating. In the old country, women even in my grandmother's generation rarely talked with men, which then did not even crack open the possibility of harmless flirtation.
In enforcing such a separation between the male and the female, one of the metaphors in the Tamil culture was about fire and cotton--these need to be kept far away from each other because otherwise the cotton will get burnt. Females being the cotton here, of course. It was to protect women from the fire and fury that men are.
Vice President mike pence practices such a separation between men and women. He has proudly noted how he doesn’t eat alone with any woman other than his wife. While it might seem like a great idea, it is another version of la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au
pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler
du pain. Why? Because, in practice it means like this:
One reason women stall professionally, research shows, is that people have a tendency to hire, promote and mentor people like themselves.
When men avoid solo interactions with women — a catch-up lunch or late
night finishing a project — it puts women at a disadvantage.
So, isn't a better approach to empower women? Give them agency?
In the current American conversation, women are increasingly treated as children: defenseless, incapable of consent, always on the verge of being victimized. This should give us pause. Being infantilized has never worked out well for women.
In this post-weinstein era, I hope we don't swing to the other extreme and strictly enforce the gender separation that continues to exist in many parts of the world.
Instead, I want something else: Serious and sincere conversations on how to deal with the biological wiring in men, and how nurture can address that aspect of nature. But then, nobody listens to what I have to say!
In the world of sovereign states after the Second World War, very few of them have allowed foreigners to permanently move into their countries. Quite a few, like the ones in the Persian Gulf, tolerate migrant workers, and most of the rest of the countries practically do not allow for immigration.
The United States continued to stand out, in contrast. In the 1960s, it even shed its racist immigration policies and made possible browns like me to make ourselves at home here in America.
And then trump happened.
Immigration is now targeted from many directions. Because it is pretty much only non-whites who want to move to America--thanks to the global demographic dynamics--the anti-immigration nationalism is ethnic-cleansing through federal policy!
We are now setting ourselves up for immense losses. Highly qualified, talented, and capable people are being denied work visas. Like in this case:
After
earning law degrees in China and at Oxford, after having worked in Hong
Kong as a lawyer at a top international firm, after coming to United
States three years ago for an M.B.A. and graduating and joining a
start-up, I was given just 60 days to leave the country. I have 17 days
left.
Law degrees, including from Oxford. MBA from Stanford. Anything else?
My work involves artificial intelligence and big data, and my letters of
support came from an authority in my industry and veteran start-up
investor, and a Nobel Prize winner. But it wasn’t enough to convince the
government that my job requires advanced skills.
What do Nobel Prize winners know anyway! It is not like many American Nobel laureates are from other countries, right?
So, any final thoughts from the Hong Kong visitor who has been given her exit papers?
America
is losing many very skilled workers because of its anti-immigrant
sentiment, and while this is a disappointing blow to me and my
classmates, it will also be a blow to the United States’ competitiveness
in the global economy. Tech giants such as Google and Tesla were
founded by immigrants.
I
can’t make sense of why an administration that claims to want this
country to be strong would be so eager to get rid of us. We are losing
our dreams, and America is losing the value we bring.
As I make plans to go back to China, I find myself wondering: If I am not qualified to stay in the United States, then who is?
Remember that powerful line from The Bridge on the River Kwai? "What have I done!"
That's the sentiment that slowly some of the technology folks are beginning to express.Like some early Facebook employees, who now worry "about the monster they have created."
It is not merely with Facebook. It is the same with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ... the list is endless.
Why? The reason is a simple one, which I have discussed a lot in this blog. But, we need to be reminded over and over again:
One of the problems is that these platforms act, in many ways, like
drugs. Facebook, and every other social-media outlet, knows that all too
well. Your phone vibrates a dozen times an hour with alerts about likes
and comments and retweets and faves. The combined effect is one of just
trying to suck you back in, so their numbers look better for their next
quarterly earnings report. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, came right out and said what we all know:
the whole intention of Facebook is to act like a drug, by “[giving] you
a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or
commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” That, Parker said, was by
design. These companies are “exploiting a vulnerability in human
psychology.” Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has echoed this, too. “Do I feel guilty?” he asked rhetorically on CNN about the role Facebook is playing in society. “Absolutely I feel guilt.”
It is easy for the likes of Sean Parker to say that now, right? After all, he has made his gazillions; Wikipedia notes that he is worth $2.4 billion! Our addiction is their dollars. If only users paused to question why they are getting these services for free. No free lunch, as economists always remind us.
People who know me sometimes even make fun of my regimented life. I stick to my eating regimen, my sleeping regimen, and ... Even when playing bridge, I commit myself to ending the playing by typing to other players that I will play one final game and after that game, well, I sign off. It is all because I know well how delightful it is to have that extra chocolate. That extra cookie. More time in bed. One more ... We humans are wired for such addictions. And technology is now explicitly and intentionally tapping into our addictive personalities.
