September 8, 2017 in 2,527 words

Mexico is braced for tsunamis after its biggest earthquake in a century

_Breaking

_{People gather on a street in Mexico City after a powerful earthquake hit the south of the country on Sept. 8, 2017.}

Mexico is on alert for tsunamis along its Pacific coast the region after a magnitude 8.1 earthquake hit just off the country’s southern coast a little before midnight local time, according to the US Geological Survey.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has warned that waves as high as three meters (10 feet) above the tide level could strike the coast of Mexico, and waves of up to one meter in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto said the quake was 8.2 magnitude, making it the largest in the country for 100 years. It is bigger than the quake that struck Mexico in 1985, centered near the capital and resulting in around 10,000 deaths. …

No, Hurricanes Are Not Good for the Economy

_{As Bastiat’s parable reminds us: Money spent to fix what’s broken could have been spent on other things.}

Do we really need to say it? Hurricanes are bad.

The pictures of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey have barely faded from our television screens (while Irma waits in the wings), but already we are seeing stories about the economic boost we can expect from rebuilding Houston.

In addition, of course, to the human suffering, the destruction in Houston represents an enormous loss of national wealth, by some estimates more than $20 billion. The technical vagaries of GDP calculation mean that rebuilding Houston may indeed result in a temporary uptick in the statistical growth rate. But that is not the same thing as real improvement.

It seems that the “broken window fallacy” simply will not die. In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat first tackled this economic myth. In Bastiat’s parable, a shopkeeper’s careless son breaks a pane of glass in his father’s store. According to the economic theory popular at the time, the broken window was actually a good thing, because it meant that the shopkeeper would have to pay the glazier to repair it. The glazier then would use his new income to buy a pair of shoes, and the shoemaker would spend the money, etc. The cycle continues, and the economy is stimulated. As Bastiat noted, “You come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry, in general, will be the result of it.” …

Dreamers condemn ‘extremely wrong’ Jeff Sessions: ‘We’re not taking jobs from anybody’

_{The attorney general said Dreamers were ‘denying jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans’ – an unfounded claim that has prompted anger and disbelief}

_{Yadira Garcia with her husband Airam Jovanny Santos and their one-year-old son Airam. Garcia said: ‘It takes years of preparation. We prepared for those jobs.’}

Yadira Garcia, a 27-year-old math teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, gathered with fellow so-called Dreamers on Tuesday morning to watch US attorney general Jeff Sessions’ announcement about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.

When Sessions said that the Trump administration was ending Daca – which granted temporary protection from deportation and work authorization to 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, including Garcia – she broke down crying, wrapped in her mother’s arms and holding her one-year-old son.

On television, Sessions justified the decision to end Daca in part by claiming it would protect American workers. The program, he argued, “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens”.

Garcia’s reaction to Sessions’ remark was one of disbelief.

“We’re not taking jobs away from anybody,” she said. “When it comes to professional positions like teaching or being a lawyer, a doctor – things like that – those are professions you can’t just randomly apply for. It takes years of preparation. We prepared for those jobs.” …

Equifax stock is plummeting after it announced a massive hack affecting 143 million US consumers

_Equihacks

_{Not good.}

Credit reporting agency Equifax announced today (Sept. 7) that hackers stole records containing personal information on 143 million of its customers in the United States.

“On July 29, 2017, Equifax discovered that criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files,” the company said in a statement. “Most of the consumer information accessed includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and in some instances, driver’s license numbers. In addition, credit card numbers for approximately 209,000 consumers.”

The company added that 182,000 credit-dispute documents, which contain personal information, were also stolen.

Shortly after the announcement, Bloomberg News reported that three executives at Equifax sold nearly $1.8 million worth of company shares after the data breach had been discovered in late July. The company’s stock dropped more than 12% in after-hours trading following the announcement at about 4:30pm ET. …

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Equifax has created a website to help its customers find out whether their data has been stolen.

