Infoman

Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-01-02T20:05:01Z.

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Posts by Infoman

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  Infoman

  Hot tips Reasons to be cheerful

  Guardian 14 Sep 2024

  1 Nensi Dojaka x Calvin Klein

  Dojaka’s eyecatching lingeriestyled barely dresses have been worn by Zendaya and Rihanna, and this show features a collaboration with Calvin Klein. A hot ticket.

  2 Preppy gets British

  Kent & Curwen started out making Eton school ties and kit for Oxbridge sports teams. With preppy style tipped as the new streetwear, their show will attempt to position them as London’s answer to Polo Ralph Lauren.

  3 The YBAs are back

  First Oasis, now the Young British Artists. Artist Gary Hume has created the set for Burberry – badly in need of a hit after disappointing financial results – for Monday’s show at the National Theatre.

  4 Edeline Lee

  Edeline Lee’s elegant, wearable clothes have long been a favourite of successful, low-key-fashionable women – like Victoria Starmer, who has worn the Dada dress.

  5 The return of Christopher Kane

  Self-Portrait is expanding into a party-dress empire with a collection by Kane. Catnip to fashion fans.

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  2024/09/15
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  Infoman

  Good times, bad times UK fashion bounces back after bad year

  Jess Cartner-Morley

  The Guardian 14 Sep 2024

  The question at London fashion week is: do you want the good news or the bad news first? The outlook for British fashion depends where you look. At SS Daley’s show in a lightflooded Royal Academy gallery, the picture looked rosy. Harry Styles, who became Steven Stokey-Daley’s financial backer when he took a minority stake in the brand earlier this year, formed a front row power couple next to Anna Wintour, who teamed her signature shades with a stars-and-stripes Harris-Walz campaign scarf.

  The show was a hit, the audience charmed by dalmatian-printed silk separates and romantically oversized Brideshead Oxford bags. The actor Emma Corrin, watching from the front row, was already wearing one of the dresses.

  The appointment of Sarah Burton to the distinguished Paris house of Givenchy, proof that British talent still leads the fashion world, is also cause for celebration – as is the return of Christopher Kane, whose label went into administration last year, back on the scene with a one-off collection for the British brand Self-Portrait.

  A reception at No 10 on Monday promises a chance for a warmer relationship than the froideur that existed between the previous government and an industry still fuming about Brexit.

  But others see a far gloomier forecast. The recent collapse of the Matches online retailer left many independent brands out of pocket, and the wider e-commerce landscape remains shaky. Molly Goddard is among the high-profile absences from this week’s catwalk as designers lick their wounds and prepare to regroup. With headlines screaming about Broke Britain, prospects for support look decidedly slim.

  Self-Portrait is one of London fashion’s most substantial recent success stories. Its founder, Han Chong, has found a commercial sweet spot with his dresses, which look and feel designer, but at around £350 are a fraction of bigname luxury prices.

  Chong was a student at Central St Martins when Kane’s eye-popping neon-and-lace debut anointed him as London’s golden boy. “I remember feeling like his clothes marked the arrival of something truly modern,” Chong recalls.

  Harris Reed, fresh from dressing Jenna Ortega in upcycled paper at the Venice film festival, turned Tate Modern into his catwalk. A lace collar was the size of a bicycle wheel, ribbon-tied cuffs trailed to the floor, a sheer net ballgown revealed platform boots. “The more theatrical I get, the bigger the appetite,” Reed explained.

  Rejina Pyo also knows how to make a splash with shows – a 2021 spectacle at the London Aquatic Centre featured Team GB divers wearing her swimsuits – but stepped back from the catwalk two years ago. A collaboration with the British luxury brand Mulberry was enough to maintain her profile this season, with the distinctive cargostyled shoulder bags spotted on several front rows.

  Having relocated to Somerset and restructured her business, Alice Temperley is in London not to stage a show but preparing to open a new boutique. Robust demand for bespoke wedding dresses have sustained her through lean times. “We are still feeling the impact of Covid and Brexit. Those feel like such boring words to say now, but they are still very real issues.”

  Temperley now plans to build out her daywear and is introducing a digital “passport” to facilitate moving toward buying back clothes from customers, and offering an in-house pre-loved collection.

  The designer Maria Grachvogel was an early adopter of “slow fashion”, pivoting from the catwalk a decade ago in favour of small collections. “Fashion seemed to be speeding up. I felt a distinct urge to slow down. And I knew that women were wearing my pieces for years, not seasons. I do miss catwalk shows for the way they show clothes on the body,” she says.

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  2024/09/15
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  Infoman

  隨著深度學習技術的發展，AI人工智能的雙刃效應日益明顯。近日，一名來自美國北卡羅萊納州的52歲音樂人通過操控AI生成數十萬首歌曲，同時註冊1000個機器人賬號，每天在Amazon Music、Apple Music、Spotify及YouTube Music等音樂串流平台上大規模播放，平均每天串流播放達66萬次，使其在7年間狠賺1,200萬美元（約9,360萬港元）。目前，他被指控共謀電信詐騙罪等三項罪名，如罪成恐面臨20年牢獄之災。

  綜合外媒報道，52歲的Michael Smith自2017年開始縝密籌劃這項詐騙計劃。由於他本身就是音樂人，所以了解音樂串流平台發放給音樂家或創作者的版稅制度。同時，他也深知，若特定的一、兩首歌曲播放量過於集中（超過10億次以上），想通過AI機器人大量播放來賺取版稅，則將很容易被串流平台的監測系統識別。

  因此，他另闢蹊徑，於2018年開始與一家AI音樂公司合作，幫助他生成了數十萬首AI歌曲。每一首AI歌曲都被制定虛假的藝術家名稱和曲目名稱，並被分布在數千個虛擬的音樂賬號上。為避免被識別，這些AI歌曲均通過機器學習技術進行了細微調整，聼感上更加自然。

  同時，為實現大規模播放，Michael Smith還建立了一個由1000多個機器人賬號組成的網絡，分布在全球52個雲服務器上，並通過VPN相互連接。1000多個機器人賬號將每天不間斷地播放他的AI歌曲，且每首歌曲的播放量都被控制在一個相對較低的水平。

  根據美國紐約地方法院公開的文件顯示，Michael Smith的機器人網絡每天的串流播放次數平均超過66萬次。每播放一次，他就能獲得半美分的收入，意味著他每日可收穫的版稅約為3,307美元（約2.5萬港元），一個月下來收入超過9.9萬美元（約77萬港元），年度版稅費高達120萬美元（約936萬港元）。

  截至目前，Michael Smith的AI歌曲累積超過40億次播放量，收穫的版稅達到1,200萬美元（約9,360萬港元）。儘管他堅稱自己的音樂都是原創，也否認以人為方式增加流量，但仍被指控共謀電信欺詐罪、電信欺詐罪和共謀洗錢罪等三項起訴。如罪名成立，恐將面臨最高20年監禁。

  2024/09/13
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  Infoman

  ASIAN MEN GET TO BE THE HUNKS

  New York Times (International Edition) 10/9/2024

  It was not long ago that the actor and writer Joel Kim Booster began going to auditions only to quickly realize that the roles available to him as an Asian American man were severely limited.

  “It does not get better from here, no matter how many Chinese-food delivery boys you play,” he recalled being told by other Asian American actors.

  But Booster kept at it. And eventually, in 2022, he got to portray a gay Asian American man in “Fire Island,” a groundbreaking rom-com that he also wrote. “So much of that movie,” Booster said, “is just a literal transcript from my life.”

  As it turned out, things did get a little better for Asian American men in Hollywood during the decade that Booster spent toiling. And he senses that the momentum has continued in the two years since “Fire Island” debuted.

  Many of the newest Asian and Asian American stories seem unconcerned with “the white gaze,” he said. And so “the conversation has sort of moved on for a lot of people,” he said, adding that his movie “almost feels a little retrograde now.”

  Indeed, since the 2018 blockbuster “Crazy Rich Asians” became a box-office hit, Asian and Asian American stories and characters have proliferated in American pop culture. And after decades of degrading, often emasculating portrayals, Asian and Asian American men like Booster have been at the center of the new work, often playing the sort of hunky hero parts that Hollywood long kept out of reach.

  The year “Crazy Rich Asians” premiered, HBO’s “Insecure” introduced Alexander Hodge as the romantic interest known as “Asian Bae.” The next year Randall Park co-starred with Ali Wong in “Always Be My Maybe,” which Park and Wong co-wrote with Michael Golamco. And in 2021, Jimmy O. Yang starred in a Christmas rom-com, “Love Hard.”

  Asian American men like Booster and Park have seized the moment to work behind the scenes, too. Park directed “Shortcomings,” a 2023 film that stars Justin H. Min as an angsty, flawed Asian American protagonist. And Sean Wang’s coming-of-age film, “Dìdi,” premiered this summer, offering a look at what it was like to grow up Asian American in the early days of social media amid California skateboard culture.

  Waves of representation can be cyclical, and those who study film and TV are quick to point out that representation is still lacking and that many of the characters who do manage to make it onscreen are often still marginalized in frustrating ways.

  But as the number of Asian Americans has risen across the United States and audiences have shown an appetite for their stories, many actors, writers and directors say it is clear that roles for Asian American men have evolved, and the smattering of new, more nuanced parts is helping to propel a shift in how Asian American men are perceived.

  “All of us want to push that narrative of Asian males being more desirable,” said Manny Jacinto, who got his break playing a hot but dumb himbo on NBC’s “The Good Place” and is gearing up to star as Lindsay Lohan’s husband in a “Freaky Friday” sequel after a stint in “The Acolyte” as a Star Wars Sith Lord.

  “And the thing is,” he continued, “those opportunities aren’t really being given to us. So it’s very much up to us to create them.”

  A RACIST HISTORY

  Many 20th-century depictions of Asian American men in American cinema were stereotypical at best: the Chinese supervillain Fu Manchu; Long Duk Dong, a socially maladjusted foreign exchange student in “Sixteen Candles” who enters scenes to the sound of a gong; and bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” played by Mickey Rooney with a wildly over-the-top accent.

  Even the virtuous early Asian and Asian American heroes — the Bruce Lees, Jackie Chans and Pat Moritas of the film world — were lauded for their martial arts but largely seen as asexual.

  (Asian women in Hollywood have frequently encountered the opposite problem: hyper sexualization, fetishization and objectification. One celebrated pioneer, Anna May Wong, began her ascent to global fame as early as the 1920s, breaking out in “The Thief of Bagdad” and starring in films like “Shanghai Express.”)

