07.22.13
Posted in Bioterrorism at 4:27 pm by George Smith
Every mid-Summer, flesh-eating bacteria found along the coast kills and maims a very small number of Americans. Called Vibrio vulnificus, my contribution to science was discovering what it produced that made it lethal. It makes an enzyme, collagenase, that digests collagen, the protein that makes up connective tissue and filler throughout your body. Said another way, this makes it efficient at eating holes in the flesh walls of you. And that’s a catastrophe.
Have you ever spent time working with a pathogen that could kill you?
From the Epoch Times newspaper:
At least one person is dead and three others were sickened in Louisiana after coming down with Vibrio vulnificus, a type of “flesh-eating bacteria.???
They contracted the illness after swimming in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, health officials told the Houston Chronicle.
Four swimmers were infected with the “flesh-eating??? Vibrio vulnificus bacteria, which is naturally occurring and found in warm water. They were swimming near New Orleans and Thibodaux.
The person who died was an 83-year-old Terrebonne Parish man who had an open wound that was splashed with water containing the bacteria.
“You get bacteria into certain wounds, and they can cause a lot of tissue destruction by virtue of the fact that these bacteria produce enzymes that break down the tissue [I did this],??? Dr. Peter Hotez, an expert at Baylor College of Medicine, told ABC-13 in Houston.
He said that people can also contract it via eating raw shellfish.
Early diagnosis and aggressive treatment with antibiotics are needed to successfully cure V. vulnificus infections. Sadly, this is often not the case and fatality or infection requiring amputation to save life is the result.
When I graduated with a Ph.D. based on the microbiology, no one was interested in continuing or funding the study of it. The small number of people it killed were of no general concern.
It took decades to make it a requirement that people be informed of the risk when eating raw shellfish taken from brackish Gulf Stream coastal waters where good growth of V. vulnificus occurs in the summertime. And many many people still do not know of the hazard which can occur if minor fishing or sea shore cuts are infected with it. Some people, due to underlying conditions, tend to be far more vulnerable to V. vulnificus.
It is a wicked disease.
What I did was innovative. I thought about Vibrio vulnificus and what it might be doing before almost everyone else believed it to be important. I decided to take a risk (and you undertake a thorough think about such things for obvious reasons) and made a hypothesis as to what might be a contributing factor to a fatal disease, did the laboratory work to find an element and define the nature of the product of the bacterium. That’s real science.
Here.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:25 am by George Smith
PARIAH Big Sharing Issue! “Powering the We Get Yours Economy!”
At Google images, “sharing economy” returns the Silicon Valley pissed-in birthwater of the future. The sharing economy, as defined here, is just a euphemism for installing network technology that atomizes labor costs, unleashes the economy into free-lance downward bidding wars, taking larger pieces of a stagnant economic pie for the owners of the technology. In other words, they always get the share, no matter how much smaller the total economic swag
becomes. (And, as is always the case with snake-oil sellers, they’re backed up with other fine-sounding euphemisms, in case “sharing economy” just isn’t enough. In this instance, Google offers “collaborative consumption.“)
iTunes and Apple are the greatest examples of the benefit of the sharing economy.
When digital conversion of music resulted in the collaborative sharing of recorded songs and albums, rendering them almost worthless as a way for all individuals not already the very biggest stars in the world to make any money through them, iTunes and Apple were coincidentally perfectly positioned to turn the aggregate into a company enriching form of rent-seeking.
Most can’t make any money in the iTunes store selling music. But the millions and millions of “you’s” who still try to can be used by the globally aggregating tools of the sharing economy to make good money for Apple to launder through Luxembourg.
In this way Apple neatly replaced record companies which, while far from perfect, took on the costs and risks of finding and developing new art. Apple’s iTunes, and similar competing structures, dispense with this as an extraneous cost and risk to be put entirely onto the makers of content. Apple doesn’t develop pop music. When Google gets into a similar business it won’t develop music. No one will.
They broke the method and replaced it with a new one, one in which they get all the spoil.
On Sunday famous Tom Friedman got to the sharing economy, specifically with the example of AirBnB:
The sharing economy — watch this space. This is powerful.
Friedman has been relentlessly pilloried on the web for a certain lack in critical thinking and detail work for the sake of grandiose claims and assertions.
On Sunday, in flugel-horning for AirBnB, he was still in form.
AirBnB, Friedman wrote, was started by Brian Chesky when he and a roommate leased three air mattresses in their place to San Francisco convention-goers who couldn’t find rooms in 2007. The rates were not particularly cheap — $80 for one night on an air mattress (?!) — and there’s no mention on whether or not the buyers were able to give it a good or bad rap on Yelp.
