July 2014 – Page 75

If You Can Make It There, You’re Probably Rich Or Shady, Or Both

Jim Epstein contends that New York’s “affordable housing” mostly benefits the rich:

In May, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) unveiled a plan to build 80,000 new affordable housing units, “marshaling every corner of government and the private sector,” he boasted, “in an unprecedented response” to the city’s “crisis of affordability.” De Blasio, who ran on a promise to reduce inequality, is now enabling upper middle class New Yorkers to tap into these subsidies to serve their housing needs. In a city in which one in five households lives below the poverty line, spending limited government dollars so professionals earning six figures don’t have to leave their favored neighborhoods is obscene.

Take Manhattan’s 606 West 57th Street, a 1,025-unit building to be put up by developer TF Cornerstone. In exchange for setting aside 220 of those apartments for “lower income” tenants, the developer will get a local real estate tax exemption, tax-exempt financing, Low Income Housing Tax Credits (in which banks kick in equity in exchange for a tax rebate), and permission to build a larger building than the zoning Council code would otherwise allow. The kicker is that some of these “lower income” families are wealthy by most standards. The 220 affordable apartments will be split up among households of four earning no less than $50,300 and no more than $193,000 per year – or nearly four times New York City’s median household income, which was $50,895 in 2012.

Meanwhile, Michael Hudson, Ionuț Stănescu and Sam Adler-Bell report on questionable NYC real estate deals:

Since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in pricey Manhattan developments have been to buyers who listed an international address – most from China, Russia and Latin America—or bought in the name of a corporate entity, a maneuver often employed by foreign purchasers. Because many buyers go to great lengths to hide their interests in New York properties, it’s impossible to put a number on the proportion laundering ill-gotten gains. But according to money-laundering experts as well as court documents and secret offshore records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, New York real estate has become a magnet for dirty money.

Andrew Rice elaborates :

[W]hile New York real estate has significant drawbacks as an asset – it’s illiquid and costly to manage – it has a major selling point in its relative opacity. With a little creative corporate structuring, the ownership of a New York property can be made as untraceable as a numbered bank account. And that makes the city an island haven for those who want to stash cash in an increasingly monitored global financial system. “With everything that is going on in Switzerland in terms of transparency, people are being forced to pay taxes on their capital that they used to hold there,” says Rodrigo Nino, the president of the Prodigy Network. “Real estate is a great alternative.”

Those on the New York end of the transaction often don’t know – or don’t care to find out – the exact derivation of foreign money involved in these transactions. “Sometimes they come in with wires,” says [broker] Luigi Rosabianca. “Sometimes they come in with suitcases.” Most of the time, the motivation behind this movement of cash, and buyers’ desire for privacy, is legitimate, but sometimes it’s not. … “It’s something that is never discussed, but it’s the elephant in the room,” says Rosabianca. “Real estate is a wonderful way to cleanse money.”

Americans And Danes Agree On Welfare

In fact, their views are almost identical, a recent study suggests, as long as you tell them whether the recipient in question is “unlucky” or “lazy”:

When modern individuals – Americans and Danes alike – form opinions on who deserves welfare in mass society, they do so using the same psychology that has guided help-giving decisions for millenniums: they watch out for cheaters and seek to help reciprocators. The key question guiding our intuitions about recipient deservingness is: Is this a person who is motivated to give something back to me and society? These psychological systems designed for cheater-detection and decision-making about reciprocity crowd out cultural learning and a lifetime of exposure to different welfare state cultures. Therefore, when provided with direct information about the motivation and the circumstances of the social welfare recipients, just two sentences of information can make Danes and American become substantially and statistically indistinguishable in their social welfare opinions.

Squeaky-Clean Energy

Michael Grunwald fears that efforts to avoid another failure like Solyndra will make the government too cautious:

So far, the [clean energy] loan program has only burned through about $800 million of its $10 billion in reserves. Mitt Romney suggested during a debate with President Obama that half of its loans had failed; in fact, more than 95 percent are performing fine. That’s a record most private portfolio managers would envy, and it’s especially remarkable for a program that’s supposed to focus on innovative projects that private financiers won’t bankroll without government help. The goal was to help push promising green technologies across the so-called “Valley of Death,” and it seems to be working. Now that a bunch of huge solar projects have been built with government help, a bunch of copycat projects are under construction with purely private financing. They’ll benefit from the lessons learned in the initial round.

