Month: November 2013

Is 18 Too Young To Smoke?

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John Kruzel hopes other cities follow New York’s lead in banning cigarette sales to anyone under 21:

[T]he 18–20 set does more than just supply cigarettes to underage smokers. According to a mix of firm statistics, anecdata, and a damning confession by a Big Tobacco official, this age group also gets addicted to nicotine in big numbers. “A significant number do in fact start between 18 and 21,” John Banzhaf, the executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, told CNN in 2002. Among 18-to-25-year-olds, the average age of first use is 18.9 years old, according to cardiologist Mehmet Oz.

On the retail side, one New York City vendor told a local CBS affiliate that half of his cigarette sales go to people between the ages of 18 and 21. But perhaps the most damning line (and maybe the obvious causal explanation) comes from a 1982 internal memo penned by an employee of the tobacco manufacturer R.J. Reynolds: “If a man has never smoked by age 18, the odds are three-to-one he never will. By age 24, the odds are twenty-to-one.” To put it another way, in the words of Patrick Reynolds, the grandson of R.J. Reynolds who would spurn the family trade to become an anti-smoking advocate, “Once they reach 21, it’s no longer an interesting vehicle for rebellion.”

Four Massachusetts towns have already boosted the smoking age to 21, and similar pushes are underway in Utah, Hawaii, and Washington, DC.

(Graph: Office of the Surgeon General)

Five-Star Art Criticism

Orit Gat profiles writer and art critic Brian Droitcour, who – after being published by ArtForum and other publications – has taken to posting reviews to Yelp:

Part of the attraction was the ability to adopt a more direct style of critical writing. (Case in point: “There are dozens of places in Chelsea to see decent art in favorable installation conditions. Don’t waste your time here.” [From a review of Family Business, April 2013.]) Droitcour says the more he wrote on Yelp, the more these reviews morphed into a process of questioning the role of the critic and the nature of criticism, and a way to get outside of the process of value-creation that most writing about art participates in. “As an art writer, when you write a review at times you feel like it’s just giving the gallery something to publicize, another page in the binder, another line on the CV for the artist. I was just super frustrated with reviews,” Droitcour explains. Yelp reviews, generally speaking, are not included in such binders.

The Internet Is Undervalued

Standard economic measures don’t account for digital gems:

You may think that Wikipedia, Twitter, Snapchat, Google Maps, and so on are valuable. But, as far as G.D.P. is concerned, they barely exist. The M.I.T. economist Erik Brynjolfsson points out that, according to government statistics, the “information sector” of the economy—which includes publishing, software, data services, and telecom—has barely grown since the late eighties, even though we’ve seen an explosion in the amount of information and data that individuals and businesses consume. “That just feels totally wrong,” he told me.

Brynjolfsson is the co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the forthcoming book “The Second Machine Age,” which examines how digitization is remaking the economy. “We’re underestimating the value of the part of the economy that’s free,” he said. “As digital goods make up a bigger share of economic activity, that means we’re likely getting a distorted picture of the economy as a whole.” The issue is that, as Kuznets himself acknowledged, “the welfare of a nation . . . can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” For instance, most Web sites are built with free, open-source applications. This makes running a site cheap, which has all sorts of benefits in terms of welfare, but G.D.P. ends up lower than it would be if everyone had to pay for Microsoft’s server software. Digital innovation can even shrink G.D.P.: Skype has reduced the amount of money that people spend on international calls, and free smartphone apps are replacing stand-alone devices that once generated billions in sales. The G.P.S. company Garmin was once one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. Thanks to Google and Apple Maps, Garmin’s sales have taken a severe hit, but consumers, who now have access to good directions at no cost, are certainly better off.

This Steampunk Thing Has Gone Too Far

The kids are taking up Victorian martial arts:

Bartitsu was developed by Edward Barton-Wright, a British engineer who moved to Japan in 1895. After returning to London, just before the turn of the century, he created a mixed martial art hybrid, combining elements of judo, jujitsu, British boxing, and fighting with a walking stick. The style was promoted to the middle and upper classes during a time when they were becoming increasingly worried about the street gangs and crime publicized by the tabloid newspapers.

For a brief period, Bartitsu was “all the rage for fashionable ladies and gentlemen” – but the fad soon passed. Now, after a century of dormancy, it’s back:

Tony Wolf, a fight choreographer, martial arts instructor, and self-described ‘walking bartitsu encyclopedia’, serves as editor of EJMAS: Journal of Manly Arts, a scholarly online journal focusing on the martial arts and combat sports of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. As a founding member of The Bartitsu Society, Wolf explains how he and other members spent years researching and compiling archival material of the era in order to “bring bartitsu back to life” and move it online. “Then we created neo-bartitsu, which is really bartitsu as it might have been,” Wolf says.

There is no such thing as an accredited bartitsu instructor, and Wolf says that the group has worked hard to keep the art open-source and apolitical. Each instructor has his own blend of practical self-defense and historical recreation. But they all feature the principles that Barton-Wright explained in 1899:

  1. To disturb the equilibrium of your assailant.
  2. To surprise him before he has time to regain his balance and use his strength.
  3. If necessary, to subject the joints of any parts of his body, whether neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, back, knee, ankle, etc. to strains that they are anatomically and mechanically unable to resist. …

A Google search brings up dozens of clubs and meetup groups around the country with class titles including “Sparring with Sherlock” and “Kicking Ass in a Corset: Bartitsu for Ladies.”

