dimanche 10 novembre 2013
Xbox One Pre-Orders Arrive Early For Some
Microsoft’s Xbox One console isn’t supposed to go on sale until November 22nd, but some lucky gamers have started receiving their pre-orders two weeks in advance. After Microsoft's 12-minute video tour of Xbox One, at least three consoles have been delivered early, with two originating from Target. One console briefly made it onto eBay with a buy it now price of $10,000 before being quickly removed. However, Twitter user @Moonlightswami has been posting his first impressions of another console over the past several hours.
Moonlightswami has found that the Xbox One takes 17 seconds to boot up before requiring a 500MB day-one patch. Microsoft confirmed the patch is a requirement to play games, and once it's installed you’re then free to download a variety of games and apps. Game sizes vary greatly in download size. NBA 2K14 appears to be one of the largest at 43GB, with Call of Duty: Ghosts set at 39GB, and Forza 5 at 31GB. Other titles like Madden and FIFA are 12GB and 8GB respectively. Microsoft promised games could be played while they’re being downloaded, and Moonlightswami claims they’re playable after 50 percent of the download is complete. He has also spotted a variety of featured challenges that appear to rotate for different games.
Moonlightswami was able to share the details, a number of dashboard screenshots, and even a YouTube video. However, Microsoft removed the video under a copyright claim and has banned his console as a result. Another gamer who received a console from an online order claims he has talked to Microsoft and the company has "said it’s mine to do with as I please." It’s highly likely that any bans that Microsoft issues at this stage are temporary to prevent details of games and apps ahead of reviews and broad availability. The Verge has reached out to Microsoft to comment on the ban and early shipments. We’ll update you accordingly.
Update: Microsoft's Larry Hryb, better known as Major Nelson, is confirming on Twitter that the ban is not permanent. In a tweet earlier today, Hryb says that "whatever happened it will not be permanent. I can say that with 100% certainty."
Update 2: A Microsoft spokesperson has responded to our request for comment, saying that "a very small number of Xbox One consoles were shipped to consumers before the November 22 street date," and explaining that the consoles would only "be restricted from connecting to Xbox Live until closer to our launch date." The full statement is below.
"Due to a retail partner’s system issue, a very small number of Xbox One consoles were shipped to consumers before the November 22 street date. We’re pleased to see the initial response to Xbox One has been so positive, but given we are still putting the finishing touches on our games, UI and online services, as well as confidential partner and media agreements, these units will be restricted from connecting to Xbox Live until closer to our launch date."
from Digg Top Stories http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/9/5083780/xbox-one-early-pre-order-deliveries
samedi 9 novembre 2013
The Right And Wrong Way To Go Solo
We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the detergent sampler that broke and spewed suds all over our mortgage bill is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, what makes a successful solo album.
Rick Simineo writes via Facebook: "Can you talk us through the right and wrong way of doing a solo album after time in a band, along with some examples of each?"
George Michael (left) and Andrew Ridgeley both went solo after Wham! broke up. One fared just a little better than the other.
Brian Aris
There's no one unifying principle behind solo success — it's been done both right and wrong in a hundred different ways, for a thousand different reasons — but I've tried to puzzle out a few guidelines based on the examples that spring to mind. For the sake of something approximating brevity, I'm going to stick to singers, because they're the ones most likely to launch high-profile solo careers.
So many of the successful singer-goes-solo stories that jump to my mind are cases in which the newly minted solo artist has a persona that needn't be confined or constrained; in which the mystique and allure of the singer has always dwarfed that of the performers around him or her. In The Smiths, Morrissey benefited immeasurably from Johnny Marr's guitars, but if you cared about The Smiths, you knew exactly what Morrissey was all about long before he became a solo artist. Bjork made a bunch of big records with The Sugarcubes, as did Natalie Merchant with 10,000 Maniacs, as did Gwen Stefani with No Doubt, but no one boggled at the cognitive dissonance between their solo and band work. In short, it helps to be the iconic face of a band if you're trying to become an iconic solo singer — but even that's no sure thing, if the uneven solo careers of Mick Jagger and Debbie Harry are any indication.
The next rule is to evolve gradually. George Michael wasn't exactly a brooding artiste in Wham!, and his hugely successful early solo records meet at the midpoint between his bubblegum persona and the more "adult" side (in several senses of the word) he'd explore later. Sting's post-Police album The Dream of the Blue Turtles finds a similar comfort zone between fizziness and mopery; it took a few years for the singer's adult-contemporary side to dominate completely. Justin Timberlake found a path from boy-band stardom in 'N Sync to solo stardom by locating the midpoint between his old group and sexy soul. Though there are cases in which hairpin turns have worked for people — Mike Patton leaving Faith No More and forming the inscrutably spastic oddity Mr. Bungle, for example — some performers have been viewed as unbearably self-indulgent once liberated from the bands that once contained them. (David Lee Roth was a huge solo star for a few years after leaving Van Halen, but the schtickiness of it all produced rapidly diminishing returns.)
To me, the most intriguing solo breakouts occur in bands with multiple competing — and often contradictory — visions. Bands often contain several highly individual songwriters, and so it's intriguing to watch a family tree emerge from the roots of an Uncle Tupelo (Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Son Volt's Jay Farrar), a Velvet Underground (Lou Reed, John Cale, et al), a Fleetwood Mac (Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie), a Beatles (all four of 'em), a Fugees (Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Pras), a Hüsker Dü (Bob Mould, Grant Hart), and even an Eagles (Glenn Frey, Don Henley, et al). That individual work can often be informed by the exhilaration of liberation, but it also comes with fascinating amounts of pressure: When a band breaks up and everyone goes solo, history will often judge its legacy by which solo act fares best. The roles of Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams in Destiny's Child, for example, will always be viewed through the lens of Beyonce's subsequent success. In most cases, that battle is won by who's got the strongest songs out of the gate.
Finally, it really helps to go solo at the right time — to not wait until a band has started to decline before striking out on your own. Several new solo albums have crossed my desk recently that might have experienced a huge profile had they been released 10 or 15 or 20 years ago: Live's Ed Kowalczyk, Collective Soul's Ed Roland, Creed's Scott Stapp. But for those guys, going solo now means rebranding themselves and bearing the weight of their bands' respective legacies. Of course, it holds true for solo acts — just as it holds true for bands — that most musicians come with commercial expiration dates, no matter how many smart moves they've made along the way.