… it would be a shame if Solyndraphobia drove the Energy Department towards overly safe projects that don’t need government help. We don’t need an energy version of the Export-Import Bank, offering slightly cheaper financing to borrowers with no plausible risk of default. The loan program’s main goal should be facilitating disruptive projects in order to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, not avoiding failure in order to make sure taxpayers recoup every dollar. The Ex-Im Bank’s repayment rate is 99.7 percent; that means it’s very unlikely to have a Solyndra problem, and equally unlikely to accomplish anything useful.

The Guilty Gamer

New research suggests that violent videogames make players more “morally sensitive” by causing them to regret their own behaviors:

“This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others,” notes lead author Matthew Grizzard [of the University of Buffalo] in a summary of the study, which is published (behind a paywall) in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. So, the suggestion is that not only is amoral in-game activity harmless, it might also be beneficial to society.

This conclusion rests on previous findings within sociology/social psychology that when humans feel guilt about some real-world behavior (or lab-simulated real-world behavior, rather) they will convert that feeling into actual prosocial behavior. A quick survey reveals a 2003 New Mexico State University study finding that feelings of guilt could be used to push real-world cooperation, suggesting that guilt may be used as “‘information’ about the future costs of uncooperative strategy.”

Related Dish on torture in videogames here.

Cracking The Human Code

Matt Quirk chats with Matt Yglesias about his recent novel, The Directive, which involves breaking into the Fed. The premise:

[T]he idea is that, rather than a heist relying on brute force like blowing up the safe, or stealth like doing gymnastics through a laser field, you get in by abusing people’s trust. When I planned out the book, I actually talked to the red teams that work for government facilities to try to break into them, and most of their techniques are based on social engineering and getting people to trust them and let them in.

It could be something as simple as having two cups of coffee — like when I went into the elevator at Vox’s office, somebody saw I was busy and they just swiped me in because I look like I belong here. Another famous one is the smokers’ door. If you get to the smokers’ door before the smokers come out and you seem like you belong there, they’ll let you back in the building because people are very reluctant to challenge people.

To beat social engineering, you would have to challenge everyone, which just isn’t in our makeup. It works at the Pentagon, they have guys with podiums everywhere whose job is to challenge people. But otherwise if you turned around and slammed the door in someone’s face and said, “swipe in,” you would seem so rude, and that’s just so against human nature. That’s the trait that these guys use to break into places.

Yemeni Apparel

Responding to a recent post on Boushra Almutawakel’s “Mother, Daughter, Doll” photo series, a reader reminisces about mid-century Yemeni fashions:

I spent one of the best parts of my childhood living in Yemen in the early- to mid- 1960s, where my father worked at the US Consulate in Taiz. We had the opportunity to mingle in the streets, to shop at the souq (albeit with a guide/male domestic worker who negotiated with the vendors) and to see how Yemenis dressed. Yemeni women did not wear the hijab much at that time – the Yemeni counterpart, called a sharshaf, was generally made of lively colorful printed fabric, and many women did not cover their faces. A number of women wore colorfully embroidered dresses with a head scarf. Yemeni fabrics and clothing were exuberantly colorful, and while I couldn’t know the level of pressure within Yemeni society to conform to modesty requirements, it didn’t appear that there was an expectation that women should be made invisible. (From my Western eyes it did seem very puritanical, but I’d spent the prior two years living in Beirut, where Lebanese women wore bikinis on the beach.)

I’ve since learned from tourists who’ve visited Yemen that there’s now a great deal of pressure to completely cover not only women, but pre-pubertal girls, who in the past were not expected to dress more than modestly. It’s also sad to learn that the famous Yemeni textile industry has gone extinct, as fabrics and retail clothes now come almost exclusively from China. Compared with the problems of poverty, gender inequality and child marriage that Yemeni women and girls must deal with, fashions and textiles are much less important, but there’s no question that their oppression is reflected in their clothing.

