George Packer's Blog, page 156

Trying to Solve the L.E.D. Quandary

Is there a workable business model for products that are built to last, rather than to fall apart? This is an idea that I explored here in July, in a story about the L.E.D. quandary. That quandary, in short: companies are making a good thing—light-emitting-diode bulbs that conserve energy and last for years—but they can’t make money in the long run from products that rarely need replacing. As global light sockets fill with L.E.D.s, century-old corporate titans are getting out of the bulb business even before “socket saturation” tips sales into a decline. The question remains whether any company has an incentive to make a product that is not designed to fall apart or become obsolete.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The L.E.D. Quandary: Why There’s No Such Thing as “Built to Last”
Back Issues: Bright Ideas

Mike Pence, Dancing with Trump

Somewhere in a paperback novel from the nineteen-sixties inspired, or willed into existence, by the “Man From U.N.C.L.E.” television series, the brave men of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement find themselves actually sharing lunch with old enemies as they make a temporary alliance with the evil forces of THRUSH (the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity—really) in order to defeat an outsider dangerous to both. They have joined forces, despite a century of enmity and countless encounters involving rogue agents and femmes fatales, because together they recognize that both sides—indeed, mankind itself—are threatened by a mad nihilist. (If a twelve-year-old’s memory serves, the nihilist, a super-scientist, has built a machine that negates energy itself.) Everything else, they agree, comes second to this threat. They make a toast, and a truce, to coöperate until the nihilist is defeated.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Looking Backward at Donald Trump
Can Donald Trump Learn from Mike Pence?
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 5th

The Battle for New York City’s Trash

Each evening at around 11 P.M., Luqman Stroud and his brother Aje drive a van through the streets of Brownsville, New York, searching dumpsters and trash heaps for scrap metal: a broken fridge, a rusty stove—anything that can be sold to a salvage yard. It is an arduous way to make a living: their haul may fetch as little as a penny a pound.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Periodic Table of New York City Trash
A Fashion Line Inspired by the New York City Sanitation Department
The Bewildering Beauty of Recycled Waste

Pence Defends Trump on Race, Kaine Interrupts

Elaine Quijano, the moderator of the Vice-Presidential debate, was pressing Mike Pence on a question he had dodged—what would he, as a supporter of stop-and-frisk tactics, say to Tim Scott, the black Republican senator from South Carolina, who had spoken about being stopped multiple times by the police?—when Tim Kaine interrupted. Kaine did this a lot. He had jumped in when Quijano first brought up the Scott question to repeat Scott’s job title, which she had just mentioned (“a U.S. senator!”). He cut Pence off when he was in the middle of quoting Mother Teresa. (Pence interrupted, too, but not as often.) When Quijano tried to get Kaine to answer a question, he stopped her and explained that what he wanted to say mattered more: “This is important, Elaine!” She’d asked about Aleppo; he was on a roll about Donald Trump’s tax returns.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Looking Backward at Donald Trump
Can Donald Trump Learn from Mike Pence?
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 5th

Everybody Won at the Vice-Presidential Debate, Except Donald Trump

Tim Kaine wore a red tie at the Vice-Presidential debate in Virginia on Tuesday night, and Mike Pence a blue one, and those colors offered a pretty good reading of the emotional temperature of the night: Kaine ran hot, while Pence was cool.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Looking Backward at Donald Trump
Can Donald Trump Learn from Mike Pence?
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 5th

Google’s Software Sell for Hardware

It was a bit surprising, on Tuesday morning, to see Google’s C.E.O., Sundar Pichai, stride onstage in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square and start talking about the quality of Google’s software and the information it brings to people. The event had been billed as a presentation of new hardware devices; some were even describing it as the most significant event of its kind that Google had ever held. And yet, there was Pichai, going on about how Google’s software allows people to connect with “over seventy billion facts about people, places, and things.” Only at the end of this speech did he get to a hardware-related point: all this impressive software would be embedded in Google’s new devices.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Ways I Use Your Data
A Smartphone Game That Captures the Futility of “Work-Life Balance”
Twenty Science Questions for Donald Trump

Wells Fargo and a New Age of Banking Scandals

The last decade has seen a steady stream of financial scandals and crises: mortgage frauds, insider trading, the illegal fixing of global interest rates, money laundering, and the rigging of the Treasury bond market. This is a partial list. There were lessons to be found in each of those cases, which revealed flaws and distortions in the financial system and weaknesses in the way that it is regulated and policed. Since the first convulsions of the financial crisis, however, none of those scandals has captured the attention of the public quite the way that the recent Wells Fargo fake-account story has.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Elizabeth Warren and the Wells Fargo Scandal
From: Wells Fargo, Re: Closing the Accounts We Secretly Opened for You
How Regulation Failed with Wells Fargo

Why the Vice-Presidential Debate Does and Doesn’t Matter

According to a poll carried out for ABC News late last week, more than forty per cent of Americans can’t name the two major-party candidates for Vice-President. Journalists, myself included, bear some responsibility for that sad state of affairs. During the entire campaign, I’ve written about each Veep contender once—Tim Kaine when he was picked, Mike Pence when he refused to apply the word “deplorable” to David Duke, the former Klansman who is supporting Pence’s running mate.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Pence Opens V.P. Debate by Begging Private Sector to Hire Him
Bonus Cartoon: The V.P. Debate
Morning Cartoon: Tuesday, October 4th

How Colombia’s Voters Rejected Peace

People everywhere may well be confused by the news coming out of Colombia. Last Monday, September 26th, in an elaborately staged treaty-signing ceremony in Cartagena de Indias, a colonial-era Caribbean city, President Juan Manuel Santos and Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias Timochenko, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, declared that the country’s fifty-two-year civil war was over. Dozens of V.I.P. guests, including John Kerry, King Juan Carlos of Spain (the former monarch, who abdicated in favor of his son), the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, and other heads of state, were in attendance. Then, in a plebiscite held on Sunday in Colombia, a majority of voters rejected the peace deal, by a margin of sixty-three thousand ballots out of thirteen million cast. The victory of the “No” side has triggered a political crisis of unforeseeable proportions in Colombia. Nobody knows what will happen next.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
At Last, a Peace Deal in Colombia
This Week in Fiction: Julianne Pachico
Latin America’s Transgender-Rights Leaders

Donald Trump and the Clintons’ Marriage

“Here’s a woman,” Donald Trump said at a rally in Manheim, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night, midway through a fit he was having about the character of Hillary Clinton. “She’s supposed to fight all these different things, and she can’t make it fifteen feet to her car! Give me a break.” Trump was referring to Clinton’s collapse on September 11th, when she was diagnosed with pneumonia, and ignoring the vigorous performance she had delivered in their debate last week; she had won, and since then he had done pretty much everything wrong. But a bully picks the material he likes, and so Trump lolled his tongue, fluttered his arms, and wiggled his shoulders in what looked like a poorly executed caricature of the subtle shimmy Clinton executed in their debate. Then he turned and took a few drooping steps before miming a stumble. Donald Trump, slouching toward Pennsylvania’s twenty electoral votes, was ready to go low.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, October 3rd
Alec Baldwin Is a Perfect Donald Trump
Christie Calls Trump Genius for Plan to Burn Down White House and Collect Insurance