[Incidentally, yes, about 14 zillion examples aren't included in this thumbnail sketch: Iggy Pop, assorted Jacksons, Diana Ross, Kenny Loggins, Robert Plant, Gloria Estefan, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, Glen Hansard, Billy Idol, Rob Thomas, a couple Black Eyed Peas, and on and on. Please feel free to bring 'em up and have at it in the comments.]
Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2013/11/08/243950702/the-good-listener-the-right-and-wrong-way-to-go-solo?ft=1&f=
2 Wounded In Bryant Park Shooting
Raghuram Krishnamachari
Twitter user Raghuram Krishnamachari took this photo of a person lying motionless on the Bryant Park skating rink.
Two people were reportedly shot in Bryant Park late Saturday night.
Police are holding approximately 200 people at the scene while they search for the suspect.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates shortly.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/breaking-shots-fired-bryan-park-2-shot-article-1.1512095
Video Of The Aftermath Of The Bryant Park Shooting
One Instagram user caught some of the moments following the Bryant Park shooting on video.
from Digg Top Stories http://digg.com/video/bryant-park-shooting-video
Here's Why Bitcoin Bulls Think It Could Go To $37,815
Bitcoin is having another huge day.
It's almost at $400. Earlier this week, it was around $250.
So how high could it go?
There's a private fund called the Bitcoin Investment Trust being sold through Second Market. They have a presentation making the case for why Bitcoin could potentially go much, much higher.
Here's the nut slide, which basically makes the argument that if Bitcoin becomes as big as other money-related entities, the current price will be nothing.
Without getting into a big Bitcoin debate here, there is some weird stuff going on.
For example, the comparisons to PayPal and Western Unions are comparing the market caps of companies to the value of an outstanding commodity. The comparisons to gold or the total monetary base of Turkey might theoretically be more apt? We really don't know.
Check out the full presentation here >
from Digg Top Stories http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-investment-trust-slide-2013-11?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29
What It's Like To Grow Up Blind
Tommy Edison, who has been blind since birth, talks about what it was like growing up without sight.
from Digg Top Stories http://digg.com/video/what-its-like-to-grow-up-blind
Did Instagram Sell To Facebook Too Early?
Answer by Marc Bodnick, Leader of Quora business & community teams, Co-Founder of Elevation Partners, on Quora,
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
With Twitter’s public market cap of $20+ billion and Facebook's at $100+ billion, it now seems pretty clear that:
- Instagram sold way too early and should have turned down acquisition offers and stayed independent.
- Had Instagram stayed independent, it would have had a very good shot at a Twitter or even FB-sized outcome.
- History may remember the FB/Instagram deal as the only time when a great, market-leading consumer internet company decided to sell when it didn’t have to.
- Facebook’s aggressive strategy to acquire Instagram was a masterstroke — arguably the most brilliant acquisition ever in Consumer Internet. Previously, Google's acquisition of YouTube would have held this title, but Instagram is arguably more important.
More thoughts:
Instagram has an extraordinarily strategic and valuable competitive position.
Instagram is valuable because:
- It dominates stranger-to-stranger social photos. By “stranger-to-stranger,” I mean products that connect people who don’t know each other. Tumblr is another product that people use for stranger-to-stranger photosharing.
- Given the strength of Instagram’s competitive position, had it stayed independent, it would have had a very strong opportunity to challenge Facebook in the friend-to-friend photos.
Here’s a simplified diagram of the social communications category:
So in those four quadrants, you’ve got $150B in market cap. It’s really not hard to imagine that Instagram’s ultimate opportunity was $25-50+B.
In summary:
- Near-term, Instagram is now the Twitter for photos.
- Longer-term, Instagram could have been the one credible threat to Facebook in friend-to-friend social communications.
Given its insane growth & mega-revenue prospects, Instagram’s investor valuation today could have been $10+B.
Instagram had 30 million users before the Facebook acquisition. Today, it has more than 150 million users.
And check out the revenue forecasts that one equity analyst recently projected for Instagram:
These numbers are probably inflated and on steroids (because that’s what sell-side analysts do), but you get the idea. This could have been Instagram’s income statement future, and it’s breathtaking.
Rather than sell, Instagram’s team could have had their cake and eaten it too.
Yes, yes — hindsight is 50/50. And a billion dollars is an enormous sum. But the interesting thing is that Instagram didn’t have to make a binary “hold vs. sell” decision. Instagram could have had it all:
- Near-term liquidity for the founders plus
- Staying independent and the opportunity to go for it.
By 2012, it was pretty standard in the venture and growth equity markets for founders of successful companies to sell some of their shares in growth investment rounds, so that they could get some liquidity and comfort and lock-in some gains on what they’ve built. I think there’s a pretty good chance that Instagram’s early investors and board members would have been totally fine with the Instagram founder team selling a significant portion of their stake in return for their continued commitment to keep building value in the company.
They could have gotten some of this liquidity in 2012 (i.e., at the ~$500mm valuation that Sequoia invested in), or waited. Had they waited (and yes this is hindsight), the company’s value would have skyrocketed, and they could have sold ~1/3 of their stake (or less) in return for as much cash.
Sell vs. stay independent: historical analogues
Over the past 10-20 years, most consumer Internet market leaders have considered acquisition offers. Here’s how I’d look at it:
Great decisions to not sell. Over the past 20 years, there were certain moments when staying independent was a great decision by the founder. The list includes: (1) Facebook not selling to Yahoo in 2006, (2) Twitter not selling to Facebook in 2008, and (3) [rumor has it] Yelp not selling to Google in 2010.
Great decisions to sell. On the other hand, there were other situations where selling the company was an awesome decision. This list includes: (1) Bebo selling to Time Warner and (2) Broadcast.com selling to Yahoo.