THE OBSCURE ECONOMIST SILICON VALLEY BILLIONAIRES SHOULD DUMP AYN RAND FOR

_{He lived almost 200 years ago, but Henry George’s theories might have something to offer people who want to put their money to good use today.}

So, you’re a Silicon Valley billionaire and you’ve already got the private plane. What you need next is a philosophy, something to live by, and to help finance, and—most important—to use to explain or justify yourself. Don’t just grab the next philosophy to come along. Chances are that will be Ayn Rand and her extreme form of capitalism, which she called objectivism.

Rand has a lot going for her, to be sure. First, you may have actually read her in high school and may have been genuinely influenced. Second, in a nutshell, she rationalizes greed, which you have nothing against. Third, she was into mildly kinky sex—something else you may have in common. Fourth, she was associated in some way you don’t quite follow with Alan Greenspan, who is respectability itself, whatever other Rand enthusiasts may have been up to.

But you’re too late. Ayn Rand, who never was really undiscovered (The Fountainhead became a movie, starring Gary Cooper as a heroic architect, a few years after it was published), has by now been thoroughly re-discovered. According to James Stewart (the prominent business journalist, not the even more prominent actor), writing in The New York Times, President Trump says Ayn Rand is his favorite writer and that The Fountainhead, her pulmonary embolism of a book, is his favorite novel. Travis Kalanick, the onetime Übermensch of Uber, is on board, as is (liberal foodies, please note) John Mackey, co-founder and C.E.O. of Whole Foods.

My dear billionaire, you need an economist almost no one has heard of. One who addressed the most pressing problems of today, which do not include the insufficient greed of rich people. But one who was not completely out of sympathy with rich people, either. …

Bunk beds, roaches and nerdy geniuses: my year in a Silicon Valley hacker house

_{The lives of tech entrepreneurs aren’t always as glamorous as they’re made out to be, as I learned living among them on a dangerous San Francisco street.}

_{Andrew Frawley, who lived at the Negev for a year.}

For the past 12 months of my life, I paid the bargain price of $1,250 per month to sleep diagonally in a bunk bed in a 10ft by 10ft room that I shared with a 32-year old man. Because I am 6ft4in, sleeping diagonally in my undersized accommodation was the only way I could make it through the night without getting cramps.

Welcome to my life in the hacker house.

In July last year, I left my home in the comfy suburbs of Washington DC to make the 3,000-mile drive west to San Francisco, with my mother along for the ride. I had just graduated from college that May, and as the cliched story goes, I was in pursuit of the tech dream. I didn’t have a lease, or a job. Because of the high rent in the Bay area, you usually can’t secure a lease without a job offer, and well, you can’t exactly say the jobs were coming easy. So I just went for it.

Upon reaching Louisville, Kentucky, I received a call from a friend. “You should look up hacker houses,” he said. “It’s a place where a bunch of tech people live to hack and build stuff.”

I had never heard of a hacker house and his description was vague, but it sounded cool enough. That night I dug around the web, found some houses and zoomed in on my favorite, the Negev. It prided itself on being a tech-first community that offered a movie theater, workspace, industrial-sized kitchen, weekend activities and a tech CEO speaker series.

Rent was steep for a shared bedroom, but I would get to live in the heart of downtown with some crazy smart engineers. I applied that night. …

Nike is investing in robots that use static electricity to put its shoes together

_Shocking

_{One of Grabit’s static-wielding robots.}

While robots are already an established part of the manufacturing process for cars, electronics, and semiconductors, they have been much slower to take over production of sneakers and clothes.

One of the main reasons is that robots have a hard time handling the wide variety of soft materials used to make complicated products like a pair of sneakers. A Nike shoe can have as many as 40 different materials in its upper alone, all of which need to be precisely stacked and fused together to make the shoe. This is quite different from a cellphone plant or automotive factory, for example, where the materials involved tend to be rigid and fairly uniform, and robots can pick things up using a vacuum, magnet, or mechanical pincher.

In garment and shoe manufacturing, no single method has offered an ideal solution. A vacuum may pick up pieces of leather, but it can’t deal with mesh. Mechanical pinchers fumble with pieces that have different degrees of flexibility and stickiness. Magnets, while great for handling metal, are useless when it comes to fabric.

