The Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is helped to his car by his wife, Elizabeth Tilson, as they leave the News Corp. building in New York City. (NYT) Yep. That’s the photo I’ve been waiting for.
Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow: White Room
Can Learfield fetch $1Billion or more?
That’s the question posed in a recent edition of Sports Business Journal. Before retiring three years ago, I worked for Learfield for 29 years. Not sure how many employees they had when I started in 1984 but in 1989 there were only 49 of us. Today, more than 1,000.
I’m guessing a billion dollars is not that much for a national media company but when I remember the little house on McCarty Street that was HQ when I started, it sound like a lot of money and I’m proud of the former co-workers who made it worth that much.
How to know if you talk too much
From the Harvard Business Review:
There are three stages of speaking to other people. In the first stage, you’re on task, relevant and concise. But then you unconsciously discover that the more you talk, the more you feel relief. Ahh, so wonderful and tension-relieving for you… but not so much fun for the receiver. This is the second stage – when it feels so good to talk, you don’t even notice the other person is not listening. The third stage occurs after you have lost track of what you were saying and begin to realize you might need to reel the other person back in. If during the third stage of this monologue poorly disguised as a conversation you unconsciously sense that the other person is getting a bit fidgety, guess what happens then? Unfortunately, rather than finding a way to reengage your innocent victim through having them talk and then listening to them, instead the usual impulse is to talk even more in an effort to regain their interest.
I struggle with this and, over the years, have developed a semi-conscious habit of putting my hand over my mouth when having a conversation as a reminder to listen instead of talk. The author suggests a couple of reasons some of us talk too much:
The process of talking about ourselves releases dopamine, the pleasure hormone. One of the reasons gabby people keep gabbing is because they become addicted to that pleasure. [and] Some people are long-winded is because they’re trying to impress their conversational counterpart with how smart they are, often because they don’t actually feel that way underneath.
Way back in 2010 I had an idea for an app I called the Blab-O-Meter. You turn on Blab-o-meter and it begins monitoring how much you are talking. You can set the app to alert you by vibrating and or playing a sound (a throat clearing; “shhhhh!” etc) when you exceed some predetermined level. 50 percent might be reasonable or, if you’re trying to listen more, set it lower.
Will you ever retire?
What it will mean to be an elderly millennial (Vice)
“Sometime before death, but after your useful phase, there’s supposed to be this in-between time called “retirement” that sounds pretty great—sorta like childhood, but without anyone trying to teach you anything, and with more drinking.”
And if your plan is to keep working…
“There’s no evidence that jobs for millennials in their 70s will exist. “In terms of their ability to work or keep up with their logical progress—the job requirements are changing a lot faster than human beings can be trained.”
Roger Ailes out?
Murdochs Have Decided to Remove Roger Ailes — the Only Question Now Is When (New York magazine)
Roger Ailes’s tenure as the head of Fox News may be coming to an end. Rupert Murdoch and sons Lachlan and James — co-chairmen and CEO, respectively, of parent company 21st Century Fox — have settled on removing the 76-year-old executive, say two sources briefed on a sexual-harassment investigation of Ailes being conducted by New York law firm Paul, Weiss. After reviewing the initial findings of the probe, James Murdoch is said to be arguing that Ailes should be presented with a choice this week to resign or face being fired. Lachlan is more aligned with their father, who thinks that no action should be taken until after the GOP convention this week. Another source confirms that all three are in agreement that Ailes needs to go.
I’ll put the champagne on ice but won’t open it until I see Roger lugging a banker’s box out to his limo (might have to hire a Town Car since the limo came with the job). That’s the part of these stories I’m most interested in but never get to see.
Yes, Roger has millions socked away and a mansion in upstate NY but that’s a long way from the action and power nexus he’s enjoyed for so long. Hard to imagine him sitting on the sofa next to Mrs. Ailes, watching The View, so does he rent an office in the Big Apple? Maybe do some consulting? (“Hire the one with the big tits”). Seeing the fall isn’t enough for me. I want to see ’em hit the sidewalk and bounce.
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All
God damn, this was a depressing read. But it’s a good example of something I don’t have a good name for. Sort of a you-know-the-truth-when-you-hear-it. It’s a combination of details and phrasing, maybe? Are humans wired to know when someone’s lying? The guy that wrote The Art of the Deal fucked up and knows it.
