Found on the Sidewalk, 19 May 2019
The Sunday New York Times, Washington edition, is delivered to my house sometime before 7:00 a.m. most Sundays—a gross extravagance and ecologically catastrophic sin for which there can be no moral justification or atonement. Here are some things I gleaned from that paper, in all my decadent shame, ink-smudged and coffee’d up and unbothered by my children’s pleas for attention.
1. Taxi medallion systems are bullshit
The print headline: Driven to Despair — How Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Cab Owners
Where is it: Front page, center (part-two published Monday)
What is it: A two-part investigation into the taxi medallion system in New York City, and how the malfeasance, opportunism, greed, and incompetence of various financial institutions, city officials, medallion owners, and regulators created an unsustainable bubble in the medallion market that enriched industry insiders while punishing drivers.
A fun part:
After the medallion market collapsed, Mayor Bill de Blasio opted not to fund a bailout, and earlier this year, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, shut down the committee overseeing the taxi industry, saying it had completed most of its work.
(…)
Earlier this year, the Council eliminated the committee overseeing the industry after its chairman, Councilman Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx, said the Council was “controlled by the homosexual community.”
The narrative thread here is either non-existent or buried beyond my ability to recognize it, because it does not appear that the alleged homosexual agenda of the City Council has anything whatsoever to do with taxi medallions, but it makes for a funny line, certainly. The two sentences ellipsed together in the above quote are separated by about 90% of a very long article. Those are the first and second times the City Council is mentioned, and the sentences need one another to make any sense, which speaks to the disjointed, incoherent tone of the whole piece. The article is heavily reported, but does a miserable job telling a cohesive story.
What matters: The taxi medallion system no longer serves any good purpose, if it ever did. The closed, highly controlled market has allowed city officials and industry insiders to treat the medallion system as a gross profit center, to the detriment of the livelihoods—and sometimes the lives—of vulnerable immigrant drivers.
The practices were strikingly similar to those behind the housing market crash that led to the 2008 global economic meltdown: Banks and loosely regulated private lenders wrote risky loans and encouraged frequent refinancing; drivers took on debt they could not afford, under terms they often did not understand.
The parallels to the 2008 mortgage crisis really are quite something. Industry specific credit unions and other lenders were encouraged to make awful, often interest-only loans, with financial assistance and partial guarantees from the federal government, loans which they increasingly sold off to third-party servicers as the bubble inflated. Write bad loans, collect all sorts of up-front fees and commissions but little-to-no down payment, collect payments on interest only, and then sell the loan off for more profit to eliminate risk. Brilliant!
No wonder this stupid industry was so easily disrupted by the likes of Uber. When you’re faced with one monstrous and illogical system that demands as much as a million dollars (or more!) for the right to earn a meager living, Uber, with it’s low barrier for entry and all the costs hidden or put off for a while, looks like a way better option. But, uh, maybe it’s not that, either.
Anyway, this is a sprawling, poorly constructed story that nonetheless exposes a stupid, horrible system of private industry working hand in glove with government to, as usual, exploit the powerless so that the rich can get richer.
2. No hand gesture is safe
The print headline: Was I Racially Taunted?
Where is it: Sunday Review, page 2
What is it: An opinion piece by former Major League Baseball player Doug Glanville about a recent incident in which he may or may not have been racially taunted, and how bigotry and hate often thrive in ambiguity and vagueness.
The short of it: This happened:
Glanville’s piece is a thoughtful personal exploration of issues he’s faced as a black man in America, and worth reading. I worry that his version of being “fully against racism” leads to a bit of a paranoiac response to innocuous behavior or even the absence of action, but that’s sorta the point, I guess.
What matters: It seems obvious to me that the fan behind Glanville was playing the circle game, not flashing a symbol meant to represent white power and white supremacy. The fact that he’s doing it upside-down is basically all the evidence I need, but I understand the sensitivities at play, especially since the Ricketts family, which owns the Cubs, have had their own racism controversy recently.
A Separate Take: Man, we sure are fucked. We’ve allowed a bunch of anonymous message board manbaby trollfaces to taint an utterly innocuous symbol with such an unforgivable stain that the local news blurred the fan’s hand out when it was reporting on the controversy.
It’s hard to imagine how we’re supposed to live in a world that empowers trolling jackasses to convert whatever they want into symbols of hate, with the wider public somehow conscripted to abide by the rules of the worst bad faith actors on the planet. This is not to say that racism and bigotry don’t exist, of course, but that it probably isn’t best confronted by banning people from polite society because they didn’t get the latest update on the secret communication weapons of sarcastic assholes. (Note: Wrigley Field is probably not the best example of “polite society.”) Besides, surely there’s a statute of limitations on evil-looking gestures, right? How long until a fella can grow an apolitical middle-lip-only mustache?
Still not quite clear of the statute of limitations on that particular salute, though, probably.
3. If you take out a life insurance policy on me, I’m going to assume you plan to kill me
The print headline: The Novelist and the Murderer
Where is it: NYT Book Review, front cover
What is it: A review, by Michael Lewis, of Furious Hours, a new book by Casey Cep.
A fun part: Michael Lewis, on brand, tying it all to the scumbags behind the 2008 financial crisis, of course:
From there, the well-insured bodies pile up and the story gathers steam. Its engine was this truly bizarre glitch in the free market: the willingness of life-insurance companies to sell policies to someone other than the insured, without the person whose death was suddenly of great value ever knowing about it. The Reverend took out policies on what amounted to a diversified portfolio of family members: “Among others, his wife, his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated.”
