One Size Fits...

The titles of the articles, both out of the UK, are designed to appeal to an idea that the world is sexist, that women aren't seen and valued. The BBC lists "Seven ways the world is not designed for women;" The Guardian calls out "The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes." And both articles seek to speak to the difficulty that women have when the "average person," for whom many products from space suits to cellular phones is designed for, is perhaps more accurately described as the average American man.

But The Guardian hints at a deeper problem, noting:

The use of a “standard” US male face shape for dust, hazard and eye masks means they don’t fit most women (as well as a lot of black and minority ethnic men).

And this is a problem that has been around for quite some time:

The high death rate in the Air Force was a mystery for many years, but after blaming the pilots and their training programs, the military finally realized that the cockpit itself was to blame, that it didn’t actually fit most pilots. At first, they assumed it was just too small and that the average man had grown since the 1920s, so in 1950, they asked researchers at Wright Air Force base in Ohio to calculate the new average.

One of these researches was a young Harvard graduate named Gilbert S. Daniels. In his research measuring thousands of airmen on a set of ten critical physical dimensions, Daniels realized that none of the pilots he measured was average on all ten dimensions. Not a single one. When he looked at just three dimensions, less than five percent were average. Daniels realized that by designing something for an average pilot, it was literally designed to fit nobody.

This is, of course, not to say that when the "average" is based on a man, that it won't cause problems for women, who don't typically conform to men's average heights, weights, reach et cetera. But it's a problem for more than just women. It's a problem for literally everyone who doesn't conform to whatever the determined average is (or averages are, depending). Now, this is a problem with a simple solution. But the simple solution is also an expensive one; returning to the pre-Civil War custom of having everything custom-sewn to the specifications of the user. Given modern make-on-demand technologies, this wouldn't be a particularly difficult thing tp put in place, but the loss of economies of scale would be telling very quickly.

And that's the somewhat inglamorous reality of the situation. That most of this is not driven by sexism or racism, but simply finances. Having all crash-test dummies be the same lowers costs. Having clothes sized into predefined dimensions lowers costs. Not send up a spacesuit for every individual astronaut on a space station lowers costs. Sure, women and people of other ethnicities than the one used to calculate the average lose out in this, but that sort of myopia is a hallmark of the human condition. People tend to see the world as a reflection of themselves, rather than something that independent of them.

May We Request a Detour?

The world is a big place. And so on any given day, a lot of things are going on. Enough things that most of us don't have the attention budget to follow up on most, or even a significant fraction of them. One item that it occurred to me had been in the news, but that I hadn't seen anything about recently, was the attempted migration of people from Africa to Europe. So I went online, and started looking for news.

And came across this story of a group of just over one hundred migrants that had been picked up off the cost of Libya by a tanker vessel. When the tanker prepared to return the migrants to Libya, the migrants seized control of the vessel, and redirected it to Malta. En route, the Maltese military intercepted and boarded the ship. Four of the migrants were arrested, and the remainder are now on Malta.

While the number of people attempting to make the Mediterranean crossing from North Africa to Europe has slowed from its peak a few years back, there are still large numbers of people who are desperate to leave war, poverty and violence-racked nations to basically eke out a marginal, subsistence living in wealthier nations. (I've always felt that it really says something about the conditions that people are leaving that an existence that's effectively a step above homelessness, and requires a full-time job {if not more} to sustain is a significant step up. Especially given the fact that many of the people who are fleeing are not poor; the truly destitute often can't afford to make the journey.)

Of course, the migration to the North is not limited to the Mediterranean basin. A large number of people make the trek to the United States every year, for various and sundry reasons. And while active barriers to migration, in the form of walls, laws or other disincentives to moving, are going to have some level of support in the destination countries, the fact of the matter remains that you can't keep significant numbers of people on the outside looking in forever. Sooner or later the draw of the greater resources and better lives that people perceive exist in the "better" parts of the world will simply become too strong to ignore. And when people feel that they have a right to a better life, or simply that they have nothing left to lose, they'll go to extremes. It's possible that the four migrants arrested in Malta won't be deported as criminals, or wind up with long prison terms for piracy. But that's a heck of a risk to take, and it speaks to the perceived stakes.