  South Asian men, meantime, were often slotted as terrorists, taxi drivers or caricatures of effeminate mama’s boys: “Either the most dangerous or the least dangerous thing,” the actor Kumail Nanjiani said. “Nothing in between.”

  Over the years, this lack of meaningful representation took a toll on many Asian American men.

  “‘I’m not into Asian guys’ — I heard that a ton of times when I was single,” Park said. “What can you say to that? It’s like, ‘OK, that’s your preference.’ But if you really dwell on it, there are a lot of things that go into that worldview. And I do think the images we see play into it.”

  That is part of the reason some actors, writers and directors have pushed to show audiences different sides of themselves — and to present different ideas about what an Asian American man can be.

  Nanjiani, for instance, became a superhero. He was featured in the 2021 Marvel blockbuster “Eternals” at the same time that Simu Liu was starring in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” (Though, notably, neither of their characters has a love interest.)

  Nanjiani said he “didn’t want the first brown superhero to also be the first nerdy superhero.”

  “I wanted to look like someone who could take on Thor and Captain America,” added Nanjiani, who reshaped his body, adding significant muscle for the part. “I wanted this guy to be like a playboy, you know? I kind of wanted him to be like a brown Iron Man or Batman.”

  NO ‘GRAND STATEMENTS’

  Many of the Asian American actors cast in leading romantic roles in recent years emphasized that they did not seek them specifically to counter dated tropes. Instead, they said, it is worth studying smaller, more subtle creative choices in the films and series they have been a part of because it is there that the shifts in representation may be most visible.

  Park winds up with Wong in “Always Be My Maybe” even though he plays the average-Joe best friend and is competing for Wong’s affection with Daniel Dae Kim, in the role of the rich heartthrob, and Keanu Reeves, playing a parody version of himself.

  “The goal was to tell a great love story, not to think too hard about countering any specific stereotype or making any kind of grand statement about Asian American identity,” Park said.

  Min recently starred as a romantic lead in “The Greatest Hits” opposite Lucy Boynton and said his character was not specifically written as Asian. Once it was decided the character would be Korean American, “it didn’t require a scene where, like, he’s suddenly eating kimchi jjigae with his parents,” Min said.

  And in the Christmas rom-com “Love Hard,” Yang’s character, Josh Lin, gets his happy ending after initially trying to catfish his love interest.

  Lin, Yang said, is “a really good man who ends up getting the girl. And I think that’s very romantic.”

  IMPERFECTIONS ON DISPLAY

  Some of what Asian actors and writers have sought to portray about themselves and their romantic lives when given the chance is complicated — and intentionally unflattering.

  Booster said he was confident and sexually active until he graduated college and downloaded Grindr, where he quickly discovered that as an Asian man, he was unwanted.

  “It taught me to hate myself in a way I never even realized I was supposed to before,” he said of the racism he encountered. “I had no idea I was undesirable until I moved to a major city and was exposed to a gay community like that.”

  He baked that experience and others into “Fire Island,” which he then starred in alongside Bowen Yang, a “Saturday Night Live” favorite.

  Wang’s new film, “Dìdi,” similarly works to reflect aspects of his own life growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2000s.

  The protagonist, Chris, is told he’s “pretty cute for an Asian” by his crush. A squirrel is shown telling Chris that no one loves him.

  And after he is labeled “Asian Chris” by new skateboarding friends he is trying to impress, he insists to those friends that he is actually half Asian, which they later discover is a lie.

  “Girls would say to me, ‘Oh, you’re the cutest Asian I know,’” Wang said. “When I was 13, I really wore that as a badge of honor. They meant it as a compliment. No one was trying to be subtly racist.”

  “But when you’re 13,” he added, “you just internalize all of that.”

  UNEVEN PROGRESS

  Actors and scholars agree that it will take a lot more than a few years of improved Asian American storytelling to erase a century of poor portrayals. Some acknowledged that progress is usually followed by regression.

  Although “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won the best picture Oscar in 2023, a year that also introduced shows like “Beef” and movies like “Joy Ride,” 2024 has offered relatively little beyond “Dìdi,” which debuted in late July.

  Gedde Watanabe has seen a lot of these sort of stops and starts in the 40 years since he played Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles.” He knows that movies wield power, and he wonders what would have happened if he had more power on set back in the 1980s. How might he have addressed the gong, the accent and the use of the word “Chinaman”?

  But for all of his character’s flaws, Watanabe insists that Long Duk Dong did reflect some important aspects of reality.

  “He wanted a girlfriend, he wanted to fit in,” Watanabe said.

  “Those are things that, universally, I can understand.”

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  2024/09/10
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  Infoman

  Facial recognitionThe Economist (UK) 07/9/2024

  BRITONS SPEND large chunks of their lives on camera. The country has up to 6m closed-circuit television ( CCTV) cameras—one for every 11 people in the country, the third-highest penetration rate in the world after America and China. To help identify rioters in the wake of violent protests that swept parts of the country in early August, police officers are collecting footage from mosques and shops that were vandalised. Some are releasing CCTV footage to the public to identify suspects. Others are using another technology to get the job done—facial recognition.

  Facial-recognition systems use artificial intelligence ( AI) to match images to identities. Retrospective facial recognition of the sort being used to pursue rioters compares CCTV footage with suspects; real-time use involves live images being compared with the faces of people who have been placed on “watch lists”. The technology was used during King Charles’s coronation in 2023. Last year the South Wales Police scanned the faces of more than 819,000 people. In Haringey in north London, around 133 facial scans are performed every minute.

  Surveys suggest that Britons accept the arguments for facial recognition. A poll taken in March by the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security and the Alan Turing Institute found that 60% of Britons are comfortable with the police’s use of the technology in real time to identify criminals in a crowd. That share is likely to have risen as a result of the riots. Scouring images to find troublemakers takes a lot longer if only humans are involved. The South Wales police force identifies 200 suspects every month using the technology; without facial recognition it takes 14 days on average to find a suspect. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has pledged to increase use of the technology in response to the disorder this summer.

  That adds urgency to questions about how it is regulated. The Investigatory Powers Act, which regulates some forms of surveillance, was recently amended to allow government agencies to use AI to process data sets when there is “no expectation of privacy”. But Karen Yeung, a professor of law at Birmingham University, points out that there is no legislation specifically covering facial recognition. “Police forces are guided by a complex patchwork of regulation, which in effect means there is little oversight on the use of the technology.”

  There is, for example, no clear criterion determining when facial recognition can be deployed; instead decisions are left to the discretion of each police force. The College of Policing, a professional body, offers guidance on who can be placed on watch lists before deploying live facial recognition, but the categories can be very broad. The Justice and Home Affairs Committee called in January for watch lists to be subject to uniform standards across police forces. Other jurisdictions have much more stringent rules. Under the EU’s AI Act, for example, the use of real-time facial recognition is allowed only when it is approved by a judge.

  There is no central register of AI technologies in Britain, either. Public bodies and all 43 police forces in England and Wales are free to employ any AI tools they like, making it impossible to know where and how they are being used. Critics argue that this lack of transparency could lead, among other things, to discrimination— some systems are better at recognising white faces, which may mean more false identifications of non-white individuals.

  Use of the technology will almost certainly spread further. Sir Mark Rowley, the Met’s commissioner, believes that facial recognition will transform policing “in the way that DNA transformed investigative work 30 years ago”. But Fraser Sampson, the last surveillance-camera commissioner (the post has now been abolished and some of its responsibilities shared out among various government departments), argues that the lack of regulation could lead to a backlash against the technology. The survey in March also found that only 19% of Britons trust police forces to use biometric tools “responsibly”. A clearer regulatory framework would probably help build confidence. ■

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  2024/09/07
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  Infoman

  Grenfell TowerThe Economist (UK) 07/9/2024

  THE WORST thing that can be said of a public inquiry is that it is a whitewash. Perhaps it is too narrow, too rushed or too gentle. None of which can fairly be said of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s final report into the fire that tore through Grenfell Tower in London in 2017, killing 72 people. The report was released on September 4th, seven years after the fire. It is almost 1,700 pages long (a preliminary report, released in 2019, was 850 pages long) and casts blame in every direction.

  Grenfell burned rapidly because of its exterior cladding, which was added during renovations in the mid-2010s. Sir Martin, a retired judge, concludes that some of the cladding manufacturers engaged in “systematic dishonesty”. The report finds that one firm, Arconic, possessed test data showing that a type of panel could react dangerously to fire, yet continued to tell the market that it was classified as safe. An insulation firm, Celotex, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers”, submitting materials for testing that contained additional fire-resistant boards. Fire had spread through cladding on other buildings before 2017. After one tower in London caught fire in 2009, killing six people, some of its panels were tested. They burned so fiercely, while dripping flaming debris, that the testing outfit feared for its equipment. Yet regulations stayed lax. Architects and contractors assumed it was someone else’s responsibility to ensure that panels were safe.

  In the background, while fateful decisions were being made to clad Grenfell Tower in dangerous materials, were Conservative-led governments. The report suggests they made matters worse. Cuts to local-authority budgets left the inspector responsible for Grenfell Tower overseeing up to 130 projects. A national deregulation drive made civil servants loth to propose new safety measures. Sir Martin points to “a serious failure of leadership” in the housing department.

  As for the London Fire Brigade, it was complacent and poorly led. It failed to plan for a large fire in a tower block or to prepare for the many phone calls that would result. In 2017 the control room was overwhelmed. Some call handlers told people that the fire was far away when it was not. One resident, who said the smoke was so thick that “you could not see a hand in front of ya”, was not told to leave.

  Among other recommendations, Sir Martin says that Britain should create an independent construction regulator, reporting to a single department. A professional body should be created for fire engineers; at present, the title means little. A College of Fire and Rescue should be built—something the government has said it wants. Firefighters ought to use high-powered radios more often, to avoid the cutouts that occurred during the Grenfell Tower blaze.

  Some survivors of the fire have welcomed the report and look forward to prosecutions. But it has been a long time in coming partly because it blames so many people. The inquiry’s solicitors informed 247 people and organisations of the criticisms that would be made of them and then dealt with their responses—a process that “took much longer than had been expected”. That may have reduced the report’s potency.

  In the past seven years the architecture firm that worked on the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower has closed; people have changed jobs; politicians have come and gone. It is easier for everyone to say that faults have already been fixed. This is a known drawback of slow inquiries. Soon after the Grenfell fire, the Institute for Government, a think-tank, argued that the “window of opportunity for change” tends to close as systems and institutions move on after a disaster. And Sir Martin’s report is too hefty to be widely read.