Tough decisions to sell. Then, there were some decisions that feel tragic — because the companies are so awesome — but you can really understand the decision. Two companies in particular come to mind:
- YouTube. I’ve heard people say that if YouTube had held on just one more year, they could have achieved a purchase price north of $5B. But YouTube apparently felt significant pressure to sell in 2006 in part because it was facing significant legal problems that represented a giant overhang on the company and represented a potentially massive and catastrophic risk. After the acquisition, Google apparently invested a huge amount of financial resources (hundreds of millions of dollars or more) settling YouTube’s legal battles with the record labels, movie studios, etc.
- Zappos. It would have been awesome if Zappos had stayed independent, and July 2009 was clearly a low-point in tech valuations versus the subsequent four years. However, Zappos was facing at least two huge hurdles when it sold: (1) the giant financial burdens of inventory that I presume were getting worse as the company grew and (2) the potential competitive threat from Amazon.
In each of these two cases, the company was very capital intensive and would probably have had to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of growth / private equity money to stay independent. In YouTube’s case, I bet that felt nearly impossible, given their lack of revenues and massive legal challenges. I’m less sure about Zappos, but I bet 2009 private equity investors would have been pretty nervous about the prospects of funding the company’s balance sheet and income statement in the face of the two threats I describe.
Instagram however, wasn’t Zappos or YouTube. Instagram wasn’t a capital-intensive business and had plenty of access to the private capital markets. In fact, the company had closed on a $50 million fundraising right before the Facebook sale.
Thanks to Jackson Mohsenin for his help thinking about the ideas in this answer and for editing help.
This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Initial Public Offerings:
- What happens behind the scenes when a stock has priced its IPO but they are debating what the opening trade should be?
- Why does an IPO stock like Twitter pop so much when trading starts?
- Did Facebook’s stock perform according to expectations on its first day of trading?
from Digg Top Stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/11/08/did-instagram-sell-to-facebook-too-early/
Dispactches From The Coming Console War
With the release of the PlayStation 4, next Friday marks the beginning of hostilities in the return of that ancient conflict, the Console Wars.
Like all the worst wars, Console Wars are long, brutal, and senseless, and yet we humans, partisan beasts by nature, cannot seem to avoid them.
This one, in which a resurgent and wrathful Sony will match its gleaming new black machine against its old foe, Microsoft and its…gleaming new black machine, promises to be the most destructive yet.
We have stared into the flames, and seen one version of the future, which runs red with blood Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
Nov. 15, 2013, or C-Day: Sony launches its new video game console, the PlayStation 4. Buoyed by a historic swell of enthusiasm from gamers, the PS4 sells out at stores across America. Desperate gamers bivouac next to barren Walmart shelves, where they ration Gushers and share tales of glorious launch days past. The lucky pre-orderers, in basements and studio apartments the world over, chuckle smugly at news reports of the huddled masses, but fight back strange feelings of emptiness when they realize that they have nothing to play, really.
Nov. 22, 2013, or C-Day, Part Two: Microsoft launches its new video game console, the Xbox One. Launch day is marred when lined-up customers in major cities across the U.S. and the U.K. are glitter-bombed by masked gangs, robotically chanting “Play-stay-shun.” For years afterward, these operations will be referred to, in hushed terms, as “The Siege of Mallingrad.”
Those lucky enough to escape discover that the One’s voice capabilities (“Xbox: On”; “Xbox: Watch Television”) immediately suggest a new form of humor: “Xboxing.” Examples include “Xbox: Go Fuck Yourself,” “Husband: Wash Dishes,” and “Dog: Eat My Homework.”
Dec. 28, 2013, or The Great Dongtroversy : Elizabeth Shecter, a 53-year-old Ohio mother of two, notices while dancing with her fully clothed family in front of their new Xbox One that she can see quite clearly her husband’s, her son’s, and her daughter’s boyfriend’s penises on their 60-inch flat-screen television. Scandalized, she calls the local news, which coins the phrase “The Great Dongtroversy” in a segment that goes viral.
“Xbone”, an early nickname for the console, takes on new meaning.
Microsoft apologizes and releases a mandatory “no-dong” patch, which uses smart technology to identify all dongs and turn them into cartoon ice cream cones.
Feb. 14, 2013, or the Valenteen’s Day Assacre: Alarmed parents realize that their teenage children are using the PlayStation 4’s dedicated “Share” button, in concert with the PlayStation Eye camera, to send each other explicit videos in honor of Valentine’s Day. Some are mere nude twerking; others are far more graphic. Microsoft uses this opportunity to promote its family-friendly, pan-living room feature set: Xbox One, now dong-free, is the game system that families can enjoy together (read: spy on each other). In combination with the early March release of the Xbox One-exclusive megahit Titanfall, Sony’s early momentum in the war erodes.
Oct. 2, 2014, or the Low Din of Mild Inconvenience: Approximately 10 months after the release of the Xbox One, a not-insignificant percentage of owners report a barely audible hum from their machines. It is first compared to the sound of a laptop, then a dishwasher, then a Pantera concert. Users begin complaining of headaches and fatigue, and blame it on the noisy console.
It immediately becomes one of the major civil rights issues of our time. Reddit crashes under the traffic strain. Change.org becomes the most trafficked site on the internet. ThinkGeek begins selling PlayStation 4s under the mock title “Xbox One Silencer”. Sony releases propaganda posters about human rights conditions on “the other side.”
Nov. 21, 2014, or the PSeNsive: With a single word, “LoL,” Gears of War creator Cliffy B changes console history. That acronym, written in a tweet with a picture attached of an error message (“PlayStation Network is currently down”), gives voice to millions of gamers outraged by short and infrequent service interruptions. Retweeted over 500,000 times, “LoL” becomes a rallying cry for Xbox One partisans in ubiquitous schoolyard skirmishes.
January 2014–December 2014, or The Faceworn Folly: In-house, top-secret R+D labs at both Microsoft and Sony work grueling and frantic hours in a bid to create virtual-reality peripherals for the 2016 Christmas season. Rumors spread: Sony is draining money from its profitable Japanese life insurance concern to fuel its VR program; Microsoft’s headset is so convincing, several testers experience complete psychological dissolution; Sony’s facility is underwater.