At some point, things are going to have to even out. Places like sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are going to have to become better places to live. There's simply no other way of putting an end to the constant tragedies that come with the mass migration of people. Destination countries tend to have, presumably unintentionally, a strange push-and-pull scheme in place: a lot of work goes into efforts to push the migrants back to the nations from which they came, yet little attention is paid to the incentives that pull them in. I've started likening it to having a mouse problem. Sure, one can put the time, money and effort into attempting to completely seal the home against mice; or it might be easier to remove the easily-scavenged food that attracts them in the first place.

But this metaphor, which I usually trot out in the service of explaining why I think that a border wall between the United States and Mexico is not the best use of resources, glosses over what may be the best solution. Borrowing a line from justifications of the War on Terror, if wealthy nations help improve the lives of people "over there," they don't have to deal with them attempting to illegally cross borders "over here." To be sure, it's a hard sell, and there are some pretty obvious perverse incentives to such a scheme. So while it may be the best solution, that doesn't mean that it would be an easy one by any stretch of the imagination.

But in the end, it something of a moot point. There is only so much attention to go around, and while this particular story may make a few headlines there and there, the situation will fade from attention again (after all, it is a limited resource) and return to being a forgotten problem, along with a million others. Forgetting about these sorts of things rarely comes back to bite the societies that walk away from them (at least not in the short to medium term), and so for them, the stakes are fairly low. This difference in the perceived stakes is part of what drives the entire conflict. Until the stakes become higher for the destination countries, there will be other priorities that preclude finding lasting solutions. And this is only to be expected. But it's still a tragedy.

Poor Practice

Since getting people to think of the children has become passé, the new mantra seems to be "Won't somebody please think of the impoverished?" While there's nothing wrong with considering the needs of the poor, there does seem to be a tendency as of late to use them as proxies, when perhaps a more direct criticism of a circumstance may be warranted. The article "‘Privacy Is Becoming a Luxury’: What Data Leaks Are Like for the Poor" seems to be an example of this. The article attempts to make the case that "Late Capitalism" is providing yet more opportunity for bad economics to injure poor Americans, but it comes across as relying on the reader's pity for the women it holds up as victims, rather than any factual support for its premise.

To make a long story short, the Seattle Housing Authority accidentally released names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and tenant code numbers of people enrolled in the Scattered Sites housing program to a group of Scattered Sites members, when they should have received an e-mail newsletter instead. The SHA says that it was a case of human error; the person sending out the newsletter attached the wrong file. To be sure, the SHA does seem to be downplaying the situation. If Personally Identifiable Information is understood as pieces of information, either alone or in combination, that may be used to positively identify a specific individual, then the mistake resulted in a release of PII.

But it's worth keeping in mind that PII isn't always a closely guarded secret. Information such as names and addresses can be a matter of public record. Any one of those dubious personal records sites can likely turn up the address that goes with a particular name. Therefore, if a name and an address is all that's needed for identity fraud, as one of the advocates quoted in the piece notes, an awful lot of people, poor or not, are exposed.

This, however, doesn't mean that the SHA wasn't being sloppy with people's data. Accidentally sending out PII when one means to send a newsletter is the sort of basic error that they should have been prepared for. While Data Loss Protection technology would have flagged the error, had it been set up to look for the specific fields in question, a better model would have been an automated system that pulled down the PDF file, attached it to a prepared e-mail and sent the finished combination to the recipients, possibly after having sent it to an SHA staffer for a final once-over. The article quotes a security advisor who hints that organizations slack off on security when dealing with poor people, because they understand that since the poor have bigger fish to fry, it won't be a problem. While this strikes me as taking cynicism to an illogical extreme, it also fails the sniff test. Given an obvious release like this, it seems that some enterprising lawyer would have gone after the city for damages already, had they done something that constituted real harm. Banking on the clientele not having the free time to participate in a legal case seems like a remarkably dangerous strategy for organizations to undertake.