  British public inquiries were not always so exhaustive. In May 1968 one corner of Ronan Point, a new tower block in London, collapsed. An inquiry began the following day and concluded six months later. The report was just 82 pages long. It avoided casting blame, arguing it was more important “that the eyes of all may be opened in the future”. The investigation led to stricter building codes in Britain and other countries and ended the era of rapidly built, prefabricated towers.

  Still, the country now seems committed to slow, excoriating public inquiries. The office building in west London where the Grenfell Tower hearings took place is busy again, with a wide-ranging investigation into how Britain dealt with the covid-19 pandemic. That might take even longer. ■

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  2024/09/07
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  Infoman

  Uk Teacher shortages

  Economist (UK) 07/9/2024

  ACROSS BRITAIN around 10m schoolaged children are returning to classrooms following the summer break. They may have no choice, but the people who teach them do. Many of them are turning away from the profession.

  In state-funded secondary schools, where the problem of teacher shortages is most acute, the pupil-teacher ratio has increased over the past 14 years from 14.8 to 16.8. The number of teaching assistants in classrooms has also declined since 2010. The problem appears to be worsening. A census of teachers in England last year (education is a devolved matter) found that vacant positions have gone from an average of 1,150 in the four years before the covid-19 pandemic to 2,800 in 2023.

  Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, listed teacher recruitment as one of his six “first steps for change” in the Labour Party’s election manifesto. The government promises to recruit 6,500 secondary-school teachers in England, “paid for” by putting VAT on private-school fees. That would increase teacher headcount by 3% and push the pupil-teacher ratio down to a six-year low. But hiring more teachers is one thing; keeping them, another.

  Over the past two years some 36,200 working-age secondary-school teachers quit the profession, the highest rate since records began in 2010. One in ten newly qualified teachers ( NQTs) quit within 12 months of starting to teach and one-third leave within five years. Some 36% of stateschool teachers were contemplating leaving in 2023—up from 25% the previous year. They cited workload, stress and low pay as their principal motivations.

  NQTs’ salaries were raised to £30,000 ($39,400) last year, and will increase by 5.5% this month. But teachers will still be paid less in real terms than in 2010 (see chart) and less than many of their peers in other rich countries. On average teachers work six hours longer each week than other graduates during term time, although holiday and pension benefits are more generous. Teachers have had to tackle a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour after covid-19 lockdowns: suspensions have doubled compared with the pre-pandemic average. And flexible working, one of the principal benefits of the pandemic, has passed teachers by: schooling children remains an in-person job.

  Money can overcome some issues. Indemand teachers in deprived areas can receive extra payments of £6,000 in their first years of teaching; policymakers want these to be more widespread. Bursaries can help recruit teachers in subjects with particular shortages. Student teachers in maths, computing and the sciences have received a tax-free upfront payment, now worth £28,000, during training. (Though, as Beng Huat See, a professor of education at the University of Birmingham, notes, in recent years about half of domestic maths graduates would have had to go into teaching to fill the government’s principal training quota for the subject.)

  But public finances are stretched, and bursaries do not tackle the problem of retention. So the government is also thinking about other ways to make teaching more attractive. Bridget Phillipson, the new secretary of state for education, told Parliament in July that teachers will now be able to do lesson preparation and planning at home. In August her department announced that it is creating a “content bank” of teaching resources that technology companies can use to train their AI models. In time teachers will be able to use these nationally approved AI models for lesson preparation. The school-inspection regime is also being revisited to make it less pressurised. Following the suicide in 2023 of a headmistress whose school had been judged “inadequate”, the government on September 2nd scrapped the system whereby inspectors summarise schools’ overall performance in a single word.

  Demography may have the biggest effect. A “bulge” of children working its way through the system is expected to see secondary-school pupil numbers peak in 2027 and then decline steadily. That will reduce classroom sizes and make teaching, on the margins, a bit easier. But a shortage of children will bring with it an entirely different set of problems. ■

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  2024/09/07
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  Infoman

  After BrexitThe Economist (UK) 07/9/2024

  FEW TOPICS in British politics cause quite such a shudder as Brexit. The subject of Britain’s relationship with the European Union is polarising, jargon-ridden and, after years of upheaval, rather repetitive. No wonder it barely featured in the recent general-election campaign. But Brexit also matters greatly. The Labour Party won power in July pledging to cure the country’s economic malady. Any diagnosis of lagging growth that omits Brexit is bound to be incomplete.

  Slapping a number on the cost of Brexit is tough: there is no easy counterfactual. Worse, Britain formally left the EU in January 2021, while covid-19 lockdowns were still warping economic data. Economists’ best stab uses a “Doppelgänger” model to approximate no-Brexit Britain to a weighted average of countries that performed similarly before 2016. That usually lands on a one-off hit to GDP from Brexit of 5%, which is also near the rough 4% assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Britain’s fiscal watchdog. That figure may well be a little high. Compared with its closest peers, Britain’s growth since 2016 has been shabby but not uniquely disastrous: better than Germany but worse than France and much worse than the Netherlands or Switzerland (see chart on next page). Many countries with similar pre-2016 records to Britain outperformed it afterwards for unrelated reasons: America was supercharged by fiscal expansion; Canada and Australia rode a post-covid commodity boom. But even a more cautious estimate, of around 2-3% of GDP, would make Brexit one of the rich world’s worst economic blunders.

  Where is the pain concentrated? The earliest symptoms were in business investment, which flatlined in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Investment didn’t start picking back up until 2023, and is still running well below its historical trend. Trade took a hit once Britain formally left the EU, choked by customs checks and regulatory hurdles. Trade intensity— exports plus imports as a share of GDP— has lagged other rich countries, mainly because goods trade fell. In the short term, weak trade stifles exporters and lowers choice for consumers. Over a longer timescale, productivity flags as domestic firms are shielded from foreign rivals and cut out of the European market.

  The Brexit camp hoped to offset lost EU trade with gains elsewhere. That was always a stretch: the EU covers nearly half of Britain’s trade. So far, the takings are meagre. Talks with America have stalled. The few new deals Britain has struck are on the other side of the world: with Australia, New Zealand and the CPTPP, a Pacific trade bloc. Dulling the impact of Brexit is a much easier way of boosting growth.

  Sir Keir Starmer, shaken by Labour’s drubbing in the 2019 election, when Boris Johnson won a big victory on the promise of getting Brexit done, has ruled out the most dramatic sorts of rapprochement: entering a customs union or rejoining the single market. In fairness, so quick a reversal might leave the EU a little perplexed, too.

  Something that Sir Keir has committed to is smoothing out border checks on food with a sanitary and phytosanitary ( SPS) deal. Farming doesn’t make up much of the British economy but has been hit especially hard by Brexit. On the import side, pulling down supermarket prices would be a welcome boost for households. And an SPS deal would usefully force the government to confront the broader trade-offs that it faces in approaching the EU.

  The Conservatives mistakenly chose to maximise Britain’s theoretical ability to diverge from European regulation, despite the economic cost. But in reality Britain has barely diverged at all on food, aside from loosening rules on genetically modified crops. For a fully seamless food border, Britain will need to insert European rules into domestic law and accept oversight from the European Court of Justice. An alternative might look like the EU’s arrangement with New Zealand, where a lower degree of regulatory alignment translates to less free-flowing trade. For Britain, that is a worse deal and probably an unattainable one anyway. New Zealand is a far-off market whose shipments arrive in easy-to-monitor batches; Britain is not.

  SPS is one instance of “dynamic alignment”: reducing trade barriers by opting in to select EU rules. Aslak Berg of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, notes that even under the Tories Britain aligned with the EU in a handful of areas where fully independent regulation wasn’t practical, like conformity assessments ( CE markings). One path forward could be to broaden that approach out to other industries like chemicals or pharmaceuticals.

  The trouble is that the EU dislikes the idea of Britain “cherry-picking” bits of the single market. Another EU worry is about future governments backtracking. The Conservatives are stuck in a messy leadership race but are already gaining in the polls. Why grant a deal that a new government might trash? One helpful model may be Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas ( DCFTAs), which the EU uses to deal with countries with shakier political institutions like Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. These are more flexible than a static deal: the EU monitors regulatory alignment and dials up or down the intensity of border checks accordingly.

  Plenty of other more minor deals with the EU could also help a little: visas for touring musicians, linking emissions-trading schemes, data roaming and so on. An agreement on youth mobility—letting Europeans in their 20s move to Britain, and vice versa—would be more useful still. Incomers would either work or pay fees to study, would almost certainly lack dependants and would head back home again well before any risk of becoming a drain on the exchequer. Young Britons would benefit in turn from opportunities to live and work in Europe. Britain already has similar deals with Australia, Canada, South Korea and others. Sir Keir has so far rejected this option; that may be a negotiating ploy.

  Where things might go after that is unclear. Sir Keir has not articulated a vision for where he wants the relationship to settle. Taking time to watch the EU’s trajectory is no bad thing: enlargement deals with Ukraine and others may widen the range of integration models. But a more serious conversation about deeper alignment, including single-market and customs-union membership, cannot be skirted forever. Public opinion on Brexit has soured: a clear majority of Britons consider it a mistake. Few are keen to reopen the issue of EU membership but that may shift as post-referendum trauma fades (see Bagehot). One lesson of the Brexit vote is that elites cannot ignore public discontent indefinitely. Give it enough time and Brexiteers may find the shoe on the other foot. ■

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  2024/09/07
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  Infoman

  Why is Starmer so timid on Europe?The Economist (UK)

  07/9/2024

  The yawning gap in the Labour government’s approach to Europe:

  SIR KEIR STARMER, Britain’s prime minister, says that he has a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to turn the corner on Brexit. He is right. He was propelled to power in July by a largely pro-European electoral coalition. The leading lights of the Brexit era—Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Sir Jacob ReesMogg—are figures of the past. And Britons themselves show plenty of signs of regret for the decision made in 2016. A clear majority of them now consider it a mistake.

  Closer relations with Europe would also serve the Labour government’s priority: growth. Working out how big an economic hit Brexit has inflicted is hard, but the damage has been substantial. Investment has suffered, trade has stuttered. The stifling of competition from abroad risks sapping productivity for years to come (see Britain section).

  But opportunities can be wasted as well as seized. Sir Keir has spent the summer meeting leaders from the European Union and pursuing the Sally Rooney school of diplomacy: normal people having conversations with friends. That is a necessary first step. But he will need to do a lot more than that.

