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I’m more than halfway through Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez. If you’re a fan of Lean In (my review) you might be interested to know what Sheryl Sandberg actually does in her role as COO. Martinez provides one concrete example:

First up in the Sheryl show was a product manager named Dan Rubinstein. Dan resembled a Woody Allen figure: short, thin, nebbish, but without the crackling anxiety. Also a former Googler, he seemed like one of those old PM hands who always made sure to take good notes and get his weekly report in on time. He fronted for User Ops, which was the user police, and the user-facing version of what I did on the ads side. Ever wonder why your feed never features any form of porn or otherwise grotesque imagery? It’s because a team in User Ops has managed to sift through the billion photos uploaded a day, and pick out a pile of offensive needles in an Internet scale haystack.

On the screen now, Dan launched a demo of a tool that was essentially that: on loading the Web app, a raft of user photos appeared, which a User Ops “analyst” could easily click to eliminate, like plucking weeds from a garden. That image would be banished forever, including versions with small color changes or cropping done by veteran spammers and sketchy ad types. As he walked the room through the demo, he would click on an image of a kitten—kittens evidently represented the porny pictures they’d normally filter—and that kitten would be gone, as well as all variants of that kitten image. Click, ban, reload, click, ban, reload. A well-oiled kitten-banning machine, ladies and gentlemen.

Suddenly Sheryl interrupted: “So, what’s with all the kittens?”

Dan, a bit startled, peered at Sheryl, clearly confused.

“Why are all the bad photos kittens?”

Dan flatly replied, “We use kittens as the bad photos in demos, because the real bad photos are . . . you know . . . kind of obscene.”

“Right,” said Sheryl, “but why kittens and not something else?”

The room was deathly silent with thirty-plus sets of twitchy eyes rising from barely concealed phones and laptops to stare at Dan and his kitten-banning machine. You could almost hear everyone mentally asking in chorus: Yeah, what is it with the kittens?

Dan looked up at the screen as if noticing the kitten pics for the first time, and then turned to Sheryl and answered, almost under his breath: “Well . . . for demo purposes we don’t show really bad photos . . . so the engineers use kittens instead. Because, you know . . . kittens and cats are like, pu—

He stopped right there, but he almost said “pussy” in front of the Queen of Lean, Sheryl Sandberg. “Got it!” she expectorated. After sucking in a lungful of air, as if loading for a verbal barrage, she continued. “If there were women on that team, they’d NEVER, EVER choose those photos as demo pics. I think you should change them immediately!” Before the salvo had even finished Dan’s head was bowed, and he was madly taking notes in a small notebook. CHANGE PUSSY PHOTOS NOW! one imagined they read. He looked like a forty-year-old scolded child.

I was dying inside. You could feel either awkwardness or repressed laughter seething from everyone in the room at this unprecedented display of management wrath and PM folly. Demoing the pussy filter to Sheryl. Epic!

Dan limped along with the rest of his demo, and then it was my turn. After that high-water mark of incompetence, it was hard to fuck things up. I glided through the slides, lingering on the money shot: a plot of the number of ads reviewed versus human man-hours. The former was up and to the right (MOAR ADS!), the latter was flat (fewer expensive humans!). All was right with the Ads Review world. I drowsed through the other presentations and bolted at the first opportunity.

 

More: read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Related:

• Shift of power from publishers to advertisers

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Vergara v. California has run its course, with the California Supreme Court today deciding not to examine an appeals court decision. It seems that the right of a government worker (schoolteacher) to continue collecting a paycheck is superior to the right of a child to an education. Not exactly news, but certainly heartening for anyone considering a career as a government worker.

Related:

• The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard
• Young teacher’s view of older teachers
• Academic tenure leads to reduction in quantity and quality of work

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“Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis” (Reuters) is an interesting example of why the highest return on investment for American business is lobbying the government:

Massachusetts is preparing to levy a 5-cent fee per trip on ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft and spend the money on the traditional taxi industry, a subsidy that appears to be the first of its kind in the United States.

Republican Governor Charlie Baker signed the nickel fee into law this month as part of a sweeping package of regulations for the industry.