[A] rigorous technology of the mind is really what we need now as a
civilization because the thing that’s killing people nowadays is too
much Facebook and cheeseburgers. We solved the problems of the
biological age by vaccines and antibiotics and discovering all these
things, and stopping the things that were killing people, and we’re not
going to find the technologies to fix these behavioral problems of
addiction, technology overuse, overconsumption of everything by walking
away from the technologies of the mind. We’re going to solve them by
getting rigorous and having a complete science and technology so that
people can reprogram themselves into the people they want to be.
We need to "reprogram" ourselves? Ain't gonna happen!
A few years ago, a student remarked in class about my blog; he said that the more he kept reading a few old posts, the more he realized a striking similarity between the blog content and the class content.
Of course those were the old days before trump, when my writings here were rarely unprofessional. Which is also why I have now stopped telling students about my tweeting and blogging.
But then, maybe I should, because it will be a powerful evidence that while I am highly charged and definitive about issues and people here in my private space, none of that spills over into the classroom. In classes, even when students ask me what I think about whatever the issue is that we are discussing, my typical response is that while I certainly have my own opinions, my job is not to bring them to the classroom, but to push them into thinking from multiple perspectives.
You, dear reader, on the other hand, have never observed me in my classes. And perhaps you have often wondered whether I am a ranting nutcase in the classroom. Rest assured that I am one hell of a straitjacketed professor in the professional environment.
So, in that spirit, I provide here a task that I assigned a class. You will notice that the topic is not new to this blog, but the tone is markedly different from how I would have written about it here. Right?
Finally, you will also notice a parallel between blogging and teaching. In both, the structure is the same: We lay out the arguments, and bring in appropriate quotes, right? Even the task that I assigned is the same way ... The real difference between my teaching and blogging is how "professional" I am in my language ;)
Go ahead, and write up the 2,000-word essay, and I will give you feedback ;)
****************************************************************
In his op-ed (from class discussions on 11/15, or click here) the Dalai Lama writes:
The time has come to understand that we are the same human beings on this planet. Whether we want to or not, we must coexist.
He adds that “empathy is the basis of human coexistence.”
Such a coexistence, the Dalai Lama argues, requires the United States, too, “to think more about global-level issues.”
While the Dalai Lama does not refer to any specific event or issue in that particular op-ed, he has been vocal about the ongoing Rohingya crisis. In other contexts, he has also explicitly called on the global leaders, which includes the United States, to act on the Rohingya crisis.
The Rohingya crisis brings together, unfortunately, many aspects that we would want to understand: For instance, the role of religion and religious differences; the level of economic development; the structure of governance in the country/countries directly affected by the crisis; and even the “different” looks of the people. Thus, in a tragic manner, the Rohingya crisis makes an ideal candidate as a global issue, and also makes as a final exam topic.
Your task for the final paper is this: In addition to clarifying the complexity of the Rohingya crisis itself, do some background reading in order to understand:
What has the Dalai Lama said about the Rohingya crisis?
What has the current president of the US said about the Rohingya crisis?
What has the president’s secretary of state said about the Rohingya crisis?
How do their views compare/contrast with the Dalai Lama’s call “to think more about global-level issues” and with “empathy is the basis of human coexistence”?
Based on all that reading, and based on the relevant materials from the course, you will write an essay in response to the following:
Do the views of the president and his secretary of state agree with the Dalai Lama’s views—about the need for global thinking and about the Rohingya crisis? If they are not in sync, then whose position do you agree with and why?
In writing the essay, keep in mind that the essay is an end-of-term demonstration of how you have met the course goals:
Understand the complexity and interdependence of contemporary global issues.
Appreciate how one’s own culture and history affect one’s worldview and expectations.
Appreciate the vastness of the world and the opportunities to create a better future for all peoples.
I will admit it; I hadn't known about the publication Vanity Fair until Christopher Hitchens started writing there.
No, I take that back. I first heard about it when Tina Brown became the editor of the New Yorker. Reports said that she was a huge success at Vanity Fair, which made me wonder what the deal was. Turned out Vanity Fair had quite some back story.
As I read those sentences that I have written, even I am amazed at how far from electrical engineering I have come, and how much I have immersed myself in the literary world. Maybe this is another piece of evidence for why I continue to think a lot about CP Snow's Two Cultures.
Anyway, back to Vanity Fair. Just as much as Tina Brown caused a sensation, it is the news about the appointment of a new editor that the literary/journalism world is talking about. The editor's name is Radhika Jones.
Ms. Jones graduated from Harvard College and received a doctoral degree
in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. She has
lived in Taipei and Moscow, where she got her start in journalism as the
arts editor at The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper. (Her
Russian, she said, is rusty.)
