Linkwad.

Honeymoon photos coming soon! Promise.

• I don’t know if I buy the “Internet is killing serendipity” argument, but this essay makes the case as well as any I’ve read.
• The history of the reeeeemiiiiiix.
• Just FYI: “Everyone else is just as bad” isn’t really a good defense, Internet commentariat.
• Obviously, the answer to “Why do we need SOPA?” is, “We don’t.”
• Pitchfork’s impact and history. For you lazy-ass TL;DR types: “A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art.”

No future (part 2).

At the risk of being hyperbolic¹, you should listen to this Titus Andronicus track while reading this Cory Doctorow essay:

As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we’ve spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.
…
We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

I think most people will remain blissfully² ignorant of this problem–every time Apple releases a new iOS device, people clamor to be allowed into their walled garden, and the piracy, copyright and patent wars³ rate similarly low on people’s priority lists. Which is an extremely long, link-heavy way of saying: “I am very pessimistic.”

Linkwad.

• Jonah Weiner’s Louis CK interview and profile.
• This eye-controlled computer is excellent, but undoubtedly already patented.
• For Baltimore job creation, filmmaking > racing. For the record, fixing potholes > racing. PS: the Brew is now on Kickstarter.
• Skip past the Tebow part for some actual knowledge on fourth down calls, momentum, and challenges.

Native sons.

This is a really interesting post about the recent resurgence in faux-Native American fabrics and patterns, and the resentment it’s created:

Many Native Americans are less than thrilled that this so-called “native look” is trendy right now. The company that’s stirred up the most controversy so far is Urban Outfitters, which offered a “Navajo” line this fall (items included the “Navajo Hipster Panty” and “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask”) before the Navajo Nation sent the company a cease and desist order that forced it to rename its products. Forever 21 and designer Isabel Marant also missed the memo that the tribe has a trademark on its name; thanks to the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990, it’s illegal to claim a product is made by a Native American when it is not.

“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.

“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”

It’s fascinating, especially since I had only the vaguest knowledge of Pendleton blankets:

“From the beginning Pendleton marketed the blankets to various native communities, but the designs themselves are not authentic,” says Bramlett, a founding member of the Vintage Fashion Guild. “What’s ironic is that the Navajo were making blankets for the white tourist trade, and Pendleton was making blankets to sell to the native communities. That’s kind of a weird twist, but that’s the way it was.

“And the Navajo designs were not even traditional designs,” she continues. “A lot of the motifs that they used were Mexican inspired. Or when traders came to them with oriental rugs, they’d use them as inspiration. So there are oriental motifs in some Navajo weavings, too. It’s just a crazy cross-cultural mix any way you look at it. You’ve got the Pendleton blankets which are a mixture of native and non-native colors and motifs. Then you’ve got the Navajo blankets, which are the same way.”

Via PTO.

Where we murder for capital.

A pair of fascinating articles on cocaine economics. First up: did cocaine’s declining price cause the drop in violent crime?

Once the margin of profit for dealing small amounts of crack cocaine disappeared, being part of the drug trade was no longer worth the persistent threat of violence or the stiff criminal penalties. A 70 percent drop in cocaine prices like the one that occurred in the mid 1990s combined with competition from decentralized sources for methamphetamines and prescription narcotics would completely eliminate the minimum wage drug dealer as a viable profession.

The same goes for turf wars, which Venkatesh saw as the source of the majority of inner-city violence. He saw the life of a drug dealer as relatively violence-free up until territory conflicts with other gangs ensued. Without the high value of cocaine as a commodity, the incentive for protracted gang wars would dwindle as well as eliminate the economy for the illegal weapons, drive-by shootings, and mercenary “warriors” needed to help defend prime dealing locations. Without profit to fight over, Vankatesh thought that “gang violence would likely return to pre-crack levels.”

On the Mexican side, a forensic economist believes the cartels are behaving rationally:

According to Dell, the cartels have behaved like textbook economic actors, shifting their trafficking routes in predictable ways to circumvent towns where the government has cracked down and raiding towns where competing cartels have been weakened by government efforts.
…
What happens when a law-and-order mayor gets elected? All hell breaks loose: Dell estimates that the drug-related homicide rate almost doubles relative to “control” towns where the PAN wasn’t elected. And it’s not the result of traffickers warring with police, but rather traffickers fighting with each other. Dell conjectures—based on anecdotal evidence about the drug war—that police efforts tend to weaken a cartel’s grip on a town just enough that competing traffickers see an opening to come in and fight for control of the town. Indeed, when a rival cartel controls a neighboring town, the effect of a PAN win on the drug-related homicide rate is several times higher.