The latter is important because Friedman and Chesky employ it to make the argument that distributed global swarm hospitality service is self-correcting. This is because you can give anyone a bad review if they deserve it in their great automated web of trust.
“On July 12, Chesky told me, ‘Tonight we have 140,000 people around the world staying in Airbnb rooms,” writes Friedman. “Hilton has around 600,000 rooms,” continues Chesky.
Stop right there. The critical thinking cops are here to snap on the manacles.
Hilton invests in maintenance of an infrastructure. AirBnB does not
and advertises this as an asset.
Hilton, and competitors, must maintain a level of use every night and day or slide into ruin and go out of business. AirBnB does not. In fact, AirBnb’s room numbers cannot be realistically compared with Hilton’s because it does not matter whether a majority or minority are stagnant for long periods of time.
This is easily seen by running AirBnB on your town, which probably isn’t a tourist destination.
I ran it on Pasadena and, yes, AirBnB rentals are here in force. But added AirBnB capacity does not add more hospitality business to Pasadena anymore than building new motels and hotels on Colorado Blvd. or Lake. There are times during the year when there are influxes of businessmen and tourists and these follow predictable patterns. AirBnB gives visitors some more options.
AirBnB adds capacity from pre-existing structure. It does not provably increase the size of the economic pie generated by rental of hospitality space because that is a constant (sometimes changing) in most cities, determined by other factors. Occupancy does not directly grow with capacity.
But if you look more closely at AirBnB property, you will see that some of the rooms are also offered as monthly rentals, revealing the desire of the owner to be an apartment manager. Of these, we already have loads in Pasadena — and in your city — and they use Craigslist, too.
Others, when examined, are renting all the rooms in a given house, which may look nice on the outside, turning it into a stealth motel. One must assume that some are illegal. Pasadena and all cities do have various ordnances for apartment complexes, hotels, motels, probably increasing in importance if the rented structures are not built in the business district.
This is the case with granny cottages here.
Most of them are illegal, in one way or another, under strict municipal code enforcement. But they are a staple in southern California where people have converted garages into them in trying to build revenue. And AirBnB makes it easier to rent them out, perhaps not that much easier than Craigslist.
In any case, this puts AirBnB in the role of virtual slumlord, although that may not be the large part of its business.
Hilton, however, cannot afford to be seen as a slumlord.
The model of AirBnB, as it is with seemingly everything in the so-called sharing economy, is in shoving all the risk of the main business off onto the free-lancers and partners.
Friedman:
[Guests] and hosts rate each other online, so there is a huge incentive to deliver a good experience because a series of bad reputational reviews and you’re done. Airbnb also automatically provides $1 million in insurance against damage or theft to nearly all of its hosts (some countries have restrictions) and only rarely gets claims.
Online ratings. Yes, everyone knows that solves everything. And although I do not know the giant hospitality industry intimately, I would be willing to assume the actual insurance liabilities taken on by AirBnB are not comparable with those that must be taken on by a company like Hilton, or even Motel 6.
None of what AirBnB does, in the practical sense for renters and tourists, is innovative. What has been the innovation in the sharing economy is the rapid proliferation of networks tools to distribute risk from a parent business to laborers and resources a corporate business puts no real investment into within the free-lance gig economy.
It does not increase the economic pie. Someone who has seen their income diminish and who is now renting a room (or rooms) in their house in Pasadena … well, most of them aren’t going to flourish on it.
The slumlord experience of mining that for maximum revenue was already well-developed before the sharing economy. I saw it during the census, the carving up of spacious homes into separate living spaces for the servant class. Further empowering it with something like AirBnB isn’t progress.
The rest of the Friedman’s column is given over to the usual veneration of opportunity for the topmost. In this case, the ability to rent Lichtenstein (really) directly through its ruler, Hans-Adam Jerk Peter, or:
Chesky then fires up his iPad and shows me on Airbnb.com the rooms and homes being offered for rent: “We have over 600 castles,??? he begins. “We have dozens of yurts, caves, tepees with TVs in them, water towers, motor homes, private islands, glass houses, lighthouses, igloos with Wi-Fi; we have a home that Jim Morrison used to live in; we have treehouses — hundreds of treehouses — which are the most profitable listings on our Web site per square footage. The treehouse in Lincoln, Vt., is more valuable than the main house. We have treehouses in Vermont that have had six-month waiting lists. People plan their vacation now around treehouse availability!???
This in service to his always larger point: If you can’t be super-special to the American — read global — plutocracy, you’re fucked. So might as well cannibalize your home and shit while you still can.