The article being grouped in with the topic of Late Capitalism is telling. While it's intended to be yet another critique of a modern American economy/society that cheerfully ignores the travails of of the lower classes, the only real consequences it speaks to are one woman's feelings that a) her identity didn't matter to the Seattle Housing Authority and b) that the SHA might retaliate against her if they knew she was speaking to the media (even though, ironically, there may be enough information in the piece to allow the SHA to identify her). Everything else is in the form of hints or suggestions, rather than concrete information. The author doesn't even bother to find out if the specific release in question needed to be disclosed, even though it's established that "specific disclosure laws vary by state." If one is interested in knowing Washington State's rules, they are summarized here: https://www.atg.wa.gov/data-breach-notifications, along with a list of notifications (the SHA release is not on it as of now).

There is certainly something to be said about the fact that public agencies tend to be given the funds to demand and collect quite a bit of personal information from people requesting public benefits, yet not enough to adequately secure the information once they have it. Protecting "makers" from fraudulent claims is clearly more important that safeguarding "takers" from those who would either prey on them for what little they have or attempt to use them as cover for their own bad acts. But that's not a facet of capitalism. Socialists can be stingy and suspicious, too.

Equinox Moon

It has been unseasonably warm and sunny in the Seattle area recently. But clouds are moving in, so today wasn't great for lunar photography.

Fortunately, I took some shots yesterday...

I normally shrink these down so that the long edge is 1500 pixels, just out of habit. But I didn't cut this one down quite so far, to preserve some of the details. It's somewhat softer than I'd like; I don't think that I've learned the correct technique for lunar photography.

It's Okay If It's Him

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella recently said: "Hate and violence have no place in our society." His post on LinkedIn garnered tens of thousands of Likes and hundreds of comments. It stuck me, however, that if you were to observe people's day-to-day actions, one could easily come away from that with the understanding that those words are something that people say, and that others support, because this is what is expected of them, and not because they actually believe it enough to work for it.

On Last Week Tonight recently, John Oliver did a segment on Public Shaming. And kudos to him for not simply coming out against the practice, but owning up to his own support of the tactic: "When it's well-directed," Mr. Oliver notes, "A lot of good can come out of it." (That good, apparently, being the opportunity to take pot shots at Tucker Carlson.)

But this strikes me as the way people tend to understand hate and violence; they're okay, so long as they are "well-directed." And few people see themselves as misdirecting their anger. An article in Slate magazine effectively holds up one Will Connelly, now known as "Eggboy" for smashing a raw egg into the back of an Australian lawmaker's head, as a hero. The reason for this is that his target, Queensland Senator Fraser Anning, is anti-Moslem.

“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place,” Anning said in a statement. Anning also tweeted:  “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”

Of course, a mass shooting, and a random egging are not the same thing. And the point here isn't to imply that they are. But here in Washington state, coming up to someone and hitting them on the back of the head is considered a form of assault, even if not a very serious one. (Other jurisdictions may consider it battery, instead.) "Hate and violence" aren't limited just to actions that are directed at people with sympathize with and reach some arbitrary threshold. And that's what tends to make denunciations ring hollow; a general willingness to be selective about what's bad and what isn't.

Floating Away

They Can See You

President Trump's idea of media bias is a simple one. "The ('mainstream') media" doesn't like him, and so it deliberately publishes slanted, hostile stories to defame him in the eyes of the public, yadda, yadda, yadda. It's a simple and tidy narrative, and one that plays into the victimization narrative that has been built up by the President and his most ardent supporters. Not to mention a fair number of his critics.

But as I understand the world to work, media bias in the United States is much more about identifying an audience and giving that audience information that buttresses their preexisting beliefs about the world. While this practice is often cast as something between "irresponsible" and nefarious, I will again quote On the Media's Brooke Gladstone:

Still, the [New York] Times positions itself as the paper that favors information over narrative; the "facts" over the readers' assumptions, emotions, and values.