“But I knew I was selling out. Literally, the term was invented to describe what I did.” Soon Spy was calling him “former journalist Tony Schwartz.”
That is a heavy weight to carry and it might get a lot heavier.
During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
I’ll confess this is a bias of mine. I always feel a little superior to people to don’t read books. I wonder how many books (and screenplays) are in the works about Trump. I wonder if he knows the difference between famous and infamous. Or cares.
You are being tracked (The Inevitable)
“This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.” [The 24 ways we’re tracked on a regular basis.]
- Car movements — Every car since 2006 contains a chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you start your car.
- Highway traffic — Cameras on poles and sensors buried in highway record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track badges. Sev enty million plates are recorded each month.
- Ride-share taxis — Uber, Lyft, and other decentralized rides record your trips.
- Long-distance travel — Your travel itinerary for air flights and trains is recorded.
- Drone surveillance — Along U.S. borders, Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities.
- Postal mail — The exterior of every piece of paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized.
- Utilities — Your power and water usage patterns are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not cataloged, yet.)
- Cell phone location and call logs — Where, when, and who you call (meta- data) is stored for months. Some phone carriers routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years.
- Civic cameras — Cameras record your activities 24/7 in most city down towns in the U.S.
- Commercial and private spaces — Today 68 percent of public employers, 59 percent of private employers, 98 percent of banks, 64 percent of public schools, and 16 percent of homeowners live or work under cameras.
- Smart home — Smart thermostats (like Nest) detect your presence and behavior patterns and transmit these to the cloud. Smart electrical outlets (like Belkin) monitor power consumption and usage times shared to the cloud.
- Home surveillance — Installed video cameras document your activity inside and outside the home, stored on cloud servers.
- Interactive devices — Your voice commands and messages from phones (Siri, Now, Cortana), consoles (Kinect), smart TVs, and ambient micro phones (Amazon Echo) are recorded and processed on the cloud.
- Grocery loyalty cards — Supermarkets track which items you purchase and when.
E- retailers — Retailers like Amazon track not only what you purchase, but what you look at and even think about buying. - IRS — Tracks your financial situation all your life.
- Credit cards — Of course, every purchase is tracked. Also mined deeply with sophisticated AI for patterns that reveal your personality, ethnic ity, idiosyncrasies, politics, and preferences.
- E-wallets and e-banks — Aggregators like Mint track your entire financial situation from loans, mortgages, and investments. Wallets like Square and PayPal track all purchases.
- Photo face recognition — Facebook and Google can identify (tag) you in pictures taken by others posted on the web. The location of pictures can identify your location history.
- Web activities — Web advertising cookies track your movements across the web. More than 80% of the top thousand sites employ web cookies that follow you wherever you go on the web. Through agree ments with ad networks, even sites you did not visit can get informa tion about your viewing history.
- Social media — Can identify family members, friends, and friends of friends. Can identify and track your former employers and your cur rent work mates. And how you spend your free time.
- Search browsers — By default Google saves every question you’ve ever asked forever.
- Streaming services — What movies (Netflix), music (Spotify), video (You Tube) you consume and when, and what you rate them. This includes cable companies; your watching history is recorded.
- Book reading — Public libraries record your borrowings for about a month. Amazon records book purchases forever. Kindle monitors your reading patterns on ebooks — where you are in the book, how long you take to read each page, where you stop.
“It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together. At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are not integrated and correlated.”
The Mind-Body Problem
“The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that.” — Philosopher David Chalmers
From Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind (NYT)
“Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing. “The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.”
I think this is what is commonly referred to as “the hard problem.” How minds are generated by brains.
“Some philosophers and scientists have been driven back to the centuries-old doctrine of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is universal, existing as some kind of mind stuff inside molecules and atoms. Consciousness doesn’t have to emerge. It’s built into matter, perhaps as some kind of quantum mechanical effect.”
I like the idea of universal consciousness. Until there’s solid, scientific consensus on how the brain creates consciousness… this is as good an explanation as any.
Paying for news
Yesterday I subscribed to the digital edition of the New York Times. I think this is the first time I have paid for news online. I’ll pay $3.75 per week, less than the cost of a double-espresso at The Coffee Zone.