An internal Nintendo intelligence report bearing the title Virtual Reality: Those Who Don’t Learn From the Past Are Doomed to Repeat It surfaces on VGLeaks.com. Microsoft, Sony, and an imminent-to-market Oculus prepare litigation.
Then the Rift, like the Virtual Boy before it, proves a total consumer dud. Microsoft and Sony both kill their secret programs and try, with limited success, to conceal the evidence, as well as their lawsuits. Thereafter, old men refer to head-worn VR as “The Graveyard of Empires.”
November 2015–March 2016, or the Long Winter: A lackluster holiday season featuring almost no exclusive titles for either console sends millions of gamers in each camp into an existential malaise. What is the point of fighting for our console? they ask themselves. What is the point of gaming at all? Sony and Microsoft retrench, and each independently decide to rerelease its consoles in bright, limited-edition colors. Morale immediately lifts.
Oct. 13, 2016, or The Battle of the Somme Really Big Games Finally: Three years after the start of hostilities, fans fight the most infamous and ferocious battle of the Console War. On the same day, Naughty Dog releases This Time It’s Really the Last of US on PS4, and Epic releases Gears of War 5: A Lion in Winter for Xbox One. Mobs burn effigies of Marcus Fenix and that dude from The Last of Us in fetid basements. Brothers fight brothers. Parents find the limits of the timeout stretched to the breaking.
April 2017, or the Kyoto Double Cross: A Nintendo triumvirate comprising Sartoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Reggie Fils-Aime receive at their high command in the ancient city of Kyoto leaders from Microsoft and Sony. For years, Nintendo has claimed a Swiss neutrality in the Console War, and yet its role has in reality been closer to France in the American Revolution: It has encouraged laid off employees, following weak sales of the Wii U, to move to Remond to work on Kinectimals.
The pretext for the meeting: peace negotiations. And yet, in a brilliant and spiteful tactical maneuver, Nintendo has only invited the leaders to its headquarters so that it can announce it has signed a deal with Apple to license Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games to iOS. Miyamoto-san’s impish grin reads as pure evil.
Chaos reigns.
October 2019–December 2019, or The Draft: Three years into the first Cruz administration, six years after C-Day, the Console War reaches its peak, by sales (just like the previous one). Casual and occasional gamers are finally able to justify the purchase of the “next” generation, as prices have come down to $199 for a new PS4 or Xbox One. While, as a consequence, more and more “soldiers” are being conscripted into each “army,” the new, less-invested console owners have the effect of diluting the hatred on each side. Fewer soldiers know why they began fighting in the first place. Many were lost to college, others to the twin discoveries of sex and marijuana
Burnt out gamers from both sides put down their controllers and come together to form a social movement, called Gamers Care. While GC starts out as a peace movement, its members, outside the culture of gaming for the first time in their lives, come to realize that games are actually problematic in ways outside of the console war. The men of Gamers Care, in a landmark series of Reddit posts, break the news to the world that games are corrosively violent, sexist, and insultingly repetitive from year to year.
Gamers Care go on to discover the pleasures of older art forms, such as reading, and inaugurate weekly “Book Clans” in which members take turn suggesting a book for group discussion “raids”.
The most radical Gamers Care members splinter into a new type of full-body gaming, called sports.
Jan. 1, 2020, or The #YOLO Conference: Microsoft and Sony executives meet and agree to end hostilities, in a peace deal brokered by Tim Cook and Gabe Newell. It’s a lasting peace, but even at #YOLO, the seeds of a new and more durable hatred are sewn.
Aware of a looming threat in the form of Steam’s increasingly polished living room consoles, and Apple’s increasingly powerful cable boxes with App Store access, Microsoft and Sony sign a secret non-aggression and profit-sharing deal, agreeing that their mutual survival in the face of these new ideologies is more important than their history of conflict.
All parties to the #YOLO Conference agree that such wanton destruction and disregard for human dignity can never happen again. In honor of those lost to the Console War, the great powers erect a single monument, devastating in its simplicity:
And yet, days later, the Console Cold War begins.
Check out more articles on BuzzFeed.com!
from Digg Top Stories http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/dispatches-from-the-coming-console-war-2013-2020
Which Of The 11 American Nations Do You Live In?
Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.
“The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in the Fall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.”
Take a look at his map:
Courtesy Tufts Magazine
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Woodard lays out his map in the new book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.” Here’s how he breaks down the continent:
Yankeedom: Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.
New Netherland: The Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world when New York was founded, Woodard writes, so it’s no wonder that the region has been a hub of global commerce. It’s also the region most accepting of historically persecuted populations.
The Midlands: Stretching from Quaker territory west through Iowa and into more populated areas of the Midwest, the Midlands are “pluralistic and organized around the middle class.” Government intrusion is unwelcome, and ethnic and ideological purity isn’t a priority.
Tidewater: The coastal regions in the English colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware tend to respect authority and value tradition. Once the most powerful American nation, it began to decline during Westward expansion.
Greater Appalachia: Extending from West Virginia through the Great Smoky Mountains and into Northwest Texas, the descendants of Irish, English and Scottish settlers value individual liberty. Residents are “intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers.”
Deep South: Dixie still traces its roots to the caste system established by masters who tried to duplicate West Indies-style slave society, Woodard writes. The Old South values states’ rights and local control and fights the expansion of federal powers.
El Norte: Southwest Texas and the border region is the oldest, and most linguistically different, nation in the Americas. Hard work and self-sufficiency are prized values.
The Left Coast: A hybrid, Woodard says, of Appalachian independence and Yankee utopianism loosely defined by the Pacific Ocean on one side and coastal mountain ranges like the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas on the other. The independence and innovation required of early explorers continues to manifest in places like Silicon Valley and the tech companies around Seattle.
The Far West: The Great Plains and the Mountain West were built by industry, made necessary by harsh, sometimes inhospitable climates. Far Westerners are intensely libertarian and deeply distrustful of big institutions, whether they are railroads and monopolies or the federal government.
New France: Former French colonies in and around New Orleans and Quebec tend toward consensus and egalitarian, “among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy,” Woodard writes.
First Nation: The few First Nation peoples left — Native Americans who never gave up their land to white settlers — are mainly in the harshly Arctic north of Canada and Alaska. They have sovereignty over their lands, but their population is only around 300,000.