The law levies a 20-cent fee in all, with 5 cents for taxis, 10 cents going to cities and towns and the final 5 cents designated for a state transportation fund.

Of course, the fee is small right now but federal income tax was originally (1913) at a 1% rate, with the first $3,000 exempt ($73,000 in today’s mini-dollars; see Wikipedia). Once the mechanisms are all set up and running it should be easy to adjust the fees and extend the law beyond its proposed 2026 sunset.

One question is how to realize the American dream of a river of cash without working. A taxi medallion in New York was $1.3 million in 2013 (nytimes) and “more than $700,000” in 2014 in Boston (Globe). But most of the suburbs of Boston are small towns in which it may not cost much to register a taxi (Waltham seems to charge $25). As this is a statewide law the handouts should be distributed statewide as well, not just in the city of Boston where taxi medallions are expensive. Why not set up a taxi company in Waltham, for example, linked to an Ooma phone number that always goes to voicemail saying “We are busy right now”? Now we are in the Check of the Month Club?

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Paris’s city museum of modern art displays “The Electricity Fairy,” a massive 1937 mural by Raoul Dufy. This is off the beaten tourist track but well worth a visit if you’re technically inclined. Nearly every electrical unit is represented by a figure, with Amps, Ohms, and Volts close together. Scientists and mathematicians are given due credit, with greats such as Maxwell and Leibniz (“Leibnitz” in French; competitor Newton is not depicted!).

See my photos.

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I’m reading Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez and found this good explanation of how the Web world has changed:

Internet advertising has the same atavistic resemblance to the newspaper advertising that preceded it. The first such ads were run in La Presse a Parisian paper, in 1836. Advertisement was originally a scheme to lower the paper’s selling price and capture market share. A successful strategy, it was soon copied by all newspapers. The ads themselves were rectangular frames of advertiser-created content, placed either below or alongside regular content, and marked as distinct by their blocky frame and large, garish lettering.

By 2008, that had all changed, which is why a former Wall Street quant like me was at Adchemy. A company called Right Media was allowing advertisers to segment users into specific clusters based on their actions on a given site (e.g., putting something in a shopping cart). Originating the notion of real-time data synchronization between the online world and specific publishers, Right Media even let you tag users that came to your site (or anywhere else) and find them again later. Acquired by Yahoo in 2007, it had developed the first “programmatic” media-buying technology; “programmatic” meaning media controllable via computers talking to one another, rather than humans talking to one another via sales calls. Additionally, one could target advertisements based on user demographics like age, sex, and geography. Media buying was no longer about putting a square on the automobile or real estate section, but about finding specific users anywhere and anyhow.

In media, money is merely expendable ammunition; data is power. With this new programmatic technology that allowed each and every ad impression and user to be individually scrutinized and targeted, that power was shifting inexorably from the publisher, the owner of the eyeballs, to the advertiser, the person buying them. If my advertiser data about what you bought and browsed in the past was more important than publisher data like the fact that you were on Yahoo Autos right then, or that you were (supposedly) a thirty-five-year-old male in Ohio, then the power was mine as the advertiser to determine price and desirability of media, not the publisher’s. As it turned out (and as Facebook would painfully realize in 2011, forming the dramatic climax of this book), this “first-party” advertiser data—the data that companies like Amazon know about you—is more valuable than most any publisher data.

This was a seismic shift that would affect everything about how we consume media, leaving publishers essentially powerless and at the service of the various middlemen between them and advertiser dollars, all in the name of targeting and accountability. If the publisher wasn’t savvy enough to arm itself with sophisticated targeting and tracking before tangling with the media-buying world, then that world would come to them, in the form of countless arbitrageurs and data quacks peddling media snake oil.

Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange. Picture it: individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day.

The author is a former Physics grad student who joined Goldman Sachs in 2005 and then got into Internet advertising as Wall Street collapsed (but not Goldman: “When the markets presented an apocalyptic Boschian landscape, every Goldman grunt, sergeant, and general would close ranks and form a Greek phalanx of greed. Unlike almost every other bank on the street, Goldman could actually calculate its risk across desks and asset classes out to five decimals. The partners, who had much of their net worth wrapped up in Goldman stock, held tense meetings and came up with a plan to save the foundering ship. Favors were called in. Clients squeezed. Risks very quickly hedged and positions unloaded. Despite the mayhem (and all the promises of drama in Liar’s Poker) I rarely saw anyone lose their cool for longer than two seconds. We bled, but others died, and you felt fortunate to have a front-row seat at the biggest financial show in a generation.”).

