The on-demand economy

Karl Marx said that the world would be divided into people who owned the means of production—the idle rich—and people who worked for them. In fact it is increasingly being divided between people who have money but no time and people who have time but no money. The on-demand economy provides a way for these two groups to trade with each other.

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The “transaction cost” of using an outsider to fix something (as opposed to keeping that function within your company) is falling. Rather than controlling fixed resources, on-demand companies are middle-men, arranging connections and overseeing quality. They don’t employ full-time lawyers and accountants with guaranteed pay and benefits. Uber drivers get paid only when they work and are responsible for their own pensions and health care. Risks borne by companies are being pushed back on to individuals—and that has consequences for everybody.

Good piece from The Economist on the implications of the on-demand economy. It's given workers more flexibility at the cost of stability, and an increasingly freelance workforce means delivery of so much of welfare (like health insurance) through employers is more and more inefficient.

Free Climbing the Dawn Wall

Climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson have spent seven years studying, planning, and practicing to be the first people to ever free climb El Capitan's Dawn Wall, a 3,000 foot vertical wall that's about as smooth and difficult a free climb as exists in the world. Anticipation is that they'll complete this climb of historic significance in the next few days, perhaps as early as Wednesday.

Some background for non-climbers like myself:

After a week of living on the wall in portaledges—dodging falling blocks of ice each morning and sustaining frigid winter conditions with nighttime temperatures plummeting below freezing—Kevin and Tommy are more than halfway there. As of Friday, January 2, both climbers have freed each of the route’s first 14 pitches, which constitute the bulk of the hardest climbing.

A long “multi-pitch” rock climb, such as the Dawn Wall, is broken down by the belays—the places on the wall that provide good stances on ledges where climbers can stop and belay each other. The individual pitches are the paths that link these points of belay, and this is where the actual rock climbing takes place. On this ascent of the Dawn Wall, Tommy and Kevin have the goal to climb each pitch, in succession, without falling and without returning to the ground in between. If a climber does fall, he must return to the previous belay, pull the rope down with him, and try again to complete the pitch without falling.

The reason it's taken seven years of planning is that the climb is so difficult that Caldwell has had to study the wall in minute detail to find features in the contour to serve as handholds or footholds and then link them together in a possible path up. This video gives you an idea of that process, including many gnarly falls and slips that left my palms sweaty (and yes, knees weak, arms are heavy).

Tommy Caldwell has spent six years working to free climb The Dawn Wall, on the 3,000 foot El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, CA. Along with his partner, Kevin Jorgeson, Caldwell is currently half way up the wall, hoping to succeed on the hardest big wall free climb in the world.

Reading about and watching the planning in action reminded me of the hit book from last year The Martian. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and it, too chronicles feats of long and intensive planning, long-term goals of such complexity that the only way to attain them is by breaking the task down into a series of smaller, concrete problems, each of manageable if extreme difficulty.

Here's one excerpt of their plan for this ascent:

Pitches 14, 15, and 16 are the three hardest pitches. Pitch 16 is the infamous “Dyno Pitch,” in which the climber has to make a jump (dyno) six feet horizontally, and latch onto a downward sloping edge of rock and hold on while controlling the swinging momentum. Thus far Kevin has had the most success in sticking this rowdy move; Tommy, however, has had less success. On this push, Kevin plans to do the dyno.

Tommy, however, plans to circumnavigate the dyno with a 5.14a variation. He will climb in a “loop”—reversing 20 feet of the last pitch, down-climbing 50 feet from the belay, and then coming back up to join a point above the dyno.

Here's an Instagram photo indicating just how tiny some of the holds are. These aren't handholds, these are fingerholds.

The fear of plunging to one's death would be enough lunacy for most people, but Caldwell is no stranger to danger of a variety of forms: in 2000, Caldwell and three other climbers were taken hostage by armed rebels at war with the Kyrgyzstan government. It's worth reading just to see what Caldwell does to save himself and his companions; it's something straight out of an action movie, I'm surprised it hasn't been optioned for a movie adaptation.

