Art, argument, and grad school

We go forward.

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“U.S. inmates quickly get used to the fact that the few rights remaining to them can be violated more or less with impunity. The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act—passed amid a flurry of hard-to-source anecdotes about prisoners suing prisons over absurd and minor grievances—prevents prisoners from being heard in the courts until they’ve first exhausted a given prison’s ‘administrative remedy’ procedure. For inmates in the federal Bureau of Prisons system, that procedure officially entails filing a BP-8, waiting five days, filing a BP-9, waiting 20 days, then waiting another 20 days if the prison needs more time, sending off a BP-10 to the regional office, waiting 30 days, then waiting another 30 days if the regional office needs more time, then sending off a BP-11 to the national office, waiting 40 days, then waiting another 40 days if the national office needs more time, and then filing in court.“

Martin Shkreli, the notorious, most-hated-man-on-the-Internet pharma douchebro who was arrested last week for securities fraud, told the FBI that the only reason they bothered busting him for financial corruption is that he had made a spectacle out of himself with his pharma shenanigans.

His crime wasn’t financial fraud, in other words: it was bringing capitalism into disrepute.

That’s why the cops tipped off the press to catch his perpwalk, too: as a lesson to the rest of the one percent sociopaths: keep a low profile. Destroy people’s lives, yes. But don’t gloat about it in public. That’s why we haveprivate parties and secret societies.

Shkreli committed his frauds years ago, to little official notice. But once Shkreli started to behave in public as millionaires behave behind closed doors, the authorities started to dig for the excuse to bust him that they knew they’d find, because something like that lurks in every hedge-douche’s past.

It’s just a less flashy version of the Russian system, in which every oligarch is known to be guilty of crimes, because oligarchy can only be attained through criminal means. So if anyone falls into official disfavor, they can be purged stripped of their fortunes.

Do not do their work for them. Do not perform uncredited labor for them, including intellectual labor. Do not bend over backwards to help them. Do not tell them they are good at things they are bad at.

Do not smile at them when you don’t want to. Do not laugh at their terrible jokes or stroke their egos or let them think they are better than you when odds are good that they are almost definitely not.

The women who react like you’re not pulling your weight with the emotional labour of looking after the men’s feelings (or the physical labour of cleaning up after them, or doing their healthwork or being their unpaid admin) because if you don’t hold up your end of managing his emotions, he’s not going to start doing it himself, there will be a woman who will, and she’ll resent you for the extra work, not him. And it’ll affect how much she and her female friends will go out of their way for you, because that’s how emotional labour works, it is the labour of maintaining social connections, of maintaining a society.

When your mother and your father are both sad that you aren’t that close to him because you won’t do all the work of maintaining a connection with him, you expect him to do his share too, and because you expect him to be as careful of your emotions and sensitivities as he would expect you to be of his, which since no other female-perceived person in his life holds him to that standard, feels to him like he has to “walk on eggshells” around you and you’re “always offended”.

When a lot of your friends’ partners dislike you, and you them, and your friends have no idea why, or possibly don’t even notice that’s the case, and it’s hurting your relationships with those friends.

When you’re talking with a friend about her relationship, and you say “wow, that was really mean. He shouldn’t have said that to you. I’m sorry he treated you like that, you deserve better,” and you know she’s taking that less seriously coming from you because you’re That Man-Hating Feminist Who Thinks All Men Are Abusive, and won’t really believe what he said was mean until she hears it from a woman who does centre men in her life. And if she did believe it was mean, the fact that you thought so too makes her wonder if she’s being too much of a man-hating feminist herself.

And that this is not about being male, it is about being privileged, and there are probably situations where you’re that man who expects women to coddle you, but split down some other axis, not male/female. Or situations where some woman is doing it to you, and you think you owe it to her and don’t see the dynamic at play because she isn’t a man.

And that emotional labour is important, necessary labour, the problem isn’t that it exists at all but that it falls disproportionately on some people instead of being shared equally.

The European Commission’s “copyright modernisation” plan is an unmitigated disaster, but there’s one particularly insane section of it that I want to call your attention to: the “link tax,” which entitles publishers to payment when people link to them on the internet.

Fundamentally, this is the insane idea that companies own the information about where they and their assets are located, a shitty idea that we’ve been making fun of since 2001, which the elected European Parliament has repeatedly rejected, which experiments in Germany and Spain have shown to be a disaster.

But the unelected, thoroughly captured bureaucrats of the European Commission refuse to let go of this ridiculous plan.

Internet people are mobilising on Twitter under the #savethelink hashtag, where you can contribute your thoughts on this regressive, absurd notion.

Angela Corey is state attorney for Florida’s 4th Circuit, where she’s put children as young as 12 on trial as adults, facing life in prison – in solitary, because children can’t be mixed with adult populations – without counseling, education, or any access to family.

Corey’s Duval County represents 5% of the Florida population and 25% of its death penalty cases – the highest per-capita rate of capital trials in America. She also leads Florida in sending children to adult prison, based on the discredited, Clinton-era theory of “superpredators.” A disproportionate amount of those children are black. Some are on trial for their first offenses.

 Matt Shirk, Jacksonville’s public defender, has a close relationship to Corey: he and she are former GOP running-mates for public office, he is her former intern, and she calls him “darling” in public. Before being elected public defender, Shirk had never defended a homicide case. He ran on promises of saving tax-dollars, and boasts that he doesn’t use the money allocated to investigating mitigating evidence for his clients. He also has been cited for extreme professional misconduct, including sexual harassment and termination of female staff, and violating client-attorney privilege in press interviews in which he was struggling to clear his reputation after gross negligence in the defense of his underage clients.

Shirk’s bumbling assistant, Refik Eler – hired to replace the experienced PDs that Shirk fired on taking office – has been repeatedly cited for failing his duty to his clients facing the death penalty (for example, “encouraging clients not to argue that they have reduced culpability due to a mental disease or defect”). Eight of Eler’s clients have been sent to death row – more than any other Florida defender.

In The Nation, Jessica Pishko tells the story of  Cristian Fernandez, a 12 year old child whose mother conceived him after being raped at the age of 12 herself. Corey had Fernandez tried as an adult, facing life in prison, when he was accused of murdering his two year old brother David (a murder whose culpability was very muddy). Fernandez faced life in adult prison if convicted, with at least six years in solitary, in order to segregate him from the adult prisoners, and without access to any services or education, or family (he was a ward of the state, effectively orphaned at 12).

Serving as Fernandez’s defender, Shirk failed his client in every way. When Corey added a sexual molestation charge against Fernandez, Shirk allowed Fernandez to be questioned without a guardian or counsel present. Then, after Fernandez’s case was taken over by pro bono counsel who were alarmed at Shirk’s misconduct, Shirk continued to act as if her was Fernandez’s lawyer, giving interviews in which he disclosed facts statements that Fernandez made under client-attorney privilege in an effort to minimize his incompetence.

Corey insists that nothing is wrong, that she is trying to protect the community, and that she is competent and upright. She also spent $800,000 in taxpayer dollars to build a special walkway from her office to the courthouse to protect her from potential assaults, despite the fact that no Fourth District prosecutor has ever been assaulted between the prosecutor’s office and the court.

When Thomas Piketty published his 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century, he said that capitalism’s primary beneficiaries aren’t those who make amazing things that improve the world (as its proponents claim) – rather, it favors those who have a lot of money to begin with.

One of Piketty’s sharpest examples is a comparison of three fortunes: that of L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (who has literally not worked a day in her life), Bill Gates the entrepreneur (when he was running Microsoft), and Bill Gates the rich guy (after he quit). Capitalism theory predicts that the greatest rewards will accrue to the second person: Entrepreneur Gates, who founded the world’s most profitable company and revolutionized the world.

But the reality is that Bettencourt saw her fortune grow by just as much as Entrepreneur Gates, over the same period, despite the fact that she contributed absolutely nothing to the world’s prosperity in that time. What’s more, Investor Gates’s fortune grew to eclipse that of Entrepreneur Gates, despite the fact that all that growth was made by moving money around, rather than making things that made the world better.

Not long after Capital in the 21st Century’s English publication, Bill Gatesreviewed the book, saying nice things about it but rejecting its core thesis.

Today, Investor Gates has comprehensively trounced Entrepreneur Gates in receiving reward for capital allocation instead of creation – it’s hard to ask for a neater rebuttal of Gates or affirmation of Piketty. I’m sure Gates is crying into his $90B breakfast cereal.

All large fortunes, whether inherited or entrepreneurial in origin, grow at extremely high rates, regardless of whether the owner of the fortune works or not. To be sure, one should be careful not to overestimate the precision of the conclusions one can draw from these data, which are based on a small number of observations and collected in a somewhat careless and piecemeal fashion. The fact is nevertheless interesting.

Take a particularly clear example at the very top of the global wealth hierarchy. Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates – the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years – increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt – the heiress of L'Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier – increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.

In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working. Once a fortune is established, the capital grows according to a dynamic of its own, and it can continue to grow at a rapid pace for decades simply because of its size. Note, in particular, that once a fortune passes a certain threshold, size effects due to economies of scale in the management of the portfolio and opportunities for risk are reinforced by the fact that nearly all the income on this capital can be plowed back into investment. An individual with this level of wealth can easily live magnificently on an amount equivalent to only a few tenths of percent of his capital each year, and he can therefore reinvest nearly all of his income. This is a basic but important economic mechanism, with dramatic consequences for the long-term dynamics of accumulation and distribution of wealth. Money tends to reproduce itself. 

-Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century

DuoSkin

Project from MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Research explores how anyone can create stylish temporary tattoos with tech functionality:

DuoSkin is a fabrication process that enables anyone to create customized functional devices that can be attached directly on their skin. Using gold metal leaf, a material that is cheap, skin-friendly, and robust for everyday wear, we demonstrate three types of on-skin interfaces: sensing touch input, displaying output, and wireless communication. DuoSkin draws from the aesthetics found in metallic jewelry-like temporary tattoos to create on-skin devices which resemble jewelry. DuoSkin devices enable users to control their mobile devices, display information, and store information on their skin while serving as a statement of personal style. We believe that in the future, on-skin electronics will no longer be black-boxed and mystified; instead, they will converge towards the user friendliness, extensibility, and aesthetics of body decorations, forming a DuoSkin integrated to the extent that it has seemingly disappeared. 

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen funded the Allen Brain Observatory, a detailed, rich data-set derived from parts of a mouse-brain: what’s striking is that the Allen Institute released all the data into the public domain, at once, as soon as it was available, which is exactly what you’d want the publicly funded alternatives to do, and what they almost never do.

Mark Humphries discusses how the incentives for public science – the need to publish a lot of papers, quickly and early, in order to secure grants – means that publicly funded scientists end up hoarding their data, lest they inadvertently give someone else the material that they need to work on their next paper. By contrast, the Allen Institute’s targets are “tight deadlines for reaching project milestones, rigour of the methods, and quality of the resulting science.”

Humphries argues that universities can get off the publish-early/often treadmill and its data-hoarding demands by reapportioning their own budgets: less on new buildings and administrators, more on long-term investments in high quality science and development of scientific tools like high performance computing software and analysis frameworks.