At the end of the day, you have your reputation.

How strange. How simple.

But getting the cash incentives right is a complex and uncharted business.

There is the capacity to get a very perverse outcome.

These issues are only going to get thornier.

Are we near the bottom? No.

Do you know?

The majority of the world is not aware this is happening. The Taiji cove is blocked off from the public. Cameras are not allowed inside and the media does not cover the story. It's critical that we get the word out in Japan. It's critical that we get the word out -- everywhere. We believe that once the Japanese people know, they will demand change.

Find out at the Tara through 20 August.

From the archive:

He seems to think that the facts speak for themselves. But facts never speak for themselves. We speak for them.

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals.

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

"Hello human, I am dolphin. You are in my waves, and I am curious about you. Long have we tried to befriend you by saving drowning swimmers and attacking sharks and being cute, and long have you repaid our kindness by catching us in fishing nets, capturing us for dumb circus shows and eating our dinners. But that is the past. Let this contact be the beginning of a new future. Let this morning mark the beginning of a great bond between our two peopl... hey, wtf where are you going?"

(Poster on wall of Nelson's bedroom: "Nuke the whales.")

Lisa [to Nelson]: "Nuke the whales?"
Nelson: "Gotta nuke somethin'."
Lisa: "Touché."

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Shallow water. Deep secret.

Skip Hollandsworth reports on how a pair of undercover cops infiltrated the secret world of Houston dogfighting.

"We just figured it was piddly shit, something for the local animal-control officers."

Then they started Googling.

"Nothing is slowing these guys down, absolutely nothing," the informant said. "They make Michael Vick look like a pussy."

Manning and Davis had seen their share of homicide victims and had been in a few bloody fights themselves, but they had never witnessed anything like this. They left as quickly as they could and drove to the nearest bar, dog blood still on their boots. "What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?" asked Manning.

"My dogs were great dogs. They were beautiful, strong dogs. Oh, man, they were beautiful."

(For the full article in four parts, see 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Robert McNamara:

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.

Michael Tomasello:

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals.

Bringing Down the Dogmen

Brian Ulrich:

Not if, but when.

Over the past 7 years I have been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.

Thom Andersen:

Perhaps "Blade Runner" expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation, because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter and blander. Buffalo will become Miami, and Los Angeles will become Death Valley at least until the rising ocean tides wipe it away. Computers will get faster, and we will get slower. There will be plenty of progress, but few of us will be any better off or happier for it. Robots won't be sexy or dangerous, they'll be dull and efficient and they'll take our jobs.

Gregory Clark:

The economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.

Niall Ferguson:

Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.

Even Felix the Cat's luck ran out during the Depression.

Jared Diamond:

When you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.

David Piling, at lunch with Jared Diamond:

I am famished, and opt for a bit of everything.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Dark Stores

Elizabeth Rubin, reporting from Afghanistan:

"I swear," Akhundzada went on, eyes agog, "I have not killed a cat in all my life." With that he took off with his rifle-toting guards and disappeared into his armored SUV.

...

I recently asked an old friend of Karzai's why Karzai would choose as his running mate Muhammad Fahim, a controversial figure who has been accused of multiple human rights abuses over many years. "Karzai believes that his two greatest mistakes as president were the removals of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada and Marshal Fahim," he said. Both happened under intense Western pressure. The reason he regretted their removal was not that he thought they were honest statesmen but that he found they were more trouble out of office. Fahim's removal lost him mujahedin support, and Akhundzada's removal triggered the fall of Helmand Province to the Taliban.

...

The consensus in Afghanistan is that if the Aug. 20 elections are somehow fair -- which is impossible to guarantee -- there will most likely be a runoff in a second round.

Karzai remains well ahead. What happens if he wins? "What will you do then?" I asked an American working for the Obama administration.

"The first step is to shift away from the weekly pat on the back he got from Bush but not be as removed as Obama was," he said. "Then if we can reduce his paranoia and if he has a renewed mandate and if we get the good Karzai, the charming Karzai. ..." It was a lot of ifs.

Rory Stewart:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

You may recall Rubin's last Afghanistan story, "Battle Company Is Out There":

If you peel back the layers, there's always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying.

It didn't take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

When Bill Keller refers to "quality journalism", he's talking about Elizabeth Rubin:

By quality journalism I mean the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards. I mean journalism that, however imperfect, labors hard to be trustworthy, to supply you with the information you need to be an engaged citizen. The supply of this kind of journalism is declining because it is hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work.

Karzai in His Labyrinth

Recently, Comcast has added a "Domain Helper" to its DNS servers. Now, instead of implementing the DNS protocol as specified in the RFC, Comcast will redirect your query to a Comcast-branded Yahoo! search page, using the text of your DNS query as search input to Yahoo. Never mind that this breaks the Internet ... there are ads to be served!

This service is reminiscent of Verisign's SiteFinder service from ~2003, about which much hubbub is preserved in the MemeStreams archive. (See below.)

Comcast customers can opt out of Domain Helper:

When a non-existent web address is typed into a browser, a built-in error message is displayed. The Comcast's Domain Helper service is designed to help guide you to a useful search page that has a list of recommended sites that come close to matching the original web address that did not exist.

If you are a residential or commercial cable modem subscriber, and you wish to opt-out of the Comcast Domain Helper service, please complete the form below.

At the end of this process they inform you that it may take two days for the opt-out procedure to be completed. Meanwhile, enjoy the broken DNS!

From the archive, a small selection on SiteFinder:

VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organization ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012.

The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.

The dispute over who controls key portions of the Internet's address system erupted into open conflict today when VeriSign Inc., the world's largest addressing company, sued the Internet's most visible regulatory body, charging that it has been unfairly prevented from developing new services for Internet users.

We all rely on them [DNS servers], and their management should be done in a way appropriate for their status.

Omniture is now tracking hits to every nonexistent .com/.net domain thanks to Verisign.

Comcast Domain Helper Opt-Out

From a slide deck about culture at Netflix:

You say what you think even if it is controversial

You are tenacious

You are quick to admit mistakes

It's about effectiveness -- not effort

Need a culture that avoids the rigidity, politics, mediocrity, and complacency that infects most organizations as they grow

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Donald Rumsfeld:

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Culture

William T. Vollmann's new book is on sale today. From the jacket:

A majestic book that addresses current debates on immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation, issues that will define America’s identity in the twenty-first century.

Here's Sam Anderson:

William T. Vollmann's Imperial is like Robert Caro's The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee's cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau's great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

As the updated Amazon reviews make clear, this is a book that will sharply divide the critics as well as the reading public. Publishers Weekly calls it "exasperating, maddening, exhausting and inchorent", whereas Booklist gives it a starred review, calling the book "immense, poetically structured, provoking, and surprisingly intimate."

From the archive, John Lanchester:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Moby-Dick in the Desert

Paul Graham:

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon ...

From last year, more PG:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Nicholas Dawidoff, on Freeman Dyson:

... always preaching the virtues of boredom ...

Samantha Power:

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Maggie Jackson:

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing -- attention.

Stefan Klein:

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Walter Kirn:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

Donald Rumsfeld:

Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn't necessarily follow that there is a solution.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

Michael Lopp, on Managing Humans:

This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff. It's about what to do during the first ninety days of your new gig, and explains why you should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Jon Mooallem:

It was just before six in the morning when we stopped at a rest area off Interstate 8, near where California, Arizona, and Mexico meet in the desert.

It was on this particular tract of sand that a fragment of another world's landscape temporarily took up residence. Over thirty-eight days in the spring of 1982, a crew from Lucasfilm erected a 30,000-square-foot wooden platform and built atop it sand dunes that rose five stories above the actual desert floor. On top of the ersatz dunes, they then built a yacht-like structure, 90 feet long and 60 feet tall; the color of weathered tree bark, it was overhung with jagged, orange polyester sails. The craft would appear in an early scene of Return of the Jedi as the hovering pleasure barge of the blubbery crime boss Jabba the Hutt and would shuttle his cadre of bounty hunters and hangers-on across the desert planet Tatooine to watch the execution of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Chewbacca. Each prisoner was to be walked off a plank into something called the "al mighty Sarlacc," a kind of belching vagina dentata in the dunes, which, it was said, would digest them over many anguishing millennia. A quarter of a century later, remnants of the set were apparently littered across the valley or buried in the sand. We would be excavating whatever authentic artifacts of that fictitious universe remained.

Can you feel it?

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Paul Reyes:

The junk left behind has fascinated me since I began working for my father ten years ago—during holidays, or between jobs, boomeranging between his home in Tampa and wherever I ended up next—tagging along with his regular crew, a pair of Puerto Rican laborers who start the day at six and call it at three. I’ve always been the crew’s weak link, both because I flinch in places that, after a year of abandonment, have become so gloriously foul, and because I can’t help but read a narrative in what has been discarded. I begin to pick, sweating nearly every item we throw away, creeping among gadgets and notes and utility bills and photographs in order to decipher who lived there and how they lost it, a life partially revealed by stuff marinating in a fetid stillness. It is a guilt-ridden literary forensics, because to confront the junk is to confront the individuality being purged from a place. My father has never been all that interested in this particular angle. He likes to keep things simple: he gets an address, the crew goes to work. Now and then I join them, but I’ve never been much good at keeping up.

Sterling Hayden:

If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change.

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

From a 1958 document entitled "A Policy on Safety Rest Areas for the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways":

Rest areas are to be provided on Interstate highways as a safety measure. Safety rest areas are off-road spaces with provisions for emergency stopping and resting by motorists for short periods. They have freeway type entrances and exit connections, parking areas, benches and tables and may have toilets and water supply where proper maintenance and supervision are assured. They may be designed for short-time picnic use in addition to parking of vehicles for short periods.

Raiders of the lost R2: Excavating a galaxy far, far away