It's journalism's first giant step towards and unreachable goal--because it's unprofitable to ignore your readers' emotions, assumptions, and values.

And it's impossible to ignore your own.
The Influencing Machine. p.98.

And when dealing with "free" (read: advertising supported) news and commentary media (the two are quite different, for all that they aren't always distinguished from one another) the problem is compounded. Firstly, by the fact that in an attention economy, attention must be attracted. Outlets are competing with one another for eyeballs, and if the cost of attention is catering to audiences' emotions, assumptions and values, then that's a price that outlets have to pay. Secondly, because people rarely turn to freely available sources such as this to make decisions that they understand have serious consequences for them. And so the relative cost of being mislead, and thus the incentive to avoid the outlet in the future, is low. This removes a source of evolutionary selection pressure that would push outlets in a more "factual" direction.

I mention all of this because I was reading a story on NBC News concerning the fact that IBM was using millions of photographs from Flickr as part of its training dataset for facial recognition software that the company is working on. The general gist of the story is as follows: IBM is using photographs of people without the permission of either the subjects or the photographers in work to train its facial recognition software to better recognize women and non-Whites. This is bad, because oppression.

Some experts and activists argue that this is not just an infringement on the privacy of the millions of people whose images have been swept up - it also raises broader concerns about the improvement of facial recognition technology, and the fear that it will be used by law enforcement agencies to disproportionately target minorities.

This "Oh, no! Big Brother!" theme is the central pillar of the article. And while I do have some questions about the facts as laid forth in the piece ("scraping" is not the same as receiving a published dataset), the piece's main draw appears to be the an appeal to a fear of the marriage of Jim Crow to a technologically driven surveillance state. The oppression-industrial complex at work.

The marrying of IBM's allegedly bad means of obtaining the photographs used in its dataset and the presumed bad ends to which government would put accurate and precise facial recognition struck me as playing directly into the emotions, assumptions and values of a generally left-leaning audience that is distrustful of both power in the hands of private entities and of government agencies insufficiently committed to the proper understandings of social, gender and racial justice. And it is in this sense that the piece struck me as biased. It doesn't come across as a hit-piece; there are no direct allegations that IBM is intentionally assisting a government that is up to nothing good. But the fueling of the creeping fear of a White male police state, instituted as a bulwark against progressive social change, can also be seen as bias, because the fears of "experts and activists" do not constitute facts.

Journalism, especially once one goes past the local scale, has always struck me as a generally left-leaning profession. It's often forward-looking, ostensibly public-serving and there's rarely any money in it. Not exactly a draw for the traditionalist crowd. But that left-leaning nature sets up an echo-chamber with left-leaning audiences, a symbiosis that rewards the parties for creating and being the audience for information that advances a particular set of preconceptions. And it works this way not because catering to to a particular set of emotions, opinion and values is bad, but because the constituency for emotion, opinion and value-neutral information is too small to drive the attention economy. I'm not sure I see that changing.

Chicken Dinner

Woody Johnson, the United States' ambassador to the United Kingdom told the BBC that post Brexit, that the United Kingdom should change their food-safety standards to allow in chicken and beef grown in the United States. Currently, the European Union does not allow it, because producers use processes that are not allowed there.

In the grand tradition of the Trump Administration, Ambassador Johnson told the BBC that the United States has the lowest levels of food poisoning, a claim that the BBC was quickly able to debunk. "So the US has four times as many confirmed cases of campylobacter per thousand people as the UK - and twenty times as many cases of salmonella," they reported. And when told that farming organizations in the United Kingdom believed that animal welfare and environmental standards in the United States were lower than those in Europe (one wonders how they could have possibly come to that conclusion...), Ambassador Johnson suggested that some sort of anti-Americanism in the European Union was at work.