Harvard undergrad, and then a doctorate from Columbia. Holy shit; you don't want to mess around with such an academic background.
Interesting that Jones did not then transition into the role of an academic, right? Good for her.
There are plenty of intellectuals like Jones who crossed over into the world of journalism after earning their PhDs. Some of my favorites, even when I mostly disagree with them, include Bill Kristol and Andrew Sullivan.
Sometimes, I wonder if the path of academic credentials and then writing for the public is the path that I would have traveled had I known better, or if I had grown up in the US. The roads we travel, and the forks that we diverge on, is what life is all about, eh!
After the meeting, I was hanging out at the airport killing time by walking around and observing life. I spotted two colleagues waiting for their flights. I walked over and chatted with them.
One talked about how she enjoys having a second home in Brooklyn, even as she continues to work and live for the most part in a town four hours away.
"The two mortgages are tight ... sometimes I feel like I can't ever go on a real vacation. But, then I reach Brooklyn, and my friends are right across from me, and I am happy," she said.
"Yes, ultimately it is all about the human-human interactions, right? It is not really about the vacation travels."
People increasingly seem to be forgetting the importance of the human interaction in real time and space. They fail to understand that virtual is not the same. It is like my favorite example that you can't eat a virtual cake. It is only real water that quenches the thirst, not the virtual.
David Brooks writes in his column that "Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy." But, people seem to be mistaking one for another, and fail to understand the difference between contact and intimacy, between acquaintance and friend.
There is no turning back. The virtual will increasingly be the preferred choice, even as people know within that it is the real that they truly seek.
And then one day in the future, humanity will run into the very scenario that E.M. Forster wrote about years before all these developed:
"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.
When two of my favorite magazines have essays on the same worrisome issue, it can only mean one thing: Curl into a fetal position, suck your thumb, and pray to your favorite gods!
First it was The New Yorker and then The Economist on "negative emissions." Here's how the Londoner puts it:
The Paris agreement assumes, in effect, that the world will find ways to suck CO2 out of the air. That is because, in any realistic scenario, emissions cannot be cut fast enough to keep the total stock of greenhouse gases sufficiently small to limit the rise in temperature successfully. But there is barely any public discussion of how to bring about the extra “negative emissions” needed to reduce the stock of CO2 (and even less about the more radical idea of lowering the temperature by blocking out sunlight). Unless that changes, the promise of limiting the harm of climate change is almost certain to be broken.
Yep, if the CO2 that is piling up cannot be sucked out of the sky, well, your grandkids are in for some deep trouble!
The New Yorker's treatment of the subject is an awesome essay by the Pulitzer winning Elizabeth Kolbert. She writes quoting Klaus Lackner:
The way Lackner sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon dioxide should be regarded the same way we view other waste products, like sewage or garbage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. (“Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,” Lackner has observed.) At the same time, we don’t let them shit on the sidewalk or toss their empty yogurt containers into the street.
Of course CO2 is a waste product. We have been allowing factories and cars to throw the waste into the air that surrounds us. So, what does Lackner suggest? What is the paradigm shift that he wants us to think about?
One of the reasons we’ve made so little progress on climate change, he contends, is that the issue has acquired an ethical charge, which has polarized people. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty. “Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner, and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity,” he has written. Changing the paradigm, Lackner believes, will change the conversation. If CO2 is treated as just another form of waste, which has to be disposed of, then people can stop arguing about whether it’s a problem and finally start doing something.
I am all for it. The guilt talk does not work. It is way more practical to talk about trash removal. Except, removing this trash ain't easy!
If we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere, what will the story be? Like I said, adopt the fetal position, and suck on your thumb!
The I.P.C.C. considered more than a thousand possible scenarios. Of these, only a hundred and sixteen limit warming to below two degrees, and of these a hundred and eight involve negative emissions. In many below-two-degree scenarios, the quantity of negative emissions called for reaches the same order of magnitude as the “positive” emissions being produced today. “The volumes are outright crazy,” Oliver Geden, the head of the E.U. research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me. Lackner said, “I think what the I.P.C.C. really is saying is ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios, and, of the scenarios which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of a negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ”
Are you all curled up yet? No? Ok, then read on:
Early last month, the Trump Administration announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules aimed at cutting power plants’ emissions. The plan, which had been approved by the Obama Administration, was eminently achievable. Still, according to the current Administration, the cuts were too onerous. The repeal of the plan is likely to result in hundreds of millions of tons of additional emissions.
So, what is Elizabeth Kolbert's bottom-line?
As a technology of last resort, carbon removal is, almost by its nature, paradoxical. It has become vital without necessarily being viable. It may be impossible to manage and it may also be impossible to manage without. ♦
I have no idea which god is out there applauding trump in the Oval Office, nor do I have any idea about the god that his 63 million voters pray to. These religious people I can never understand!
