Curt Long

Curt Long

Never Prebook Your Return Flight From a Rocket Launch

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On June 22, Rocket Lab started the countdown for its first real launch, in operational and not experimental mode, called “It’s Business Time.” The Electron, looking like the little pencil that could, stood on a launchpad on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, clouds of vapor billowing toward the cold sky. But they were the only things that would go up that day: The launch was called off at T-minus-23-minutes when a tracking dish, an antenna that communicates with and pinpoints the rocket, acted up.

On June 26, the Electron stood up to try again. But minutes after the launch window opened, the company said there was “an issue” with the motor controller, which manages commands sent to and from hardware and software on the rocket.

Rocket Lab had already delayed this inaugural commercial launch by two months, for a similar motor-controller problem. “It’s kind of like a hazard light flicking on in the dash of your car,” says Beck. “You would never go on a big trip.” Beck believed the company’s engineers had resolved the issue, but when that same metaphorical hazard light lit up again, the company called off the countdown and shut the launch window. “We’re not in the business of taking risk,” says Beck.

But no one in the launch business can be 100 percent successful, 100 percent of the time. Even much-vaunted aerospace vehicles, like the Falcon 9, explode. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed. The Russian Proton hasn’t always been a roaring success either. They’re rockets, man: They don’t work sometimes. “You can never have all the risk figured out,” says Caleb Williams, a space systems analyst at engineering and consulting firm SpaceWorks. “So there’s always going to be some leap of faith at some point.”

But it makes sense for the company to skew conservative during the Electron’s infancy. It’s kind of like if you want to make a good first impression at a party, and your options are (A) blowing up the house, (B) throwing the hosts’ valuables where they don’t belong, or (C) being late—and making everyone watch a livestream of the door till you arrive.

You’d probably pick Option C.

How Pokémon Go Still Dominates Two Years After Its Explosive Debut

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Two years ago today, a studio called Niantic released a game with a novel proposition: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. Catch some monsters. Within a day, Pokémon Go was at the top of every app store chart. Within 200 days, players had spent a billion dollars on in-game upgrades—the shortest time to reach that milestone by a wide margin. In the summer of 2016, you couldn’t walk two blocks without running into, sometimes literally, a person in hot Pidgey pursuit. And then it stopped. Or so it seemed.

The news reports faded. Shops that had seen a sharp spike in sales thanks to Pokémon hot spots settled back into their normal routines. In just four weeks, between that August and September 2016, Pokémon Go shed nearly 20 million players, as enthusiasts headed back to school, or lost themselves in various other viral pursuits.

But the game’s long retreat from that initial burst belies its continued, unprecedented success. And in the gap between what you might think happened to Pokémon Go and the game’s current-day dominance lies an important lesson about the future of apps.

Pokémon Went

It’s true that far fewer people play Pokémon Go today than did two years ago. In July 2016, the crush of players boosted attendance at Pokémon-heavy Crystal Bridges Museum in Fayetteville, Arkansas by 50 percent year over year. By that August, the tide was already ebbing. “It seems like the hype died down in the span of a month,” says Crystal Bridges public relations director Beth Bobbitt. (She adds, “We still have a lot of ‘pokestops’ and ‘gyms’ all around the museum campus so I think we’re still a great location to play the game, for those who still are.”)

‘You’re forming real friendships with them. Friendships are sticky. That’s probably the secret sauce of the game, right there.’

Niantic CEO John Hanke

You’ve seen this yourself, anecdotally. There are no viral videos of Pokécrowds gone amuck anymore. No one makes Weedle jokes at the water cooler. The natural conclusion: Pokémon Go is just another fad that disappeared in a blink, a fameball of Pog proportions. But writing off Pokémon Go after the initial frenzy is like assuming PyeongChang no longer exists post-Olympics. What matters isn’t how Pokémon Go looked at its zenith, but how it held on from there.

“It was completely uncharted territory. The initial fervor, that global excitement around the game and the way it spread virally, globally, in such a short period of time. It was a new experience for all of us,” says Niantic CEO John Hanke. “But looking at it in retrospect, it looks very similar to all games. There’s an attrition curve that’s reasonably consistent across games. Some games are better at that attrition curve than others. That kind of separates the winners from the losers.”

By every measure that matters, Pokémon Go has been a winner. Since its launch, it has almost never dropped out of the daily top 100 downloaded apps in both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, according to app analytics company App Annie. It has been the top-grossing app in the Play Store this entire week. In two years, according to an estimate by app analytics firm Apptopia, it has taken in $1.8 billion in revenue.

“Even though the mega spending at the beginning has died off, the rate of revenue is still highly impressive,” says Apptopia communications lead Adam Blacker. “Where the money comes from is actually pretty evenly split between iOS and Android, which is unusual”

It also helps that mobile games don’t necessarily require lots of players to be successful. Revenue generally comes from power users, the whales that invest in PokéCoins—or whatever their poison—the way others might their 401k.

“Generally speaking within games, a smaller portion of your users are spending a lot of money. That’s true of most premium games,” says App Annie analyst Lexi Sydow. “I would imagine that trend would hold for this game.”

But the most impressive indicator of Pokémon Go’s sustained success is how much of their lives people devote to it. To this day, more cumulative time is spent playing Pokémon Go than any other game. It’s not even close: One in five minutes spent on the top 20 games on Android in May was devoted to chucking virtual Pokéballs.

“The game has been remarkably consistent and stable in terms of its performance post that bubble era, if you want to think of it that way, when we first launched,” Hanke says.

In fact, only a handful of apps—hello there, Candy Crush Saga—have had anything close to Pokémon Go’s staying power. The durability is surprising, especially if you’d forgotten Pokémon Go even existed. But it’s also instructive, especially as the app economy fully embraces the augmented reality experiences Niantic pioneered.

All Inclusive

Niantic doesn’t offer much in the way of demographic specifics on its players, but suffice to say they don’t much resemble the Fortnite crowd. The game attracts proportionally more older people and more women than its peers—and in fact can credit much of its initial success to enthusiasts who otherwise wouldn’t be playing anything at all.

“Pokémon Go was not displacing other games. It wasn’t taking time away,” Sydow says. “We saw that it was actually additive time. People were taking more of their day playing Pokémon Go but also doing what they would originally.”

Pulling from a broader pool has helped keep Pokémon Go going. While it experiences steady attrition like any other game, it has a higher ceiling on potential new players to attract. And because it’s a game that takes place in the real world, it has more ways of making sure those players stick around.

“I think the design of the game in terms of it being an MMO should not be overlooked,” says Hanke, referring to the massively multiplayer online game genre of which Pokémon Go is a prime example. World of Warcraft would be another, a comparison that Hanke invites. Just as a WoW guild encourages regular, cooperative play, exploring the world through a Pokémon Go lens with friends can be mutually reinforcing.

“I think in Pokémon Go, because it’s a real-world game, it’s even more sticky than with League of Legends or something, where you’ve got a team but never see them face to face,” Hanke says. “With Pokémon Go, you are meeting those people face to face. You’re forming real friendships with them. Friendships are sticky. That’s probably the secret sauce of the game, right there.”

The most impressive indicator of Pokémon Go’s sustained success is how much of their lives people devote to it.

Niantic has, naturally, leaned into this advantage. In June 2017 it introduced so-called Raid Battles, a cooperative mode where groups of players team up to take down especially powerful bosses. This past January, it began organizing a monthly worldwide Community Day, using special Poké-bonuses to lure enthusiasts out into the open in major cities. And just last month, it started rolling out a Friends feature, which enables sending of gifts and trading of Pokémon among people you know in real life.

The roadmap from here follows that same course, buttressing the gaming appeal of Pokémon Go with hints of a social network. “I think there’s a ton more we can do there to basically enrich the game when you’re playing it together with people that you know,” Hanke says. That includes a system for dueling other players, which Niantic still plans to implement at some point.

Brave New Worlds

Whether Pokémon Go’s durability, two years later, surprises you likely depends on if you still play it. But its disappearance for so many people for so long underscores how little we know about what happens on other people’s phones.

“Our mobile phones are our most personal devices. We have our bank accounts linked, we have our messages to our family members, we have our emails,” Sydow says. “I think that translates here.”

Its success may also prove difficult to replicate, although you can expect a swath of imitators now that both Apple and Google have invested deeply in augmented reality, and Niantic itself has opened up its platform to outsiders.

Pokémon Go is itself, after all, a spin on Ingress, a game Niantic launched in 2014 that follows the same basic pattern—minus the Pikachu appeal. Ingress had its devotees, but without generations of Pokémon fans to tap into, it had nowhere near the cultural impact. Niantic’s upcoming effort, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, will also map a famous fictional property over the real world. As AR becomes less of a novelty than the norm, the trick will be to create those experiences without the failsafe of a megahit’s built-in fan base.

Still, surely something else will catch the same lighting in a bottle—or Blitzle in a Pokéball—that Niantic has. When that happens, all due credit to the model that enabled it: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. And find some friends to do it with.

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How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar

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Facebook’s rise in popularity in Myanmar came at a time of tremendous political and societal change in the Southeast Asian nation which fueled and enabled the platform’s growth. Myanmar had been ruled since 1962 by successive military regimes that drove the country into political isolation, crippled the economy, oppressed ethnic minorities, and repeatedly put down popular uprisings with deadly force.

A parliamentary election in 2010 was widely criticized as far from free and fair but an important step for the military’s carefully choreographed transition to quasi-civilian rule. Aung San Suu Kyi, the wildly popular opposition leader held by the military under house arrest for some 15 years, was barred from participating. Members of her party, the National League for Democracy, boycotted the vote, in which the majority of seats were won by a military backed party. Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest six days after ballots were cast.