(Photo: Yemeni women line-up outside a polling station to cast their vote in the presidential election in Sanaa on February 21, 2012 that brings an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year hardline rule in Yemen. By Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)

The Shocking Truth, Ctd

Recent research into solitary thinking found that a significant percentage of subjects preferred to suffer an electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts. In a follow-up, Tom Jacobs notes that men were disproportionately likely to give themselves a jolt when faced with boredom:

Amazingly, 67 percent of the men – that is, 12 of 18 – gave themselves at least one shock during this period of thought and reflection. Only 25 percent of the women self-administered the jolt – still a high number when you consider there is physical discomfort involved. “The gender difference is probably due to the tendency of men to be higher in sensation-seeking,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, Lauren Hitchings gives critics of the study a fair hearing:

[T]he results may have been partly down to the artificial set up. For a start, the very nature of letting your mind wander is that it drifts off on its own. Sitting in an experimental setting with an electric-shock generator might not be a fair representation. The set-up, especially the fact that participants were told to sit still, may have made people feel distracted and uncomfortable, says Jonathan Schooler, who studies the wandering mind at the University of California in Santa Barbara. But he does think there is a need to better understand those people who didn’t struggle with the task. After all, much has been made of the benefits of allowing the mind to wander – for instance, it can help to generate creative insights.

John Timmer zooms out:

[T]he results may indicate that, although we complain that we’re persecuted by things like smartphones and the constant barrage of e-mail, we actually may relish the distractions they bring. And, in terms of even broader perspectives, the study brings to mind a quote from Blaise Pascal: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”

A Plankton Of Action

David Biello profiles Victor Smetacek, a marine biologist who devised a scheme to use plankton to help cool the earth:

Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one species of cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus. This species was not even discovered until the 1980s: it is so tiny that millions can fit into a single drop of water and no one had produced a sieve small enough to catch it. The oxygen made by these tiny marine plants dwarfs that produced by the Amazon rainforest and the rest of the world’s woodlands combined. By taking in CO2 and exhaling oxygen, these tiny creatures serve as the planet’s lungs, whose steady breathing is limited only by nutrition.

Just as land plants need nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements to thrive, missing nutrients restrain planktons’ growth. Add enough of those missing elements – via dust blown off a continent or fertiliser run-off from farm fields – and the oceans will produce blooms that can be seen from space. Many of these plankton pastures are held back by iron shortages, especially in places that are largely cut off from continental dust and dirt. With access to more iron, the plankton would proliferate and siphon more and more planet-heating CO2 from the atmosphere.

In an experiment in 2004, Smetacek’s ideas worked. He and his crew “fertilized” part of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, and the plankton bloomed with remarkable results:

For two weeks, he was able to induce carbon to fall to the sea floor at the highest rate ever observed – some 34 times faster than normal. Just as marine and terrestrial plants sucked up CO2 from Carboniferous or Jurassic skies only to be buried and cooked with geologic heat and pressure into coal, gas and oil, these modern microbes helped pull back some of the CO2 released when we burned their ancestors to make electricity, or to propel hulks of metal over tarred roads. This marine tinkering could help buffer the ever-increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, concentrations that have touched 400 parts-per-million, levels never before experienced in the hundreds of thousands of years that our clever species, Homo sapiens, has existed. Smetacek has given us the blueprints for a man-made portal for our pollution, a column of plankton running between the atmosphere and the deep ocean.

Further experiments, however, were halted due to protests from environmentalists. Update from a reader:

O for crying out loud! The articles describing Smetacek’s experiments came out in 2012. Environmentalists called for more study in 2008, and that’s what they got. You think we should just launch a huge plan to dump tons of iron sulfide over the Southern Ocean without studying it seriously first? And one of the papers resulting from the experiment is titled: “Iron fertilization enhanced net community production but not downward particle flux during the Southern Ocean iron fertilization experiment LOHAFEX“. From the abstract:

Our data thus indicate intense ﬂux attenuation between 100 and 200 m, and probably between the mixed layer and 100 m. We attribute the lack of fertilization-induced export to silicon limitation of diatoms and reprocessing of sinking particles by detritus feeders. Our data are consistent with the view that nitrate-rich but silicate-deﬁcient waters are not poised for enhanced particle export upon iron addition.

From the conclusion:

Our results add further evidence to support the idea that Fe fertilization does not necessarily stimulate POC export and sequestration under Si limitation in the Southern Ocean. Zooplankton community composition and activity under the mixed layer may strongly regulate the export by reprocessing sinking particles and altering the particle size distribution.

Things are not as simple as Martin hoped, back in 1988.