“[Average] is over — the skills required for any good job keep rising — a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent their kids’ rooms, their cars or their power tools,” he writes.
Chesky emphatically adds it’s time to free up your power drill for the sharing economy.
If you are (or were) a thoughtful American high up in the government you are beginning to become very worried by this train of progress. You’ll know you can’t have a stable democracy of over 300 million where everyone has been turned into a self-cannibalizer or free-lance worker.
Because, inevitably, the sharing economy will come for everyone and you’ll be the worse for it.
AirBnB imagery on Google illuminates the sharing economy culture — which is of plutocracy. Here, for example, we have the rental of a house built with a jet plane fuselage extension and the AirBnB guys, made over from the unbearable to prancing maximum hipster cool.
Addendum, more fine print:
If one checks AirBnB listings for your city (again, use Pasadena) you find that when compared to standard transient rooms along Colorado from the 2-star to 4 and 5 star places, the swarm offerings from the sharing economy are not that great.
In some you don’t get privacy, but location. One had a no alcohol rule — which I bet is a real big attraction for people coming in for the Rose Parade.
Privacy, and a separate bathroom, naturally, are must-haves in real motels and hotels for many reasons which are not necessary to delve into here if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Other listings, if the city actually went into them, I’m betting would clearly be found to violate a municipal code or two. This doesn’t make them bad rentals per se — again this is normal in soCal — but it does separate them from legitimate businesses that invest in hospitality infrastructure.
Others are guest houses mobilized on the wealthy properties around the Rose Bowl and CalTech, the plutocracy doing its grasping thing.
And while some of these deals aren’t bad nothing is particularly cheap in Pasadena.
Other entries in AirBnB’s database are the sublet and subdivided properties of people who want to own and rent their own apartments (or sub-sublet inside something they’re renting).
What they really want are long-term tenants who take on a lease and, one assumes, you can find all, or most of them, also on Craigslist. In fact, at least one the AirBnB rentals listed didn’t want to rent for brief stays at all with a minimum booking of “365 nights.” Ha-ha.
So if many of AirBnB’s “rooms” are also listed on Craigslist, or some other rent-a-room realty service, does that make them all the new paradigm, rising in comparability to Hilton? (Craigslist, one adds, was one of the first into the new economy, taking all the share of newspaper advertising, causing the business model of a sustainable independent free press to collapse. Which it’s still doing, newspapers now having business tech writers enthusiastically covering the sharing economy that’s destroying their livelihood as another round of lay-offs rips through the newsroom.)
[Emit horselaugh.]
You see, this is another of the great magics of the sharing economy. You can be a transparent bullshitter and find someone like Tom Friedman (in the Sunday NYT) to publish all the grand humbugs about your business being like the Hilton without batting an eye.
Watch this space. The sharing economy is powerful stuff.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:25 am by George Smith
Don’t watch Net TV on original content server websites of mega-corporations. They drip with what would have been considered malicious programming ten years ago.
I have been mildly interested in Under the Dome, the CBS serialization of the King science-fiction novel. If you watch it on CBS’s website it lays an unnecessary burden on you.
It’s far easier and more pleasant to watch it off a site that provides pirated streams, like Couch Tuner.
And this is because American mega-business entertainment and news websites have largely gone over to using malicious programming web design to wring maximum value from online viewers. They all use scripting to take over your machine, instituting endless background downloading and churn to whatever stream you are intent on viewing or listening to. The programming design of the page is not to benefit the user in any way. It is to squeeze maximum big data and value from the target.
Let’s take Rolling Stone magazine’s website as another example.
If you read Matt Taibbi’s space regularly you’ll have noticed that the RS designers have put in a click trap as well as an annoying overlay. When you click on a Taibbi post the first time it will load a Facebook sign-on so that it can reach into your profile on the social network. And this is not because they like you and are trying to make an easy, pleasant experience of the reading.
RS wants your profile data for use in its advertising department. It wants the ability to sneakily add likes you may not be interested in giving to its own presence. And it wants your material for whatever reciprocal deal it has going with the ZuckerBorg. This just for the privilege of reading a damn blog posting already festooned with digital advertising.
Most of this is plainly hostile. American web users accept this because it is normalized. They have been conditioned to take a daily dispensation of digital guff as good. The web was far from always being like this.
You can deal with this level of corporate animosity, for television anyway, by using the pirate aggregator I linked to at the beginning of the piece. If you do so and you’re savvy enough about your machine, you’ll immediately see the processing burden is far less, even with pop-ups from the Internet’s bottom-feeders.
There is no reason for streamed network television or video to take over your device.