Thein Sein was sworn in as president of Myanmar in March 2011 for a five-year term. The bespectacled, subdued leader surprised observers by embracing a number of reforms—quickly suspending an unpopular Chinese-backed dam project and, in 2012, dropping heavy-handed censorship of the press. That year, the country was enraptured by a visit from President Barack Obama, the first sitting US President to visit Myanmar. It was a remarkable turn of events given that seven years earlier, the US had labelled the country an “outpost of tyranny,” along with North Korea and Iran, and for years had punished it with harsh economic sanctions. (The last of the sanctions were lifted by the fall of 2016, though one former general has been since been sanctioned for his alleged role in the violence against the Rohingya.)

Barack Obama and Myanmar’s President Thein Sein shake hands before the East Asia Summit in Myanmar’s capitol, Naypyitaw, in November 2014.

Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters

One of Thein Sein’s most significant accomplishments was the liberalization of the country’s closed telecommunications sector, which had long been dominated by a state-owned monopoly. Under that regime, internet connectivity was severely limited and frustratingly slow. The country’s internet penetration was less than 1 percent in 2011 and there were just 1.3 million mobile subscribers, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations’ agency.

This slowly began to change, and in 2012, mostly in major cities like Yangon and Mandalay, SIM card prices fell to hundreds of dollars from over a thousand, making them slightly more accessible though still out of reach to most. As internet connectivity expanded, so did social media. The state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper declared in 2013 that in Myanmar, “a person without a Facebook identity is like a person without a home address.”

Sonny Swe, the founder of the independent Myanmar Times newspaper who was jailed by the junta, says he was hit by a “digital tsunami” when he was released from prison during an amnesty in April 2013.

He served more than eight years of his 14-year sentence, passing the time by speaking to spiders and other insects that crawled through his cell. “I named them individually and they all become my friends,” he would say later.

Upon his release, he noticed two things—the heavier traffic choking the streets of Yangon and the widespread usage of mobile phones. His son helped him set up a Facebook page days after he was freed in the back of the newspaper’s aging offices.

The digital transformation was poised to accelerate that year, when the government granted licenses to two foreign telecoms providers—Norway’s Telenor and and Qatar’s Ooredoo—ending the state monopoly.

Ambitious connectivity targets included in the license agreements by the government ensured that the country’s internet use would skyrocket in coming years. When Telenor and Ooredoo launched operations in 2014, people queued for hours for SIM cards that cost around a dollar. Mobile shops appeared seemingly overnight hawking cheap Chinese smartphones. The state-run telecom provider, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications, partnered with two Japanese firms the same year, further increasing competition and connectivity.

Mobile penetration leapt to 56 percent by 2015, according to a Deloitte report, with many Burmese accessing the internet for the first time on phones. Today, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, citing official figures, internet access is around 25 percent and mobile penetration around 90 percent. In a recent briefing in Washington, DC, one longtime Myanmar expert described the adoption of Facebook that followed this sudden uptick in connectivity as the fastest in the world.

Predictably, this has all had a huge impact on the distribution of information. Last year, a public opinion survey from the International Republican Institute found that 38 percent of people polled got most, if not all, their news from Facebook. Respondents said that they were most likely to get their news from Facebook rather than newspapers, though radio, relatives and friends, and TV were more popular. There are now an estimated 18 million people who use Facebook in Myanmar, according to the company.

While the positive developments in Myanmar under Thein Sein were noteworthy, tremendous challenges remained. Conflicts between the still-powerful military and a number of ethnic armed groups, some of whom had been battling for greater autonomy for decades, continued or intensified. Land confiscation and human rights violations remained pervasive. Bouts of violence in 2012 between Buddhists and the Rohingya on the country’s west coast added a new obstacle to the country’s precarious path toward a fuller democracy. Tens of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised as they languished in ramshackle camps.

During the decades of military rule, the country lacked a free press and the junta operated largely in secret—the military changed the country’s flag and moved the capital with almost no prior warnings—people in Myanmar had spent decades reliant on state-run propaganda newspapers, parsing opaque military announcements for what was really happening. The arrival of Facebook provided a country with severely limited digital literacy a hyper-connected version of the country’s ubiquitous tea shops where people gathered to swap stories, news and gossip.

“Myanmar is a country run by rumors, where people fill in the blanks,” says Derek Mitchell, who served as US Ambassador to Myanmar from 2012 to 2016.

There is a great insecurity and fear among people in Myanmar that unseen powers are working in the shadows to control the levers of power, Mitchell says. The arrival of Facebook provided a platform for these rumors to spread at an alarming rate. “Facebook could have done more to proactively talk about positive speech,” he says, “how to look at things on Facebook to avoid pitfalls, and the dangers of negative speech, put their brand behind a more constructive approach to the platform.”

As hate speech and dubious articles quickly began to surface in volume on Facebook in 2012 and 2013, many targeting Muslims and the Rohingya in particular, the government raised concerns that the site could be used to incite unrest. Some activists and rights groups, however, were not totally convinced of the threat of online hate speech.

In 2013 an official from Human Rights Watch was largely dismissive that Facebook could play a major role in the spread of hate speech. He pointed to pamphlets distributed by monks and ultra-nationalist organizations in rural areas prior to the 2012 violence in Rakhine as a more pernicious vehicle for spreading disinformation.

This skepticism about the risks of Facebook was rooted in part in a fear that the government or military would use hate speech as an excuse to censor or block certain websites that it did not agree with. The fear of web suppression was not unfounded. Myanmar had in the past restricted access to the internet, notably during the 2007 monk-led popular uprising dubbed the “Saffron Revolution,” in an failed attempt to keep news of the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown from leaking out.

“The answer to bad speech, is more speech. More communication, more voices,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said in Yangon in March 2013. The Myanmar public was, “in for the ride of your life right now,” he added in the speech that was a gleeful take on the positives Myanmar would reap from its technological and telecoms liberation.

How Facebook Checks Facts and Polices Hate Speech

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Chris Cox has long been the Chief Product Officer for Facebook. He has also recently been promoted to run product at WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, which means he is effectively in charge of product for four of the six largest social media platforms in the world. He recently sat down with Wired Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Aspen Ideas Festival to talk about the responsibilities and plans of the platforms he helps run.

Nicholas Thompson: I’m going to start with a broad question. There are a lot of trade-offs that you talk about. There’s a trade-off between privacy and utility, right. The tougher your privacy settings are, the harder it is to code things and the harder it is for users to add apps on. There’s a trade-off between free speech and having a safe community. There’s a trade-off between a totally neutral platform and making sure the highest quality content thrives. So: Over the last year, as you’ve gone through this and as you think about the future, how has your thinking shifted on where the balance lies?

Chris Cox: It’s shifted immensely, on each of those dimensions. I started at the company 13 years ago; I joined when Facebook was 5 million American college students. It was called “The Facebook.” It was a directory only. There was really no tool for communication. People were using their real names and so it had the promise of being a place you could find each other, find a roommate, find a high school best friend, find your cousin’s new boyfriend, and you could learn about the people around you. The lesson we learned very early on was that these tools could be forces for people to come together around ideas. The first time we had a group with over 1 million people in it was a few days after we launched News Feed. There were 10 million people using the service and 1 million of them joined a group called, “Students Against News Feed.” It was a huge misunderstanding. We did a bad job of explaining how the product worked. We worked through it, but the second and the third largest groups were groups raising awareness about humanitarian issues. The second largest group was a group about Darfur, which at the time was an under-reported humanitarian issue that a lot of college students cared about.

And so we had this feeling from the early days that this platform generally wanted to be a force for good, that people wanted to come together around ideas, and we should let that happen. And so the focus was a lot more open than it is now. if you look at today, we have hundreds of our best people now working on protecting elections. And that’s the right thing for us to do—looking at over 40 countries, working with electoral commissions, data scientists, researchers, understanding the playbook of the Internet Research Agency, but also the playbooks of financially motivated spammers, who use the excitement around elections to try and make money from ad farms. There’s a whole list of things which we have done over the past year and a half. We really said we need to be experts at this. We need to be working with world experts in each of these areas and each of these countries. And that is a big change in disposition that’s happened inside of the company.

NT: Back to those general dimensions that I mentioned. I’ll just give my outsider’s guess on how you shifted on all of them. So privacy versus utility, you guys have massively shifted toward privacy. And, in fact, I bet there are people inside the company who worry you’ve been pushed too far by the Cambridge Analytica outrage, and it’s kind of too hard to build things now, but you had to move really far on privacy. On free speech and community, you’re moving much more towards making a safe community and away from the initial ideas of social media platforms from the Arab Spring of free speech. Neutral platform versus high-quality content, you’re definitely moving towards high-quality content, much more of a publisher, less of a neutral platform. Am I right or wrong on those three?

CC: You’re right on all of it. And I think we’re trying to do this in a way where we’re putting decision-making in the hands of institutions who have a history, like fact-checkers. The way we’re combatting the fake news problem is to identify when something’s going viral, then getting it quickly to fact-checkers—we’re in 15 countries now, we want to be in more—and helping the fact-checkers prioritize their work, so that rather than fact-checking whichever story may have come across their desk, they’re looking at the ones that are about to get traction on social media. Then you use that to reduce the distribution of the story and also to educate folks who are about to share it or those who are coming across the story on social media. The partnership with fact-checkers means that we can rely on institutions that have standards, are showing their work, and allow us to not be in a situation where we feel like we need to be making these really difficult calls. And they are difficult calls. I mean, the cover of Time magazine is a difficult call.

NT: The cover of Time magazine is a difficult call because it’s got a picture of a girl crying. It says, “Welcome to America” but the girl wasn’t actually crying because she was separated from her parents, right?