Now, I'm not a particularly adept salesperson; I find that I have to really enthusiastic about a product or service to have any chance of selling it to someone else. But it seems to me that when you have a situation in which people have doubts about the product they're being asked to purchase, arguably false statements and conspiracy theorizing are unlikely to land a sale.

It's likely easy to understand what American agricultural businesses aren't keen on the Europeans' food safety rules. My personal bet would be on the idea that food production in the United Kingdom and European Union uses food safety procedures that would be expensive to implement nation-wide, and even if some producers were using them, a certification process would also be expensive.

But one of the things about trade is that it's the exchange of things that both sides want or need. Ambassador Johnson appears to be banking on the idea that British shoppers will set aside whatever concerns they may have if lower-priced American meats show up in their grocery stores. And he is likely right about that to a certain extent - there will always be people who are willing to take on a certain level of risk for the chance to eat better or otherwise improve their material standards. And it's not like the general public in the United States has been up in arms over the approximately four per thousand people who come down with campylobacter or salmonella-based food poisoning in a given year. (Although salmonella warnings in produce seem to be happening with somewhat greater frequency.) So, dodgy statistics or none, the overall claim that meats created in the United States are safe is a reasonable one.

Still, if you want someone to buy something that they don't need to buy, it must be on their terms. I suspect that the United States would be better off acknowledging that.

When We Were Young

On weekend mornings, when it's not raining, I like to go for a walk to get in some exercise. Treading the trails alone can be boring (I'm not really the meditative type) and so I usually take something to listen to. For the past few months, this has been music. (Podcasts may make a comeback in the future, if I decide to take up a more leisurely pace again.) My typical go-tos have been Prince and Janet Jackson; their music tends to have beats that drive an energetic walking pace.

This is the music of my college and twenty-something years, and I hadn't really listened to it in some time before adopting it for my morning walks. Listening to Prince's Graffiti Bridge or Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation, I was struck by how much it was the music of youth and change.

We are the New Power Generation
We're gonna change the world
The only thing that's in our way is you
Your old-fashioned music
Your old ideas
We're sick and tired you tellin' us what to do

I immediately appreciated the irony. I was 22 when Graffiti Bridge was released. But now I'm 50, and I'm the one who's in the way. And Graffiti Bridge now lives squarely in the realm of "old-fashioned music." (There's always something strange about having music you remember as the hot new track showing up on an "oldies" playlist.")

But the question that I have is: Why didn't we change the world?

Being a member of the unimaginatively-named "Generation X," I've largely been a bystander in the inter-generational (and class) warfare between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. (By the way, did anyone actually tell the Baby Boomers that there was a war on?) Which strikes me as strange; because for all of our grooving out to songs of changing the world and raising our voices in protest, we've become the primary footsoldiers of the status quo.

Looking back on it, I think that part of it is that we never really cared. There's a reason why most of the more socially-conscious tracks from Rhythm Nation didn't make it onto Design of a Decade. We didn't want a call to arms. We wanted to tear it up on the dance floor. (I suppose that "we" should be in quotes, not only because I'm not really qualified to speak for my entire generation; I also don't dance. Rejoice in this.) I don't think that I'd ever actually listened to the music of my youth, in terms of actually attempting to hear and understand the narratives and messages of the lyrics, until a year or so ago.

When I had a somewhat short-lived semi-radical phase, during which I was convinced that "the Establishment" was corrupt and evil, I understood the effects of the policies, institutions and social mores that I disagreed with. But the causes were unknown to me. Again, I think that lack of interest was at work. All I cared to know was that the world was a bad place, and that there were bad people who were willing to stoop to any level to make sure it stayed that way. But then "real life" started to put in appearances. And I had more important things to worry about.

