[Plura-list] 80% of Britons want happiness, not growth; Shanghai Disneyland re-opens; The bailout is working (for Wall Street)

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Mon May 11 14:14:00 EDT 2020


Today's links

* 80% of Britons want happiness, not growth: Defeating Goodhart's Law.

* Shanghai Disneyland re-opens: Social cohesion and pandemic
countermeasures.

* The bailout is working (for Wall Street): How's that trickle-down
treating you?

* NLRB nukes Hearst's union-busting: "Company unions" are a fiction.

* Podcast of "Rules for Writers": More what you call guidelines.

* Facebook's "supreme court": You can't fix something from the inside if
it shouldn't exist in the first place.

* This day in history: None

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🦝 80% of Britons want happiness, not growth

A YouGov poll found 80% of Britons "would prefer the government to
prioritise health and wellbeing over economic growth during the crisis,
and 6 in 10 would still want the government to pursue health and
wellbeing ahead of growth after the pandemic"

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/10/britons-want-quality-of-life-indicators-priority-over-economy-coronavirus

GDP is a terrific example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a
target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Or, as Alice Taylor puts it, "Any number you put on the wall will go up."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

There's a trivial sense in which economic growth correlates to broad
prosperity, but GDP is a uniquely jukeable stat.

First, "economic activity" is not synonymous with "prosperity-producing
activity." Torching a home and paying a crew to clear the wreckage is
"activity."

Consider that in the LIBOR-rigging scandal, traders at rival firms were
able to juke their stats by colluding so that one would sell millions of
dollars of paper to the other, who would immediately sell it back.

https://boingboing.net/2017/09/24/empathy-not-sympathy.html

But even where GDP measures useful activity, it's a mistake to assume
that the benefits increase general prosperity. As we've seen, the
benefits of growth are often hoarded by rich people while everyone
else's wealth stagnates or decreases.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/

An emphasis on economic growth paves the way for the rich getting
richer, often through destructive tactics like the Private Equity trick
of buying a company, loading it with debt, and running it into the ground.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

Neoliberal and centrist governments have long paid lip-service to the
idea of  measuring "General National Happiness" or other metrics that
try to put prosperity and wellbeing on equal footing with raw economic
measures. This never transcends the cosmetic.

That's because the finance sector (obviously) has a lot of money, and
they spread it around to ensure that any measures that might nerf
enrichment for the rich get neutered before they goes into effect.

But that might change.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#pandemic-profiteers

As unemployment hits 25-35%, governments will have two choices:

1. Do nothing, face civil collapse. States with protracted massive
unemployment fail. Not as in "we failed to put people to work" but as in
"failed state."

2. Create national jobs schemes that will result in 25-35% of workers
becoming new government employees (in addition to existing public
employment).

We're in real danger of 1 happening, so maybe go and source a pole now
so you can go digging through rubble for canned goods.

But assuming we're not all drinking our own urine and fighting in the
Thunderdome in a year...

Option 2 means that something like half the workers in the country will
see their destiny totally decoupled from finance benchmarks.

Whether the line goes up or down will have no impact at all on their
take-home pay or benefits or savings or pension.

This great decoupling might finally weaken looter capitalism to the
point where we can start treating its perpetrators as sociopathic wreckers.

Rather than celebrating them as heroes.

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🦝 Shanghai Disneyland re-opens

Shanghai Disneyland re-opened today with a suite of post-pandemic
measures that are being watched as a bellwether for other public space
reopenings. I've spent a lot of time thinking about themeparks and their
future, so I find this very interesting.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/shanghai-disneyland-reopens-intl-hnk/index.html

Shanghai is a weird park to start with. Sure, reopening in China (versus
somewhere else) makes sense, given the progress that's been made in
containing the pandemic there, and the merging of the invasive
surveillance state with public health surveillance.

But of all the Disney parks in the world, Shanghai is the one that
relies the least on social cohesion and rule-following. It's basically
built on the assumption that everyone who visits will cheat the system.