A California company called Grabit has a novel technology that’s solving this problem for Nike, and soon perhaps a number of clothes manufacturers as well. Grabit uses electroadhesion—basically the cling of static electricity—to let robots pick up and handle objects of all kinds. The company says the same technology is capable of maneuvering an egg, soft fabric, or a 50 lb. box. …

New AI can guess whether you’re gay or straight from a photograph

_{An algorithm deduced the sexuality of people on a dating site with up to 91% accuracy, raising tricky ethical questions}

_{An illustrated depiction of facial analysis technology similar to that used in the experiment}

Artificial intelligence can accurately guess whether people are gay or straight based on photos of their faces, according to new research that suggests machines can have significantly better “gaydar” than humans.

The study from Stanford University – which found that a computer algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women – has raised questions about the biological origins of sexual orientation, the ethics of facial-detection technology, and the potential for this kind of software to violate people’s privacy or be abused for anti-LGBT purposes.

The machine intelligence tested in the research, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and first reported in the Economist, was based on a sample of more than 35,000 facial images that men and women publicly posted on a US dating website. The researchers, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, extracted features from the images using “deep neural networks”, meaning a sophisticated mathematical system that learns to analyze visuals based on a large dataset.

The research found that gay men and women tended to have “gender-atypical” features, expressions and “grooming styles”, essentially meaning gay men appeared more feminine and vice versa. The data also identified certain trends, including that gay men had narrower jaws, longer noses and larger foreheads than straight men, and that gay women had larger jaws and smaller foreheads compared to straight women. …

The Unlikely Medical History of Chocolate Syrup

_{How the sundae staple went from treatment to just treat}

At first glance, nothing seems particularly odd about the December 1896 edition of The Druggists Circular and Chemical Gazette, a catalog of products that any self-respecting pharmacy ought to carry. But look closer: Hiding among medical necessities like McElroy’s glass syringes and Hirsh Frank & Co’s lab coats, you’ll find some more curious finds—including Hershey’s cocoa powder.

Perfectly soluble,” boasts the ad in bold, capital lettering. “Warranted absolutely pure.” It reads as if it was peddling medicine—and in fact, it sort of was.

Druggists of the day often used the dark powder to whip up a syrup sweet enough to mask the flavor of objectionable remedies, explains Stella Parks, a pastry chef with the food and cooking website Serious Eats. Parks happened upon these vintage advertisements while she was researching her new book, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which features lesser-known histories of our favorite sweet treats.

The Hershey’s ad intrigued her. “What in the world are these guys doing advertising to druggists?” she recalls wondering at the time. By digging into the history and tracking down more pharmaceutical circulars and magazines, she discover the rich history of chocolate syrup, which began not with ice cream and flavored milk—but with medicine.

Our love of chocolate goes back over 3,000 years, with traces of cacao appearing as early as 1500 B.C. in the pots of the Olmecs of Mexico. Yet for most of its early history, it was consumed as a drink made from fermented, roasted, and ground beans. This drink was a far cry from the sweetened, milky stuff we call hot chocolate today: It was rarely sweetened, and likely very bitter. …

Food labels now say “free-range trees,” which might be even more insane than “gluten-free water”

_{It’s Nutty}

_{It’s nuts.}

Is your dairy-free, non-GMO “milk” made from free-range trees? This one is.

In the wild world of product claims, the fledgling macadamia-nut-milk industry is charging into the US market elbows out, taking pot-shots at the dairy and almond industries along the way. This explains the unabashed claim on Milkadamia’s cartons, which is that the company only sources nuts from so-called “free-range trees.” The Chicago-based company’s nuts are grown from trees in Australia, then shipped to the US for processing.

To be sure, “free-range tree” does not fall within the scientific lexicon used by horticulturalists. It’s nothing more than a marketing ploy to hook consumers enamored by product claims. Milkadamia cartons go on to explain that its milk comes from “trees supporting life, not trees on life support,” meaning they aren’t attached to irrigation systems.

It’s meant to be a “gentle” dig at California almond farmers, Milkadamia CEO Jim Richards tells Quartz. He characterizes these farmers—much to their chagrin—as being dependent on irrigating water from aquifers. The almond industry is, of course, one of Milkadamia’s rivals, as it supplies the nuts for almond milk. Researchers are trying to figure out ways to refill aquifers, which often sit about 45 ft (13.7 m) below ground. …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}