  One problem stands out. The Brexit saga turned the relationship with Europe into a test of ideology. Compromise was portrayed as betrayal, sovereignty became a shibboleth. After Theresa May specified her hard-line negotiating priorities, one commentator wrote in 2017: “Those red lines swept the customs union and single market off the table, along with any future role for the European Court of Justice. This was always an extreme interpretation of the referendum.”

  That commentator was—you guessed it—Sir Keir. Yet seven years on, he and his government appear trapped by the lexicon and mindset of the post-2016 years. He has outlined some sensible, but piecemeal, objectives: fewer checks for farm products and more co-operation in foreign policy and defence. But he has needlessly drawn red lines of his own. In the campaign Sir Keir said that Britain would not go into the single market or the customs union in his lifetime. He has been disdainful of European overtures for a youth-mobility agreement, although that would supply the economy with young, dependant-free workers and open doors abroad to young Britons.

  Missing is any attempt to reframe the relationship. That does not mean trying to rejoin the EU: the one thing Brexit did mean was that Britain would leave the bloc. But the result left plenty of room to make the case for closer economic integration and regulatory alignment than exists today. Sir Keir can aim for more defence-industry co-operation, say, without having to pick a specific model, such as the customs union.

  Sir Keir has some good arguments. One is that nothing matters more than growth, which alone makes closer ties with Britain’s largest trading partner essential. Another is that trying to resist the EU’s power to set regulatory norms is often quixotic and costly. Tory governments wasted time trying to promote a British rival to the “CE” product-certification mark stamped on toasters and toys. They failed. Integration is not a zero-sum game, despite what negotiators on all sides tend to say. By allowing youth mobility to be presented as a European “demand”, Sir Keir has made something that would be good for Britain seem like a concession.

  Caution comes naturally to him. At some level, it is understandable: saying little on Brexit did not stop him getting into office. But public opinion on the EU is not rigid. Polls suggest a big majority of voters are receptive to common-sense forms of co-operation. He has the rare political capital that comes with a landslide election victory, and the chance to set out a new rationale for Britain’s relationship with the EU in the national interest. If Sir Keir and his government are too timid and unambitious to argue their case on an easy issue like Europe, they will struggle with everything else. ■

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  2024/09/07
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  Infoman

  中國人就係被困在魚缸中散沙

  西方社會係精緻機械，外貌好似好亂，不過內部運作井然有序，所以中間勢力係公民社會最有價值的結構，支撐著整個社會運作，社會不會因為政府失效而產生種種問題

  中國不是沒有中間層，而是中間太弱小，強干弱支，發揮唔到作用

  香港現在開始消滅中間階層，如果沒有替代者，將來會付出沉重代價

  在ai 及互聯網年代，如果有新的中間替代方案，包括所有專業服務，例如金融，銀行，會計，法律等，將會係中長期一條康莊大道

  2024/09/03
• 
  

  Infoman

  An experiment in lust, regret and kissing

  C. Sittenfeld

  The New York Times (International Edition) 02 Sep 2024

  I challenged ChatGPT to a beach read writing contest. Here are the results.

  This summer, I agreed to a literary experiment with Times Opinion: What is the difference between a story written by a human and a story written by artificial intelligence?

  We decided to hold a contest between ChatGPT and me, to see who could write — or “write” — a better beach read. I thought going head-tohead with the machine would give us real answers about what A.I. is and isn’t currently capable of and, of course, how big a threat it is to human writers. And if you’ve wondered, as I have, what exactly makes something a beach read — frothy themes or sand under your feet? — we set out to get to the bottom of that, too.

  First, we asked readers to vote on which themes they wanted in their ideal beach read. We also included some options that are staples of my fiction, including privilege, self-consciousness and ambivalence. ChatGPT and I would then work using the top vote-getters.

  Lust, regret and kissing won, in that order. Readers also wrote in suggestions. They wanted beach reads about naps and redemption and tattoos gone wrong; puppies and sharks and secrets and white linen caftans; margaritas and roller coasters and mosquitoes; yearning and bonfires and women serious about their vocations. At least 10 readers suggested variations on making the characters middle-aged. One reader wrote, “We tend to equate summer with kids,” and suggested I explore “Why does summer still feel special for older people?”

  So I added middle-age and another write-in, flip-flops — because it seemed fun, easy and, yes, summery — to the list and got to work on a 1,000-word story.

  My editor fed ChatGPT the same prompts I was writing from and asked it to write a story of the same length “in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld.” (I’m one of the many fiction writers whose novels were used, without my permission and without my being compensated, to train ChatGPT. Groups of fiction writers, including people I’m friends with, have sued OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of copyrighted work.)

  Readers made it clear, with their votes and suggestions, that a beach read is more than just a story you happen to read at the beach; it’s a vibe. As for the results of the contest — which one was the better story — I invite you to be the judge. Here are my story and ChatGPT’s. Read to the end to find out which is which.

  You probably can see where this is going

  When my flight from LaGuardia landed in Minneapolis on that August afternoon, the first text I received was from the executive director of the nonprofit I’d be holding the training for the next day, canceling our dinner because of a family emergency. The second text was from my friend Jenny asking me to look at the profile of a guy named James on the dating app we both used and to let her know if it was the same askednot-one-question James I’d gone out with around Christmas. That date had felt like such a waste of an evening that I’d given myself a break from the app since.

  By the time the seatbelt light had gone off, I’d texted Jenny to tell her it wasn’t, and I’d received a heart on the app from a man who was currently online, whose handle was MtnBiker1971. He was 53, a year younger than me; he had deep brown eyes and was bald with a gray and brown beard; and three of his five photos featured him on a bike. I swear, I swear, that MtnBiker1971 and I already had exchanged generic greetings before it occurred to me that because my settings showed profiles within 10 miles of me, he was local.

  “Oh sorry!” I typed. “Just realized you live in Minnesota and I’m only visiting for 36 hrs.”

  Before I could send this, a new message came in from him: “What’s your favorite fruit that’s considered a vegetable and what’s your best episode of TV ever?”

  So I deleted “Oh sorry ... ” and typed “Okra and the season finale of Severance. You?”

  Can you see where this is going? You probably can see where this is going.

  By the time I was in an Uber, he’d told me his name was Brian, he worked for an environmental advocacy group, and the previous weekend, on a trail, he’d ridden his bike past a woodpecker sitting on the back of a deer; he’d been so close that he and the deer had made eye contact.

  I typed, “Just to clarify, you did or didn’t also make eye contact with the woodpecker?”

  “Sadly no,” he replied. “Next time?” By the time I’d entered my hotel room, he’d written, “I don’t usually suggest it this quickly but want to grab a drink tonight?”

  So far, I’d answered no question untruthfully. When he’d said he lived in Saint Paul, I’d typed, “I’m currently in downtown Minneapolis.” I hesitated for a few seconds then typed, “I’m free tonight.”

  THE UBER LET ME OUT about a hundred feet from Lake Como, and I walked toward the pavilion. A band Brian liked was performing at 7, and when I’d admitted I’d never been to Como Park, he’d replied, “You’re not one of those Minneapolis people with a superiority complex over St Paul, are you?” I’d written, “Nope, my superiority complex is for totally different reasons.”

  Outside the pavilion’s restaurant, I spotted a bearded bald guy; he wore a blue T-shirt, jeans and flip flops. From a few feet away, I said, “Brian?” and he raised his eyebrows and said, “Cassie?”

  “Should we hug?” I asked, and he smiled such a warm and since-reseeming smile that even though I’d been on far too many mediocre dates for extravagant optimism, I was gripped by extravagant optimism. “Yes,” he said. “We should.” We stepped into each other’s arms.

  On line for beers, I felt as if I were on a reality show about middle-aged Manhattan women who travel to Minnesota to go on dates with hot outdoorsy middle-aged men. Then we carried our drinks outside — I rarely drank beer, but it seemed Midwestern — and all the picnic tables were full so we walked along the lake until we found an empty bench. It was 70 degrees, the sunlight was golden, and the trees were lushly green; why didn’t I live in Minnesota?

  We discussed where we’d grown up (me in D.C., him in Duluth), our jobs (I refrained from mentioning my employer’s location) and our first marriages (his had lasted 13 years, mine 21). When he casually asked, “And what year did you move here?” I hesitated before blurting out, “2019.”

  I really almost never lied, in life or on dates, and I deeply regretted the necessity.

  Both to change the subject and because it was true, I gestured toward the multiple pedal boats out on the lake, whose prows were shaped like the heads of swans, and said, “Is it cheesy to say I love those?”

  “It’s cheesy,” he said, “but in a good way.” He glanced at his watch. “The band is starting, though.”

  The band! It turned out to be a David Bowie cover band, a fact I’d hardly paid attention to amid the spontaneity, excitement and growing deceit. As we entered the upper level of the pavilion, I could hear the opening notes of “Golden Years,” and I saw six people onstage, the lead singer a woman with long blond hair wearing a baby blue suit and a white tie. The pavilion was packed with people of all ages, some already dancing by the stage and others sitting on rickety benches and folding lawn chairs.

  As “Golden Years” segued into “Changes,” Brian angled his head toward the dance floor, and I nodded. As I learned over the next several songs, he was proficient in his headbobbing and sidestepping without trying too hard or too little, which was probably the best I could hope anyone would say about me. Then I was dancing with two octogenarian women wearing button down shirts, fanny packs and Tevas; then with an androgynous aqua-haired 20-something who wore a cropped black tank top and showed abundant armpit hair whenever they threw their arms up; then with two little girls and their dad. Whenever I turned away from the band, I could see the sun setting over the lake.

  By the last song, the sun was down. After the final applause, as the crowd dispersed, Brian said, “Swan boat time?”

  The boat rental did not, apparently, stop at dark; the boats could be illuminated, so that the swans glowed, and their glowing reflections were mirrored in the water. When we were in the middle of the lake, I said, “I feel like I’m inside a fairy tale.”

  “Yeah?” Brian turned his head to look at me. “Which one?”

  If I turned my head, I knew we’d kiss. “I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said, and I turned my head toward him.

  HE OFFERED TO DRIVE ME HOME, but of course I declined. We made out more as we waited for my Uber, though, and when it arrived, he said, “I’d love to see you again.”

  “Same,” I said.

  From the car, I texted Jenny: “This is so weird but I just had a perfect first date.”

  Ten seconds later, my phone rang. “Perfect how?”

  “I went out with him impulsively, as a lark, then I accidentally really liked him. He was great and we drank beer and danced sweatily. But I never told him I’m just in town for work, so now I ghost him, right? Because even though ghosting is horrible, what else am I supposed to do? Retroactively ruin things?”