For example, its queue stanchions are chest-height and solid to the
ground to prevent queue-jumping (I have no idea how they square that
with fire safety). The entrance turnstiles don't have their own queues
(which invites scrumming), instead there's a maze of riot-fencing.

It's one person wide (to prevent queue-barging) and a cast member
directs the front to a specific turnstile as it becomes available.

There are limits to how many turkey legs you can buy because people were
buying several and walking back down the line, selling them.

When you use a Fastpass, your face is matched to a database at the queue
entrance and then once (or twice) more before you board.

It's a contrast with other regional parks (HK, Tokyo), where there's a
high degree of trust embodied in the queueing architecture and policies.

Shanghai also has the longest lines I've ever seen at a Disney Park, and
several of them are lines for GA shows with no seating, some of them
indoors. They have strict limits on the number of Fastpasses they give
out and all Fastpasses are gone shortly after the park opens.

So there will definitely be some serious challenges to re-opening.
First, there's the queues. Switchback queues are space-efficient and
psychologically inviting (compared to a long, snaking queue), and
they're compact enough to encase in an air-conditioned building.

They're also impossible to maintain distancing in. It looks like they've
modified some switchbacks with bulges that separate people in adjacent
turns, but this makes the queues less compact, and still has waiting
spots where you'll  be too close.

https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52620179

It's gonna be 31'C tomorrow in Shanghai, and 70% humidity. Pushing
queues out of the show buildings and into the direct sun is gonna be brutal.

To make things harder, they're reducing capacity on the rides to create
distancing, meaning that queues will move more slowly.

Then there's the technical matter of whether distancing on an attraction
is meaningful or just pandemic theater: the research is inconclusive,
but being next to someone in a show for 45 mins (or downwind of the HVAC
direction) sounds risky.

As does being in someone's slipstream on a fast-moving ride for 5-8 minutes.

They're removing every second restaurant table from service:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2020/05/11/china-shanghai-disney-reopens-coronavirus-culver-pkg-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn

But again, without knowing about predominant HVAC currents, it's hard to
say whether this will do much. We know that sitting a couple tables
down(wind) from an infectious person is a risk:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6915e1.htm?s_cid=mm6915e1_w

Some of the countermeasures feel like theater, such as the multiple
temperature scans. It's true that these will catch cheaters who go even
if they know they're sick, but the hard problem of coronavirus isn't
cheaters, its asymptomatic carriers.

"At least 44% of all infections--and the majority of community-acquired
transmissions--occur from people without any symptoms. You can be
shedding the virus into the environment for up to 5 days before symptoms
begin."

https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them

Whenever I hear someone talking about temperature checks, I wonder about
their calculus. Is it:

* Delivers some benefit, doesn't hurt, why not?
* Mostly useless, but makes people feel safe, why not?
* My world is full of cheaters who'll selfishly risk others?

I don't see anything wrong with temp checks but I worry that social
cohesion is our only way forward (asymptomatic people who know they were
exposed but refuse to isolate are a much bigger risk than people with
fevers who do so).

I also don't want to trust my safety to anyone who engages in symbolic
gestures "to make me feel better" even if they don't make sense. Those
people distort our discourse about safety and security and elevate
nonsense to the same plane as evidence.

Given Shanghai Disney's emphasis on cheater-prevention, I think the temp
scans are about catching cheaters, but if management is assuming that
people will cheat, then temp checks won't catch the majority, who'll be
asymptomatic.

IOW: if you think large numbers of cheaters will break the rules, then
you can't open safely until the rules aren't needed (that is, until a
vaccine is on hand).

A red flag for me: it's not clear how Disney will operate profitably
under these constraints.

Independent analysts say the break-even point for a themepark under
normal conditions is 50% of capacity (probably higher if you're paying
additional staff to clean surfaces and manage compliance).

The news reports don't say what the new capacity of Shanghai Disney is,
but it looks low. One way to fix this is to raise prices. At Disneyland
California, the prices have skyrocketed without a drop in attendance,
suggesting attendees are price-insensitive.

