The 2016 Republican roster

But a direct comparison with the last Republican primary, in 2012, reveals how strong this bunch of candidates is for the 2016 nomination. And the comparison is surprisingly direct: For most of the 2012 candidates, 2016 has offered a stronger, better-prepared, and more qualified rough equivalent.
 
Jeb Bush, for instance, is more or less Mitt Romney — a respected, technocratic, big-money Republican governor from a gentler decade. Except Bush was actually a conservative at the time, and so he doesn’t find himself painfully rewriting his history or groveling to a movement he used to scorn.
 

Interesting observation by Ben Smith at Buzzfeed on the 2016 slate of Republican candidates. The meta point is that Democrats shouldn't make the mistake of thinking 2016 will be a replay of Obama vs. a Republican joke.

Beyond that, the analogies get a little thin. Trump is a singular figure, a product of the New York tabloids with no 2012 equivalent, though Newt Gingrich, with more will than rationale, filled some of the same space, as did Bachmann. Rick Perry 2.0 appears to be pretty much Rick Perry. Mike Huckabee becomes a somewhat weaker candidate every cycle, as his demographic ages out and his charm wears thin. Santorum 2.0 is a poor man’s Santorum 1.0. And Marco Rubio’s generational campaign has no 2012 equivalent.
 
But don’t be fooled into thinking that this is a weak field, or that most of these candidates would get run over by the Clinton juggernaut. The Democrats are plodding toward the nomination of the sort of solid establishment candidate John McCain was in 2008 for Republicans. The Republicans onstage tonight represent a generation of their party’s stars.

#SQUAD

I missed this Rembert Browne deep read of this photo of Nicki Minaj at a bar mitzvah when it came out in April, but it is truly a timeless work that deserves to be memorialized one more time here.

Even after reading Rembert Browne's piece, I'm filled with questions. What is going on here?

When you’re this age, and a boy, you have no idea what to do. In any situation. At any given moment, you could curse or cry. It’s a wild time to be alive. Your body is constantly betraying you, causing your mind to do backflips — typically as a failed attempt in calming yourself down — further causing your body to betray you.
 
This picture is all about dreams coming true, excitement, and then panic. It’s a moment that was never supposed to happen, a moment you’ve long been waiting to have happen, a moment in which you have no idea what to do. This picture should not confuse you. Because every single thing happening makes perfect sense.
 
First off, Nicki. Look at Nicki. There are three 13-year-old boy #SQUAD hands on her body, while she holds one #SQUAD boy’s face and daintily holds the hand of a cool eighth-grader.
 
Just hands everywhere. And interestingly enough, it’s extremely confusing to determine whose hand belongs to which member of the #SQUAD. You think you know at first, but you quickly realize you have no idea.

Education is the not the same as schooling

There has arisen a kind of parallel network – a lot of it is on the Internet, a lot of it is free – where people teach themselves things, often very effectively. But there is a kind of elitist bias: people who are good at using this content are people who are already self-motivated. 
 
The better technology gets, the more human imperfections matter. Think about medicine: the better pharmaceuticals get, the more it matters which people neglect to actually take them in the right doses. Education is entering the same kind of world. There’s so much out there, on the Internet and elsewhere. It’s great; but that means that human imperfections, like just not giving a damn, will matter more and more.
 
What concrete changes would I make in schools? The idea that you need to take a whole class to learn some topic is absurd. Whatever you’ve learned is probably going to be obsolete. A class is to spur your interest, to expose you to a new role model, a new professor, to a new set of students. We should have way more classes which are way shorter. It should be much more about learning, more about variety, give up the myth that you’re teaching people how to master some topic; you’re not! You want to inspire them; it’s much more about persuasion, soft skills. 
 

Short and sweet from Tyler Cowen.

Related, competency-based education:

For the most part, colleges and universities have changed very little since the University of Bologna gave the first college lectures in 1088. With the exception of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs—free lectures and courses on the Internet—most university learning still requires students to put their butts in seats for a certain number of hours, complete a list of courses, and pass tests demonstrating that they learned from those courses (or were able to successfully cram for over the course of a few days).
 
But a new model is upending the traditional college experience, and has the potential to change the way universities—both new and old—think about learning.
 
Called competency-based education, this new model looks at what students should know when they complete a certain degree, and allows them to acquire that knowledge by independently making their way through lessons. It also allows students who come into school with knowledge in a certain area to pass tests to prove it, rather than forcing them to take classes and pay for credits on information they already know.
 

A model that focuses horizontally on the accreditation function of schools, rather than competing with the full vertical stack offered by a university. Seems like a model that could be useful in companies, or to companies, as well. Today, for many job functions, say product management, a college resume only obliquely hints at competencies, it functions more as some signal of one's generalized learning ability and willpower.

Software engineering interviews have a version of competency tests in the form of coding questions or challenges, but lots of business competencies aren't really tested optimally with a live interview. The ideal interview is over a longer period of time, goes into more depth, and in its most optimal form may be just an internship, but not all candidates are willing or able to do an internship, especially those who aren't in college or just graduating.

Face-to-face interviews are good for testing chemistry (which makes it a reasonable method for job roles where that's a key attribute, like sales), but they are susceptible to all sorts of unconscious biases and often just flatter the interviewers into believing in their powers of observation. It would be interesting to compare face-to-face interviews to a competency-based interviewing method that eschews in-person exchanges altogether. As radical as that might sound, I'm confident it would lower many types of discrimination.