  When Jenny sighed, the sigh was somehow affectionate. “If you ghost him,” she said, “it’s definitely the end. But if you tell him the truth, maybe it’s the beginning.”

  The flip-flop moment

  Lydia had always been practical. It was her hallmark, the trait that kept her life organized in neat rows, like the files on her desk or the cushions on her sofa. At 48, this practicality had become her armor, protecting her from the reckless impulses that she might have indulged in during her younger years. And so, when she walked into the coffee shop on that sweltering July afternoon, it was with the same cautious optimism that she had applied to everything else in her life.

  The coffee shop was called Java Junction, an ironic nod to its nondescript location. It was where she met her friends for book club, where she studied with her son while he was in high school and where she’d spent countless hours with her late husband. That was the first thing she’d felt when she entered, the lingering echo of shared memories. She was here for a meeting with her college friend, Julie, and Julie was late, which gave Lydia plenty of time to observe.

  She sat at a small table near the window, which was always Lydia’s favorite spot. The sunlight spilled over the table, creating a halo around her as she skimmed through a magazine, her flip-flops occasionally brushing the edge of the table. She had never been one for extravagant shoes — practical, again. But on that day, the flip-flops seemed to betray a different side of her, a side that wanted to feel something more, something less anchored.

  Julie arrived, panting slightly from the heat. She was a whirlwind of energy, always dressed in vibrant colors and speaking in rapid bursts. The two friends embraced, and Lydia noticed how the decades had changed them both — Julie still had that unfiltered joy, while Lydia felt a certain grayness to her own existence.

  They talked about their lives — Julie’s recent move to a beach town and Lydia’s endless workdays, the responsibilities of being a single mother, the growing distance from her teenage son. They laughed about old times and reminisced about their college days, and for a moment, Lydia felt something she hadn’t in a while: a spark of connection, of vitality.

  As they chatted, Lydia noticed a man sitting alone at a nearby table. He was tall, with an easy smile and eyes that seemed to dance with mischief. He wore a pair of flip-flops — practical, but worn with a casual confidence. Lydia couldn’t help but glance at him every now and then, her gaze lingering longer than she intended.

  Julie, ever observant, caught Lydia’s eyes darting toward the man and laughed. “You’ve got that look, Lydia.”

  Lydia flushed slightly, but tried to play it off. “What look?”

  “You know, the look of someone who’s thinking about doing something impulsive. Go talk to him.”

  Lydia shook her head, though her curiosity was piqued. “I don’t think so.”

  But the man, sensing perhaps that he was being observed, caught Lydia’s eye and smiled. It was a warm, inviting smile, and Lydia felt a flutter in her chest. She looked away quickly, pretending to examine her coffee cup,

  but she could feel the heat rising in her cheeks.

  Julie, however, had no such qualms. “What’s the worst that could happen? You go over, say hello, and if it’s awkward, you just come back. It’s not like you’re trying to get married.”

  Lydia hesitated, her mind a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she felt the tug of familiarity and routine. On the other, she felt the irresistible pull of something unknown, something that reminded her of her own lost desires.

  “Fine,” she said, laughing nervously. “I’ll do it.”

  Julie’s grin widened as Lydia stood up, her flip-flops slapping against the floor with each step. She approached the man, her heart pounding in her ears.

  “Excuse me,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “I hope you don’t mind me bothering you, but I couldn’t help but notice your flip-flops. They’re kind of . . . carefree.”

  The man looked up, his eyes twinkling. “I suppose they are. I’m David, by the way.”

  “I’m Lydia,” she said, extending her hand, which David took with a warm, firm grip.

  They talked, the conversation flowing easily. David was charming and engaging, with a disarming honesty that Lydia found refreshing. They spoke about their lives, their interests and the little quirks that made them unique. For a while, Lydia forgot about her practical life and lost herself in the moment.

  It was only when the conversation began to dwindle and David suggested they meet again that Lydia felt a pang of regret. She was in her 40s, a mother, a widow. What was she doing, flirting with a stranger in a coffee shop?

  “Maybe,” Lydia said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I should get back to my friend.”

  David looked disappointed but smiled. “Of course. It was lovely meeting you, Lydia.”

  As Lydia walked back to her table, she glanced over her shoulder to see David watching her, a hopeful expression on his face. Julie looked up at her, eyes twinkling with mischief.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Julie asked.

  Lydia smiled weakly. “No, it wasn’t.” But the encounter had stirred something within her — a mix of excitement and apprehension. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been on the brink of something, something that might have changed her life. And as she left the coffee shop later, her flipflops felt unusually heavy, as though they were holding her back from taking a step into the unknown.

  The days that followed were filled with a mix of longing and regret. Lydia found herself thinking about David more often than she cared to admit, replaying their conversation, analyzing every detail. She had never been one for regret, but this time, it gnawed at her — a small, persistent itch that she couldn’t scratch.

  Eventually, she realized that the flip-flop moment wasn’t just about David or the possibility of a new romance. It was about her own desire for change, for something different from the routine she had built. The encounter had awakened something inside her, a recognition of the parts of herself that had been buried under layers of practicality and duty.

  And so, with a mixture of courage and trepidation, Lydia decided to embrace the unexpected. She reached out to David, sending a simple message that read, “If you’re still interested, I’d love to continue our conversation.”

  As she hit send, Lydia felt a sense of liberation — a small step towards reclaiming the parts of herself she had put on hold. She knew that whatever happened next, she was ready to face it, flip-flops and all.

  Postscript from the author

  My story was the first one. Could you tell?

  I have to give credit to ChatGPT for making its protagonist a 48-year-old who reads magazines and blushes — those are definitely things my characters would do. But otherwise, I didn’t think the language or emotions seemed similar to those in my fiction. In fact, and this might be the ultimate insult, ChatGPT’s story was so boring that I wouldn’t have finished reading it if I hadn’t agreed to this assignment. Overall I found it to be proficient on a sentence level but clichéd, and also shallow in sentiment. To me, there’s just something missing — like the literary equivalent of fat-free cookies or a Ken doll’s genitals. (Admittedly, I make no pretense at objectivity. I don’t want to lose my livelihood, after all.)

  Here are some of the things I did to write a summer-themed short story that I’m pretty sure ChatGPT didn’t do:

  • started writing more than a week before I knew what the reader-selected prompts would be, because I was worried that if I tried to write too quickly, the results would be sloppy.

  • drove from my house in Minneapolis to the park in St. Paul where I’d decided to set the story to see what it looked and felt like.

  • included in the story a real Twin Cities-based David Bowie cover band, called The Band That Fell to Earth, whom I’d seen perform.

  • asked a biking enthusiast friend if Brian’s dating app handle MtnBiker1971 was so obvious that no self-respecting biker would use it.

  • asked the same friend what trail Brian would recently have ridden on, but then didn’t name any of the places he suggested because of space.

  • got feedback on my first draft from several family members and friends, including a friend who, like Cassie, lives in New York, is in her early 50s and intermittently uses dating apps.

  • changed the location of where Brian grew up from Mankato to Duluth because Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate during the weeks I was working on the story, and Walz’s ties to Mankato made the mention of it feel distracting.

  • interrupted the writing process to look at the menu of a Thai restaurant I’ll be eating at soon and to check flight times to Cincinnati in October (and no, there’s absolutely nothing in my story that’s relevant to Thai food or Cincinnati — this was recreational).

  • wrote a first draft that was almost two times too long.

  • cut that draft but still asked my editor if I could exceed the agreedupon 1,000-word length by about 200 words.

  This is something I did that ChatGPT may have done:

  • chose character names by looking at popular baby names from the 1970s, when the characters would have been born, on the Social Security Administration website.

  Something I definitely didn’t do that ChatGPT did:

  • wrote its story in 17 seconds. That last detail feels the most, well, robotic and the most unsettling. Contrast that with the specificity and longing of readers’ suggestions — the margaritas, the linen caftans, the redemption. What I loved about them was that they were a mix of colorful, ridiculous, funny and poignant, which is also what, at our best, we as humans are — and what, as of this writing, it still seems to me that A.I. isn’t.

  In human vs. machine, at least for the time being, I’m still betting on people.

  Shared via PressReader

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  2024/09/02
• 
  

  Infoman

  An experiment in lust, regret and kissing

  C. Sittenfeld

  The New York Times (International Edition) 02 Sep 2024

  I challenged ChatGPT to a beach read writing contest. Here are the results.

  This summer, I agreed to a literary experiment with Times Opinion: What is the difference between a story written by a human and a story written by artificial intelligence?

  We decided to hold a contest between ChatGPT and me, to see who could write — or “write” — a better beach read. I thought going head-tohead with the machine would give us real answers about what A.I. is and isn’t currently capable of and, of course, how big a threat it is to human writers. And if you’ve wondered, as I have, what exactly makes something a beach read — frothy themes or sand under your feet? — we set out to get to the bottom of that, too.

  First, we asked readers to vote on which themes they wanted in their ideal beach read. We also included some options that are staples of my fiction, including privilege, self-consciousness and ambivalence. ChatGPT and I would then work using the top vote-getters.

  Lust, regret and kissing won, in that order. Readers also wrote in suggestions. They wanted beach reads about naps and redemption and tattoos gone wrong; puppies and sharks and secrets and white linen caftans; margaritas and roller coasters and mosquitoes; yearning and bonfires and women serious about their vocations. At least 10 readers suggested variations on making the characters middle-aged. One reader wrote, “We tend to equate summer with kids,” and suggested I explore “Why does summer still feel special for older people?”

  So I added middle-age and another write-in, flip-flops — because it seemed fun, easy and, yes, summery — to the list and got to work on a 1,000-word story.

  My editor fed ChatGPT the same prompts I was writing from and asked it to write a story of the same length “in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld.” (I’m one of the many fiction writers whose novels were used, without my permission and without my being compensated, to train ChatGPT. Groups of fiction writers, including people I’m friends with, have sued OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of copyrighted work.)

  Readers made it clear, with their votes and suggestions, that a beach read is more than just a story you happen to read at the beach; it’s a vibe. As for the results of the contest — which one was the better story — I invite you to be the judge. Here are my story and ChatGPT’s. Read to the end to find out which is which.

  You probably can see where this is going

  When my flight from LaGuardia landed in Minneapolis on that August afternoon, the first text I received was from the executive director of the nonprofit I’d be holding the training for the next day, canceling our dinner because of a family emergency. The second text was from my friend Jenny asking me to look at the profile of a guy named James on the dating app we both used and to let her know if it was the same askednot-one-question James I’d gone out with around Christmas. That date had felt like such a waste of an evening that I’d given myself a break from the app since.