CC: It was part of the debate in the fact-checking community this week.

NT: That’s a great example. Let’s talk about this disinformation stuff. You just laid out some of the ways you’re dealing with it in a text-based world, or text and image-based world. But the internet’s going to be mostly pictures and videos soon, and then we’re going to move to virtual reality, and then we’re going to move to like neural interfaces, where we’re all going to be connecting our brains. How are you going to fight and counter disinformation at these different levels? I kind of know how you’re doing it on text, I don’t know how you’re doing it on images, I really don’t know how you’re doing it in VR.

‘The way we’re combatting the fake news problem is to identify when something’s going viral, then getting it quickly to fact-checkers’

CC: So it’ll be the same playbook. We’ll be finding things that start to go viral, we’ll be sending them to fact checkers. The two most interesting [things] for photos are things that are doctored and things that are taken out of context. Those are the two categories where we see the most activity on social media and on the internet. And we want to use the same principles, which is we’re going to find what’s starting to move across Facebook and Instagram, we’re going to get it in front of fact-checkers, we’re going to let fact-checkers decide, and then we’re going to educate people when they see it and reduce its distribution. And then we’ll use artificial intelligence tools and classifiers to basically spread what people have said, if it is a false story, and find other things that look like it.

NT: Wait, so stuff will start to go viral, and it will be controversial, and you’ll send it to humans, and then you’ll use AI? Won’t it be the other way around? Won’t it start to go viral, you’ll use AI, if the AI can’t solve it, then it will go to humans?

CC: So you’ll find things that are going viral, that’s just counting. Then you’ll send it to fact-checkers. Then you’ll use fuzzy matching, as it’s called. It’s just finding things that are saying the same thing but are slightly different. This is important for photos, it’s important for links. We recently had a story in France—a health hoax—that said if you’re having a stroke, you should prick your fingers and your stroke will subside. You know, health hoaxes are as old as time. They’re part of the rumor mill, they’re a part of gossip, they’re a part of conversation. But they’re really important to help people get educated. And in this instance, there were more than 1,000 stories that were all about this one hoax. And so rather than sending 1,500 stories to fact-checkers, we want to send one, and just have a tool that says these two things are the same.

NT: What is your confidence level? In the 2016 election, there were bad guys putting out this information, there were good guys trying to stop this information, good algorithms, and the bad guys won, right. What is your confidence level that in the 2018 election you’ve gotten good enough at this that you can prevent someone from hijacking an election?

CC: Well we feel very good about every election we’ve had since we’ve put this team together. We’ve been working with electoral commissions ahead of time so we have a sense of how we’re doing in their eyes, which is really important. We’ve been doing that in Mexico [for Sunday’s election] for months now. We announced recently the take-down of 10,000 Pages, Groups and accounts in Mexico and across Latin America because they violated our community standards, as well as removing 200,000 fake Likes, which could help artificially prop up political candidates. So, we’re not going to get 100 percent of everything, but I feel a lot more confident that we’ve developed our best teams with tools that are working. In the Alabama special election we saw thousands of economically motivated—meaning they’re just using it as spam to get people riled up—actors, and each time we find one of these patterns we’re getting more competent at having the right antibodies to each of the types of problems. So a lot more confident, but I can’t be 100 percent sure there’s not going to be anything.

NT: So you feel the immune system is evolving more rapidly than the virus.

‘We feel very good about every election we’ve had since we’ve put this team together’

CC: I do.

NT: That’s good to hear. Let’s talk about other viruses. One of the most interesting and complicated products in this suite of platforms you run is the toxic comments filter on Instagram. Instagram built a system, they hired a bunch of humans to evaluate comments to say “this one is racist,” “this one is sexist.” They used that to train an algorithm, and now there’s an algorithm that will go through comments on Instagram and basically vaporize anything super mean. When is that product going to be fully deployed on Facebook?

CC: Again, you’re in this balance of a platform for letting people say what they want and a platform that’s keeping people safe and helping people have constructive conversations. If it’s hateful, we’re going to take it down.

NT: Will you automatically take it down?

CC: We rely upon reporting, and then we build tools to help find language that is similar to the stuff that’s been reported as hateful. But it’s an area where people need to be involved because there are so many judgment calls around hate speech.

NT: But the filter will knock away stuff without any humans reviewing it or anybody flagging it.

CC: Based on language that’s being used on Instagram. One of the things we’re looking at, especially in my new role, is finding more places that we can re-use tools. We’re doing this in a bunch of places across Facebook and Instagram, for example taking down photos that violate our standards. The comments stuff isn’t as unified yet. We have different approaches. But on Facebook, to your question, the most interesting tool we’ve found is upvoting and downvoting. Good old-fashioned upvoting and downvoting, which is separate from liking, but just lets people surface comments that are helpful and push down comments that are unhelpful.

NT: Reddit, right? That’s the foundation of Reddit.

‘On Facebook, the most interesting tool we’ve found is upvoting and downvoting.’

CC: Yeah, that’s Reddit. But it’s really effective at collapsing things that aren’t helpful. It doesn’t hide them, but it helps keep the conversation constructive, it helps create cross-cutting positive discourse, which is what you really want here. And that’s the direction we’re heading.

NT: So, to summarize, on Instagram, if somebody writes something nasty about me on my feed it will be vaporized automatically. On Facebook, somebody writes something nasty about me, somebody will flag it and it may be vaporized the next day.

CC: With a little more detail underneath it, yes.

NT: When does it become a free speech issue? Is it just when you delete it or don’t delete it? Is it also a complicated free speech issue when you’re shrinking the image size or comments are collapsing in?

CC: They’re all on the continuum of free speech and safety. We published in April, for those of you who are interested in reading the 64-page guide, exactly how we decide. We also have the two-page version, which is our community standards, which is just: these are the things we don’t allow on the platform. Then we have the long version which is, here’s exactly how we think about a hate speech issue, how we understand what is a contextualized slur, which is a whole thing, a reclaimed slur, which can be a part of a group expressing identity in solidarity. And so these are all hard calls. We work with world experts on these in these areas to arrive at our policies. We publish the policies so that they can be debated, and that’s kind of where we stand. For the things we don’t remove, there are certain things like misinformation, we want folks to be able to see the content as well as the education around it, so informing people. And that’s where we say this has been disputed, we expand other articles that are linking to the fact-checkers, and we reduce distribution so that these stories don’t go viral.

NT: I want to ask one more question about this. When I was looking at the Instagram filter and I was asking why won’t this be implemented on Facebook, one person told me, “Well, it will never be implemented on Facebook, because as soon as you show that you can build a hate speech filter on Facebook, the German government will mandate that you use it, and it will become an impossible situation because every government will say we want to use your filter.” Is one reason you’re not deploying the tool because of the requests that would come if you deployed it?

CC: No. We published our transparency report. So every six months we release a report where we go through each of the categories of content, like fake accounts, terrorist content, hate speech, and we publish how many pieces we review, and how many we took down. The goal is just to have this stuff out in the open so that we can have a conversation about how we’re doing. And we can have scrutiny from people who study each of these areas, scrutiny from journalists, and scrutiny from people in each country to understand how we can do better. We like having this stuff out in the open in general. One of the things you’ll see in there is which things we’re able to take down proactively. And so terrorist content we’re able to take the vast majority of it down before it even shows up on the platform. This is stuff like ISIS. Hate speech is the really, really hard one. Because it is such a human judgment. And it is such a contextual judgment. And it’s one where we’re relying on policies written by people who study this for their entire lives. And we’re very committed to it because it [creates] a really bad experience, especially where it can lead to real-world harm, and that’s going to be the driving principle for how we think about the work.

NT: Alright, let’s talk about the algorithm. So at Facebook, one of the most important things is the algorithm that determines News Feed. And my critique of the algorithm has always been that the factors that go into it favor Cheetos over kale. They favor likes and immediate shares. The factors that favor kale, which is like the ratio of shares after reading to shares before reading, time spent reading an article, those things matter less, and the impulse stuff matters more. Obviously, the algorithm has been evolving. You made a whole bunch of changes to it this year, but let’s start with the different things that you can measure on the Cheetos versus kale continuum, how you think about the different measurements, and what new tools you have for measuring this stuff.

‘Hate speech is the really, really hard one. Because it is such a human judgment. And it is such a contextual judgment.’

CC: The most important tool is what people tell us. We’ll show people side-by-side, thousands of people every day, which of these things do you want to read? Why? We hear back the same thing: I care about friends and family more than anything. That is why we announced this ranking change in January; there had been a huge influx of video and other content from Pages, which is often great, but it had drowned out a lot of the friends and family stuff. So the most important quality change we made, is to make sure that people don’t miss stuff from their friends and family, that’s number one. The second is what we’re able to discern, people want to have conversations around stuff on Facebook. They don’t want to be passively consuming content. This is connected with the research on well-being, which says that if you go somewhere and you just sit there and watch and you don’t talk to anybody, it can be sad. If you go to the same place and you have five or six conversations that are good around what’s going on in the world, what you care about, you feel better. You learn something. There’s a sense of social support. And that is exactly how we should think about digital and social media, which is, to what extent are they building relationships versus being places that are passive experiences. And so the ranking change we announced in January was helping to prioritize friends and family, but then beyond that, things that were creating conversations between people because we heard from people that’s why I’m here. The third area is focusing on quality. And that’s really about the news that gets distributed on Facebook. And this isn’t why people come to Facebook primarily, but it is an important part.

NT: It’s a very important part.

‘That is exactly how we should think about digital and social media, to what extent are they building relationships versus being places that are passive experiences.’