The clashes between the 11 nations play out in every way, from politics to social values. Woodard notes that states with the highest rates of violent deaths are in the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, regions that value independence and self-sufficiency. States with lower rates of violent deaths are in Yankeedom, New Netherland and the Midlands, where government intervention is viewed with less skepticism.
States in the Deep South are much more likely to have stand-your-ground laws than states in the northern “nations.” And more than 95 percent of executions in the United States since 1976 happened in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater and the Far West. States in Yankeedom and New Netherland have executed a collective total of just one person.
That doesn’t bode well for gun control advocates, Woodard concludes: “With such sharp regional differences, the idea that the United States would ever reach consensus on any issue having to do with violence seems far-fetched. The cultural gulf between Appalachia and Yankeedom, Deep South and New Netherland is simply too large. But it’s conceivable that some new alliance could form to tip the balance.”
Take a look at his fascinating write-up here.
RELATED: 19 photos that make you appreciate America
from Digg Top Stories http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/
Click Your Way To A Meth Empire
widgets (purity is NA )
0
0 per second (net)
0 per second (gross)
make
cash ($0 ea)
$0
$0 laundered
$0 per second
sell
You have a low chance of a DEA raid (0%)
You have a low chance of an IRS audit (0%)
Game saved 60 seconds ago
No new messages
The game has been updated! It may be wise to create a backup before refreshing.
from Digg Top Stories http://clickingbad.nullism.com/
Cosmonauts Take Olympic Torch On Its First Spacewalk
In space, no one can hear you cheer. But cosmonauts will take the Olympic torch aloft anyway, on a Saturday spacewalk from the International Space Station.
The six-hour spacewalk was already planned for maintenance purposes on the space station, says Jay Bolden of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which manages station operations. (Also see "Olympic Torch in Need of a Light.")
The Olympic Flame travels from Greece to the host country for the opening ceremonies at every Olympics. From February 7 to 23, 2014, Russia will host the Winter Games in Sochi. (See "The Sochi Olympics' Snow Problems.")
Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky will secure the Olympic torch outside the station after exiting the airlocks to begin their maintenance efforts.
Taking the torch on the spacewalk was an add-on to the maintenance work that was already planned. "This is a mission of opportunity, in a sense," Bolden says. "Not a stunt for stunt's sake."
The torch will not be lit while it is aboard the International Space Station to forestall a fire hazard on the tightly confined orbiting laboratory. The torch will simply accompany the cosmonauts on the spacewalk but won't be part of their maintenance efforts, Bolden says.
"It will be perfectly safe; they are very well trained," says MIT aerospace engineer Dava Newman, an expert on spacewalks. "It will essentially be like carrying tools, which they do all the time. And it will be a good celebration of the Olympics and of the space station."
The torch should return to Earth on Sunday, according to NASA's Joshua Byerly, along with returning space station crew members Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency, Karen Nyberg of NASA, and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency. The torch will feature in the Sochi opening ceremonies on February 7, 2014.
Follow Dan Vergano on Twitter .
from Digg Top Stories http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131109-olympic-torch-spacewalk-space/
A Mostly False History Of The Xbox One And Playstation 4
Next week begins what many will consider the official roll out of next-generation consoles when the PlayStation 4 launches in North America. The following week sees the debut of Microsoft's Xbox One. The dual holiday season releases will bring nearly two years of rumor, speculation, anticipation and ever-changing business plans from Sony and Microsoft to a close.
Our first glimpses of those consoles, under their code names Durango and Orbis, used by developers to secretly talk about the Xbox One and PS4, respectively, came in early 2012.
At the time, the most basic details were being reported by Kotaku; the next Xbox would include a Blu-ray optical drive, a higher fidelity Kinect sensor and might not play used games. Those details were all accurate when Microsoft announced the Xbox One more than a year later, though the company famously reversed course on restricting used games.
(Truthfully, one of the first indicators of a new Xbox was the inclusion of an "Xbox 720" logo cameo in the movie Real Steel . But since robot boxing is not yet a major spectator sport, the timing of the console's existence, as detailed by Real Steel, now seems inaccurate. The name was also wrong.)
One early and contradictory report from MCV asserted that the next Xbox wouldn't ship with an optical drive at all, focusing solely on downloadable games.
The earliest reports of the PlayStation 4 — based on development kits going out to game makers — pointed to processors supplied by chipmaker AMD, which Sony confirmed when the console was announced on Feb. 20 of this year. At the time, Kotaku reported that Sony's next-gen PlayStation wouldn't be backwards compatible, which was accurate, and would also feature measures designed to block used games, which turned out not to be true.
Given the unwelcome reception to used game restrictions and confusing DRM-schemes, Sony proudly touted at E3 2013 that the PS4 could play secondhand and borrowed games, as previous PlayStations had, using that as a key selling point.
In the middle of 2012, well before either the Xbox One or PS4 was made official, a reportedly leaked Microsoft document appeared to lay out the company's plans for an Xbox 360 successor. In that document were references to more prominent SmartGlass integration, a new Kinect sensor, hardware with six times the computing power and deep TV programming integration coming to the "Xbox 720," then expected to launch in 2013.
While those particulars panned out, other details haven't — at least not yet. The document also included references to internet-enabled eyewear dubbed "Fortaleza" glasses that bring augmented reality vision while playing the next-gen Xbox. Microsoft hasn't announced such a product, but is reportedly prototyping something similar to what's seen in the document.
Other details that proved inaccurate included a $299 launch price, well below the Xbox One's $499 MSRP, and possible backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games. (Some reports, including one from Nukezilla, claimed that backwards compatibility was coming to the next-gen Xbox.)
Granted, that document was supposedly published in the summer of 2010, well before Microsoft made any Xbox One details official.
Details on the hardware powering both next-gen consoles was outlined in early 2013 in a report by Eurogamer's Digital Foundry. The new Xbox and PlayStation, they said, would run on chips based on AMD's Jaguar architecture, information that later proved to be accurate. According to Digital Foundry's report, the PS4 would ship with faster RAM, but less of it than the new Xbox — 4 GB of DDR5 RAM compared to 8 GB of DDR3 RAM.