  By the time the seatbelt light had gone off, I’d texted Jenny to tell her it wasn’t, and I’d received a heart on the app from a man who was currently online, whose handle was MtnBiker1971. He was 53, a year younger than me; he had deep brown eyes and was bald with a gray and brown beard; and three of his five photos featured him on a bike. I swear, I swear, that MtnBiker1971 and I already had exchanged generic greetings before it occurred to me that because my settings showed profiles within 10 miles of me, he was local.

  “Oh sorry!” I typed. “Just realized you live in Minnesota and I’m only visiting for 36 hrs.”

  Before I could send this, a new message came in from him: “What’s your favorite fruit that’s considered a vegetable and what’s your best episode of TV ever?”

  So I deleted “Oh sorry ... ” and typed “Okra and the season finale of Severance. You?”

  Can you see where this is going? You probably can see where this is going.

  By the time I was in an Uber, he’d told me his name was Brian, he worked for an environmental advocacy group, and the previous weekend, on a trail, he’d ridden his bike past a woodpecker sitting on the back of a deer; he’d been so close that he and the deer had made eye contact.

  I typed, “Just to clarify, you did or didn’t also make eye contact with the woodpecker?”

  “Sadly no,” he replied. “Next time?” By the time I’d entered my hotel room, he’d written, “I don’t usually suggest it this quickly but want to grab a drink tonight?”

  So far, I’d answered no question untruthfully. When he’d said he lived in Saint Paul, I’d typed, “I’m currently in downtown Minneapolis.” I hesitated for a few seconds then typed, “I’m free tonight.”

  THE UBER LET ME OUT about a hundred feet from Lake Como, and I walked toward the pavilion. A band Brian liked was performing at 7, and when I’d admitted I’d never been to Como Park, he’d replied, “You’re not one of those Minneapolis people with a superiority complex over St Paul, are you?” I’d written, “Nope, my superiority complex is for totally different reasons.”

  Outside the pavilion’s restaurant, I spotted a bearded bald guy; he wore a blue T-shirt, jeans and flip flops. From a few feet away, I said, “Brian?” and he raised his eyebrows and said, “Cassie?”

  “Should we hug?” I asked, and he smiled such a warm and since-reseeming smile that even though I’d been on far too many mediocre dates for extravagant optimism, I was gripped by extravagant optimism. “Yes,” he said. “We should.” We stepped into each other’s arms.

  On line for beers, I felt as if I were on a reality show about middle-aged Manhattan women who travel to Minnesota to go on dates with hot outdoorsy middle-aged men. Then we carried our drinks outside — I rarely drank beer, but it seemed Midwestern — and all the picnic tables were full so we walked along the lake until we found an empty bench. It was 70 degrees, the sunlight was golden, and the trees were lushly green; why didn’t I live in Minnesota?

  We discussed where we’d grown up (me in D.C., him in Duluth), our jobs (I refrained from mentioning my employer’s location) and our first marriages (his had lasted 13 years, mine 21). When he casually asked, “And what year did you move here?” I hesitated before blurting out, “2019.”

  I really almost never lied, in life or on dates, and I deeply regretted the necessity.

  Both to change the subject and because it was true, I gestured toward the multiple pedal boats out on the lake, whose prows were shaped like the heads of swans, and said, “Is it cheesy to say I love those?”

  “It’s cheesy,” he said, “but in a good way.” He glanced at his watch. “The band is starting, though.”

  The band! It turned out to be a David Bowie cover band, a fact I’d hardly paid attention to amid the spontaneity, excitement and growing deceit. As we entered the upper level of the pavilion, I could hear the opening notes of “Golden Years,” and I saw six people onstage, the lead singer a woman with long blond hair wearing a baby blue suit and a white tie. The pavilion was packed with people of all ages, some already dancing by the stage and others sitting on rickety benches and folding lawn chairs.

  As “Golden Years” segued into “Changes,” Brian angled his head toward the dance floor, and I nodded. As I learned over the next several songs, he was proficient in his headbobbing and sidestepping without trying too hard or too little, which was probably the best I could hope anyone would say about me. Then I was dancing with two octogenarian women wearing button down shirts, fanny packs and Tevas; then with an androgynous aqua-haired 20-something who wore a cropped black tank top and showed abundant armpit hair whenever they threw their arms up; then with two little girls and their dad. Whenever I turned away from the band, I could see the sun setting over the lake.

  By the last song, the sun was down. After the final applause, as the crowd dispersed, Brian said, “Swan boat time?”

  The boat rental did not, apparently, stop at dark; the boats could be illuminated, so that the swans glowed, and their glowing reflections were mirrored in the water. When we were in the middle of the lake, I said, “I feel like I’m inside a fairy tale.”

  “Yeah?” Brian turned his head to look at me. “Which one?”

  If I turned my head, I knew we’d kiss. “I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said, and I turned my head toward him.

  HE OFFERED TO DRIVE ME HOME, but of course I declined. We made out more as we waited for my Uber, though, and when it arrived, he said, “I’d love to see you again.”

  “Same,” I said.

  From the car, I texted Jenny: “This is so weird but I just had a perfect first date.”

  Ten seconds later, my phone rang. “Perfect how?”

  “I went out with him impulsively, as a lark, then I accidentally really liked him. He was great and we drank beer and danced sweatily. But I never told him I’m just in town for work, so now I ghost him, right? Because even though ghosting is horrible, what else am I supposed to do? Retroactively ruin things?”

  When Jenny sighed, the sigh was somehow affectionate. “If you ghost him,” she said, “it’s definitely the end. But if you tell him the truth, maybe it’s the beginning.”

  The flip-flop moment

  Lydia had always been practical. It was her hallmark, the trait that kept her life organized in neat rows, like the files on her desk or the cushions on her sofa. At 48, this practicality had become her armor, protecting her from the reckless impulses that she might have indulged in during her younger years. And so, when she walked into the coffee shop on that sweltering July afternoon, it was with the same cautious optimism that she had applied to everything else in her life.

  The coffee shop was called Java Junction, an ironic nod to its nondescript location. It was where she met her friends for book club, where she studied with her son while he was in high school and where she’d spent countless hours with her late husband. That was the first thing she’d felt when she entered, the lingering echo of shared memories. She was here for a meeting with her college friend, Julie, and Julie was late, which gave Lydia plenty of time to observe.

  She sat at a small table near the window, which was always Lydia’s favorite spot. The sunlight spilled over the table, creating a halo around her as she skimmed through a magazine, her flip-flops occasionally brushing the edge of the table. She had never been one for extravagant shoes — practical, again. But on that day, the flip-flops seemed to betray a different side of her, a side that wanted to feel something more, something less anchored.

  Julie arrived, panting slightly from the heat. She was a whirlwind of energy, always dressed in vibrant colors and speaking in rapid bursts. The two friends embraced, and Lydia noticed how the decades had changed them both — Julie still had that unfiltered joy, while Lydia felt a certain grayness to her own existence.

  They talked about their lives — Julie’s recent move to a beach town and Lydia’s endless workdays, the responsibilities of being a single mother, the growing distance from her teenage son. They laughed about old times and reminisced about their college days, and for a moment, Lydia felt something she hadn’t in a while: a spark of connection, of vitality.

  As they chatted, Lydia noticed a man sitting alone at a nearby table. He was tall, with an easy smile and eyes that seemed to dance with mischief. He wore a pair of flip-flops — practical, but worn with a casual confidence. Lydia couldn’t help but glance at him every now and then, her gaze lingering longer than she intended.

  Julie, ever observant, caught Lydia’s eyes darting toward the man and laughed. “You’ve got that look, Lydia.”

  Lydia flushed slightly, but tried to play it off. “What look?”

  “You know, the look of someone who’s thinking about doing something impulsive. Go talk to him.”

  Lydia shook her head, though her curiosity was piqued. “I don’t think so.”

  But the man, sensing perhaps that he was being observed, caught Lydia’s eye and smiled. It was a warm, inviting smile, and Lydia felt a flutter in her chest. She looked away quickly, pretending to examine her coffee cup,

  but she could feel the heat rising in her cheeks.

  Julie, however, had no such qualms. “What’s the worst that could happen? You go over, say hello, and if it’s awkward, you just come back. It’s not like you’re trying to get married.”

  Lydia hesitated, her mind a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she felt the tug of familiarity and routine. On the other, she felt the irresistible pull of something unknown, something that reminded her of her own lost desires.

  “Fine,” she said, laughing nervously. “I’ll do it.”

  Julie’s grin widened as Lydia stood up, her flip-flops slapping against the floor with each step. She approached the man, her heart pounding in her ears.

  “Excuse me,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “I hope you don’t mind me bothering you, but I couldn’t help but notice your flip-flops. They’re kind of . . . carefree.”

  The man looked up, his eyes twinkling. “I suppose they are. I’m David, by the way.”

  “I’m Lydia,” she said, extending her hand, which David took with a warm, firm grip.

  They talked, the conversation flowing easily. David was charming and engaging, with a disarming honesty that Lydia found refreshing. They spoke about their lives, their interests and the little quirks that made them unique. For a while, Lydia forgot about her practical life and lost herself in the moment.

  It was only when the conversation began to dwindle and David suggested they meet again that Lydia felt a pang of regret. She was in her 40s, a mother, a widow. What was she doing, flirting with a stranger in a coffee shop?

  “Maybe,” Lydia said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I should get back to my friend.”

  David looked disappointed but smiled. “Of course. It was lovely meeting you, Lydia.”

  As Lydia walked back to her table, she glanced over her shoulder to see David watching her, a hopeful expression on his face. Julie looked up at her, eyes twinkling with mischief.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Julie asked.

  Lydia smiled weakly. “No, it wasn’t.” But the encounter had stirred something within her — a mix of excitement and apprehension. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been on the brink of something, something that might have changed her life. And as she left the coffee shop later, her flipflops felt unusually heavy, as though they were holding her back from taking a step into the unknown.

  The days that followed were filled with a mix of longing and regret. Lydia found herself thinking about David more often than she cared to admit, replaying their conversation, analyzing every detail. She had never been one for regret, but this time, it gnawed at her — a small, persistent itch that she couldn’t scratch.

  Eventually, she realized that the flip-flop moment wasn’t just about David or the possibility of a new romance. It was about her own desire for change, for something different from the routine she had built. The encounter had awakened something inside her, a recognition of the parts of herself that had been buried under layers of practicality and duty.