Other religious people have tried to talk sense to trump. Like the Pope himself. Remember this one?
When the President met the Pope at the Vatican, last week, it was as if they were members of different species, so far apart in values and style that the actual content of what separated them proved elusive. Francis slyly presented Trump with a gift, though, that—as of yesterday—defines their opposition as absolute. The gift was a copy of his encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’.” Trump politely promised to read it. Sure.
If you believe that trump read even one page of that book, hey you are one of the 63 million voters!
[The] dangerously degraded planet, for Francis, is a manifestation of a deeper problem, for “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” Though the Pope would not say so, Trump is an embodiment of the moral pollution that generates atmospheric pollution, a sign that something has gone gravely wrong in the way we humans relate to one another.
How awesome that the Pope reasons that our moral pollution is the cause of atmospheric pollution.
Another religious/spiritual leader has stepped in with his anti-trumpism. The Dalai Lama writes "America First" is deeply flawed:
There are no national boundaries for climate protection or the global economy. No religious boundaries, either. The time has come to understand that we are the same human beings on this planet. Whether we want to or not, we must coexist.
I am sure trump immediately understands this. His 63 million voters, many of whom include deeply religious Catholics--now denounce him. Of course I am being cynical!
The Dalai Lama continues:
We must learn that humanity is one big family. We are all brothers and sisters: physically, mentally and emotionally. But we are still focusing far too much on our differences instead of our commonalities. After all, every one of us is born the same way and dies the same way.
I wonder if the pussy-grabber really knows that he too is going to die some day, like every one of us. Maybe not. Maybe he thinks that he will merely step into a golden plane and be off to much greener golf courses!
So, what does Tenzin Gyatso--aka, the Dalai Lama--suggest that we do?
The young generations have a great responsibility to ensure that the world becomes a more peaceful place for all. But this can become reality only if we educate, not just the brain, but also the heart. The educational systems of the future should place greater emphasis on strengthening human abilities, such as warm-heartedness, a sense of oneness, humanity and love.
Humanity.
Empathy.
Love.
Heart.
Peace.
Words that trump does not even seem to know. And 63 million voters elected him! Shame on them!
The public's memory is notoriously short. Which is why politicians get away with anything, for the most part.
Remember the Terry Schiavo tragedy in the public sphere? It was awful. Here was a young woman in an irreversible vegetative state for years, and Republican senators in DC adamantly stood against pulling her plug, in order to defend the sanctity of human life. They were ok with wars and killing, prisons and killing, cops and killing, but no pulling the plug nor aborting fertilized eggs. Nutcases!
Their leader at that time, Bill Frist, even made his own diagnosis--without having ever met the patient! I tell ya, the GOP has been home to nothing but nutcases ever since that newt-led revolution in 1994.
Finally, after 15 years in a vegetative state, Schiavo died. By then I was already an Oregonian. And had already authored an op-ed on the state's Death With Dignity Act. I wrote that in late 2002, soon after I moved to Oregon in response to the Bush administration's effort to overturn the Oregon law. That effort was led by a religious fanatic John Ashcroft, who was the Attorney General.
The nutcase Republicans in DC gave it their best shot, but Oregon's law prevailed. A couple of weeks ago, it was the law's 20th anniversary.
In Oregon, use of the law has steadily grown. Last year, it happened 133 times. Nearly 1,200 people have died using the law in the last two decades. A vast majority cited loss of autonomy as their main reason.
You remember how horrible it was before the Oregon law passed? Like this one:
In 1990, a Portland woman, Janet Adkins, traveled to Michigan where Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped her use his lethal injection device in his Volkswagen van. Her death inflamed a national debate.
Kevorkian was later found guilty for his assistance in a number of cases. He served time too, which is unfortunate. Almost nine years in prison, as an old man himself. But, boy did he stand up for his beliefs!
I understand that not everybody will be ready to exit the planet as I am. I love life. This existence is simply fascinating. I hate the very idea that I will miss out on everything that I cherish. But, like every saint and sinner who ever existed, I too will die. A lonely event that will be. Living like today could be the last day ever makes clear what my priorities are, how I should spend my time, and what I need to plan for. Which is also why I don't have much in my bucket-list.
Here today, gone tomorrow! You should even think in terms of writing your own obituary. At the very least, we could all benefit from having the most difficult conversations: Talk to the next of kin and make clear one's end of life choices. After all, we talk shit all the time. We have time for sports. We talk endlessly about the shittiest human ever in the White House. We talk forever about the weather, for heaven's sake. We definitely have time for this important conversation.
If you want some ideas on how to go about having such a talk with your people, check out the resources here.
In the meanwhile, enjoy the precious gift of life!
In a few days, my fellow Americans will overeat. Most men will also unbuckle their belts and sit down in front of the television and watch football while having yet another huge slice of pie.
As the day comes to an end, whether or not people sincerely thanked their stars for being alive during the best time ever in human history, quite a few will finalize their plans for the big shopping the following morning.
Black Friday is around the corner.
And then, a few days later, many will head back to the stores to return stuff. Apparently throughout the year, we return a lot of stuff that we bought:
Returning stuff is an American pastime, a tradition even. The
industry-wide consensus is that 8 to 10 percent of all goods bought in
the U.S. will be returned. For online sales, the rate is much higher, in
the range of 25 to 40 percent. Retailers see their return policies as a
way to win loyal customers and undercut the competition. Some
e-commerce companies make it so easy to send back used products that it
can feel like they're almost begging you to do it.
Returns are far
less common in other countries. In Asia and Europe, less than 5 percent
of purchases are returned. "It's a very uniquely North American
phenomenon," says Charles Johnston, a former executive at Walmart
and Home Depot who worked on the returns team. "If you go to Europe and
other countries that Walmart is not in, most people don't return. You
go to Germany and it's just not an expectation." (The exception is the
U.K., which behaves like us.)
Such is life in an age of affluence!
If so much stuff is returned, then, if you are like me, you begin to wonder what happens to all that returned goods.
An entire industry has evolved to deal with this--"reverse logistics":
Logistics giants are vying with each other to make returns as speedy and
simple as possible. Last year, for example, FedEx spent $1.4bn to buy
GENCO, a specialist in so-called “reverse logistics”.
Head. Spinning.!!!
So, the returned goods, and the unsold stuff, are hot business--in the US and abroad. Go figure!
The brick-and-mortar stores that aresucceeding are in the
outlet or overstock side of the business. According to the commercial
real-estate and analytics firm CoStar, five of the 10 U.S. retail
companies that added the most square footage in the first half of 2016
were so-called value stores: Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree,
Marshalls, and TJ Maxx. During the Great Recession,
customers started doing more of their shopping at dollar stores and
outlets, and those habits stuck after the recession ended. Consider that
there are now more Nordstrom Rack stores than there are Nordstroms, and
Macy's recently launched Macy's Backstage to compete with Nordstrom
Rack.
Perhaps like how Hollywood created a channel for straight-to-video, maybe the big retailers now have a straight-to-secondary route.
Now, think about how rapidly e-commerce has grown, and will grow. This means:
More e-commerce means more returns, as customers buy goods without
seeing them, often in several sizes, then send back what they don’t
need.
After buying all that stuff, if people don't have space at home? There is another industry that helps out, for a fee: Self-storage!
This is the American Dream, and the pursuit of happiness?
Remember the magic number 75 that I often refer to here? I have always suspected that 75 will be a mere stop as I continue on.
Today, this website gave me more for me to worry about; it says that I will coast along well after 75. And might come to a final resting place only by 100.
Your Healthy Life Expectancy is 42.6 Years
Your Unhealthy Life Expectancy is 2.9 Years
Your Life Expectancy is 45.6 Years
Out of the potential 45.6 years ahead, thankfully only the final three will be unhealthy. Small mercies!
This is the first time such a measurement tool has been developed.
While it’s too early to validate the accuracy of our calculations with
actual data, we have been careful to ensure that the model assumptions
are based on established actuarial sources and the modeling results are
logical and consistent.
Big data at work here, behind the scenes. The big data that the Social Security folks and life insurance folks use.
As if the potential 45 years ahead of me is not scary enough, the researchers note this: "One thing it doesn’t take into account however is the impact of the genetic revolution." Oh, great! The rapidly advancing genetic medical technology will then make me live for another twenty years. I will be 120 when I finally die! Un-fucking-believable!
The lead researcher there is Jeyaraj Vadiveloo. For us Tamils, that name is recognizable. But the twist in the spelling from the usual one that we find back in the old country means that this Jeyaraj Vadiveloo was born to people of Tamil stock who lived in places like Malaysia/Singapore, South Africa, the West Indies. The diaspora tried their best to retain names from the old country, and in the process came up with their own spellings.
One of my favorites along those lines is the name Mahendra Nagamootoo. In Tamil Nadu, the name "Nagamootoo" would be usually spelled "Nagamuthu." But, the diaspora community went with the sound and then created their own spelling of the name. Jeyaraj Vadiveloo is here in the US via Malaysia. Vadiveloo is the "Vadivelu" of the old country.
When I eventually die, a gazillion years from now, people are going to have a tough time linking my last name to the old country!
Asia is pretty darn huge, right? Look at Iran and Kazakhstan alone. Asia is huge.
No wonder then that the New York Times has a lengthy write-up: Asian-American Cuisine’s Rise, and Triumph. It is about "America’s long, complicated love affair with Asian cooking":
As a nation we were once beholden to the Old World traditions of early settlers; we now crave ingredients from farther shores. ...