How Millennials View Government

Beinart reviews polling on the subject:

A November 2011 Pew study found that young Americans were more than 20 points more likely than the middle-aged, and a whopping 30 points more likely than the elderly, to favor a bigger, more expensive government over a cheaper, smaller one.

But the same failures that have made young Americans eager for government help also have left them dubious that government can provide it. When a 2009 Center for American Progress study compared millennials to previous generations of young people, it found them significantly less likely to trust government to “do what is right most of the time.” A 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggests that this paradox is typical of people who enter adulthood during rough economic times. “Recession-stricken individuals on the one hand ask for larger involvement by the state in redistribution,” observed authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, “but at the same time are more skeptical of the state institutions’ ability to intervene effectively.”

During Obama’s first term, this contradiction only grew. According to pollsters, young Americans were far more supportive of Obamacare than their elders. But between 2010 and 2013, their faith in government continued to fall. Until a month ago, it seemed possible that when health-care reform took effect, and young Americans began to feel its positive results, the gap might close. Now it seems likely to widen further.

A New Trump Card?

Coin is a single card that stores all credit, debit, gift, membership or loyalty card data in one place:

Coin looks and works exactly like a credit or a debit card. You add your card information to it using the mobile app and a free accessory they provide. You connect the accessory to your phone and then swipe your current cards through it. The accessory transfers the card data to the phone app and saves it there. Then you take a photo of the card to help you identify it. The app then transfers the card data to the Coin. The app can hold an unlimited number of card data but Coin itself can store up to eight.

Ross Rubin calls Coin a “pricey convenience for those who carry many cards”:

Coin would appear to be convenient, or at least trade a bit of button manipulation for bulk, but its developers plan to sell it for $100 after a deep-discount preorder phase ends. And once you buy it, you’ll have to keep paying. While Coin doesn’t have a subscription fee, its nonrechargeable battery expires after two years, creating an effective cost of about $50 per year. What if Coin is gobbled up by an ATM and not released?

Christopher Mims says that it “sounds like a great idea … until you realize that … your ability to pay for anything becomes entirely dependent on the battery life of your smartphone”:

In those odd moments that you find yourself with a dead phone battery, it ceases to function. That might not happen so often, but think of the times it might, and how they’re precisely those moments you would most want your credit cards to function: Late at night, when you need to pay a cab, tow truck, restaurant bill, or whatever else you need to get you back to a place where you can charge your phone again.

Will Oremus fails to see this as a “fatal” drawback:

People are already so reliant on their phones that they’re terrified of letting the battery run low. If you want a safeguard, why not keep just one physical credit card in your wallet as insurance? … To me, the only real problem with Coin is that it feels like a stopgap technology, like those CD-changer cartridges that were popular for a little while before everyone switched to mp3s. Replacing eight cards with one may lighten your load by an ounce or two, but is that enough to convince people to take the leap of faith involved in adopting a new payment system? Even early adopters could be forgiven for holding out for a more comprehensive digital wallet—the kind that will let you pay for everything just by tapping your phone, or perhaps some other, even more seamless gesture.

Lauren DeLisa Coleman writes that while “for now, Coin is the coolest payment gadget available,” it’s “not the only company focused on innovating payment”:

In fact, banks are eager to move beyond magnetic strip cards into secure chip cards. “The primary security problem with cards in the U.S. is that it’s easy to capture and replay the contents of the [magnetic] stripe. When done by criminals, this is called skimming,” says Paul Kocher, President and Chief Scientist at Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI), a San Francisco-based R&D security company. “Coin is essentially doing the same thing, but for the cardholder’s benefit. … The U.S. will be rolling out chip cards soon in preparation for transaction liability rule changes in 2015, and Coin won’t work with the new cards.”

Is Bloomberg Caving To Communist China, Ctd?

It sure looks more and more like it:

A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China, which employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors, was suspended last week by managers. The reporter, Michael Forsythe, was based in Hong Kong and has written award-winning investigative articles on China. He met with supervisors and was placed on leave, said two Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the situation, which was supposed to be private.

Joshua Keating sees a clash between Bloomberg’s editorial and business interests:

According to unnamed Bloomberg employees, that story had been killed over fears that the company, whose news website is already blocked in China, would be expelled entirely. Amazingly, this whole story may have been first broken in a video by Taiwan’s Next Media Animation studio, which in its own inimitable way implied that the whole affair may be tied to soon-to-be-ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s business interests. That may be a stretch, but there certainly does seem to be an inherent conflict between the goals of Bloomberg’s top-notch investigative team, and the company’s interest in maintaining its lucrative terminal business in China. Last week, the New York Times’  Ed Wong, who seems to be getting pretty unfettered reports from inside the company, reported on the existence of “Code 204,” a line of coding that Bloomberg editors attach to certain articles on political and social issues in China so that they don’t appear on financial terminals on the mainland.

Dean Starkman is concerned:

There’s a lot, obviously, we don’t know—but that’s a problem in and of itself. Bloomberg’s hallmark – from its see-through headquarters to its entire corporate rationale – emphasizes transparency above all else. It was a key talking point, for instance, in its justly famous, successful lawsuit against the Federal Reserve’s secretive emergency lending programs during the crisis. … [This] issue is sensitive, involving unpublished material and personnel decisions. But suspending a reporter who is already involved in a very public controversy without further explanation is the opposite approach, in some ways very un-Bloomberg-like, and one unlikely to end the crisis.

Previous Dish on the scandal here.