Within the week, a separate report from Kotaku indicated that PS4 was outfitted with 8 GB of RAM. That discrepancy can be easily explained, however. Sony originally intended to pack 4 GB of RAM into the PS4, but at the behest of developers, the system's memory was doubled.
Not long after, Edge reported that Microsoft would require a regular internet connection with its next Xbox. The system would be "always on, always connected," supposedly leaked Durango documentation said, a worrying stipulation that would have effectively killed the secondhand video game market on the new Xbox. And Kinect would be included with every system, serving as an "integral" part of the console.
More details culled from developer documentation pointed to other changes, like the requirement that all games, even those shipped on optical discs, would need to be installed to the next-gen Xbox's hard drive.
A handful of pervasive rumors that didn't pan out were other Xbox models that Microsoft had planned, including an "Xbox Mini" that had limited Xbox 360 functions and a separate piece of hardware that would provide backwards compatibility to Xbox One.
While rumors swirled about the new Xbox and its new Kinect, Sony announced the PlayStation 4, its new DualShock 4 controller and its plans to utilize its cloud computing service, Gaikai, as an integral part of the system. Before Sony acquired Gaikai in July 2012, it was heavily rumored that the two companies were partnering to bring older PlayStation games to modern PlayStation hardware. Streaming games through Gaikai to PS4 and other devices is expected to launch in 2014.
In April, a report from The Verge revealed Microsoft's ambition to position the new Xbox as an entertainment device designed to work with TV and set-top box inputs. The detailed report backed up rumors that Microsoft was planning on using the next Xbox as a TV overlay, hoping to make the game console as integral to watching television as a cable box. This included the ability to control certain TV and media functions with Kinect, using voice commands and physical movements to control video programming.
When Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One a month later, television services played a major role in the company's presentation. Using voice commands to switch between TV and games, between movies and apps, as well as a partnership with the National Football League, were Microsoft's focus, not games.
Another report from The Verge outlined some of the launch games planned for Xbox One. Crytek's Ryse, formerly an Xbox 360 Kinect game, and a new Forza Motorsport racing game were planned for the system's launch. They would be joined by "a zombie game" and "a family game set on an island with Pixar movie-style graphics," titles that were later revealed at E3 2013 to be Dead Rising 3 and Kinect Sports Rivals.
A commonly circulated rumor was that Microsoft would be able to deliver the Xbox One cheaply, thanks to subsidies from subscription services or cable subscriptions. A version of that story was later reported by Paul Thurrott, who said a $299 price point for Xbox One would be offered to buyers willing to commit to two years of Xbox Live Gold membership at $10 a month. While Microsoft took that approach with the Xbox 360 at certain retailers, it hasn't offered the Xbox One at any price less that $499.
While many early reports about Microsoft's plans ultimately proved true, the company changed its position on many Xbox One features in the wake of terrible reception to its DRM, used games and internet connection requirements. It now seems likely that other decisions, never made public, were changed in response to reception from consumers and Microsoft's rumored difficulty in getting Xbox One done and out the door.
Looking back on the history of rumors and initial reports about the next console generation, it was, logically, the underlying hardware that came into focus first. Development hardware went out to game creators and software engineers, and those developers leaked details on Microsoft and Sony's earliest decisions. Software and services, not set in metal and silicon like the electronics powering the next PlayStation and Xbox, emerged later, as games, UI and entertainment apps can change right up to launch day — as evidenced by planned day one software patches for both PS4 and Xbox One.
And while we now have a crystal clear view of next-gen platforms, given how radically the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 changed over their lifetimes, who knows what they'll look like eight or more years from today?
This is part of Polygon's Gen Next series, stories that will examine the transition from current-generation to next-generation consoles, what it means if you don't make the transition and if and when you should. Follow along here.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/9/5072120/the-true-and-false-history-of-the-xbox-one-and-playstation-4
1,200 Feared Dead After Typhoon Haiyan
By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, November 9, 2013 9:51 EST
One of the most powerful typhoons in history is believed to have killed 1,200 people in the Philippines, the Red Cross Saturday, as rescue workers raced to reach towns devastated by tsunami-like waves.
A day after Super Typhoon Haiyan whipped across the central Philippines with maximum sustained winds of around 315 kilometres (195 miles) an hour, a picture emerged of entire communities having been flattened.
Authorities said that, aside from the ferocious winds, storm surges of up to three metres (10 feet) high that swept into coastal towns and deep inland were responsible for destroying countless homes.
“Imagine a strip one kilometre deep inland from the shore, and all the shanties, everything, destroyed,” Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said after visiting coastal towns in Leyte, one of the worst-hit provinces in the east of the archipelago.
“They were just like matchsticks flung inland. All the houses were destroyed.”
The official government death toll on Saturday night was 138.
But with rescue workers yet to reach or communicate with many ravaged communities across a 600-kilometre stretch of islands, authorities said they were unable to give a proper assessment of how many people had been killed.
Philippine Red Cross secretary general Gwendolyn Pang said her organisation estimated 1,200 people had died, while a UN official who visited Leyte described apocalyptic scenes.
“This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed and the streets are strewn with debris,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, the head of a UN disaster assessment coordination team.
“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” he said, referring to the 2004 disaster that claimed about 220,000 lives.
Stampa made his comments after arriving in Tacloban, the destroyed capital of Leyte with a population of about 220,000 people.
More than 100 bodies were littered in and around Tacloban’s airport, according to the facility’s manager.
AFP journalists who arrived in Tacloban on a military aircraft encountered dazed survivors wandering amid the carnage asking for water, while others sorted through what was left of their destroyed homes.
One resident, Dominador Gullena, cried as he recounted to AFP his escape but the loss of his neighbours.
“My family evacuated the house. I thought our neighbours also did the same, but they didn’t,” Gullena said.
Eight bodies had been laid to rest inside Tacloban airport’s chapel, which had also been badly damaged, according to an AFP photographer.
One woman knelt on the flood-soaked floor of the church while holding the hand of a dead boy, who had been placed on a wooden pew.
Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla reached the fishing town of Palo, about 10 kilometres from Tacloban, by helicopter and said he believed “hundreds” of people had died just in that area.
Pope Francis tweeted his support for the typhoon victims: “I ask all of you to join me in prayer for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda especially those in the beloved islands of the Philippines.”
Race to reach decimated communities
Meanwhile, the military, government relief workers and non-government organisations battled to reach communities and deliver desperately needed supplies.
Fifteen thousand soldiers were in the disaster zones and helping in the rescue effort, military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Ramon Zagala told AFP.
Zagala said helicopters were flying rescuers into priority areas, while infantry units deployed across the affected areas were also proceeding on foot or in military trucks.
Haiyan’s wind strength, which remained close to 300 kilometres an hour throughout Friday, made it the strongest typhoon in the world this year and one of the most intense ever recorded.
It exited into the South China Sea on Saturday and tracked towards Vietnam, where more than 200,000 people crammed into storm shelters.
Philippine authorities had expressed confidence on Friday that only a few people had been killed, citing two days of intense preparation efforts led by President Benigno Aquino.
Nearly 800,000 people in danger zones had been moved to evacuation centres, while thousands of boats across the archipelago were ordered to remain secured at ports. Hundreds of flights were also cancelled.
Aquino said on Saturday night it appeared some communities had not heeded the warnings.
“I hesitate to say this, but it seems that Tacloban was not that prepared, shall we say, compared with other areas,” he told reporters in Manila.
An average of 20 major storms or typhoons, many of them deadly, batter the Philippines each year as they emerge from the Pacific Ocean.
The Philippines suffered the world’s strongest storm of 2012, when Typhoon Bopha left about 2,000 people dead or missing on the southern island of Mindanao.
Haiyan is expected to make landfall in central Vietnam early Sunday, with millions of people thought to be in its path.
Authorities have begun mass evacuations in at least four central coastal provinces, Vietnam’s state-run VNExpress news site said, as the country was put on high alert.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/09/1200-feared-dead-in-typhoon-devastated-philippines/
These Are The Cars We'll Be Driving In 2050
What will the cars of 2050 look like? What will power them? Will they even have a steering wheel? Sven Beiker peers under the bonnet of tomorrow’s autos.
Car companies have recently been telling us what the car of 2020 will be like: autonomous is one word used, electric is another, and it will be connected to the internet too. Sound exciting? It is, but it’s doubtful you’ll find all of this on the forecourt in the next seven years (cars typically get completely redesigned every five to seven years). However, the directions being proposed are a very good starting point to look even further and ask the question: what might the car of 2050 look like?
For a start, will there even be cars in 2050? Will an invention that will be 150 years old by then be replaced by something better? Will environmental concerns kill it? Will people become tired of getting behind the wheel, as recent studies suggest? The answer seems to be “maybe”, but the reality is that the automobile is a very liberating and flexible means of transportation. It fulfills people’s desire to move around freely and independently. And – done right - the automobile can be a sustainable and safe means of transportation.
But we must also acknowledge this form of mobility comes at a premium, as polar ice melts, megacities become suffocated by smog and congestion, resources dwindle, and around 1.2 million people get killed in traffic accidents globally every year. We know why: we want to be mobile, and our mobility has some negative implications.
So what can – actually, must – we do in order to make the automobile of the year 2050 cleaner, safer, leaner and still enjoyable to use? This is a crucial question: mass-motorisation in emerging countries means there will be more than three billion vehicles on the planet in 2050, compared with around one billion today.
Hands-free driving
The automobile in 2050 will be self-driving. Companies are working on concepts allowing cars to cruise along on the highway without driver intervention, many of which are likely to be seen on our roads.
There is the Super Cruise from General Motors, which controls the vehicle on long highway stretches when not much is happening. Then there is the Traffic Jam Assistant from BMW; cars move along in a congested traffic area just like a school of fish. Or there’s Road Train from the European Satre project which includes Volvo, where one vehicle with a professional driver leads a platoon of other vehicles, connected virtually and following like pearls on a string along the highway – turning the commute into possibly more productive time as the drivers can now work or rest. And when the car makes it to its destination, it can park itself in a high-tech parking structure, just as Audi has demonstrated.
Will the driver need to do anything at all? Will there still be a steering wheel? Cars will probably require that drivers monitor what the vehicle does and switch from one mode to another – such as highway driving to city driving. There will probably still be a steering wheel, but some models could have a little joystick that the driver only uses rarely.
Driving is likely to get much safer (human error still accounts for the majority of all accidents) and also much more efficient, as centralised traffic control will lead to a smoother flow and less congestion. But how much of an effect this new technology has will depend on how widely it is rolled out.
The changes might not stop there. We may also have some other kinds of automobiles, which are small, highly efficient mobility pods similar to the GM EN-V concept or autonomous vehicles like the Induct Navia. These will be urban, flexible solutions to move people around.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131108-what-will-we-be-driving-in-2050
So I Opened a 529 Account For a Kid Who Doesn't Exist
So I Opened a 529 Account For a Kid Who Doesn’t Exist
When I found out that a company I once worked for was being acquired by a giant corporation whose name ends in an exclamation point, and that I stood to make a lot-to-me of money from the deal, I was mostly in shock. I didn’t cheer, or high five anyone, or even go out and get drunk. I didn’t go out and buy anything, not even a nice meal. Just paced around the kitchen and mumbled “holy shit” a lot.
When my best friend came over for dinner that night, she yelled congratulations, hugged us, then shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, now your kids can go to college!”
I laughed and said, “Yeah!” but thought, Wow that sounds boring. These kids I don’t even have can pay for college themselves, I’m going on a damn trip or something.
Well, it’s three months later and I still have not gone on a damn trip, but I do, inexplicably, have a college fund, a 529 account to be exact, with $5,000 in it. I opened it in August and I’m a little disappointed to report that it’s only made $25, despite my choosing the “ultra-aggressive” risk setting at nysaves.com.
Now if this sounds a little too much like starting a Pinterest board for your wedding before you meet someone you want to spend your life with (not that I don’t support that), let me explain. Or try!