And the same perverse incentives that had created the world that I understood to be so broken enlisted me as an active participant in its perpetuation. Revolutions are messy. And they're expensive. And I became too busy with rent, car payments and the phone bill to set aside anything to pay for the one that my younger self had wanted. And since there was no revolution in the offing between then and now, I'm pretty sure that I can say that few, if any, of the rest of my fellow "Gen-Xers" did things any differently. Rather, we invested in securing our places in the world as we found it. Rather than ragequit and flip the table, Generation X applied itself to learning how to play the game. And some of us played better than others. Here and there, a few people dropped out. Some of us ascended to the highest levels of the corporate power structure. If your borders of age cohorts fall a certain way, there has even been a Gen-X president. But many of us are simply quietly working to maintain, rather than change, the world we live in, and the incentive structures, broken as they are, that (however badly) built it.

The man isn't telling us what to do anymore. We've taken that baton and are running with it. Maybe "we" should do something about that.

And... Liftoff!

Weigh-In

Von Abele readily and unreservedly condemned the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the slave trade, and European colonialism, characterizing them as tribalist holdovers before personalism took hold. He also argued that if all Western atrocities were put on one side of a scale, awful as they were, with Western contributions put on the other side, humanity was in the aggregate better off. Did I realize how many lives were saved by the Haber-Bosch process alone? That without it, half of today’s population would not be alive?
Conor Friedersdorf "Probing the ‘White People’ Rant That Roiled Columbia"

Ah, the "scale." The imagined weighing of the good with the bad in order to make the point that some or another group is deserving of whatever statements (good or bad) are made about it. It's an obvious way of contrasting things. It's also a pointless one. A cost-benefit analysis presupposes, more or less by definition, that the costs and the benefits come as a set; that you can't have one without the other. But in the case of Western atrocities versus Western contributions, the two are not that tightly related. The contributions that Fritz Haber, for instance, made did not necessitate the atrocities that the Nazi government of Germany carried out with his inventions. But the analogy of a scale tends to imply that it does, and in so doing makes those who suffered the atrocities into acceptable sacrifices to gain the contributions. And this is why, I suspect, it generates such anger. Because the people who belong to tribes other than the one that Julian von Abele claims as his own become worried, reasonably or not, that the next round of trading atrocities for contributions will come at their expense. For the good of the aggregate, you understand. One can't make the world an omelet without breaking someone else's eggs. Because the things that "White people" are typically dunned for, such as "the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the slave trade, and European colonialism" were costs that other people paid.

There's also another common fallacy in von Abele's reasoning; the idea that without certain great (and white) people, certain inventions, and the advantages they bring, would not have come about. But it's unlikely that there was anything special about Fritz Haber that somehow tied his method of increasing ammonia production to him. And technological advancements that become know worldwide only have to be invented once. So once Haber had perfected his process, it didn't matter if someone else came up with it. And in this sense, the advantages that White Europeans tended to monopolize snowball in arguments like this: Being both wealthier and better educated, they were in a better position to invent things than other people. Likewise, due to other people being locked out of the upper levels of academia and the sciences, they were also better positioned to build and improve upon those inventions. And this becomes a blind spot of the White identitarian; the idea that the "Western contributions" were created on an even playing field, rather than one deliberately skewed. Part of this is due to the tenuous grasp that many Americans have on history as a force, rather then just as stories; progress immediately remakes the world into its ideal state, rather than simply introducing changes into this or that factor over time.

Ironically, the cost-benefit analysis model of looking at this presumed that Western Civilization is, or at least at some point was, incapable of making contributions without committing atrocities. Which doesn't exactly show Westerners in a favorable light. Because if humanity is so much better off than the status quo due to the West managing to contribute more than it destroyed in atrocities, one can imagine that, humanity would be even better off in the aggregate if another group of people had managed to make those same contributions, yet not fallen into atrocities that blunted their impact.

I understand Julian von Abele's frustration with the idea that there's something wrong with White people. I even understand why he also seems to be unable to understand people's frustration with the idea (that he denies) that President Trump is constantly saying that there's something wrong with non-White people (and, depending on how you read him, women). After all, he's young. I don't think that I was really any more self-(or other) aware when I was in college either.

Incentives

Riding the Waves

The Puget Sound isn't much for traditional surfing. But when the wind blows, the windsurfers take to the water.