The Dish

Nancy S. Kim argues that wrap contracts – online contracts “that can be entered into by clicking on a link or on an ‘accept’ icon” – limit a company’s liability, “diminish your privacy rights, take away your intellectual property and even deprive you of your free speech rights”:

In [a] disheartening example of abuse by wrap contract, a company threatened to fine a consumer named Jen Palmer $3500 for posting a negative review about it on a consumer review website. The company, KlearGear, didn’t claim that the review was false; rather, it claimed that her review ran afoul of a non-disparagement clause in the company’s online terms of sale. Palmer claims that the company reported her to a credit reporting agency which negatively affected her ability to obtain loans for a new car and home repairs. What’s particularly troubling about this example is that it’s unclear which version of the contract applied or that Palmer was even subject to KlearGear’s contract since the company did not complete the sale to her (which was the basis of her negative review). Yet, very few consumers would be willing to sue to test the validity of a wrap contract in court.

The wrap contract, by its “legal” nature, can be used to intimidate consumers and deter them from acting in ways that are perfectly lawful. They allow companies to change the rules that would ordinarily apply between a company and a consumer, giving companies all the power to enforce provisions to their advantage.

The solution to wrap contracts requires raising consumer awareness of its potential dangers. Cognitive biases work against the consumer. Consumer optimism and myopia make it easy to ignore latent harms in favor of immediate gratification — why fret about hidden terms when you want to get online now? The herd effect lulls users into a false sense of security since everybody else is clicking “agree” too.

But the consumer is hardly to blame here. There is simply too much information that it would be unrealistic to expect consumers to read every wrap contract they encounter, but consumers can and should make some noise when they encounter unfair terms. They should complain to companies, the state legislature, their friends. (Faircontracts.org has other suggestions here.) What they should not be is indifferent about the status quo.

Evangelical Christians are declining: 

The most recent Pew Research Center survey of the nation’s religious attitudes, taken in 2012, found that just 19 percent of Americans identified themselves as white evangelical Protestants—five years earlier, 21 percent of Americans did so. Slightly more (19.6 percent) self-identified as unaffiliated with any religion at all, the first time that group has surpassed evangelicals.

Secularization alone is not to blame for this change in American religiosity.

Even half of those Americans who claim no religious affiliation profess belief in God or claim some sort of spiritual orientation. Other faiths, like Islam, perhaps the country’s fastest-growing religion, have had no problem attracting and maintaining worshippers. No, evangelicalism’s dilemma stems more from a change in American Christianity itself, a sense of creeping exhaustion with the popularizing, simplifying impulse evangelical luminaries such as [televangelist Robert] Schuller once rode to success.

Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me.

Institutions around the world are doing “amazingly well” when it comes to attracting visitors, according to Fiammetta Rocco:

Some of the new enthusiasm for museums is explained by changes in demand. In the rich world, and in some developing countries too, the share of people who are going on to higher education has risen spectacularly in recent decades. Surveys show that better-educated folk are a lot more likely to be museum-goers. They want to see for themselves where they fit in the wider world and look to museums for guidance, which is why so many of these places have been transformed from “restrained containers” to “exuberant companions,” as Victoria Newhouse writes in her book, Towards a New Museum. …

In the more affluent parts of the developing world, too, museum-building has flourished, driven mainly by governments that want their countries to be regarded as culturally sophisticated (though wealthy private individuals are also playing a part). They see museums as symbols of confidence, sources of public education and places in which a young country can present a national narrative.

China in particular is pouring money into museums:

In 1949, when the Communist Party took control, China had just 25 museums. Many were burned down during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 and their collections dispersed. But the rapid growth and urbanization that accompanied Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policies after 1978 also launched a museum-building boom that did far more than simply replace what had been lost. Every provincial capital now seems to be constructing a new museum, or upgrading one it has already. This is seen as a good way to kickstart a cultural program, even if the building has nothing to display for a while. Rich Chinese collectors are also putting up private museums to show off their treasures.

According to the current five-year plan, China was to have 3,500 museums by 2015, a target it achieved three years early. Last year a record 451 new museums opened, pushing the total by the end of 2012 to 3,866, says An Laishun, vice president of the China Museums Association. By contrast, in America only 20 to 40 museums a year were built in the decade before the 2008 financial crash.

Recent Dish on the museum experience here.

(Photo by Flickr user InSapphoWeTrust)

Armed with a new Rand study (pdf), Mark Thompson argues that the ”one-size-fits-all-services” F-35 fighter was a $400 billion mistake:

The real danger of relying on a single aircraft is that it could endanger its pilots. “During the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force was able to rapidly upgrade one of its four jet fighters, the F-86 Sabre, to meet the surprise introduction of the Russian Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG)-15, a Soviet-designed fighter that was more capable than any other U.S. fighter in the Air Force or Navy inventory,” Rand says. “Had the Air Force and Navy relied exclusively on a single joint fighter other than the F-86, it might not have been able to respond quickly to the unanticipated new threat posed by the MiG-15.”

The fundamental challenge of building a multi-service fighter is that one size doesn’t fit all in the war-fighting business. “They are separate airplanes,” Thomas Christie, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester from 2001 to 2005, told Time earlier this year of the F-35’s three variants. “We would have been better off if we’d let the services go off and do their own thing.” A bonus would have been multiple plane builders—instead of a single contractor—to keep the companies on their toes, he added.

Dave Majumdar explains the risks of using the F-35 in situations better suited to the faster F-22 Raptor:

Both China and Russia are developing these so-called fifth-generation fighters, which feature high speed, maneuverability and radar-evading stealth. The Chinese have their Chengdu J-20 and Shenyang J-31 prototypes. Russia is working on the Sukhoi T-50. Both the Russian and Chinese aircraft might have the potential to match certain aspects of the Raptor’s performance. By contrast, there are troubling questions as to how well the F-35 would fare against the new foreign fighters. While the F-35 has air-to-air sensors and can carry air-to-air missiles, it does not have the kinematic performance of the F-22. It’s simply sluggish in comparison. The Raptor was designed from the outset as an air-to-air killer par excellence—the F-35 was not. The Raptor combines a very stealthy airframe with a high altitude ceiling and supersonic cruise. Further, the F-22 possesses excellent maneuverability for close-in visual-range dogfights.

Amanda Ripley urges education policymakers to take boredom seriously:

When Gallup asked American teenagers to choose three words that best described their typical feelings in school from a list of 14 adjectives, “bored” was chosen most often—by one out of every two students. (“Tired” came in second, chosen by 42 percent of teenagers surveyed.) And boredom is global. Across 32 countries, nearly half of 15-year-olds said they often felt bored at school on average, according to a 2000 OECD survey. (Ireland did worst of all, with 67 percent of teenagers reporting frequent boredom, compared to 61 percent in the U.S.) …

The research on boredom in school is surprisingly scant—perhaps because boredom, unlike anger or defiance or other, less common schoolhouse emotions, does not directly disrupt the classroom. It is more of a latent virus, less likely to provoke adult interest. “Test anxiety has been examined in more than 1,000 studies to date,” Ulrike Nett and her colleagues noted in a fascinating 2010 study on boredom in school, “yet only a handful of studies have explored boredom.”