Paradoxically, pirate sites which established the reputation for giving you malicious gifts you didn’t want, are now a more pleasant place to do on-line viewing of mainstream corporate product.
They also dispense with the commercial breaks.
I don’t have a problem with commercials but in today’s world their elimination becomes an added small pleasure, too. Because in erasing them more layers of the automation of reflexive corporate grasping that permeates every aspect of the American experience are peeled away.
As mega-corporate America becomes more malicious on the web, enabled by Silicon Valley programming for the aggregation of avarice, aka the sharing economy [1], it becomes counter-productive. It gives justice to recommending and encouraging piracy, outright stealing of content.
When you cynically view your web-delivered entertainment as just another vehicle for extracting data from consumers, you’ve crossed a threshold to a point where striking back with efforts to deprive you of that content, if even only in a minimal way, are just.
American corporations work under the premise that it’s proper and fair for them to use programming to surreptitiously get into your on-line world, to reach into your pocket. They employ the equivalent of malicious programming to do it. Twenty years ago they would have been called professional programmers of booby-traps, trojan horses, and viruses. They share the same sets of skills. They are criminals passed off as cutting edge programmers.
1. The sharing economy: American tech industry euphemism for the creation of an economy in which the top 1 percent gets all the share.
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07.17.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Yesterday, an article from TIME magazine on the obvious: Digital technology has destroyed making a living on recorded music unless you’re at the very top of the winner-take-all society. The euphemism the gurus of tomorrow have developed for it is the sharing economy, or an economy in which only the 1 percent, or a very few, own all the share. More recently, the blog has discussed it here and here.
It’s not news that the sharing economy has demolished the music business. However, what you don’t often see are the actual statistics on how little even well-known names get for their work.
From yesterday, some figures:
The fast-growing music-streaming service Spotify received a very public put-down on Sunday when singer Thom Yorke [of RadioHead] and producer Nigel Godrich, members of the band Atoms for Peace, announced via Twitter that their music would be pulled from the platform …
On Twitter, Godrich wrote that while streaming services can help established artists generate money from their past work, new artists are being stifled because of low payouts. “New artists get paid f–k all with this model. It’s an equation that just doesn’t work,??? he wrote.
The magazine added that independent music acts make about half a penny/song per stream.
Let’s do some obvious arithmetic: 1,000,000 x .005 = $5,000.
One million is major national hit numbers. Over the course of a year, a 5000 dollar pay-out is a pittance. For 100,000 plays, it’s a virtually not-worth-doing 500 bucks. Smaller numbers, and like Google’s profit sharing model for AdSense impressions, the artist can probably wait for 10 years of play for the threshold required to mandate cutting a check.
However, the operating environment in the winner-take-all digital economy is that the owners of capital make all the swag from the tools of digital distribution. From TIME: “The three major record labels actually own a minority stake in Spotify, which means they will be earning profits from the company’s overall future success whether or not it benefits individual artists.”
“The alternative before streaming was rampant piracy. A fear of returning to the days of Napster — along with a complacency on the part of record labels who can win with Spotify without necessarily having their artists win too …”
Paradoxically, this piece on one of the guru billionaires behind the digital awakening, Sean Parker, recently pilloried for an excessive wedding in Big Sur:
Napster founder, former Facebook president and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker has been forced to pay a $2.5 million (£1.6 million) fine after his extravagant star-studded wedding in California took place in a protected coastal area.
The 33-year-old, who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, married singer-song writer Alexandra Lenas in a $10 million ceremony on Saturday in Big Sur.
Officials were notified that he had reportedly built a small village – including a gated cottage, fake ruins, bridges, ponds, waterfalls and a huge dancefloor – without permission in a closed campground owned by Ventana Inn & Spa …
From Napster, and the bad old days of music piracy, to Spotify, the new bad days of shrinking the pie and taking what little is left off the peons, like grains of sand. He has all the bases covered.
The magic of the corporate technological revolution is that it does not result in progress. The software applications merely make the collection of monopoly rents on content production globally efficient. Simply by holding the distribution networks and applications, remuneration can be reduced to record low levels while using the group to keep individual corporate entity profit high. With the global reach of the world-spanning network, you can do that with every bit of intellectual or creative content created that is copied digitally.
This is the economic model and technology which will eventually get to hanging everyone from the lamp post for the benefit of the few.
We can cheer for the eventual destruction of Spotify as it serves no real purpose in the betterment of the artistic jungle. Maybe it will even happen. It would be only a small victory in a losing war. But the revenge aspect, the idea that one digital bilking operation/Ponzi scheme failed can yield minor satisfaction.
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