Age of abundance, #hashtag edition

People are appending anything up to 50 hashtags to their Instagram posts, carefully researching the most popular hashtags, or formulating individual strategies (here’s a travel blogger explaining hers).
 
Hashtags are a search tool, providing a way to make your content discoverable by people who don’t already know or follow you. In this way, they’re a means of getting attention – and therefore status – in the endless popularity contest that’s metric-driven social media. Excessive hashtag use may be a bid for Instacelebrity, and the ensuing Instacash – with reports of top style bloggers earning $1m per year, and an estimated $1 billion sponsored Instagram post economy - or a sheer addiction to the dopamine hit of the ‘like’ count ticking upward.
 
But as a matter of taste, it all looks… a little grasping.
 

Anyone well versed in social media understands hacks like these to gain distribution for their content. This piece, whose opening is cited above, is much more interesting for its analysis of hashtag use in conveying and reinforcing status.

Let’s start from the principle that hashtag usage is often a bid for attention – you want your content to be discoverable, for more people to see it (and hopefully like it). But visibly betraying a desire for attention is a sign of neediness – and neediness is low status (you are dependent on other people’s behaviour to define your self worth). Therefore:
 
Hypothesis: High status brands don’t use hashtags extensively
 
Evidence:  We find @ChanelOfficial using hashtags, but with two constraints:
 
· A maximum of three per post, often only one
· Almost entirely ‘owned’ hashtags based on their campaign names
 

Whole thing isn't that long, all worth a read.

I recall being a kid in school, struggling to learn, often painfully, about how my words and clothing and haircut and actions affected how people perceived me, what circles I could enter and which were closed off. A terrifying crucible.

What must it be like to grow up today, not only having to learn the real world signaling prices but also the values of strategies and cultural assets and selfie poses in the social media market? I've heard from many people that if they post something to social media and if it doesn't garner a certain volume of likes within some period of time, they pull it down immediately. Oh the horror of changing your Facebook profile photo and not getting enough likes within the first hour. Every one of these kids a William Masters or Virginia Johnson of social media, exploring the boundaries of what is or isn't acceptable to local and global tribes.

From my limited sample set of observation (yep, it's still a sample set of one), a lot of social media usage cuts along a generational line demarcated by whether you grew up in the age of scarcity or in the internet-driven age of abundance. I don't have data to back this up, but if someone out there does, please let me know.

Older people, who largely grew up in an age of scarcity, publish content to social media and interact or affirm such content carefully. A like from such a person is difficult to earn because they treat it as something that must be earned. The act of giving out such a like also conveys something about the giver, so it is a considered action.

Younger people seem to be more generous and prolific with content, likes, etc. They've grown up in an age where everything digitizable is available on demand, from TV shows and movies to music to photos to articles. Their likes are freely given, and plentiful, often used more as a read receipt than a standing ovation.

It makes sense if viewed from an abundance economic framework. Likes are an infinitely replenishable virtual good, and if it adds some happiness to the recipient, what's the harm? Perhaps everyone would be happier if we all liked and favorited more frequently, more generously. Social media need not be a zero sum game.

The other view, that of scarcity, is that we'd just be reinforcing coddled millennials who, in receiving affirmation for everything, receive it for nothing. Damn these sensitive unemployed self-promoting kids with their need for trigger warnings and their impulse to take offense at even the most harmless of jokes!

The piece quoted up top comes full circle by the end.

High status social media usage often demands that the labour of working at one’s social media persona be concealed. As with beauty, status is something one is supposed to attain effortlessly – and should the frantic paddling below the surface be revealed, that is vulgar, a faux pas.
 
This is why Kim Kardashian is so interesting – because she, almost uniquely, does not pretend she #wokeuplikethis, but instead makes the artifice of her social media persona not only evident but into a published art photography book, the brilliantly entitled ‘Selfish‘. In this way, Kardashian (and also Amalia Ulman,) make the ‘Oh me? I’m not self-promoting’ hashtaglessness of Chiara Ferragni et al. look like the studied pose it really is.
 
Hyperproliferating hashtag useage is thus interesting as one potential tactic to invert social media ‘good taste’.
 

What more suitable patron saint of the age of abundance than Kim Kardashian, who finds every opportunity to shove her ample, or shall we say abundant, derriere in the public's face through all possible social media channels.

The most scarce play she's made is releasing an actual physical coffee table book that costs $9.97, at last count, on Amazon, and includes photos not released on Instagram before. I suspect these first several customer reviews are from the scarcity school of thought.

COCOM Limits

In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 60,000 feet (18,000 m).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.
 
Some manufacturers apply this limit only when both speed and altitude limits are reached, while other manufacturers disable tracking when either limit is reached. In the latter case, this causes some devices to refuse to operate in very high altitude balloons.[3]
 

Next time you bring your GPS into outer space and wonder why it isn't working, you'll know why.

Via reddit, which, after all the recent outcry and pronunciations of doom, seems to be trucking along the same as usual, for all its good and bad (and awful, hiding in plain sight). It strengthens my suspicion that most of the people predicting its doom weren't regular users of the service. It may not be a great business, or maybe it chooses not to be, but it still commands a whole lot of eyeballs.