These are American ingredients now, part of a movement in cooking that
often gets filed under the melting-pot, free-for-all category of New
American cuisine. But it’s more specific than that: This is food borne
of a particular diaspora, made by chefs who are “third culture kids,”
heirs to both their parents’ culture and the one they were raised in,
and thus forced to create their own.
True, right? What a melting-pot this country is!
The report continues:
Could we call it Asian-American cuisine? The term is problematic,
subsuming countries across a vast region with no shared language or
single unifying religion. It elides numerous divides: city and
countryside, aristocrats and laborers, colonizers and colonized
So, at this point, I should lower the boom.
The "Asian-American" discussed there has no place for Iran. No Kazakhs, No Nepalis. It is all about the "Asia" that Americans refer to: China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand. Not even Indonesia!
The American (mis)understanding of the world is unique in many ways. Reminds me of another map on this theme:
Often I have worried that my intellectual preparation has made me a mile-wide and not even an inch-deep. I might be a flake. A man who knew too little about too many.
And then after a few minutes, that worry eases and I am back to reading, thinking, teaching, and, yes, blogging!
The lack of "depth" is a tradeoff that I systematically made in order to do what I do. Expertise on the dreaded question of angels dancing on a pin has not ever fascinated me.
Such an approach makes me appreciate life and understand the world. Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker on how most rural communities in America stagnate, while a handful survive and prosper.
A wonderful essay all by itself, in which the author writes:
In his 1970 book, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,”
the economist Albert O. Hirschman described different ways of
expressing discontent. You can exit—stop buying a product, leave town.
Or you can use voice—complain to the manufacturer, stay and try to
change the place you live in. The easier it is to exit, the less likely
it is that a problem will be fixed.
I know what the author is writing about. In fact, you, dear reader, also know that I know; remember this post of mine in which I paid tribute to Hirschman? In that post, I wrote that they don't make thinkers like Hirschman anymore? And how Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is one of the few books that I bought and retain? Hirschman's intellect though was a mile-wide and a mile-deep!
Back to the New Yorker essay:
Americans, Hirschman wrote, have always preferred
“the neatness of exit over the messiness and heartbreak of voice.”
Discontented Europeans staged revolutions; Americans moved on. “The
curious conformism of Americans, noted by observers ever since
Tocqueville, may also be explained in this fashion,” he continued. “Why
raise your voice in contradiction and get yourself into trouble as long
as you can always remove yourself entirely from any given environment
should it become too unpleasant?”
The fabled mobility of Americans is rapidly changing. I routinely ask students in my introductory classes whether they would move to places like Alabama or the Dakotas, or Sub-Saharan Africa, if that's where their economic futures might be. Rare is a student who is ready to move.
But, in a trump America, it will be interesting to see how Americans react. We now have a solid blue wall along the West Coast, which is certainly bound to annoy quite a few trump toadies. Will they pack up and exit? (I hope and pray they will!) Will frustrated progressives in states like Texas stay back and voice their opposition? (I hope and pray they will!)
This barely-scratching the surface wannabe-polymath will watch with great interest how Hirschman's thesis plays out in trumpistan, er, America.
It is about people who smoke without actually smoking. Yep, without lighting up a cigarette, people smoke about two packs every single day. Adults, children. Everybody.
On
Tuesday, levels of the most dangerous air particles, called PM 2.5,
reached more than 700 micrograms per cubic meter in parts of the city,
according to data from the United States Embassy. Experts say that
prolonged exposure to such high concentrations of PM 2.5 is equivalent
to smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day.
The smog in Delhi is so intense that breathing that air throughout the day is the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes!
While in many contexts I metaphorically write about puking, kids and adults are literally throwing up because of this atrocious conditions:
Manish
Sisodia, the deputy chief minister of Delhi State, said he was driving
to a meeting Wednesday morning when he passed a school bus and saw two
children throwing up out of the window. “That was shocking for me,” he
said. “I immediately told my officers to pass the order to close all the
schools.”
Schools closed for a week. But, what are the kids going to do? Their homes don't filter out all the crap. Further, they will end up playing outside.
The situation prompted the state’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, to
say on Twitter: “Delhi has become a gas chamber. Every year this happens
during this part of year."
A gas chamber!
Pollution kills. It kills way more than the notorious tobacco industry can ever kill. “Pollution has not received nearly as much attention as climate
change, or Aids or malaria – it is the most underrated health problem in
the world."
Pollution
kills at least nine million people and costs trillions of dollars every
year, according to the most comprehensive global analysis to date,
which warns the crisis “threatens the continuing survival of human
societies”.
...