No punches will be pulled in this book it seems, e.g., “Goldman Sachs was unusual among Wall Street banks in that it had mostly kept a partnership management structure. Hence, every incoming employee was hired by a specific partner, and you were that partner’s boy. My feudal liege lord was a short, balding guy with an intense stare and oddly biblical name: Elisha Wiesel. Elisha was none other than the only son of Elie Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor whose horrifying Night is required reading for many American high schoolers. His father may have been a Holocaust luminary and a public intellectual, but his son was a vicious, greedy little prick.”

I wonder if there will be a further dramatic change in Internet advertising or if this will prove to be the steady-state (television advertising reached a steady state in the 1950s?). If so, this means that mass-market publications (celebrity news!) will increase their dominance over specialty publications? Or if the specialty publication (about yachting?) attracts super rich readers then it can still thrive by auctioning them?

Readers: Who else has read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley?

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Here’s a photo showing the newly militarized face of Paris. This is in a quiet street with no major tourist attractions (a 10-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower, though).

The city hadn’t lost its magic during our July visit (though given the 93-degree high temps I wish that the French did not consider air conditioning to be an unproven novelty), but rifle-toting soldiers were a regular sight.

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Looking at two recent news stories…

“Ex-SEAL Member Who Wrote Book on Bin Laden Raid Forfeits $6.8 Million” (nytimes) indicates that the total pre-tax income for writing a bestselling non-fiction account of the death of Osama Bin Laden was roughly $6.7 million. This compares unfavorably with the minimum of $7 million post-tax that Amber Heard obtained by being married to Johnny Depp for one year (see previous posting and also the comments in which I note that there is no way to know if the $7 million payment we’ve read about is the complete financial transfer from defendant to plaintiff; if Amber Heard had wanted to make a $7 million charitable contribution and be divorced from Depp it would have made a lot more sense to donate from a joint checking account and then sue Depp only for divorce without seeking alimony, property division, legal fees, etc.).

A good example of how thoughtfully working the U.S. family law system is more lucrative than achieving success in the non-sexual part of the economy. (Mr. Bissonnette now finds himself stripped of the entire $6.7 million, so his success was unfortunately fleeting.)

Related:

• Helicopter pilot review of No Easy Day

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My mom and I visited the following European countries: Iceland, France, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, and Denmark. We were on a Royal Caribbean ship with more than 3,000 passengers and crew, each of whom needed to go through a security screening process (metal detectors for humans; X-ray for bags) every day upon returning to the ship. During our three weeks in Europe, which included the cruise and three intra-European flights, the longest that we ever waited in a line was about 10 minutes. Then we came back to Logan Airport here in Boston. Our Icelandair 757-200 (flying like Donald Trump!) landed before 7 pm on August 6. We were early so our gate wasn’t ready and we sat on a taxiway for about 30 minutes. Then we entered a sea of humanity waiting for passport clearance. Mom is 82 years old and had ordered a wheelchair so we bypassed more than 1000 people and got into a line for “diplomats and wheelchairs” adjacent to the flight crew line. There we waited for about 25 minutes behind perhaps 7 family groups. Next to us and proceeding at the same pace was a British Airlines long-haul 747 crew. These folks travel every month to every corner of globe. Was this kind of line typical for Boston? “It is always like this,” responded a flight attendant, “but LA is a lot worse. The U.S. is the slowest and most disorganized country in the world now, but LA makes Boston look efficient.”

When we got to the front of the line, instead of the all-business approach taken by the unsmiling Russian immigration agents in St. Petersburg, the Department of Homeland Security (annual budget: $41 billion) agent chatted amiably with us. She was quite pleasant, but had already processed our passports and the result was a further delay for the folks behind us.