His uncanny ability to predict the often grisly deaths of relatives, while leaving no trace of himself at the scenes of their deaths, made him a local legend. The fears ran high and the rumors flew fast, and everyone around him except the poor women who kept agreeing to marry him felt sure that the Reverend was some kind of voodooist. But he was more like a card counter in a casino. Or like one of those Goldman Sachs traders who, in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, bought insurance on subprime mortgage bonds they had themselves designed to fail — and made a fortune when that failure occurred. They sensed that neither the markets nor the law would ever catch up to them — and neither did. The Reverend sensed that too.
The short of it: Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird and nothing else, apparently spent a great deal of time working on a true crime book that she never neared finishing nor publishing. The story was about a preacher in Alabama who seemed to keep getting away with murdering close associates—including more than one wife—upon many of whom he’d taken out substantial life insurance policies. Cep tells that story, the one Lee never finished, while also trying to interrogate Lee’s life, and why she never published again. It seems like a really interesting story, and I will read it if my local library happens to get a copy.
What matters: Taking out life insurance policies on other people sure does invite some perverse incentives, doesn’t it? Yeesh. There should be an X-Files or Twilight Zone-type story told about a sad-sack psychic who can always tell when someone is about to die. He only discovered this skill after going to work for some international super-conglomerate insurance company, and his job is to sell off or sell back the policies before they have to pay out. He shuffles through policies, and just knows when someone is about to kick the bucket, and he makes like $40,000 a year and drives a Hyundai.
4. Kristin Gillibrand will not be the next president
The print headline: Gillibrand Needs a Lane, and Some Cash
Where is it: Front section, page 15
What is it: A piece about the diminishing likelihood of Gillibrand mounting a successful run at the Democratic presidential nomination, and her attempt to change her fortunes by seizing on recent Republican-led attempts in many states to make abortion all but always illegal.
A fun part:
The poor showing has left the New York senator short on one of the Democratic National Committee’s key criteria — having at least 65,000 donors — to qualify for the party’s official debates that begin next month.
The short of it: Senator Gillibrand, who received in excess of 4 million votes the last time she ran for office, in 2018, cannot even get 65,000 people to give her a few bucks so she’ll qualify to debate other Democrats. Now she thinks that pivoting her whole campaign to focus on the single most heated and divisive and fraught debate in American politics is going to help her chances of getting the nomination and ultimately defeating Trump. It may be early, but Brain Iron has an official prediction: Kirsten Gillibrand will not be the president come January 2021. Yet another blonde woman Senator from New York going splat on that glass ceiling, I guess.
5. Policing bad content is way too big a job for one person
The print headline: Facebook has said A.I. is the answer to toxic content. Its top A.I. executive says it’s not so simple. ‘It’s Never Going to Go to Zero.’
Where is it: Sunday Business, front
What is it: A profile of Mike Schroepfer, an executive at Facebook, and his work to keep all the most awful stuff off of their platform. Curiously, the ongoing blacklisting of Brain Iron goes utterly unmentioned.
A fun part: Oh, this poor broken S.O.B.
In March, a gunman had killed 51 people in two mosques there and live streamed it on Facebook. It took the company roughly an hour to remove the video from its site. By then, the bloody footage had spread across social media.
Mr. Schroepfer went quiet. His eyes began to glisten.
(…)
In two of the interviews, he started with an optimistic message that A.I. could be the solution, before becoming emotional. At one point, he said coming to work had sometimes become a struggle. Each time, he choked up when discussing the scale of the issues that Facebook was confronting and his responsibilities in changing them.
“It’s never going to go to zero,” he said of the problematic posts.
What matters: While the tens of millions of dollars a year he makes no doubt helps alleviate some of his apparent pain, he does seem to be tasked with a basically impossible and thankless job. There are some two billion people on Facebook’s platforms—platforms that are designed to make it as frictionless as possible for the average human to have a thought or take an action and then broadcast it as far and wide as the network allows. Schroepfer’s whole job is at cross-purposes with the Facebook mission. And lots and lots of people are terrible, and want to broadcast terrible things.
It seems to me that the hardware and distribution networks will always make it slightly easier to share awful (especially live) content than it will be for THE ALGORITHMS to police it out of sight. Are we going to have a seven-second broadcast delay on every piece of communicated information, in the hopes that we’ll be able to protect everyone from offensive and hateful content? I guess if the next school shooter pulls a Christchurch, there will be the motivation to make such things a reality. Good thing I can’t think of any authoritarian governments who might use such technology to suppress speech and dissent.
6. I don’t know shit about European soccer
The print headline: Man City Wins F.A. Cup
Where is it: Sports Sunday, page 5
What is it: That ^ is the full text of a small AP squib insert about some hot European soccer action. Here it is, again:
MAN CITY WINS F.A. CUP
Raheem Sterling scored a hat trick as Manchester City completed the first sweep of English men’s soccer trophies by routing Watford, 6-0, in the F.A. Cup final in London. City secured its fourth trophy this season with goals by four players—David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne Gabriel Jesus—at Wembley Stadium. The victory came a week after City had successfully defended the Premier League trophy, adding it to the League Cup and the Community Shield.
I took the picture and typed it out, just to see if I could make heads or tails of it after putting all the words together in order myself, but I still have virtually no idea what any of that means. It’s practically in a different language. Why the fuck are there Cups and Shields? How many different things are up for grabs in the average soccer season over there? Why does the article mention that goals were scored by four players and then list out only three names? What is F.A.? Is it a bigger deal than the Premier League trophy, or the League Cup, or the Community Shield, or the Gryffindor Jug, or the Queen’s Armoire?
The bulk of the rest of the sports section was devoted to golf, and how it’s mostly still white people. Now that I understand!