  And so, with a mixture of courage and trepidation, Lydia decided to embrace the unexpected. She reached out to David, sending a simple message that read, “If you’re still interested, I’d love to continue our conversation.”

  As she hit send, Lydia felt a sense of liberation — a small step towards reclaiming the parts of herself she had put on hold. She knew that whatever happened next, she was ready to face it, flip-flops and all.

  Postscript from the author

  My story was the first one. Could you tell?

  I have to give credit to ChatGPT for making its protagonist a 48-year-old who reads magazines and blushes — those are definitely things my characters would do. But otherwise, I didn’t think the language or emotions seemed similar to those in my fiction. In fact, and this might be the ultimate insult, ChatGPT’s story was so boring that I wouldn’t have finished reading it if I hadn’t agreed to this assignment. Overall I found it to be proficient on a sentence level but clichéd, and also shallow in sentiment. To me, there’s just something missing — like the literary equivalent of fat-free cookies or a Ken doll’s genitals. (Admittedly, I make no pretense at objectivity. I don’t want to lose my livelihood, after all.)

  Here are some of the things I did to write a summer-themed short story that I’m pretty sure ChatGPT didn’t do:

  • started writing more than a week before I knew what the reader-selected prompts would be, because I was worried that if I tried to write too quickly, the results would be sloppy.

  • drove from my house in Minneapolis to the park in St. Paul where I’d decided to set the story to see what it looked and felt like.

  • included in the story a real Twin Cities-based David Bowie cover band, called The Band That Fell to Earth, whom I’d seen perform.

  • asked a biking enthusiast friend if Brian’s dating app handle MtnBiker1971 was so obvious that no self-respecting biker would use it.

  • asked the same friend what trail Brian would recently have ridden on, but then didn’t name any of the places he suggested because of space.

  • got feedback on my first draft from several family members and friends, including a friend who, like Cassie, lives in New York, is in her early 50s and intermittently uses dating apps.

  • changed the location of where Brian grew up from Mankato to Duluth because Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate during the weeks I was working on the story, and Walz’s ties to Mankato made the mention of it feel distracting.

  • interrupted the writing process to look at the menu of a Thai restaurant I’ll be eating at soon and to check flight times to Cincinnati in October (and no, there’s absolutely nothing in my story that’s relevant to Thai food or Cincinnati — this was recreational).

  • wrote a first draft that was almost two times too long.

  • cut that draft but still asked my editor if I could exceed the agreedupon 1,000-word length by about 200 words.

  This is something I did that ChatGPT may have done:

  • chose character names by looking at popular baby names from the 1970s, when the characters would have been born, on the Social Security Administration website.

  Something I definitely didn’t do that ChatGPT did:

  • wrote its story in 17 seconds. That last detail feels the most, well, robotic and the most unsettling. Contrast that with the specificity and longing of readers’ suggestions — the margaritas, the linen caftans, the redemption. What I loved about them was that they were a mix of colorful, ridiculous, funny and poignant, which is also what, at our best, we as humans are — and what, as of this writing, it still seems to me that A.I. isn’t.

  In human vs. machine, at least for the time being, I’m still betting on people.

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  2024/09/02
• 
  

  Infoman

  已故蘋果教主喬布斯（Steve Jobs）在史丹福大學的畢業演說，人人只記得結尾的「Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish」。但之前還有十分重要的一段：「時間是生命的改變劑，它把舊的清掉，好為新的騰出空間。現在，你們是新的。但有一天，離現在不會太久，你將逐漸成為老的並被清掉。抱歉說得如此直白，但這是相當的真實。你的時間有限，所以不要浪費它在過別人的生活。不要被教條給困住，也就是勿活在別人思考的結果中。」 經歷一個周期讓財富翻倍 「不要讓別人意見的噪音淹沒你自己內心的聲音，最重要的是要有勇氣追隨你的內心和直覺。它們因某原因已經知道你真正想成為什麼，其他的事情皆是次要的。」

  2024/09/01
• 
  

  Infoman

  Why is it so hard to cure the loneliness epidemic?

  MATTHEW SHAER

  The New York Times (International Edition) 31 Aug 2024 Maybe we aren’t thinking about this complicated emotion in the right way

  In the early months of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic settled over the United States, a psychologist and Harvard lecturer named Richard Weissbourd approached his colleagues with a concept for a new kind of study. Loneliness, or the specter of it, seemed to Weissbourd to be everywhere — in the solitude of quarantine, in the darkened windows of the buildings on campus, in the Zoom squares that had come to serve as his primary conduit to his students.

  Two years earlier, he had read a study from Cigna, the insurance provider, showing that 46 percent of Americans felt sometimes or always alone. In 2019, when Cigna replicated the study, the number of lonely respondents had grown to 52 percent. God knows what the data would say now, Weissbourd thought.

  “Initially, the idea was, OK, we’ve got a problem that’s not new but is obviously affecting lots of us, and that is now more visible than ever — it’s more present than ever,” Weissbourd told me. “What I really wanted was to get under the hood. Like, what does loneliness feel like to the lonely? What are the potential consequences? And what’s causing it?”

  Finding answers to these types of questions is a notoriously difficult proposition. Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any

  chronically lonely person can tell you. A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss.

  For the sake of convenience, most researchers still use the definition coined in the early 1980s by the social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau, who described loneliness as “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too.

  In order to understand the current crisis, Weissbourd, who serves as the faculty director of Making Caring Common — a Harvard Graduate School of Education project that collects and disseminates research on health and well-being — created a 66-question survey, which would be mailed to approximately 950 recipients around the United States. With the exception of a couple of straightforwardly phrased items, a majority of the queries devised by Weissbourd and the project’s director of research and evaluation, Milena Batanova, approached the issue elliptically, from a variety of angles.

  Several weeks later, the raw results were sent back to Weissbourd. “Frankly, I was knocked back,” he told me. “People were obviously really, really suffering,” and on a scale that dwarfed other findings on the topic. Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness. Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their families cared about them at all.

  Last year, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued a 71-page advisory warning of an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” with all the danger that classification implies. Murthy has estimated that a lack of social connection currently affects more Americans than, say, diabetes or obesity.

  Together with a concurrent decision by the World Health Organization to make loneliness a “global public health concern,” the surgeon general’s report has helped nudge the emotion into the same cultural position as that held by depression in the era of “Prozac Nation” and anxiety in the early aughts: a celebrity condition to be unpacked in an apparently endless cascade of front-page articles and self-help books. There are now hundreds of podcast episodes devoted to loneliness, as well as a raft of start-ups like Belong Center, an anti-loneliness nonprofit organization.

  Japan and Britain, where loneliness is as much a concern as it is in the United States, even have appointed ministers of loneliness — government officials tasked with plumbing the depths of the crisis and ameliorating it, whether through public awareness campaigns (“Your hobbies and interests are important.”) or initiatives, like one in Britain, in which mail carriers were asked to check in with the elderly residents on their routes.

  COMPARED WITH OTHER ailments of the mind, loneliness is a surprisingly modern concern: Although large segments of the world have probably always been anxious, have always been depressed, have always been wrathful, they have not always been lonely in the specific way contemporary experts understand the emotion today.

  In the 1950s, a small cohort of American scientists began grappling, for the first time, with the causes and effects of this modern malady. Among them was David Riesman, a sociologist who framed the emotion as being inextricably entangled with absence. Postwar America was prosperous, Riesman allowed, but prosperity had encouraged Americans to care about the wrong things. “Other-directedness,” he called it in his best-selling book, “The Lonely Crowd,” which he wrote with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. Today we would call it FOMO (fear of missing out): Americans were constantly peering over their neighbors’ fences, admiring the barbecue kit, the pool. When they failed to get those things for themselves, loneliness set in.

  The psychologist Louise Hawkley has been researching loneliness for nearly 30 years — along with her mentor and friend, the late psychologist John Cacioppo, she has overseen or worked on nearly a hundred publications that illustrate, in often graphic detail, the physiological toll loneliness takes on the lonely. It is thanks to Cacioppo and Hawkley, for example, that we know loneliness raises our blood pressure, negatively alters our cognitive functions, is associated with Type 2 diabetes and shortens our life spans.

  In the mid-2000s, Hawkley and Cacioppo funneled their combined research to date into a framework that Hawkley described to me as a “sort of grand evolutionary theory of loneliness.”

  The results, released nearly two decades ago in The Journal of Research in Personality, manage to get at the roots of our present predicament as incisively as anything I’ve encountered. In essence, Hawkley and Cacioppo argue, early Homo sapiens, outgunned by all manner of long-toothed beasts and without natural armor, achieved safety through community. Or the successful ones did, anyway. Gradually, our brains evolved to prioritize togetherness, and conversely, to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it.

  In worst-case scenarios, loneliness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — a snare that tightens with each effort to shrug it off. What you sometimes see is the onset of a kind of feedback loop, Hawkley told me: People desperately want not to be lonely, but fear and anxiety have convinced them that their loneliness reflects a fundamental undesirability.

  IN 2000, ROBERT PUTNAM, the Harvard political scientist, published “Bowling Alone,” a book that documented a steady erosion in membership of organizations and groups that once bound so many Americans together. Nearly a quartercentury on, the trend lines identified by Putnam have not been reversed. If anything, they’ve grown more pronounced, as have the related data on household status and family: In 2024, American marriage rates are far lower than they were at the midcentury mark, while the number of one-person households in the country has more than tripled to 29 percent.

  Needless to say, marriage doesn’t negate loneliness — plenty of bad or abusive marriages are chillingly sad for the people locked inside them — and a single-person home is not synonymous with a lonely one. Still, it’s impossible to look at the aggregate data from the 1950s onward, including a new survey by Gallup on weekly attendance of religious services, which sank last year to 21 percent of the U.S. population, and not feel that something has been lost.

  This year, Weissbourd and Batanova conducted a follow-up to their 2021 loneliness survey, adding an open-ended prompt in which lonely respondents could try to account for the presence of the emotion in their lives. Many subjects cited a lack of “meaningful connection” as the primary culprit. This was true whether or not human companionship was available to them. Physical proximity wasn’t always the issue. Emotional proximity usually was.

  Work — the office — appears to be of little help. Fewer Americans are finding purpose and meaning in their careers, and the ones who do are laboring in a drastically altered landscape. Post-pandemic, office buildings in every major city remain empty; something like 22 million Americans now work from home. Whether or not you believe that “virtual commuting” is good for productivity, it is demonstrably bad for community building.

  The residue of the pandemic, for all of us, has proved difficult to scrub away. Studies have shown that we emerged from quarantine with less ability to make eye contact or conduct ordinary conversations with acquaintances. “The interactions that make us less lonely come naturally to us, but they still need to be practiced, or our skills atrophy,” Ian Marcus Corbin, a Harvard Medical School philosopher and senior fellow at Capita, which helped fund Weissbourd’s study, told me. “And in 2020 and 2021, a lot of people who were in a formative period of their lives saw those muscles atrophy.”

  TRADITIONALLY, THE MOMENTS Americans have been most afflicted by loneliness have also been moments of major societal change: It is no accident that David Riesman wrote “The Lonely Crowd” in the age of TV dinners and white picket fences that separated one neighbor from the next.

  “There’s a cyclical nature to it,” says Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and the author of “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.” “You look through the literature, and you can read anxiety about loneliness in the early 1900s, when everyone started listening to the radio. Or later, when we worried that cars would lead to us driving away from our families and neighborhoods in search of something new.”

  If the loneliness “epidemic” today feels uniquely profound, Klinenberg believes, it is only because the current dislocation is occurring at an unprecedented scale. Political dysfunction, global warming, a waterfall of mental health crises — and on top of it all, a transformation, in the internet, in the way we communicate.

  The easiest way to respond to these dislocations, and to try to account for the loneliness they elicit, is to wish them away. Weissbourd calls it a “palpable nostalgia for old modes of closeness,” and it’s everywhere in the responses to his and Batanova’s follow-up survey, in which subjects were asked if Americans today are lonelier than they were in decades past and if so, why.

  “Previous generations,” one respondent writes, “weren’t as self-centered and helped each other more.” Another speaks of a time when individuals “lived in closer proximity” and “relied on family members to a greater extent.” “It took a community,” a third says, “to survive.”

  This sentiment, too, colors many of the various proposed policy fixes, like the 2023 guidance from Murthy, who suggests near the end of his advisory that lonely individuals “reach out to a friend or family member” and that parents encourage their children to participate in structured, in-person activities. One implication is that shrinking the gap between realized and desired social relations will merely be a matter of recreating, in some sort of updated form, the types of community alive in an older era.

  Unfortunately, history rarely works that way. When loneliness gripped the Western world during the Industrial Revolution, everyone didn’t suddenly retreat to ancestral villages; the radio didn’t make us permanently lonely. We built new communities in the city, far from our families; we used radio to expand our world and to talk to people on the other side of the country. We adapted. And as hard as it may be to accept, the path out of loneliness in 2024 lies almost certainly via a similar route — forward, forward.

  There are signs that a similar mass evolution is already underway. Take the smartphone, a device that gets a lot of blame for our lack of physical connection and that has simultaneously led to other, but no less meaningful, forms of togetherness.

  “I wrote an entire book about online dating, and to give you one example, I know as much as anyone about how much it can suck to be on Tinder,” Klinenberg says. “I also know the internet is the main way people meet their spouses these days. I think about cases of people who have rare diseases and are able to share information and get better care and feel connected because the internet allows them to do so.”

  None of which is to say we won’t still need physical togetherness — only that there may be less of it, and the physical togetherness that does persist may look different from the togetherness our ancestors experienced. Ninety-six thousand Taylor Swift fans singing in sync, the thunder of a crowded football stadium and then a gazillion internet threads in which the attendees relive and post photos and remember the euphoria of their shared experience. A romance that exists partly in the real world and partly online, and in which emotional closeness is not diminished but enhanced by a steady stream of the sort of soul-baring disclosures that social media apps can facilitate.

  There may be bumps, hurdles and obstacles, but as is the case with Cacioppo and Hawkley’s evolutionary theory, those bumps could be part of the learning process, the adaptation process. Part of the drive that forces us together.

  Squint, and you can see it: a scenario in which the loneliness crisis today is really a mass period of acclimatization. It’s a bridge, an evolutionary step, during which we make our peace with certain trade-offs and realities — that in 2024, we’re not all going to race to rejoin the local grange. That we’re not all going back to church or temple or the mosque. That the workplace will remain diffuse, tethered by Zoom meetings and the occasional in-person happy hour. That we may often see friends more on Face-Time than we do in real life. And most important, that despite it all, we’ll find one another again.

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  2024/08/31
• 
  

  Infoman

  Both U.S. political parties embrace tariffs

  New York Times (International Edition) 30 Aug 2024

  When Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016, there was not much love for tariffs in Washington. Many Republicans and Democrats believed that putting levies on imports created economic inefficiencies and that freer trade was the best recipe for growth.

  That view has largely fallen out of fashion in 2024. While Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, differ greatly in their campaign proposals, both of their parties are increasingly embracing tariffs as an essential tool in protecting American manufacturers from Chinese and other global competitors.

  It has been a sharp reversal from previous decades, when most politicians fought to lower tariffs, rather than raise them. But the loss of American manufacturing jobs as a result of globalization and China’s focus on churning out cheap exports have created a bipartisan backlash against more open trade. Given that Mr. Trump’s 2016 win capitalized on such sentiments, Democrats have been striving to avoid losing voters opposed to free trade.

  “On economic policy and trade issues, you have both major parties moving in the same direction,” said Nick Iacovella, a senior vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates tariffs and domestic investments in industry.

  Mr. Iacovella said that Mr. Trump would most likely go further on tariffs than Ms. Harris would, but that no matter who won the election “it’s still going to be a tariffs administration, and an industrial policy one.”

  Ms. Harris has sought to distance herself from Mr. Trump’s trade proposals, which include tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on most imports and levies of more than 60 percent on China. Many economists say that level of tariffs would drive up prices for consumers, since companies would be likely to pass on higher import costs.

  At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, Ms. Harris described her opponent’s proposals as “a national sales tax — call it a Trump tax” — and said the plans “would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

  Economists’ estimates vary, but the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund calculated that the tariffs could increase costs on a middle-income family by $3,900 per year.

  Ms. Harris has not said much about how she would approach tariffs, including whether she would impose addi

  tional levies on China. But Charles Lutvak, a representative of the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement that Ms. Harris would “employ targeted and strategic tariffs to support American workers, strengthen our economy, and hold our adversaries accountable.”

  Despite early criticisms of Mr. Trump’s trade policy, the Biden administration has maintained the former president’s initial tariffs on China and proposed adding another $18 billion in new levies on some Chinese products, including a 100 percent tax on electric vehicles. The administration also proposed new tariffs on electric vehicle batteries, semiconductors, steel and medical products, in an effort to ensure that newly invested American factories can stay in business.

  The Biden administration is set to issue its final determination on those levies before the end of August. Last month, it also imposed additional tariffs on certain metals from Mexico, seeking to block Chinese materials from entering the United States through its neighbor.

  Inu Manak, a trade policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said politicians of both parties were now more willing to argue that they could increase tariffs without any negative effects. She pointed to a recent poll by the Cato Institute that showed that Republicans and Democrats had high levels of support for hypothetical tariffs imposed by their party but not those imposed by the other party.

  “When Harris criticizes Trump, she’s not criticizing tariff policy, she’s criticizing his tariff policy,” Ms. Manak said. “And I’m sure if she proposed something, Democrats would think that’s great.”

  The tariffs that Mr. Trump has floated are orders of magnitude larger than what President Biden’s administration has proposed, presumably covering more than $3 trillion worth of trade and implying a much bigger impact on the economy.

  In addition to a universal tariff on all imports and higher tariffs on China, he has suggested a reciprocal policy in which the United States will match tariffs that another nation imposes on American exports.

  Speaking in Asheville, N.C., last week, Mr. Trump said he might double the 10 percent tariff he had already proposed on most foreign goods.

  “We are going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years,” he told the crowd.

  Economists generally agree that tariffs of this magnitude would have a noticeable effect on consumer prices, while also raising costs for manufacturers that buy imported parts or materials. About a third of U.S. imports are inputs that go into American farms and factories.

  Large tariffs could also incite retaliation from foreign countries, kicking off a damaging trade war. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said this year that a 10 percent American import tariff could lead to a “free-for-all, which would upend the stability and predictability of trade.”

  Mary Lovely, an economist at the Peterson Institute, said tariffs seemed to be the “solution du jour — a supposed remedy for a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, left-behind communities, and income inequality.”

  “Unfortunately, tariffs remedy none of these ills, and, sadly, higher tariffs will make them worse,” Ms. Lovely said.

  But the tariffs have proved popular with industries that have faced stiff competition from Chinese firms, like makers of kitchen cabinets. Paul Wellborn, the president of Wellborn Cabinet, a manufacturer of kitchen and bath cabinets in Ashland, Ala., credited tariffs with saving his company and the industry.

  Wellborn Cabinet’s sales fell after the Great Recession, when the housing market collapsed and with it demand for new cabinets. But as the economy started to recover, business was still slow, Mr. Wellborn said. The industry realized that Chinese companies had taken over about 40 percent of the market and that their share was continuing to grow.

  Wellborn Cabinet joined with others in its industry to mount an investigation into Chinese trade practices, which resulted in tariffs ranging from 4 percent to nearly 300 percent on Chinese cabinets. The industry was further helped as Mr. Trump added first 10 percent and then an additional 15 percent of tariffs on top.

  “He’s right on the money as far as tariffs,” Mr. Wellborn said of Mr. Trump.

  Other companies have been more critical. Thomas Shaw, the founder of Retractable Technologies, a maker of syringes, said that he supported tariffs and American manufacturing but that the government had not given his company time to relocate before imposing the levies.

  The company makes some of its syringes and needles in a plant in Little Elm, Texas, while making others in China. Mr. Shaw claimed he had been blocked from producing more in the United States by anticompetitive behavior and had been forced to go to China to manufacture what he described as an innovative product that had reduced needle sticks for nurses and helped the government deploy vaccines during the pandemic.

  This year, the Biden administration said it would give the company only a few months before a 50 percent tariff on Chinese syringes took effect, which was an unrealistically short period to move a factory around the world, Mr. Shaw said.

  “We were forced to go to China, and now with the tariff, we’re being forced to go back,” he said.

  Even if tariffs cause certain economic duress, they may still be a winning formula politically. One study put out this year by a prominent group of economists, for example, found that Mr. Trump’s China tariffs had little effect on employment in the industries protected by the tariffs. But politically, they were a success, resulting in more support for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party in the affected areas.

  “Some of the support it creates for Republicans might be due to the fact that people appreciate the government reacting to, standing up to China,” David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview this year.

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  2024/08/30