CC: Exactly. For people who are coming to the platform, for democracy, for your paper. And what we’ve tried to do there is reduce clickbait, sensationalism, the things that people may click on in the moment because there’s an alluring headline, but then be disappointed by. And that’s where we’ve done an immense amount of work. We’ve been doing this work for a long time but we’ve doubled down on the work over the last two years.

NT: So let’s say I leave this room, I get to my laptop, and I write two articles. One has the headline: “I had this really profoundly interesting conversation with Chris Cox, here’s a transcript of it, here are the seven smartest things he said”, and I post that on Facebook. And then I take something you say and I kind of take it out of context and say, “Chris Cox says we should shut down Time.” Or let’s take something that you say a little bit out of context and make it salacious. The second one is still going to get a lot more likes and shares, right?

CC: To use my intuition, probably. Yeah.

NT: And so how do you stop that? Or how do you change that?

CC: Well, I think the most important thing there is whether over the long run that is building a good relationship with your readers or not. That is why I think the work on digital subscriptions is so important. A digital subscription is a business model that helps somebody have a long term relationship with a newspaper. Which is different from a one-at-a-time relationship.

NT: It’s a marriage versus a one-night stand.

CC: I wasn’t going to say that, but yeah it’s a longer-term relationship. And you’re seeing, for older institutions and newer ones, you’re seeing digital subscriptions as a growing business model on the internet. And it’s one that we’re committed to helping out on. Because we like the property that it helps create a relationship between a person and an institution. We just announced, actually, this week, a really interesting result on a digital-subscription product we’re building to help publishers take readers and convert them to subscribers on our platform. They get to set the meter, which is how many free reads do you get, they keep the revenue. It looks like it’s performing better than the mobile web, which is what we hoped, is that we can offer them something that improves their business. But it gets to what I think is the heart of the matter, when we start to talk about being in a headline culture, which, by the way, is not unique to social media. And that’s how do we think about business models that are about long relationships? And I think that’s a fascinating conversation, and to me is a really important area to go as an industry.

NT: And as someone who’s just launched a paywall and subscription model at WIRED, that is all music to my ears. Journalists and news organizations have been worried, fretful, since your changes were introduced in January. Maybe even going back to when they were being beta-tested, traffic is going down. We’re talking about it at WIRED. When you see drops of 20 percent, 25 percent in your Facebook referral traffic, there’s some concern that Facebook is getting out of the news. Is it?

CC: No. What we’ve done here is we’ve rebalanced; this is really going back to the ranking change I just talked about in January, where we’re trying to rebalance based on what people tell us. Which is they want to have conversations with people they care about on Facebook primarily. Among the news they get, they want it to be good. They want it to be informative. They don’t want to be fooled, they don’t want to be deceived, they don’t want to look back on it and feel like they were hoodwinked. That’s all the work we’re doing on clickbait, on quality, on working with fact-checkers, etc. and I think we do have immense responsibility on both of those.

NT: Let’s talk about regulation. You were just in Washington, your boss was also just in Washington, we all watched him on TV, probably there’s going to be some kind of regulation. The spectrum basically goes from, we’re going to ask for citizen education, to we’re going to have tough privacy regulation and tough hate speech regulation, all the way to antitrust. What is your sense of the way to make regulation work in a way that allows you to continue to innovate?

CC: I was in Washington last week, meeting with senators, civil society groups. We do a product road show just to help folks understand the work we’re doing on elections. It was a fascinating week to be in Washington. We had all the immigration stuff going on. And to me, and whether this takes the form of regulation or not is an important point, but to me the conversation is just that we need to be spending more time understanding, from people whose jobs it is to be representing the opinions of the state, what are their big issues and what can tech do about it? I think that is so productive. To me, the positive version of this is just a lot more dialogue in each of these arenas, on how should we think about data use, how do we communicate about data use; it’s a very difficult problem. It’s a problem for the next decade, how is a person to think about their data? Where is it, what can they do about it, how can they control it, how should they feel? I’m hopeful that what all of this is leading to is just a lot more clarity in each of these arenas.

NT: So you want more clarity, but let me just go through how you feel about some regulations. Again, I’ll just take the approach of guessing what Facebook’s position is. So, antitrust, clearly you are against that. The German hate speech law, my guess would be, you think it was an overreach because it puts the burden of identifying hate speech on you, meaning you have to hire tons of people, and also, the easy way out of it is just to delete everything from the platform.

CC: I’m not even sure if Germany feels like that was a good policy.

‘How is a person to think about their data? Where is it, what can they do about it, how can they control it, how should they feel?’

NT:GDPR [Europe’s new data-protection law], it seems like you’re conflicted about it. You rolled out a whole bunch of new stuff here that seems like you’re kind of in favor of a lot of what GDPR did.

CC: Yep, absolutely.

NT: And then on the sort of the easy spectrum, like the Honest Ads Act, it seems like you’re actively lobbying for it. So on that end of the spectrum, you’re good with it.

CC: You know, one of the things we did with GDPR is we worked with the folks who were writing the laws, in addition to the usual research groups, where you’re sitting down with privacy experts, you’re sitting down in user research, you’re asking about comprehensibility, your understanding, what is the design of the thing that the most people emerge understanding and feeling good about. It can’t be 100 pages long. If you make it one page long everybody says you don’t share enough, if you make it 10 pages long no one’s going to read it. It’s a hard one. But it’s nice when you can do it and say, “And, this is something we did in cooperation with the government.” So it helped having a body of people who were saying the thing is certified.

NT: My theory of government regulation is that it’s very hard for governments to regulate tech companies because by the time the bill is passed, everything is evolved past what they were thinking about. So my dream regulation would be government to get you together, to talk a lot, and to threaten you really aggressively, but then not do anything. And then you would self-regulate yourself really closely.

CC: That’s happening right now. I mean, these are arenas where—each one of them is something where we need to be really dialed in, on both exactly how the product works, and the research we’ve done to support that. I’m personally really proud of the work we’ve done in each of these areas, and my biggest takeaway from Washington is, once we explain the work, they’re pretty excited about it. And the biggest thing happening is a misunderstanding. Not understanding the election stuff we’ve done already, not understanding the way we’ve done research to design GDPR…

NT: Not understanding that you sell ads.

CC: Well I don’t mean it like that, it’s on us. You know these are really brilliant people, who do study and read the literature.

NT: I interviewed Zuckerberg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, and we were talking a little bit about regulation and he said, one reason why regulation is hard is because AI is going to be the most important tool to solving the problems on our platform and regulation will be put in place before all this AI gets implemented. I agree with that. And I agree with using AI to solve all kinds of problems, even problems we haven’t imagined. But the people who cause problems will also have AI, right. And AI will also have amazing opportunities for hacking—you can hack into the training data. Explain to me sort of conceptually how you think about the arms race between AI in the service of making Facebook a better platform, and AI in the service of using Facebook to try and destroy the world.

CC: First of all, AI should be thought about as a general technology. It’s like electricity. You know, it can be used in a lot of different ways. It’s being talked about in a lot of different timeframes, it’s the buzzword of the festival this year, which is good. It’s tied up in the future of jobs, it’s tied up in the future of medicine, it’s tied up in a lot of the important conversations on how we’re going to make the world a better place, we’re going to take advantage of the power of this technology. It’s also going to be, take this French medical hoax example, if we didn’t have a classifier that could quickly look at what are all the stories that look like this, that probably would have been viral. And the most important application of this work for us right now is in that kind of stuff, safety and security. And I am not aware of seeing, in the arms race, that sort of sophistication in this arena so far. So we’re obviously going to pay attention to it but if you look at the score right now, I think it’s massively in favor of security and safety.

NT: The most important thing you do financially is you sell ads. And the best product you’ve built is this tool that can identify who I should target. When I worked at The New Yorker, it was an amazing tool because we used it to sell subscriptions to people who, based on their habits measured by Facebook, are likely to get New Yorker subscriptions. So you built this incredible ad tool based on slicing and dicing populations. The biggest problem with Facebook is filter bubbles and groups where misinformation becomes disinformation and people become radicalized, which, again, is based on slicing and dicing. My presumption would be, one of the reasons filter bubbles exist is because you can get into a small group of like-minded people. And sometimes in that small group of like-minded people, you get more and more radicalized, whether it’s into a political view or it’s into a view about vaccines causing autism. And so the question is whether the business model is tied to the problematic elements of filter bubbles and radicalization within groups.

CC: I don’t think it is. And I’ll tell you why. I think one of the most important misunderstandings based on the academic research is the literature around polarization, how social media changes a media diet, which is really the underlying issue. Are you exposed to a broader set of information or a narrower set of information? And the literature says it’s complicated. It’s complicated because a world without social media as a primary source of information in the US is going to be cable news, which, according to the researchers, is a massively polarizing thing.

NT: Oh, definitely.

CC: So what’s interesting is—this is what the empirical research says—is that social media exposes you to a broader media diet, because it connects you with friends around you, “weak ties” it’s called in the literature. This is the person you went to high school with, it’s the person you used to work with, it’s people who you’d never message with, people who you wouldn’t necessarily keep in touch with without Facebook and Instagram. They tend to read something different from you, and you tend to trust them. And it’s where you tend to get the most cross-cutting discourse, which is to say people bonding over an issue that isn’t politics, and then listening to one another on an issue which is politics. The vast majority of groups on Facebook are not political. They are a mother’s group, a group of locksmiths, a group of people who play Quidditch together in London (actual Quidditch!). What we’ve heard, and this is the vast majority of the Groups on the platform, is that these are places where bonding happens and bridging happens. Which, in the literature of community leadership, in the literature of polarization, is an incredibly important thing.

NT: I’m going to not counter it but say, you can believe both that Facebook is less polarizing than cable news, and you can believe the Groups are generally good, and also believe that Facebook should be working hard to counter the polarization that does exist both within Groups and within the regular feed.

CC: Which I agree with.

NT: So then, how do you counter it more?

CC: I think the key thing to look for there is sensationalism, hate, misinformation. These are the things where we’ve seen on the platform, and we need to find them through a combination of reporting and detection, and then we need to deal with it.

NT: You mentioned earlier that changing the business model of journalism toward subscription and away from views has a beneficial effect on the industry. What about changing the way ads work within that context and saying, you can’t slice and dice on political content, you can’t use custom audiences for a campaign.

CC: The tricky one here is there’s a massive amount of good that’s done when you let a very small business, a barber shop in London, you know, has zero customers, has $10, wants to start advertising, wants to speak to people in this age group because they know who their customers are — they just need a way to reach them. And on the ledger of the good that is enabled when you allow people to reach small audiences, we think it’s vastly good because small entrepreneurs, small businesses, a small news magazine, that wants to reach a particular type of person and couldn’t afford to reach people in the way advertising worked prior to the internet. I believe in that. If you go out and talk to small business owners in the US, you get somewhere between 50 and 60 percent say our platform was responsible for helping them grow their business meaningfully, and that translates to more successful small entrepreneurs out there. Then the question is: well what about political and issue advertising, where, again, on the one hand you have people trying to raise money for important causes. You have nonprofits in Texas trying to raise money to help reunite children with their parents. And to say, you can’t do this on our platform, we think, would be wrong. So what we’ve done is to release an archive, to label every single ad where exactly is it coming from, to let people—journalists, civil society, watchdog groups, experts—study the way that the advertising is being used, so that we can have it out in the open. We can have a conversation out in the open and, frankly, we can have help from people who are studying very specifically this one group of people in Ohio and helping us spot when there’s misuse there, and we’re going to go after it.

NT: And then you can use your other tools to help promote the people who are helping find lost children and knock away the ones who are using it to spread Russian propaganda.

CC: It’s interesting. Did anybody here hear about this fundraiser last week? This is one of the more interesting things that happened on our platform last week — a fundraiser for a Texas nonprofit raising money to reunite children with their parents after they were separated at the border. It raised $20 million in six days. It was a couple, Dave and Charlotte Willner in California, their ambition was to raise $1,500. And it created a copycat phenomenon. And it’s powerful because it’s letting people do something. It’s a release. And it’s a contribution to what the national conversation was last week.

The interview then turned to audience questions.

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Lost Pit Bull Asks Cop For Help In The Sweetest Way

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It was on the drive to a local animal shelter, where the dog’s family would most likely be looking for her, that Akers discovered just what a dear pit bull she really was.

“She fell asleep in Officer Akers’ lap and napped the entire ride to Contra Costa Animal Services,” the police department wrote, adding: “She is well trained, can sit, stay and lay down.”

Senior Dog Abandoned With Brother For Being ‘Loud’ And ‘Smelly’

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For 10 years, Donnie and Marie spent their lives outside. It was far from ideal, but at least the brother and sister had each other and a backyard to call home.

Then last Monday, without warning, the senior shepherd mixes were loaded into the back of a truck and dropped at the Humane Animal Treatment Society, an animal shelter in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

The senior dogs had been barking too much, their owner explained to the shelter worker, and she no longer wanted to care for them.

Kid Loves New Kitten So Much He Decides To Build Her A Real House

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Nine-year-old Peyton Harris has been begging his parents to let him adopt a kitten for years — and about a month ago, they finally agreed. The family of five visited a few different shelters and an adoption event, but as soon as Peyton met little Luna Lovegood, he knew she was the kitten he had been waiting for.

“He had his heart set on this particular kitten,” Lauren Harris, Peyton’s mom, told The Dodo. “She had an adoption application already filled out for her, so we had to wait to see if they would adopt her or pass on her.”

As it turns out, Peyton and Luna were meant to be together, because the other family decided not to adopt her, and Luna officially became the kitten Peyton had been waiting so long for.

Bear Used As ‘Bait’ For Hunting Dogs Finally Sees Her First Flowers

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The only times Kvitka was ever allowed out of her cage at the “hunting station” in Terebovlya, Ukraine, where she lived was when she was used for an illegal practice called “bear baiting.”

Four Paws International, which negotiated for months with the owner of Kvitka to free her, obtained some footage of what this cruel practice looks like: Bears, weak from malnourishment, are chained to a post while hunting dogs circle them and “practice” on them. The bears have often had their claws painfully removed so the dogs can attack them without risk.

Dog Left Tied Up In Woods With Only Empty Food Bowls For Comfort

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Alone in the woods for days, a 3-year-old German shepherd barked and barked in hopes someone would hear her.

She had been tied up without any food or water, and she waited for her owner to return, but each day she was disappointed. Still, the dog wouldn’t give up hope that someone would find her.

Finally, a nearby resident decided to report the dog’s frantic cries for help.

“I got a call from one resident who said that there was a dog tied somewhere in the back of their building, and the dog was hollering and screaming all night long,” Alex Kelly, an animal control officer with New Jersey’s Irvington Township, told The Dodo. “So I asked her, ‘How long has the dog been hollering, and barking?’ And she said, ‘I’m going to be honest with you, the dog’s been back there at least three days.’”

Guy Comes Into Kitchen And Finds Someone Strange Eating His Pasta

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Making fresh pasta from scratch isn’t an easy task, but a man in Brisbane, Australia, had already managed the culinary challenge — when he encountered another rather unexpected difficulty.

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Tiny Dogs Abandoned On Roadside Were Living Together Inside Old Tire

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On a hot Saturday afternoon, three tiny dogs huddled together inside an old tire, attempting to escape the bright sun.

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A driver who took a wrong turn spotted a matted white terrier perched atop the pile of garbage. Sensing the animal needed help, the man called Faith Easdale, a local dog rescuer with Dream Fetchers: Project Rescue. Easdale receives this type of call far too frequently.

Guy Moves Into New House And Discovers It Apparently Comes With A Cat

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When Crispy the cat’s family was in the process of moving from California to Texas, she was very overwhelmed by all the boxes and commotion — and while the door was open to move things out, Crispy ran outside and disappeared. Her family was devastated when they realized she was missing, and searched for her to no avail. They moved to Texas with heavy hearts, hoping that, eventually, someone would find their beloved cat.

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New California Bill Restores Strong Net Neutrality Protections

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Last month, a California Assembly committee voted to remove key protections from a state-level net neutrality bill. Critics said the changes opened loopholes that would allow broadband providers to throttle some applications, or charge websites or services for “fast lane” access on their networks. Now those key protections are coming back.

At a press conference Thursday, California state Senator Scott Wiener, who introduced the original bill, and Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, who proposed the changes last month, said they had agreed on a new version of the bill that restores provisions that would make the California bill the most robust net neutrality protections in the nation.

The latest version of the bill restores provisions that prevent broadband providers from exempting some services from customers’ data caps, and ban providers from charging websites “access fees” to reach customers on a network or blocking or throttling content as it enters their networks from other networks, according to a fact sheet released by Wiener, Santiago, and state Senator Kevin de León.

During the press conference, Wiener explained that he and Santiago have been working on a new version of the bill since shortly after Santiago’s changes were approved last month.

Wiener’s original bill, which passed the California Senate in May, was in some ways more robust than the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality protections repealed last month; Wiener’s bill, for example, explicitly banned broadband providers from exempting services they own from customers’ data limits. So if the bill were to become law, AT&T would no longer be allowed to exempt its DirecTV Now video streaming service from its mobile users’ data allotments.

Last month, the Communications and Conveyance committee, which Santiago chairs, amended Wiener’s bill to remove the provisions that covered data caps, as well as other sections that explicitly banned broadband providers from charging websites “access fees” to reach customers on a network or blocking or throttling content as it entered their networks from other broadband networks.

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The WIRED Guide to Net Neutrality

Santiago originally framed his changes as bringing the bill in line with the Obama-era net neutrality protections. The FCC’s net neutrality order wasn’t as explicit as Wiener’s bill, but it did give the agency authority to regulate data caps and the interconnections between broadband networks; removing those provisions from the California bill made it weaker than the Obama-era protections.

Asked why he reversed course, Santiago says the changes he made in committee last month were part of an ongoing process to get the net neutrality protections right. “We ran out of time, we kept the issue moving, and we agreed to get it right,” he says.

But he also faced pushback from advocacy groups. One group, Fight for the Future, announced a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a billboard targeting the assemblymember in his Los Angeles district.

“We appreciate Assemblymember Miguel Santiago’s change of heart,” Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer said in a statement. “This should be a lesson to other lawmakers: don’t mess with net neutrality unless you’re prepared to feel your constituents’ wrath. Today’s news shows the power of the internet to overcome business as usual and win real victories for the public.”

The new version of the bill still needs to be approved by both houses of the California Legislature, and signed by Governor Jerry Brown. From there, it could face legal challenges from the FCC, which prohibited states from adopting their own net neutrality protections when it repealed the national net neutrality rules. During the press conference, Santiago said the California bill would stand up to legal scrutiny. Legal experts have told WIRED they are unsure whether the FCC has authority to preempt state law on the issue.

The telecommunications industry group USTelecom has promised to challenge state level net neutrality rules, arguing that they would lead to a fragmented legal environment.

“Ideally we would have one national standard, but that hasn’t happened,” Wiener said Thursday.

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Bioproducts are seeing major tailwinds in renewable tech

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Tom DicksonContributor
Tom Dickson is CEO of New Energy Risk.
Brentan AlexanderContributor
Brentan Alexander is chief science officer for New Energy Risk.

Although Silicon Valley seems to have largely forgotten about cleantech after failures in solar, wind and batteries, there are still major strides being made across new and exciting renewable technologies. However, because these companies can take a decade or more to come to market — a timeline that is anathema to Sand Hill venture capital — media coverage has died down significantly over the last few years. So what’s going on?

It turns out… a lot.

In particular, there are significant developments across the waste-to-fuel and waste-to-product industries, in the form of thermal (pyrolysis, hydrothermal, gasification) and non-thermal technologies.

The driver for this is somewhat simple: The human population is creating more waste every year and there are fewer options for disposal. Incentives around building a “circular economy,” where renewable products are created from that waste, are growing and making more financial sense.

Basically, companies are learning how to turn trash into cash.

Today, entrepreneurs are approaching the space head-on, and there are dozens of cutting-edge companies coming to market and breaking through with major projects and customers. Companies in the space can be divided between the developers like Fulcrum BioEnergy, Red Rock Biofuels, RES Polyflow and Envia, and the technology providers, such as TCG, TRI, Velocys and many others.

These companies are targeting a variety of waste types, including household garbage (plastics and organics), as well as agricultural waste (like wood) and livestock waste (like manure). Waste is then converted into various products, including synthetic crude oil, natural gas, electricity, refined products (from diesel to high-value waxes) and specialty chemicals.

In short, we’re seeing some major tailwinds for bioproduct companies as we near 2020. Here’s why.

The value of waste removal and disposal has increased

As population and urban density grow and environmental concerns mount, there are fewer places to store waste. Just recently, China — which recycles nearly half of the globe’s waste — banned the import of certain plastics, as well as 23 other waste products, leading to overflowing landfills in many countries, including Australia and Great Britain. Landfill permitting is becoming more stringent, while countries can no longer just ship their trash somewhere else to be dealt with. Gate or tipping fees (the cost of disposing waste at a landfill) are also increasing.

So, with more pressure on these systems around the world, waste disposal has increased in value, making waste-to-product facilities and technologies more economically attractive to developers.

The human population is creating more waste every year and there are fewer options for disposal.

These projects have become even more financially sound when paired with government incentives for cleaner fuels and lower emissions. These often come in the form of renewable credits and fuel standards, such as the EPA’s Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard Program (LCFS). In many cases, these credits are a significant portion of revenues, and similar government-market support can be seen in Europe and Asia.

RINs, in particular, were enacted about 10 years ago, initially for corn ethanol projects. In the last few years, however, the advanced biofuels RINs requirements have started to come in to force and generate a new market. For companies that can sell their product in California and take advantage of the LCFS, these policies, in tandem, can support more than 50 percent of the revenues of some plants, making them economically possible. The effects of these mechanisms are hard to overstate.

Old science, new goals

What’s most surprising, though, is that the science behind many of these companies and technologies is not actually new. In fact, some of the science was developed in the early 20th century in Germany, primarily used to convert coal into oil during World War II to overcome small domestic oil reserves. Later, in the 1970s, the idea of peak oil and price shocks around OPEC’s formation pushed major oil producers, like Exxon, to look for alternatives, refining and advancing these processes and creating fuels and products (once again primarily from coal).

However, oil producers focused on massive-scale projects because the goal was to supplant a portion of oil production. So they were looking at $5-10 billion facilities, which were not feasible for waste-to-fuel and waste-to-product processes. Trying to feed such huge facilities with sufficient waste day in, day out would be a logistical impossibility. Moreover, once cheap oil returned, there was no longer an economic rationale for alternative fuels, and much of the technology was shelved.

Today, rather than building $10 billion refineries, developers like Fulcrum BioEnergy or Red Rock Biofuels are looking at$100 million to $500 million in capital expenditure projects — still large sums for a startup. They are taking these systems initially developed for coal processing and using them for all kinds of waste, from household trash to wood to manure. These are smaller-scale systems that fit more specific needs for specific customers and geographies. However, this shift toward smaller scale has presented a new set of engineering challenges that many companies are just now beginning to overcome.

Luckily, developers today are using their experience building and financing similar facilities in the ethanol market and applying it to these new waste-to-fuel projects. High oil prices and ethanol subsidies in the late 2000s led to a resurgence of interest in renewable energies, and the last decade has seen engineering techniques applied to waste-to-fuel for the first time, such as small-scale, temperature-regulated Fischer-Tropsch, small-scale gasification and supercritical water pyrolysis. These big investments into engineering, as well as logistics, have been instrumental in bringing together technologists, developers and customers.

Corporate interest has improved both logistics and market opportunity

For these new projects and technologies to be successful, developers need to secure a reliable source of waste to feed the facility, as well as “offtake partners” — customers who commit to purchase the fuel or product before they can finance and build a large facility. Increasingly, companies are stepping up to the plate. The necessity and value of environmental and carbon credits, as well as growing concerns around sustainability, are pushing corporations to become more involved.

Partnerships have made securing sufficient feedstock possible. This includes waste disposal companies like Waste Management that want to preserve landfill space and reduce methane emissions, forestry companies looking for new forms of lumber byproducts and livestock companies looking to dispose of manure.

Companies are learning how to turn trash into cash.

In addition, some companies are becoming investors or buyers of the end product. For example, airlines (United, Cathay, JetBlue, Southwest, Qantas, British Airlines, Canada Air) are investing in and buying biofuels because of international policy requirements. Grocers (Whole Foods, Tyson) and food and beverage companies (Coca-Cola) are also looking for sustainable waste disposal, packaging and reduction of their environmental footprint.

These projects are highly susceptible to market changes, so company commitments to longer-term agreements for purchasing products like fuel — particularly ones that include price-floors in exchange for decreased upfront cost — can help bridge price gaps and mitigate project risk for lenders. Luckily, we’re seeing more of this happen.

Still, major challenges remain

It’s not all rosy, though. The most challenging aspect of scaling up these bioproduct operations are the significant capital requirements and funding. The process toward economic feasibility has not been an easy one, and unfortunately is littered with stories of failure — but these are high-risk ventures, and failures, are how the market navigates new technologies and learns from mistakes.

Indeed, we’ve seen a few green shoots over the last few years that have served as a boon for companies looking to hit scale.

Tax-exempt bonds and government funding have served as an alternative to traditional loans from risk-averse banks. Solid-waste processing facilities are allowed under the IRS rules for tax-exempt private activity bonds that can be issued by states. This financial mechanism isn’t new, but the use of it by renewable energy developers has helped project financials by lowering the interest rate on the debt that the project has to pay. However, the pot for tax-exempt bonds is also limited by state and federal governments, so developers have to fight to be given an allocation with other projects, which has limited availability of this kind of financing.

In addition, guaranteed performance of these facilities has been a significant weakness in the field. One response to this has been the creation of insurance and warranty products that guarantee reliability of new facilities, thereby reducing the risk for lenders, leading to better financing terms from banks and bond investors, and increasing customer adoption.

Lastly, nearly all of waste-to-product companies today rely on credits to make their projects financially sound. In many cases these are a significant portion of revenue. As mentioned above, RINs and LCFS have been key drivers for domestic projects.

However, not all sectors are treated the same way by these support systems. One of the major drivers in wind, solar and fuel cells has been investment tax credits, which do not apply to waste facilities. Moreover, oversupply of RINs is possible, which could lead to a market price collapse. Of course, the market is also susceptible to political squabbles. So far, the RINs market has survived the EPA transition under Scott Pruitt — they are prized by the farm lobby after all — and it seems increasingly likely the market will remain in place. In fact, the EPA just released its proposed 2019 biofuel requirements and continues to increase the number of available RINs beyond prior levels.

Support and demand for these technologies and processes are accelerating as stakeholders from across the marketplace align to bring these projects to life. Moreover, because of the local and regional nature of these projects, it is unlikely for global forces to derail progress, like China aggressively entering the market and undercutting prices as they did with solar a decade ago.

However, a number of factors still pose a threat, including volatility within the market for renewable credits, as well as government support structures, or risks around commercial and technological viability that scare financiers away from backing these new projects. Only the most robust projects that address a variety of risks and shore up their commercial and technological viability will succeed over the long-term.

Overall, though, given renewed corporate interest in biofuels, new sources of financing and new feedstock and regional focuses, we may soon see a quiet boom in renewable biofuels and products.

The Boat Circling the Planet on Renewable Energy and Hydrogen

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Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Sails kept the boat moving, but Erussard relied on an engine and generator to keep the electronics running. He temporarily lost his autopilot and his navigation systems, jeopardizing his chances of winning the 2013 Transat Jaques Vabre race.

Never again, he thought. “I came up with the idea to create a ship that uses different sources of energy,” he says. The plan was bolstered by the pollution-happy cargo ships he saw while crossing the oceans. “These are a threat to humanity because they use heavy fuel oil.”

Five years on, that idea has taken physical form in the Energy Observer, a catamaran that runs on renewables. In a mission reminiscent of the Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that Bertrand Picard and André Borschberg flew around the worlda few years back, Erussard and teammate Jérôme Delafosse are planning to sail around the planet, without using any fossil fuel. Instead, they’ll make the fuel they need from sea water, the wind, and the sun.

The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production.

Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels—1,400 square feet of them in all.
Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP

Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it’s the way that’s stored that’s clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas. An electrolyzer uses the current to spilt the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The latter is released into the atmosphere, and the H2 is stored in eight tanks, made from aluminum and carbon fiber, which can hold up to 137 pounds of compressed hydrogen. When that energy is needed, the H2 is run through a fuel cell and recombined with oxygen from the air to create electricity, with water as a byproduct. That’s the same way fuel cell cars, like the Honda Clarity and Toyota Mirai work.

By storing energy this way instead of with banks of batteries, Erussard made the Energy Observer three times lighter than the similarly sized MS Tûranor PlanetSolar, which became the first boat to circumnavigate the globe using only solar power in 2012.

