Mike Lofgren:

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
 
 – The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)
 
 There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
 
 During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.

Carey Biron:

An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors.
 
 Mirroring a trend being experienced across the globe, this strengthening focus on agriculture-related investment by the private sector is already leading to a spike in U.S. farmland prices. Coupled with relatively weak federal policies, these rising prices are barring many young farmers from continuing or starting up small-scale agricultural operations of their own.
 
 “This is no longer necessarily about food at all, but rather is a way to reap financial profits.” — Anuradha Mittal
 
 In the long term, critics say, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health.
 
 “When non-operators own farms, they tend to source out the oversight to management companies, leading in part to horrific conditions around labour and how we treat the land,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group focusing on global large-scale land acquisitions, told IPS.

Bill Barnett:

The good news is that by doing things myself, I learned how. I’m still unlikely to be called by Angelina Jolie any time soon, but I’m a better teacher for having done this myself. That is how things go; call it the “learn or buy” decision. Need food? Go to the store. Need to finish a math assignment? Get to work. You could pay someone to do your math assignment, but then you’d not only be a liar, you would never learn your math. Paying for things is a way to avoid learning. Some people change the oil; some people pay Jiffylube.
 
 Common sense, you say. But I work with companies all the time who don’t get this basic truth. Leadership wants their company to learn something, so they acquire another company that already knows how. But this purchase does not make their company learn; it just means they own another company that knows how to do things that they don’t. For their company to learn, they would have to do it themselves, and through that difficult process they might have learned. But paying someone else does not help you to know. In fact, since you can rely on the acquired unit, you can avoid having to learn.
 
 

Dan Neil:

I suppose at this point, I must observe that the sun is setting on manual transmissions. As it should. In an era of quick-twitch mechatronics—of continuously variable transmissions, 8-speed dual-clutch transaxles, 9-speed automatics with torque converters—using a series of steel linkages to engage and disengage gears while levering the clutch in and out of the way with your foot? It is barbaric.
 Sentimentalists argue that semiautomatic and automatic systems are uninvolving to drive. You want involving? We should go back to wooden wheels and cable brakes.
 
 Look, I only read the writing on the wall. I didn’t write it. Manual transmissions are, for example, slower than modern automatic and dual-clutch transmissions. Around a road course, a PDK-equipped, paddle-shifted Porsche 911 will steadily walk away from the exact same car with some stick-shifting yokel in the driver’s seat. As hybrid and electric parts take up a greater percentage of powertrain duties, gearboxes themselves will become obsolete.
 
 Manual trannies are also less fuel-efficient than other cog-swappers, and rising fuel economy standards will only marginalize manual transmissions further. The percentage of new light vehicles sold in the U.S. with manual transmissions is in the single digits. Meanwhile, only a small and aging segment of the driving population even knows how to drive a manual transmission. Go ahead, leave the keys in it: A car with a stick shift is practically immune to theft.

Bruce Schneier:

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA’s missions.
 
 The first is targeted surveillance.
 
 This is best illustrated by the work of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group, including its catalog of hardware and software “implants” designed to be surreptitiously installed onto the enemy’s computers. This sort of thing represents the best of the NSA and is exactly what we want it to do. That the United States has these capabilities, as scary as they might be, is cause for gratification.
 
 The second is bulk surveillance, the NSA’s collection of everything it can obtain on every communications channel to which it can get access. This includes things such as the NSA’s bulk collection of call records, location data, e-mail messages and text messages.
 
 This is where the NSA overreaches: collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately. It doesn’t make us any safer, and it is liable to be abused. Even the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged that the collection and storage of data was kept a secret for too long.

Scene 2 | Scene 3

Much more on Chichen Itza here.

PBS Frontline:

Thanks to social media, today’s teens are able to directly interact with their culture — artists, celebrities, movies, brands, and even one another — in ways never before possible. But is that real empowerment? Or do marketers still hold the upper hand? In “Generation Like,” author and FRONTLINE correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (“The Merchants of Cool,” “The Persuaders”) explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media — and exposes the game of cat-and-mouse that corporations are playing with these young consumers. Do kids think they’re being used? Do they care? Or does the perceived chance to be the next big star make it all worth it? The film is a powerful examination of the evolving and complicated relationship between teens and the companies that are increasingly working to target them.