(Maybe not so much after their fortunes were destroyed by coronavirus, ofc).

But high prices *are* correlated with more pathological customer
behavior, from arriving at rope-drop and staying until closing to "get
their money's worth" (no one ever enjoyed a 16h Disney day).

They're also correlated with customers demanding - or cheating - to get
a turn on every ride and show (to get their money's worth).

I'm worried that charging more will reduce compliance.

I really wanna go back to Disneyland! I hope this works! But I'm
concerned that it's premature and will set things back.

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🦝 The bailout is working (for Wall Street)

The S&P; 500 rose 30% since March. Private equity giants' shares are
soaring: Apollo's up 80%; Blackstone, 50%. Jpmorgan is bullish, on the
basis that Wall Street can expect unlimited bailouts.

20.5M Americans lost their jobs in April.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bailout-is-working-for-the-rich

Bailing out Wall Street definitely works for asset holders. Workers are
expected to benefit from a trickle-down. No trickle-down is in sight.
Instead, workers are being coerced into risking their lives to re-open
bailed-out businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/volcano-gods/#reopening

The Fed is buying up billions in junk bonds, and the junk bond and
leveraged loans are rallying. The largest owners of these assets are
private equity funds, whose investors are the richest people in America.

Food bank lines in America now routinely stretch for more than a mile.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/nyregion/coronavirus-nj-hunger.html

Image: David Parkins/The Economist
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/07/the-market-v-the-real-economy

(Image David Parkins/The Economist
)

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🦝 NLRB nukes Hearst's union-busting

When Heart Magazine writers formed a union, the publisher struck back
with a suite of risible and illegal tactics to prevent it. Friday, the
NLRB ruled against Hearst on every count.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/hearst-loses-big-at-the-national-labor-relations-board.html

They ruled that the employees Hearst tried to classify as management
(which disqualifies them from joining the union) were not management.

They ruled that the Hearst International Employees Association was not a
union (it's an illegal "company union").

And they ruled that Hearst could not split its workforce into six weaker
bargaining units on the basis that they were separate businesses. They
lost this last one in part because they'd put workers from all six
divisions into their fake company union.

The company union is *such* a scam: "[HIEA] is registered to the same
address as Hearst Communications... its contract didn’t describe the
unit it allegedly  represents, or explain how it classifies the
employees it’s meant to  cover."

"The HIEA also didn’t respond to a letter from the NLRB which explained
the steps it would have to take in order to properly intervene in the
union election, and it didn’t show up to any hearings. This is again
very strange, because unions usually object to losing members." -Sarah
Jones, New York Magazine

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🦝 Podcast of "Rules for Writers"

This week on my podcast, I take a break from my reading of Someone Comes
to Town Someone Leaves Town to read my new Locus column, "Rules for
Writers" - the tale of how I had a very belated epiphany about writing
advice while teaching on last year's Writing Excuses cruise.

I'd always understood "rules for writers" as things you shouldn't do,
but after decades of teaching them and employing them, I realized that
"rules" are in fact "things that are hard to do wrong" and thus "things
that are likely the problem with a story that doesn't work."

You can read the column here:

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/11/rules-for-writers/

And here's the MP3:

https://archive.org/download/cory_doctorow_podcast_341_202005/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_341_-_Rules_for_Writers.mp3

And here's my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

(You can catch up on my reading of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone
Leaves Town" here:)

https://craphound.com/podcast/?s=%22someone%20comes%22

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🦝 Facebook's "supreme court"

Facebook has a new "supreme court" of 20 esteemed outsiders who will
make binding judgments on some content removal decisions. @sivavaid
explains why this kind of self-regulation is likely to fail.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-regulation/

Siva's reasons are all good ones: a handful of hard individual content
removal decisions won't solve the wider problems of Facebook discourse;
the board is heavily skewed to US experts, the scope excludes some of
FB's most toxic forums.

I have another reason, which is that I don't trust Facebook, because
they always lie, and any principled position they have advanced in the
past turned out either to be a deception, or was jettisoned the instant
it interfered with the company's ambitions.