The voyage, which started in June 2017, will last six years, reach 50 countries, and make 101 stops. The vessel has already travelled 7,000 nautical miles, to port cities around the French coast, and is now in the Mediterranean.
Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP

And the new vessel is kind to the ears as well as the planet. “There’s zero sound pollution, it’s a true pleasure to navigate on this vessel,” Erussard said on stage at the recent Movin’On future mobility conference in Montreal, Canada.

Inside there’s a gleaming white helm, with two captains chairs, and living quarters that wouldn’t look out of place in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with an almost harshly minimalist white design. The team designed the furnishings to be as light as possible too, because a lighter boat uses less energy, and so is more efficient.

The team isn’t rushing things. The mission started in June 2017, and will last six years, reach 50 countries, and make 101 stops. The vessel has already travelled 7,000 nautical miles, to port cities around the French coast, and is now in the Mediterranean. It’s due to arrive in Venice on July 6, and spend 10 days in port, where the crew will meet the public, and hold set up an interactive exhibit to showcase environmentally technologies.

“The idea with this ship is to prove a potential energy system of the future,” Erussard says. He’s determined that the same types of energy generation and storage that he’s using onboard could be used on land too, to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and maybe one day to clean up those container ships he’ll pass en route.

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Huawei MateBook X Pro Review: About That Webcam…

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Chances are, you’ve never owned a Huawei laptop. You may not even know how to pronounce it (it’s ‘wah-way’ if you’re a stickler). Along with being a target of U.S. politicians and spy agencies, the Chinese tech giant is best known for its Android smartphones and tablets. That will change if it keeps making laptops like the MateBook X Pro.

It may have just made its big push into laptops last year, but Huawei’s new MateBook X Pro makes a strong statement, and it does it by making almost no statement at all: If you sat it down next to some of the fanciest notebook computers, it would fit right in.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think Huawei has made laptops for years. The MateBook X Pro looks and feels as luxurious as some of the most sought-after ultrabooks from established brands. It has everything you’d expect: a slim aluminum chassis, spacious touchpad, superb battery life, speedy boot times thanks to a solid-state drive, and souped-up processor. Its cool brushed exterior and island-style keyboard look right at home sitting next to a Surface Laptop, Dell XPS 13, HP Spectre 13, or any MacBook inspired machine.

Ports, Pixels, and Power

The MateBook X Pro gives you perks competing laptops don’t have, too. The high-end configuration I tried comes with a 2GB Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card, a big step up from the usual integrated Intel graphics many similar machines rely on. It’s not powerful enough for hardcore, frame-rate intensive software, but it does open the door to some light gaming and will help in Adobe Photoshop or Premiere.

The extra oomph will help you get work done, too. I’ve used this laptop for almost all my needs in the past month. I regularly have dozens upon dozens of Chrome tabs open and an ultra-wide second monitor hooked up. Slowdowns have been rare thanks to the Nvidia chip, 512GB SSD drive, quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, and 16GB of RAM in my unit.

Though it charges with one of its two USB-C ports (your laptop and phone can now use the same charger!), Huawei was also kind enough to include a full-size USB-A on the opposite side. To my delight, I also found a multi-function USB-C dongle that let me connect the X Pro to my external monitor via HDMI, while also connecting a USB-A device and USB-C charger—it even has an old-school VGA monitor hookup.

Gazing upon the MateBook’s screen for the first time is astonishing. It stretches nearly 14 diagonal inches into a frame that would normally hold a 13-inch one. Huawei makes every dot on its 3,000 x 2,000 pixel touchscreen count, pushing the the screen right up to the edges with bezels that are less than a quarter inch (5mm) on the sides and top. It’s stunning to look at, and a greater joy when you realize it’s also gasp a touchscreen.

Typing on the MateBook X Pro comes very naturally if you’ve owned a thin laptop before. The backlit keys are spacious and have more travel than Apple’s flat, flawed butterfly keyboard, and adjusting the volume, brightness, and other settings with the top row of function keys is easier than many laptops.

Unworkable Webcam

The MateBook’s middle function key has a secret. Press down on it and up pops a 1-megapixel webcam. I couldn’t stop thinking of like the headlights on an old Corvette. It’s fun, makes a satisfying click when activated, and there is some comfort knowing that the camera physically cannot see you when it’s inside the keyboard.

Huawei hid the camera in the keyboard because, like Dell’s XPS 13, that beautifully thin 5mm bezel around the screen left no room up top. Sadly, it should have made space because the MateBook’s ‘nosecam’ is not practical.

Huawei

A webcam sitting underneath the screen—in this case angled up from the keyboard—is incredibly awkward to use no matter how you look at it. My video chats on Skype or Zoom felt so weird—my coworkers totally noticed something was off. The angle highlights my chin and nose in the most unflattering way, and I couldn’t type or take notes while on a call because my wiggling fingers block the camera.

Even though the webcam is this , I did miss Windows Hello facial recognition (which likely couldn’t fit because of the hidden webcam), though the MateBook’s power button does double as a speedy fingerprint sensor, which works almost as quickly. If you’ve used a fingerprint scanner to unlock a smartphone or tablet, you’ll feel right at home unlocking this laptop with a touch.

And then there are the quirks: the X Pro’s two processing chips can get a little hot and the fan is noticably audible if it’s running at full tilt. And even though the touchpad works well, it can be touchy at times. My left hand accidentally triggers Windows 10’s gestures accidentally while I’m using the computer. I’d like to blame my palm, but other laptops I use never seem to react while I’m happily typing away.

Outside of the X Pro’s webcam problems, there’s a lot to like. Assuming you won’t ever need a webcam, Huawei’s MateBook X Pro is a killer high-end laptop and a bargain next to some of its competitors. The high-end Core i7 model with Nvidia GPU costs $1,500 and its spec sheet looks incredibly good next to some $2,000+ competitors. If you have the cash, go for it, but the $1,200 model—which has an 8th-gen Core i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD for file storage—should do the trick. You’ll just have to wave goodbye to Nvidia and open your heart to Intel and its integrated graphics.

Huawei is onto something, and the MateBook X Pro is a fantastic laptop by most respects. Hopefully its next MateBook Pro won’t X-out the webcam.

An Astronomer Explains Black Holes at 5 Levels of Difficulty

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You probably know the basics when it comes to black holes: A lot of mass squished into not a lot of volume makes for an entity so prodigiously dense, not even light can escape its gravity. Perhaps you even know about things like event horizons, the boundary outside of which escape becomes possible, and gravitational waves, the ripples that black holes generate in the cosmic fabric when they collide. Conceivably you even know what a black hole would “look” like, if you were ever so fortunate (unfortunate?) as to observe one up close: a gyre of oddly lit matter that wraps around a spherical split in spacetime, thanks to the beam-bending effects of gravitational lensing (another essential black hole concept).

Maybe you already know all of these things. For all I know, you’re the champ of black hole trivia. But at some point, your knowledge probably peters out and collapses in on itself like a … like a … well, like a something. That simile got away from me. But! Fortunately! Wherever and whenever your command of the subject craps out, Varoujan Gorjian will be there to pick up where you left off.

A research astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Grojian specializes in—and I’d just like to pause here to emphasize that this is the official title of his research group at JPL—the structure of the universe. Which means the guy not only knows about event horizons and gravitational lensing but stuff like tidal forces (what!), x-ray binaries (hey now!), and active galactic nuclei (oh my god!). Seriously, the guy’s knowledge of black holes is encyclopedic.

And best of all, he’s good at explaining the stuff. Check out the video above to watch Gorjian discuss black holes at five scales of difficulty, from grade school to grad school right on up to fellow-black-hole-expert levels. Because who among us doesn’t want to hear two authorities on the subject nerd out about the extracoronal illumination of accretion disks? (There. Bet you didn’t know that term.)

The Sooty Logistics of Fighting 2018’s First Major Wildfire

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Just a few weeks into the 2018 fire season, any hopes that an ongoing drought and a winter of weak snowfall wouldn’t wreak havoc are already toast. Fires are already popping up across Colorado, New Mexico, and west into Oregon and California.

This year’s season got off to a roaring start more than a month ago in Durango, Colorado, where the 416 Fire has burned more than 50,000 acres in the San Juan National Forest. The burn started in a populated area and grew to cover huge swaths of ground in just a few days, but crews managed to contain the blaze and prevent the loss of any structures or life.

And as the fire season picks up momentum, it’s worth an examination of the techniques and tools firefighters use to fight back the flames.

The 416 Fire started on June 1, early in the Colorado fire season, which turned out to be somewhat helpful. There are only so many firefighters, engines, planes and helicopters to go around, and federal agencies must allocate them based on current and emerging threats to life and property. For a time, the Durango fire was the highest priority wildfire in the United States, and that means the crews fighting it got everything they needed. Including the VLAT.

When it comes to controlling a fire, aircraft are one of the most important tools in the arsenal. Whether it’s helicopters dropping a few hundred gallons of water on a single burning tree or enormous aircraft dropping tens of thousands of gallons of flame-suppressing chemicals at once, aircraft can change the tide of the fight. The rarest resource of all is the VLAT, or Very Large Air Tanker. Oftentimes these are repurposed DC-10’s with 11,600-gallon capacities, five times as much as a Large Air Tanker. And they put on quite a show, as this video shot by Durango Fire & Rescue (where I was a volunteer firefighter for five years) makes clear:

“They’ll use it to buy time strategically,” explains Deputy Chief Randy Black of Durango Fire & Rescue. “They don’t want to put crews in steep terrain at night. They’ll bring one in and paint the line, and that can take care of it for the evening. That was the last aircraft to come in, then sometime the next afternoon they started working that line.”