Hannah Kuchler:

In a back street in San Francisco’s start-up dominated SoMa district, a rapidly growing business is busy studying how millions of employees behave each day. Its computers know in real time why a worker was hired, how productive they are and can even follow them as they move to a new job.
 
 Evolv is a leader in the nascent Quantified Workplace movement, where big data analytics companies are springing up to measure how we work. “Every week we figure out more things to track,” says Max Simkoff, Evolv’s co-founder and chief executive, who claims it can help improve productivity by at least 5 per cent in two-thirds of jobs.
 
 More than half of human resources departments around the world report an increase in the use of data analytics compared with three years ago, according to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. But many employees are still blissfully unaware of how information they may deem private is being analysed by their managers.

The Economist:

GOODBYE city, hello country. In recent years some of America’s biggest urban areas like Los Angels, Chicago and the Northeast corridor have seen an outflow of people. At the same time, spectacularly beautiful places like the Southwest and Colorado have seen a massive influx.
 
 These big demographic trends are visible in a map produced by statisticians at America’s Census Bureau (below). It shows internal migration on a county-by-county basis: blue represents people leaving, red means coming in. One clearly sees the degree to which people have fled Detroit and southern Florida. At the same time, the data and other charts in the report show much less churn in the central states.

While on travel recently, I encountered a couple of photographers taking portraits, bathed in pleasant natural and artificial light. They were well equipped with modern Canon 35mm DSLR bodies, the excellent 70-200mm 2.8L ii lenses and a nice wireless flash system – which worked most of the time.

One of the photographers sported an accessory, a “strap mounted” Gizmon covered iPhone.

Intrigued, I asked the photographer about her iPhone experiences while displaying my airborne tennis player image (above), captured during a iPhone 5s 10 frames per second burst. I further mentioned that the iPhone’s relentless imaging improvements have given Canon and Nikon a historic challenge. The low to mid range camera market is being eaten by iPhone.

The reaction to my inquiry was rather hostile, “beneath contempt” and included “I could name ten things wrong with that image”. Indeed. But, the iPhone continues to improve, eating away at Canon & Nikon’s traditional camera market (see Drew Gardner’s latest). In addition, the legacy manufacturers further annoy customers with absurd pricing for features that should be standard and in fact are on the iPhone such as trivial file transfer and GPS. Canon’s “WFT-e7” “wireless file transmitter” for the 5D mk iii DSLR costs a cool $849.99! GPS? well that’s another $390.00. I was reminded of these painful prices after reading about Jennifer Szalai’s portrait style in a recent 6th Floor article.

Szailai’s portrait images are produced by two separate cameras that fire simultaneously. Remote wireless control would be useful for any number of applications.

Subsequently, I conversed with a professional photographer who was seeking input on features for a future dedicated camera from one of the usual suspects. I offered a few user interface improvements along with a recommendation for built in wifi and an sdk for iOS developers. One photographer responded that “wifi junks up the camera”, which completely misses today’s photographic (and video) reality. Fast sharing and remote control via an iOS device are essential to any camera that wishes to be purchased.

I further mentioned that the iPad Air may be used to create excellent videos in short order via iMovie and that future software will surely crunch raw photos with great speed.

I closed with “consider this a lifeline“.

Sony’s QX 10/QX 100 provide a glimpse of the possibilities that new thinking offers. I tried one and found it reasonable. Software polish, improved battery life and more responsive hardware will make this product more compelling. I enjoyed the ability to place the camera/lens and wonder around photographing and capturing video remotely via my iPhone.

My mind returned to the somewhat hostile photographer when I saw Apple’s 1-24-14 film, shot entirely on the iPhone 5s. Beautiful work that illustrates what can be done with a bit of creative thinking, not to mention the “large format” version.

Change can be hard and the unknown frightening. Yet, the new thing brings opportunity to those who seize it. Market churn is essential to education, creativity, economic opportunity and societal improvement.

Stagnation is expensive.

As for me, I remain thankful for the many opportunities that new processes and technologies have brought to my life:

James 1:17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

I look forward to the arrival of the iPhone 6s, now, God willing, less than two years away.