(Image via the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This true-color image captures a phytoplankton bloom in the Ross Sea on January 22, 2011, as viewed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Bright greens of plant-life have replaced the deep blues of open ocean water)

Why Pull The Trigger? Ctd

Adding to the theme of a recent thread, a reader wants to see more “feminists against dwelling on trauma, triggering”:

Here’s an essay by a famous queer feminist (Jack Halberstam, formerly Judith) that is getting a lot of positive attention on Facebook and Twitter that I think you should read. It’s an updated argument similar to the one Wendy Brown made in her very popular 1995 academic book, States of Injury, arguing that left identity politics should be very cautious about grounding itself in past harms. (We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and the argument against framing ourselves as victims is a very well known and widely embraced one – on feminist terms – and has been at least as long as I’ve been in academia. I’m a tenured Women’s Studies professor at a major research university now.)

Anyway, I think it might make a difference to see that arguments like this are popular (though still contested, of course, which is fine) and that feminist and queer scholars have a long tradition of querying the political and theoretical consequences of claiming victimization.

From Halberstam’s essay:

Much of the recent discourse of offense and harm has focused on language, slang and naming. For example, controversies erupted in the last few months over the name of a longstanding nightclub in San Francisco:

“Trannyshack,” and arguments ensued about whether the word “tranny” should ever be used. These debates led some people to distraction, and legendary queer performer, Justin Vivian Bond, posted an open letter on her Facebook page telling readers and fans in no uncertain terms that she is “angered by this trifling bullshit.” Bond reminded readers that many people are “delighted to be trannies” and not delighted to be shamed into silence by the “word police.” Bond and others have also referred to the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them into affectionate terms of endearment. When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!

In The Life of Brian, Brian finally refuses to participate in the anti-Semitism that causes his mother to call him a “roman.” In a brave “coming out” speech, he says: “I’m not a roman mum, I’m a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, I’m kosher mum, I’m a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!

The Best Of The Dish Today

Screenshots from Fox News are often full of hathos:

https://twitter.com/nbj914/status/486194542061051905

I’ve long had a simple frustration about national security policy. We debate the merits and otherwise of various anti-terrorism policies – spying, drones, invasions, occupations, torture, etc. – and yet we never really have a solid grip on just how dangerous the threat really is. We still think of it almost entirely in terms of 9/11, even though nothing has been attempted on anything like that scale since. In other words, we know the costs of our anti-terror policies, but we really don’t have much of a grip on the benefits – i.e. real dangers really averted. And so it’s always a relief when someone who has had access to all the necessarily secret intelligence on Islamist terror can give us a better sense of what we’re grappling with. And along comes the former head of MI6 in Britain, Richard Dearlove, telling us this:

He told an audience in London on Monday there had been a fundamental change in the nature of Islamist extremism since the Arab spring. It had created a major political problem in the Middle East but the west, including Britain, was only “marginally affected”. Unlike the threat posed by al-Qaida before and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks 13 years ago, the west was not the main target of the radical fundamentalism that created Isis, (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Dearlove said.

But the premise of the assumption that we somehow have to reinsert ourselves into the Iraq implosion and Syrian civil war is that we will be threatened if we don’t. The Cheneys have even raised the specter of nuclear Armageddon. But what if the most effective way to make ourselves a target in an otherwise distant Muslim sectarian and regional war is to involve ourselves directly in it? What if ignoring it, or keeping a very long distance, is actually the best way to defeat Islamist terror? This isn’t a matter of hawks or doves; it’s about what is the most effective response to specific threats – threats that have and will evolve and change over time. And that doesn’t just apply to the governments in the West; it should also apply to the media:

[Dearlove] made it clear he believed the way the British government and the media were giving the extremists the “oxygen of publicity” was counter-productive. The media were making monsters of “misguided young men, rather pathetic figures” who were getting coverage “more than their wildest dreams”, said Dearlove, adding: “It is surely better to ignore them.”

Advice not from a peacenik, but from a man more directly exposed to the real threat than almost anyone else.

Today, we wrapped up some loose and troubling ends from the Hobby Lobby case; we explored the growing evidence behind the notion of a continuous spectrum of consciousness between humans and other animals; we defended the anti-institutional faith of the Millennial generation; and speculated about the demise of the few lesbian bars left in America.

The most popular post of the day was “The Tears Of An Elephant“, followed by “Map of the Day” on state-by-state painkiller prescriptions in the US.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. One writes:

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With that said, your recent threads on adver-journalism have spurred me to chip in $30. In this society we vote with our dollars. And as they say, you’re either your part of the solution, or part of the problem. Here’s to keeping things honest.

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