The red chemical mixture, or slurry, this aircraft dumps isn’t actually meant to extinguish the flames. “It’s to push the fire out of the trees and down to the ground,” says Black. “They’ll get it down to the ground, then do a burn off from the line up to the fire and control it. Create the line they want on their terms.”

The line is all important in battling wildfires, where the main tactic is cutting the flames off from the fuel they need to keep going. This part of the process looks like high-precision, high-speed landscaping. Twenty-man hand crews will use chainsaws, shovels, and a specialized tool called a Pulaski to remove leaves, pine needles, and other sorts of fuel from a stretch of ground to create a barrier around the fire. If the fire is creeping along the ground, an 18-inch wide stretch of line just might be enough to stop it.

Sometimes, the best way to fight fire is, yes, with fire. A controlled burn can eat up the fuel the main fire needs to advance. By creating an area of “black”, or burned out ground, firefighters can control where the fire goes.

“You have actual line, then the black, leading up to the fire that’s burning. Then you can mop up and make sure it’s cold in the black area. You’ll have a strong, reinforced line and you’re good,” says Chief Black. “Slurry bombers are working on slowing the fire and trying to control it to the point where it would be a line.”

Each unit relies on the other to work. A plane dropping slurry can’t do much without crews on the ground reinforcing the drop, and those crews can’t do anything if the fire is torching— jumping from tree to tree high above the ground. The logistics are daunting, especially when aircraft are involved: It can take hours for a DC-10 to return to base, refuel, refill with slurry, and then get back to the fire. In Durango, the plane needs to go back to Colorado Springs, which takes at least a two-and-a-half hour turnaround time. An aerial attack team must coordinate all of the assets at hand to best fight the fire. VLATs, helicopters, heavy tankers, single engine air tankers, ground crews—all to steer and manage the fire as best they can.

“That’s the science coming out of the command team, the fire behavior analysts, and meteorologists,” says Black. “Here’s what the weather is, tactically do this, then do this at this time. They have all this fuel modeling software and engineers—it’s not two 1970s Forest Service dudes sitting up in a tower there hoping this works. It’s a calculated scientific process.”

And when fire season roars in, you just hope it’s enough.

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Welcome To The Highly Probable World of Improbability

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In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the problem of intergalactic travel is ultimately solved by suspending an atomic vector plotter in a nice hot cup of tea. The tea, it turns out, is a strong producer of Brownian Motion: The molecules of water are moving pseudo-randomly, and any given specific configuration of those molecules is highly improbable. The vector plotter takes the improbability of that particular nice hot cup of tea, converts it into the identical improbability of intergalactic travel, and, presto, spaceships can travel, instantly, through every point of every conceivable universe.

To put it another way: Highly improbable events are all around us. Those events can make for extremely exciting sport competitions — after running 10,000 simulations, for instance, a team of 18 analysts from Swiss banking giant UBS determined that Germany, with a 91 percent chance of making it through to the round of 16, was by far the most likely country to win the World Cup. Instead, Germany crashed out at the bottom of its group, losing not only to Mexico but also to South Korea.

Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. He hosts the Slate Money podcast and the Cause & Effect blog. Previously he was a finance blogger at Reuters and at Condé Nast Portfolio.

At roughly the same time, in June’s midterm primaries, 28-year-old political neophyte Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spectacularly dethroned Joseph Crowley, the powerful congressman who chaired not only the Queens County Democratic Party but also the House Democratic Caucus. Her thumping victory was a direct consequence of another highly improbable result — the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president. Trump’s election came in the wake of an electoral upset across the pond — the Brexit referendum — which came as such a surprise that the most sophisticated prediction mechanism on the planet, the global foreign-exchange market, was blindsided in the middle of the British night. If you were one of the small group of hedge funds that bet in the right direction, you ended up making well over $100 million in the space of a few hours.

Humans love to read meaning into the unexpected and the improbable, even where there is none. As the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s best seller has it, we’re fooled by randomness. When Germany fails to make it out of the group stage of the World Cup, the pundits say it turned out to be a weaker team than anybody thought; when Ocasio-Cortez beats Crowley, we say that’s because she ran a powerful grassroots campaign that was largely invisible to the media elite; when Trump is elected president or when Britain votes to leave the EU, that’s because of … [insert any one of a thousand explanations here].

None of these narratives is wrong, exactly; they just tend to overlook the simple fact that improbable events happen on a regular basis, and that for every improbable event that happens, there are dozens which don’t. In certain artificial contexts, the frequency of improbable events can even be quantified: If you’re playing backgammon or craps, for instance, you know that you’ll get double ones one time in every 36 rolls, on average. If you roll a pair of dice a hundred times and never get double ones, you might not be surprised, but at the same time something fishy is going on.

These narratives tend to overlook the simple fact that improbableevents happen on a regular basis, and that for every improbable eventthat happens, there are dozens which don’t.

In the real world, probabilities tend to be Bayesian rather than frequentist — which is to say, their improbability is not something that can be measured empirically, but is rather a function of the available evidence and the direction that evidence points. You can’t measure the probability of outcomes in the World Cup or an election by re-running the same experiment thousands of times, since these are events that are played only once.

Still, there’s nothing inevitable about their outcome, and it remains important and true to be able to say that Germany was probably going to win their group, that Crowley had every reason to expect an easy victory, and that any presidential election where one candidate gets 4 million more votes than her opponent is overwhelmingly likely to result in that candidate’s victory. The recriminations that invariably follow an improbable event all too often ascribe an inevitability to a result which wasn’t inevitable at all and which in truth can most honestly be credited simply to bad luck.

In many ways, the really improbable event of recent decades was the manner in which so much of the world experienced stability and predictability. What was the probability that we could, collectively, have created such an unprecedented quantity of wealth, health, and prosperity? The late Hans Rosling astonished audiences worldwide by showing them the enormous gains that humanity has made; economists tend to work from the assumption that nearly every economy will grow in nearly every year, and that the rare periods of shrinkage, or recession, are anomalies which can generally be blamed on misguided government policy. The growth assumption is generally true today, but would have been hilariously false for most of human history. Steady, compounding economic growth is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is almost impossible to grasp instinctively.

Perhaps human intuition has something important to tell us here: That those audiences were right to be astonished by Rosling’s statistics, and that it’s perfectly normal for things to go down as often as they go up. Certainly the sweepingly new political enterprises being installed in countries from China to Hungary to Mexico — not to mention the US — are explicitly designed to upend the old system and replace it with something radically different. Disorder and unpredictability used to be the result of political mistakes and miscalculations; increasingly they’re a desired outcome of political leaders, with Donald Trump gleefully playing the role of chaos monkey in chief.

Disorder and unpredictability used to be the result of politicalmistakes and miscalculations; increasingly they’re a desired outcomeof political leaders.

The current world is one which has lost the probabilistic dampeners we all got used to growing up. We find ourselves immersed, much like Douglas Adams’s atomic vector plotter, in a soup of improbability—a place where we have to expect the unexpected. Such a world rewards resilience and improvisation; it naturally defeats well-laid plans.

The next time something improbable happens, then, don’t kick yourself for failing to see it coming, and don’t kid yourself that it was in any way inevitable. The best you can do is recalibrate and remain nimble. Because no matter what universe you find yourself in today, it’s very likely to be significantly different tomorrow.

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How to Take a Screenshot on a Mac

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In the age of ephemeral communication, you need the receipts. Screenshots act as digital proof of what’s been said and done. They’re also a convenient way to capture, save, and send information to yourself and to your friends.

You probably already know how to take one. But do you know all the ways to do it? Here’s a primer on capturing screenshots on a Mac.

Entire Screen Shot

You’re watching West World on your laptop and Dolores is making a particularly fierce facial expression that you want to savor forever. This is a perfect time to take a screenshot of your whole computer screen. Press Command, then Shift, then 3. The image of your entire screen will be saved to your computer’s desktop. Use it to make the Dolores meme of your dreams.

Window Shot

Maybe you don’t want your whole screen, but a specific window open on your desktop. Hold down Command + Shift + 4, and then press space. Your cursor will turn into a little camera icon. With this activated, any window you hover over will turn gray; the entire window or application will appear in your screenshot. Click on the window you want to capture.

Selection Shot

You’re planning to see the Incredibles 2 at your local movie theater, but you and your date haven’t decided on a showtime. Instead of texting the movie times one by one, send your date a screenshot. You don’t need to send them the whole window, and you definitely don’t need to send them the whole screen. You want a cropped image that centers the Incredibles 2 showtimes. Press Command + Shift + 4, and a marquee selection tool will appear. Click and drag to highlight the selection you need. When you release, the selected area will be saved to your desktop.

Copy to Clipboard

If you just need a shot for immediate copy-and-paste purposes—not something you want to save to your desktop—add the Control button into the mix. For screenshot of the entire screen, you’ll press Command + Shift + Control and then 3. This will copy the screenshot to your clipboard instead of saving it to your desktop. When you’re ready to paste it, hit Command + V.

Use Preview

You can also take screenshots through the Preview Application. Open Preview, and from the File dropdown menu, hover over Take Screenshot. From there choose to capture a screenshot of a Selection, Window, or Entire Screen. Once it’s been taken, the image appears in preview. With Preview, you can change the automatic PNG format to JPEG, PDF and more.

Full Page Screen Capture

Sometimes you want to capture an entire webpage to save an article or story. This can be especially useful if you’re about to be without internet for a while. The Chrome extension, Full Page Screen Capture, lets you do just that. Download the extension for free from the Chrome web store. It’s icon will appear as a little camera in the top right corner of the page. Go to the page you’d like to save and simply click that icon when you’re ready to save it. From there, you’ll be given the option to save it in PNG format as an image, or PDF format as a file.

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