I mean, this is some scorpion-and-frog stuff: why would we expect FB to
behave any differently now?

It's like when Google's Sidewalk Labs came to Toronto and hired a
privacy board, then nerfed or ignored their recommendations, until they
resigned

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3km74w/google-smart-city-in-toronto-advisor-resigns-data-privacy

And then brought on an indigenous advisory board and nerfed or ignored
all of its recommendations:

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/10/25/indigenous-elder-slams-hollow-and-tokenistic-consultation-by-sidewalk-labs.html

and then went around trumpeting that its plan had been developed in
concert with leading privacy experts and indigenous elders.

Which brings me to a concern about this privacy board that Siva didn't
raise: that these are, by and large, really excellent people who have
important work to do, and I believe they are going to be used as
window-dressing for a company that shouldn't exist.

The problem of building a content moderation scheme that takes account
of 2.5B peoples' boundaries on reasonableness and fairness across 150+
countries' cultural and legal norms isn't soluble.

What's more, Facebook attained that incredible scale by cheating: buying
nascent competitors to capture or kill them, merging with major
competitors to avoid competition, cornering vertical monopolies, using
predatory pricing and lock-in, etc.

The right answer to the dysfunction of a 2.5B user Facebook is to break
it up - force it to divest of the companies it bought, subject future
mergers to heavy scrutiny, etc. Adding a window-dressing layer of
experts won't make the impossible possible.

I'd rather see the 20 stipends, junkets and reimbursements go to 20
homeless people who can't afford to live in the Bay Area any more in
part because of FB's lavish spending to kill affordable housing laws.

They wouldn't get anything done, either, of course.

But the money would mean a lot to them, and the experts whose time is
going to be taken up with board work for FB would be freed up to
continue their effective work on fairness, moderation, harassment, etc.

Image:
Anthony Quintano (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793468502).jpg

CC BY
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en


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🦝 This day in history

#15yrsago Journal of Ride Theory amazing zine is now an amazing book
https://www.lulu.com/shop/dan-howland/journal-of-ride-theory-omnibus/paperback/product-144097.html

#10yrsago U Texas/Austin's ACTLab to close
https://web.archive.org/web/20100518175145/http://www.mygeekylife.com/?page_id=395

#10yrsago Literary sports jerseys https://www.novel-t.com/

#10yrsago Open source hardware business booms: 13 companies making $1M+
https://singularityhub.com/2010/05/10/13-open-source-hardware-companies-making-1-million-or-more-video/

#10yrsago FOR THE WIN launches today https://craphound.com/category/ftw/

#10yrsago Crucimickey in an upscale Beijing mall
https://www.flickr.com/photos/frankyu/4594198174/

#5yrsago Copyfighting, jailbreaking legend Ed Felten is the White
House's new deputy CTO
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/05/11/white-house-names-dr-ed-felten-deputy-us-chief-technology-officer

#5yrsago Librarians: privacy's champions
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/librarians-versus-nsa/

#1yrago Facebook's "celebration" and "memories" algorithms are
auto-generating best-of-terror-recruiting pages for extremist groups
https://www.securityweek.com/whistleblower-says-facebook-generating-terror-content

#1yrago Beto O'Rourke just hired a "senior advisor" who used to lobby
for Keystone XL, Seaworld and private prisons
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/11/beto-orourke-campaign-staff-lobbyist-keystone-xl/

#1yrago Bipartisan groups call on Congress to reinstate the Office of
Technology Assessment, which Gingrich killed in 1995
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190510/14433442180/broad-coalition-tells-congress-to-bring-back-office-technology-assessment.shtml

#1yrago British jury ignores judge and frees self-represented climate
activists based on the "necessity defense"
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/05/10/necessity-defense-climate-change-activists/

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🦝 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/),
Late Stage Capitalism (https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 688 words (13685 total).

Currently reading: Facebook: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy.

Latest podcast: Rules for Writers
(https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/11/rules-for-writers/)

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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