Also, Caldwell is missing his left index finger. He's climbing a mountain with tiny handholds and he's missing a finger!?!

In 2001 while working with a table saw, he accidentally cut off his left index finger-a debilitating loss when your life's passion involves hanging by your fingertips.

Doctors were able to reattach the finger, but told Caldwell that with its diminished mobility he'd never climb again. At first he was devastated, but then his determination kicked in, and he had the finger removed so as not to hinder him. Five months later, he free climbed the 3,000-foot (914-meter) Salathé Wall, another route on El Capitan, in less than 24 hours.

(h/t Hang Up and Listen)

Two pieces on Charlie Hebdo

The two pieces on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy that resonated with me most were this piece by Teju Cole and this comic by graphic novelist Joe Sacco on satire.

But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions. The A.C.L.U. got it right in defending a neo-Nazi group that, in 1978, sought to march through Skokie, Illinois. The extreme offensiveness of the marchers, absent a particular threat of violence, was not and should not be illegal. But no sensible person takes a defense of those First Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi beliefs. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not simple martyrs to the right to offend: they were ideologues. Just because one condemns their brutal murders doesn’t mean one must condone their ideology.

Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

The lone follow

Two points make a straight line, as everyone knows, so I'm going to take this and this as the start of a new trend investigating whenever someone or something really famous follows one random person on social media.

I like to think perhaps this is a pastime for the powerful and famous, just testing the extent of their power, like Superman flying over a city and using his heat vision to cook someone's hitherto raw steaks on a rooftop grill, just for kicks.

Kobe Bryant's lonely imperiousness

Even at his peak, Kobe Bryant made greatness look grueling. He had every gift, every natural blessing — but he made having them look hard. He could do whatever he wanted on a basketball court, but being in charge of that kind of skill was exhausting, and the strain showed. It was as if he had to keep the Amazon flowing with nothing but his own force of will. The scorn he directed at other players — at rivals, at his own teammates — always seemed to come from a place not just of superior ability but also of superior suffering. You call that a river? He defined himself through his talent, but in the sense of someone who takes pride in carrying a heavy burden without mislaying it. He had contempt for anyone whose burden was smaller, or who didn’t take it as seriously; this was why, after he’d made something of himself, he couldn’t go on tolerating Shaq. His stringency and his ferocious responsibility to himself left him sealed inside a closed circle. People wanted to be like Mike. When Kobe came around, they wanted to get the hell out of his way.

He wasn’t humorless, nor was he above showboating. But where Michael Jordan’s little backpedaling shrug was a gift to the crowd, a way of inviting fans in, Kobe’s smirk was a provocation. Jordan knew instinctively that the final inch of dominance was earned through a certain lightness, and he cultivated it as ruthlessly as his jump shot — the tongue-waggling, the pranks at the All-Star Game, the celebrations where he wept unself-consciously or seemed to float in the air. It was theater, but it completed the aura of invincibility; here was an athlete whose supremacy was so unshakable that he could afford to act unconcerned about it. Kobe could never be unconcerned, because unlike Jordan (or LeBron, or Shaq, or Kevin Durant, or Allen Iverson), he didn’t inhabit his talent so much as angrily oversee it. His smile had a way of making moments feel more tense, of ratcheting the stakes to a level at which only he could cope with them. It wasn’t in him to be generous. If you’re Superman, you can have fun flying; if you’re the CEO of Exxon, oil is never a joke.

Those are the opening two paragraphs to a magnificent piece on Kobe Bryant by Brian Phillips. This was a money quote to me: “He made misanthropy look like a key ingredient in a team sport.” Not a single teammate invited to his wedding. Not a one.

I love that we have so much more data with which to understand the value of basketball players in a sport like basketball which has so many interaction effects (Kirk Goldsberry's piece is an exemplar of the form). But Phillips' piece is a type of piece I hope we don't lose in sportswriting, a form of exploration of the fans' emotional relationship with particular players.