The vast majority of the pollution deaths occur in poorer nations and
in some, such as India, Chad and Madagascar, pollution causes a quarter
of all deaths. The international researchers said this burden is a
hugely expensive drag on developing economies.
People, especially those in India, need to ask themselves whether such a "development" of a country is worth all the physical and emotional toll.
The following is a re-post from a few months ago.
__________________________________________________________________
Even prior to this post, I have blogged 37 posts that I have tagged with a label that matters to me a lot: Empathy. In her speech last night, Meryl Streep reminded us about that noble human quality. By pointing out how empathy-deficient the pussy-grabbing president-elect is:
It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter—someone
he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It
kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my
head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was real life. And this instinct
to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by
someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of
gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
I still cannot believe he won despite such talk and action. A horrible human being as the President!
It is even more depressing to think that he won because of such talk and action.
To quote the philosopher Adam Smith--yes, that same Smith who is canonized as the saint of capitalism--"by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels." We imagine how it would be to be disabled. Or to be terminally ill. Or to live in Aleppo. Normal human beings, therefore, do not mock the disabled, or the dying, or those being bombed in Aleppo. Yet, if millions voted for that horrible human being to be the president, then I worry more about my fellow citizens than about the pussy-grabber himself!
Trump campaigned on state repression of disfavored minorities. He gives every sign that he plans to deliver
that repression. This will mean disadvantage, immiseration, and
violence for real people, people whose “inner pain and fear” were not
reckoned worthy of many-thousand-word magazine feature stories. If you
voted for Trump, you voted for this, regardless of what you believe
about the groups in question. That you have black friends or Latino
colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t
change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect,
change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at
being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of
your political choice.
To empathize requires a fundamental starting point of recognizing and respecting the other--who does not look like me. Not with this demagogue and his voters!
Empathy is also what serious art conveys to us. As Streep said, "An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like." Like even when a eleven-year old boy silently sheds tears because an animated character dies.
Unlike that eleven-year old boy, the demagogue has an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy. There will be situations during his presidency when he will have to be the comforter-in-chief. There will be situations when he will have to weigh whether or not to bomb a place or a country. There will be situations when his policies might have drastic effects on people. But, when he lacks empathy ... progress will stall. We might even regress. The trump voters will stand accused!
Just come to China, or India, go to a BPO company ... happiness seeing how far their children have come as compared to them.
I don't deny that these have happened. Even the children from humble backgrounds have come a long way from those origins.
But, we need to separate two different aspects that we are talking about: The opportunities to anybody, versus the opportunities that exist for the privileged at birth.
Consider, for instance, the schools that kids attend. Thanks to every government in the world advancing literacy and spending money on education, children from any background can now attend school. (Sadly, there are countries where girls are not educated.) Even if students do not have electricity at home.
This is a cause for celebration, no doubt. It is phenomenal an achievement. We humans deserve credit for making such a world happen.
To look at that development and engage in self-congratulations is, well, not what I do. To begin with, that is not my job--I am a critic, by choice and by profession.
For another, in this context, if we were to merely engage in rah-rah about literacy even for the disadvantaged, we begin to overlook the serious troubles there.
Does one imagine, for instance, that a government school in rural Uttar Pradesh is anywhere near the quality of the school that I (and the commenter) went to? Why are the kids in rural Uttar Pradesh condemned to those godawful schools where teachers might not even come to class, leave alone being horrible teachers in the classroom, while kids in Neyveli get much better education? Not the kids' fault that they were accidentally born to their parents who live in a certain area, right?
Now, think about how education is merely one out of the gazillion ways in which the accidental birth makes a huge difference in one's life.
Most of us in the political left-of-center always worry ourselves to death that such inequality that arises for no fault ought to be addressed via public policies. Even while celebrating the fantastic reductions in extreme and absolute poverty, we worry about the uneven competition that exists only because of the accident of birth.
And speaking of inequality, my go-to-expert on this, Branko Milanovic, writes about how complicated this topic is.
For a while now, I have been blogging about the (mis)fortunes that come our way just because of our parents. Who we are born to makes a huge difference in life. Every time I blog along those lines, the frequent (and now the only) commenter, and others have disagreed with me. (Check this out, or this, for instance.)
I have also blogged in plenty about luck. Dumb luck.
Thus, I have never really cared much for people bragging about how they made it all by themselves. Not that he brags, but consider Bill Gates. It is not as if he created his fortunes after growing up in the projects. I was not born a Dalit and my father was not a manual scavenger. The truly rags to riches, rising from the utterly disadvantaged, is a rare exception. Most of us have only built upon the accident of birth.
I started thinking as a social scientist on the role of circumstance and
luck in how lives turn out. It's a sobering experience to realize just
how many variables are out of our control
Yep. That's what I have been saying for a long, long time.