A 529 account, for the uninitiated, is kind of like an IRA but instead of investing money for retirement, you’re putting money in a mutual fund for college expenses. Like 401(k)s and IRAs, the earnings you make are tax-deferred, and ultimately, for 529s, tax exempt! That shit can just grow and grow (or yes, shrink, but sssh, it’ll be in there for 20+ years and we aren’t going to think about that) and you don’t even have to report it on your taxes.
Plus! In many states, you can deduct your 529 deposits on your state income tax. In New York, for instance, you can deduct up to $5,000 if you are single, and $10,000 if you are married filing jointly. Which is why I deposited exactly $5,000. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you’re interested in saving for your kid’s college, they seem flexible and make sense. But what if, like me, you don’t have a kid, and you aren’t even married (I wasn’t even engaged when I did this, I will admit), but you’d still like to invest some money somewhere where you don’t have to pay taxes on the growth, not to mention the sweet tax deduction (and no, I never thought this would be a concern of mine, but here we are!)?
WELL, guess what? You can change the name of the account’s beneficiary whenever you want, as long as they are in your family.
This is how I justified it to myself, and how I opened up a 529 account that is technically in my name. Barring having kids of my own, or going back to grad school, which I am interested in, I can always give this money to a future niece or nephew. And yes, if no new young people are born into my extended family in the next 30 years, you can always withdraw the money for a 10% penalty (plus now it’s subject to income tax).
Other things about 529 accounts I like (more here):
• You can open a 529 account in any state, so if you don’t like the plan offered in your state (or if there isn’t one), shop around.
• You can use the funds in your 529 account at any accredited college or university, not just the ones in the state of your 529 account.
• Beyond tuition, funds can also be used for room and board, fees, books, and supplies.
• The funds are for the beneficiary, but the account holder controls them, and decides how they’re disbursed.
• There are no income limitations for contributors (unlike, say, the Roth IRA, which as of 2013 has an income cap of $125,000/year).
• Minimum contributions can be as low as $10! In New York, it’s $25.
And that is how I ended with a 529 account in my name with $5,025 in it. This is the only constructive thing I’ve done with the stock money since I got it, so I guess my friend was right. “At least my kids will go to college.” Or, at the current rate of growth and inflation, one child will get to go to one week of college. But hey, it’s something!
Photo: Andrew Magill
Previously on The Billfold
from Digg Top Stories http://thebillfold.com/2013/11/so-i-opened-a-529-account-for-a-kid-that-doesnt-exist/
The First Amendment Protection Of Fortune Tellers
A 65-year-old woman named Michele Zlotkin walked into a sparse, peach-colored Boca Raton, Fla., storefront that advertised psychic readings. It was just over a year ago and she had recently retired from teaching elementary school. For the first time in 40 years, she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. She wasn’t married, didn’t have children, and her elderly mother lived in New Jersey.
“I thought, well, I have to start a new life,” Zlotkin says. “So when I passed this store that said ‘Spiritual Healer’ and ‘Psychic’ on the front, I stopped in, thinking they could help.”
Zlotkin had been to see what she calls “spiritual healers” before and had always found them comforting. “I sat down and talked to this guy named Trinity and I don’t know what happened, but the next thing I knew, I was going to his place more often than I should’ve gone.” Over the next six months, she would give $130,000 in gift cards, watches, and cash to Trinity, who told her he was using them to get her recently deceased father out of purgatory.
It’s tempting to write Zlotkin’s story off as yet another misfortune of the superstitious or overly gullible. A search of newspaper records turns up similar arrests and trials dating at least as far back as the 19th century. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, over the past 20 years the percentage of Americans visiting fortune tellers and psychics has remained steady at 15 percent. Clearly not all those people would buy a $28,000 Rolex for a psychic who worked in a strip mall, as Zlotkin did. But hundreds of such incidents happen annually, and only a handful of psychics is ever prosecuted.
Recently, the number of cases seems to be climbing. In January, charges were dropped against an Orlando psychic after she returned $100,000 to a client who’d paid her to remove a curse. In September, a 62-year-old psychic named Rose Marks was found guilty in a Florida court of running a $25 million scam out of storefronts in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Manhattan; during the trial, bestselling romance novelist Jude Deveraux testified that she paid Marks $17 million over nearly 20 years. Less than a month later, a Manhattan psychic named Sylvia Mitchell was found guilty of stealing $138,000 from clients who visited her Greenwich Village shop. She faces up to 15 years in prison.
At the low end, fortune telling starts with a simple palm reading. For a few dollars, a fortune teller will trace the lines on your palms and give a vague description of your past. You’ve had troubles, the psychic tells you, something isn’t going your way. Meanwhile, the psychic is watching you for clues.
“They’re very good at cold readings, by which I mean reading the body language of a stranger who’s walked in off the street,” says Bob Nygaard, a retired police officer with the Nassau County Police Department in Long Island. N.Y., who is now a private investigator specializing in fortune-telling scams. Nygaard operates mainly out of New York and Florida, which he says are “hot spots” with lots of fortune-telling activity. Zlotkin is one of his clients.
Nygaard is quick to point out that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a palm or tarot card reading. In fact, fortune telling is protected under the First Amendment as free speech. Plenty of benign psychics will give you a glimpse into your future—however inaccurate that glimpse might be—and then send you along your way. Nygaard isn’t worried about them. “I’m talking about people who run confidence schemes,” he says.
Fraudulent psychics will endure a long succession of customers paying just the basic fee for the novelty of having their palms read, knowing that eventually someone will walk into the ofisa, or fortune-telling storefront, who’ll be psychologically pliable enough to be taken for a ride. Most victims of fortune-telling scams are emotionally vulnerable and socially isolated. They’re often struggling with a personal heartache, such as divorce or bankruptcy. They’re someone like Tiffany, a young IT contractor in Texas who’ll give only her first name because she’s embarrassed to admit that from 2007 to 2009, she gave $40,000 to a psychic she found on Craigslist.
“The day after I lost my job, my boyfriend broke up with me. Then my dad got sick. I searched out a psychic because I wanted and needed answers at a time when my life was falling apart,” she says. Tiffany is quick to point out that she is college educated (Zlotkin is, too) and not usually prone to superstitions. