The growth of the financial industry has been a boon for its highly-paid managers. According to New York University economist Thomas Philippon, who contributes one of the most striking chapters in Rethinking the Financial Crisis, “total compensation of financial intermediaries (profits, wages, salary and bonuses) as a fraction of GDP is at an all-time high, around 9% of GDP.”

To give those numbers some context, consider that 9 percent of US GDP last year was about $1.4 trillion—an unprecedented windfall for America’s capitalist class. “What does society get in return? Or, in other words, what does the finance industry produce?”

Historically, the unit cost of intermediation has been somewhere between 1.3% and 2.3% of assets. However, this unit cost has been trending upward since 1970 and is now significantly higher than in the past. In other words, the finance industry of 1900 was just as able as the finance industry of 2010 to produce loans, bonds and stocks, and it was certainly doing it more cheaply. This is counter-intuitive, to say the least. How is it possible for today’s finance industry not to be significantly more efficient than the finance industry of John Pierpont Morgan?

The short answer is that Wall Street, for the last thirty years or so, has been skimming prodigiously from the top. The graph above shows how the total economic cost of financial intermediation grew from under 2 percent in 1870 to nearly 6 percent before the stock market collapsed in 1929. It grew slowly throughout the postwar expansion, reaching 5 percent in 1980. Then, beginning during the deregulatory years of the Reagan administration, the money flowing to financial intermediaries skyrocketed, rising to almost 9 percent of GDP in 2010.

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/graph-how-the-financial-sector-consumed-americas-economic-growth/

The translated narration isn’t very good, and there are some editing glitches here and there, but this video describes some interesting experiments, and has some sections of nice octopus footage.

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In artist Sarah Meyohas‘s series Speculations, infinite tunnels are created with facing mirrors set against pastel backdrops. Smoke, flowers, and finger tips border the reflective surfaces, creating dream-like environments that pull the viewer deep into the image’s frame. Meyohas is interested in the creating a seductive quality in each of the photos. “Whether it’s the colors or the flowers drawing you in, I want viewers to feel like they’re being drawing into the void, like standing upon a precipice,” the New York City-based artist tells Sleek Magazine. You can see more of her mirrored works on Instagram. (via Contemporary Art Blog)

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/08/mirrored-installations-by-sarah-meyohas/

A new strandbeest! Hooray!!

Earlier this summer artist Theo Jansen (previously) revealed UMINAMI, a new addition to his series of wind-powered strandbeests. The kinetic sculpture is much thinner than previous iterations, and is made without hinging joints so it does not need to be lubricated when roving along the sandy shore. The fabricated creature seems to imitate the motion of a crawling caterpillar, producing an undulating movement as it sweeps across the beach. You can watch other strandbeests in motion on Youtube. (via Laughing Squid)

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/08/theo-jansens-new-strandbeest/

🙁

Reporters and political commentators often express frustrated surprise at the steadfast support of President Trump from most Republicans in the House and Senate. But they shouldn’t — it has happened before.

In fact, when these critics refer back to the Watergate era as a time of bipartisan commitment to the rule of law over politics, they get it exactly wrong. Defending the president at all costs, blaming investigators and demonizing journalists was all part of the Republican playbook during the political crisis leading up to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Despite the fact that 32 people and three companies have been indicted so far by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, only four of 11 Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee joined Senate Democrats earlier this year in an effort to protect Mr. Mueller’s investigation. The House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, said in June that he thinks “the Mueller investigation has got to stop.” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Devin Nunes of California, have joined Mr. Trump in calling the investigation a “witch hunt.”

Dispiriting, perhaps, but not shocking or unprecedented. In late 1972, when a Democratic congressman, Wright Patman of Texas, began to investigate connections between Mr. Nixon’s aides and the Watergate burglary, the House Republican leader, Gerald Ford of Michigan (who later succeeded Mr. Nixon as president), called it a “political witch hunt,” according to the historian Stanley I. Kutler in his book “The Wars of Watergate.”

NYT

Still, however much I assure myself that my choice is a bold one, it is also a retreat of sorts. The terrible thing—the unspecified, unimaginable thing that I used to say could dislodge me from America—finally happened, and not to me alone but to the country itself. I’m not leaving because of Trump, but I’m not not leaving because of him, either. The day after the 2016 election, George and I dropped our son off at school, and we walked in endless, shocked circles around the park at the end of our street. We saw friends, and embraced them with few words, in tears; it was as if everyone were in mourning. We could leave, George and I began to whisper to each other. Should we leave? When will we know whether we should or not? When might it be too late?

I’m not the only one: during the past year and a half, a trickle of foreign-born or foreign-partnered friends began to leave New York, and everyone I know who has a second passport, or has the right to get one, has begun to assess her options…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/20/a-new-citizen-decides-to-leave-the-tumult-of-trumps-america

(2011)

But when you start talking about building a social graph that transcends any specific implementation, you quickly find yourself in the weeds. Is accepting someone’s invitation on LinkedIn the same kind of connection as mutually following them on Twitter? Can we define some generic connections like ‘fan of’ or ‘follower’ and re-use them for multiple sites? Does it matter that you can see who your followers are on site X but not on site Y?

One way to solve this comparison problem is with standards. Before pooling your data in the social graph, you first map it to a common vocabulary. Google, for example, uses XFN as part of their Social Graph API. This defines a set of about twenty allowed relationships. (Facebook has a much more austere set: close_friends, acquaintances, restricted, and the weaselly user_created).

But these common relationships turn out to be kind of slippery. To use XFN as my example, how do I decide if my cubicle mate is a friend, acquaintance or just a contact? And if I call him my friend, should I interpret that in the northern California sense, or in some kind of universal sense of friendship?

In the old country, for example, we have two kinds of ‘friendship’ (distinguished by whether you address one another with the informal pronoun) and going from one status to the other is a pretty big deal; you have to drink a toast with your arms all in a pretzel and it’s considered a huge faux pas to suggest it before both people feel ready. But at least it’s not ambiguous!

And of course sex complicates things even more. Will it get me in hot water to have a crush on someone but have a different person as my muse? Does spouse imply sweetheart, or do I have to explicilty declare that (perhaps on our 20th anniversary)? And should restrainingOrder be an edge or a node in this data model?

There’s also the matter of things that XFN doesn’t allow you to describe. There’s nonemesis or rival, since the standards writers wanted to exclude negativity. The gender-dependent second e on fiancé(e) panicked the spec writers, so they left that relationship out. Neither will they allow you to declare an ex-spouse or an ex-colleague.

And then there’s the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids – how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can’t really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn’t work together. I’d like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?

And speaking of booze, how come there’s a field for declaring I’m an alcoholic (opensocial.Enum.Drinker.HEAVILY) but no way to tell people I smoke pot? Why are the only genders male and female? Have the people who designed this protocol really never made the twenty mile drive to San Francisco?

What happens to dead people in the social graph? Facebook keeps profiles around for a while in memoriam, so we probably shouldn’t just purge dead contacts from the social graph immediately. But we certainly don’t want them haunting us on LinkedIn – maybe there should be a second, Elysian social graph where we can put those nodes to await us?

You can call this nitpicking, but this stuff matters! This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they’re completely inadequate.

Here the Ghost of Abstractions Past materializes in a flurry of angle brackets, and says in a sepulchral whisper:

“How about we let people define arbitrary relationships between nodes…”

https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

(2014)

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.

Users have been so well trained to expect surveillance that even when widespread, clandestine government surveillance was revealed by a whistleblower, there has been little organized, public demand for reform and change. As a result, the Obama administration has been slightly more transparent about government surveillance requests, but has ignored most of the recommendations made by his own review panel and suffered few political consequences. Only half of Americans believe that Snowden’s leaks served the public interest and the majority of Americans favor criminal prosecution for the whistleblower. It’s unlikely that our willingness to accept online surveillance reflects our trust in the American government, which is at historic lows. More likely, we’ve been taught that this is simply how the Internet works: If we open ourselves to ever-increasing surveillance—whether from corporations or governments—the tools and content we want will remain free of cost.

At this point in the story, it’s probably worth reminding you that our intentions were good…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/