When we got to the baggage carousel I was feeling relieved about having skipped out on most of the wait. But our bags weren’t there. An hour after we’d landed. Then I realized that the baggage folks were likely accounting for the fact that the typical passenger would need at least one hour after arriving at the gate to get through passport control. Thus there was no point in having bags pile up on the carousel. They would then need to have extra people to come into the terminal and pull them off the carousel into a big heap. So mom and I waited another roughly 45 minutes before the bags from our flight began to arrive (a friend who is a Global Entry customer says that he seldom saves any time because he always needs to check a bag and when the system is backed up the bags take an extra hour or two to arrive; he just waits in a different part of the airport than if he did not have Global Entry). There are no bathrooms in this part of the airport, presumably because nobody imagined that travelers would be hanging out in this area for multiple hours. A European grumbled that “In Zurich this whole process takes 15 minutes from the time you land.”

Once we did get our bags, there was a line of about 400 people trying to get out. There were at least four DHS agents near the exit, but only two were taking the customs forms and waving people out. The other two were sitting chatting and waiting next to an X-ray machine in case anyone was flagged for an exception. During the 45 minutes that we waited I didn’t see this happen. If they had joined their colleagues they probably could have cleared out the backlog in 15 minutes, but instead they sat. idle.

We left the terminal with our bags roughly 2.25 hours after landing. The wheelchair guy pushed my mom all the way into the parking lot. He had been with us for 1.5 hours so I gave him a $20 bill (“for half of your next visit to Starbucks”) and he seemed happy.

[If you travel with only carry-on bags and would like to try to speed things up with Global Entry, the Customs folks are conducting interviews at Logan Airport. The next available time slot is in April 2017.]

 

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Readers: Health care is nearly 20 percent of our GDP. The surest way to be a full participant in this massive and growing sector of the economy is to get an MD. But it is a substantial commitment for a young person to prepare for, enter, and complete medical school. What is it like day-to-day? To help young people (and old people advising young people) answer this question, I have placed a mole in one of America’s medical schools. I’ll be publishing his diary on a regular basis. Here’s the first installment….

One week to go before entering medical school, Class of 2020, and I am two parts excited, one part anxious: excited about the first cadaver cut in Anatomy 101; anxious about aspiring to heal others, about having another trust me with vulnerabilities. How must I change to uphold the physician’s charge?

Why this book: (1) as a reminder of the enthusiasm with which this long process was entered, (2) in case it is helpful to students considering premed.

Personal background: With the exception of a few years overseas, I grew up in a wealthy American suburb with two well-educated parents and academically successful older siblings. After enjoying an uneventful K-12 in public school, I majored in biomedical engineering (GPA 3.8) at one of America’s better universities, scored 37 on the MCATs, and could have started medical school shortly after graduation in 2015. I spent a year working, however, so that medicine would be an affirmative choice rather than a default. I enjoyed the engineering job, but now that I’ve seen the opportunity cost of not pursuing medicine I won’t have second thoughts after paying tuition bills.

The Whole Book: http://tinyurl.com/MedicalSchool2020

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I used Verizon’s $10/day “travel pass” program to roam in Europe with my iPhone 6 Plus. In France this was frustrating due to the fact that the phone was never able to obtain LTE service; the phone reported “3G” connectivity most of the time. Our hotel offered 5 Mbits of download and about 200 Kbits/second of upload speed on its WiFi network so the entire week was pretty challenging for this Internet addict. Is it that Verizon doesn’t have a deal with the French telecoms for LTE? Or that a Verizon iPhone 6 Plus doesn’t have the right radio frequency capabilities? (this article suggests that there are different version of this phone with different radios)

I kept the phone in Airplane Mode in Russia because the travel pass arrangement does not work there. The Qataris on our tour were the only ones who seemed willing to ignore the crazy roaming charges and were happily using their smartphones as though they were at home.

The phone obtained LTE service in about half of the countries around the Baltic Sea but LTE coverage was never as good as here in the U.S. Again, I’m wondering if most of the LTE service offered to consumers in these countries is on a frequency that my U.S. iPhone cannot receive.

Separately, I learned from a Kuwaiti that mobile phone service there costs about $60 per month for 50 GB of data at “very fast” LTE speeds. There are three comprehensive networks and some resellers of bandwidth on those networks.

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