What about intelligence and hard work? Surely they matter as much as
luck. Yes, but decades of data from behavior genetics tell us that at
least half of intelligence is heritable, as is having a personality high
in openness to experience, conscientiousness and the need for
achievement—all factors that help to shape success. The nongenetic
components of aptitude, scrupulousness and ambition matter, too, of
course, but most of those environmental and cultural variables were
provided by others or circumstances not of your making.
Choosing your parents well has given you one hell of an advantage, dear reader!
Michael Shermer wraps up his column--his 200th for the Scientific American--with this:
There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is
important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful
life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting
long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and
being true to yourself.
Ahem, I have been saying this, too, for the longest time. Damn, I am good!
Years ago, when my daughter came home from college, she put her bag down and said, "give me a couple of minutes, I need to drop the kids off at the pool."
In case you don't understand what she was referring to, well, it is scatological, dear reader! ;)
“This is indeed a very familiar story,” says Nick Haslam, a professor
of psychology at the University of Melbourne and author of Psychology in the Bathroom. “Most people feel more comfortable going to the bathroom in familiar—and private—surroundings.”
Imagine that--a professor has written about the psychology in the bathroom!
The author then spoke with "Jack Gilbert, a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago, and the director of the university’s Microbiome Center":
to understand whether there is a physical call-and-response between my
home and my body that might trigger the need to make a deposit in the
porcelain bank. Or is it simply that I feel more comfortable at home?
Good question, right?
BTW, how did you like her phrasing this as "make a deposit in the porcelain bank"? A good one, right?
So, what does Gilbert have to say?
“When you get back into your home, your glucose tolerance will
change,” he continues. “Your adrenaline pumping will change, and the
energy sensors of your muscles will change, altering your actual
respiration, how much energy your burn, and how much fat you deposit.
When you get back into your home your sleep patterns will change,
because the hormones that control sleep will be altered. All of these
factors influence how quickly food moves through your gut.”
Anything else?
“We are essentially automata responding to environmental cues,”
Gilbert says. “I’m pretty sure I can train you as a human being to pee
when you smell peppermint. That’s an example of how much of an automaton
you are. It would be technically possible to do that.”
We have been programmed that way; we are automata! Like how even adults feel like they want to pee when you make a slow hissing sound--as kids, they were toilet-trained that way.
The craziest thing in that essay? The sentence that the author, Julie Beck, writes to wrap up her essay on pooping at home:
Think about that the next time you drop the kids off at the pool.
"drop the kids off at the pool" is perhaps the lingo of that generation of, ahem, kids ;)
(If you want, you can also check out these related posts: One; two; three)
A wonderful book-review essay in The New Yorker is about Martin Luther, on the occasion of 500 years since he hammered "his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony."
Thanks to that essay, I now know that Luther did not really hammer those on the doors. Makes for a nice story though.
There is plenty there to be impressed about. One of those is this:
Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and
though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him
once he got going. ...
In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.
Imagine if Luther had lived and died before Gutenberg had invented the printing press! The Reformation was aided by the technological advancement of the day.
The printing press has been put to uses of many kinds since its invention. Including for pornography. Porn has always been at the cutting edge, ready to embrace the advancements in technology. When it was print, porn in the papers. Then porn in the films. In the initial months and years of the worldwide web, porn led the way with web pages. In an op-ed during those days, I wrote about how porn sites cleverly worked their addresses after popular websites. A small little mistake took users, for instance, not to the White House page, but to a graphic porn site. Porn also blazed the trail for payment and e-commerce.
While
virtual-reality pornography may feel like something out of a science
fiction movie, it already has a formidable, if underground, presence.
According to website Pornhub, views of VR porn are up 275 percent since
it debuted in the summer of 2016. Now the site is averaging about
500,000 views (on Christmas Day in 2016, this number shot up to
900,000.)
By 2025 pornography will be the third-largest VR sector, according to estimates prepared by Piper Jaffray, an investment and management firm.
The primal, animal, urges that Luther's Christianity and other religions try to moralize about cannot be tamed that easily.
Porn, VR and regular, work for a simple reason:
Sex sells, and where there is money to be made, there will be entrepreneurs who want to adopt it and make money from it
The power of the market!
Many complications lie ahead, of course. Not only in terms of technology, but also regarding ethics. But, there is one issue that is increasingly the problem in these modern times that then fuels the need for VR porn too: Loneliness.
“There are people who are already lonely, and people who live their
lives being alone. They work all day and come home to an empty house,”
he said. “This is just offering an alternative to those types of people.
They don’t have anyone else.”
Martin Luther did not have to worry about loneliness. He was gregarious. "He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him." And he lived a happily married life, after theologically questioning "the requirement of priestly celibacy."
But, life now is not the life of five centuries ago. Even a Luther cannot help us understand how to be happy and content in this modern kingdom.
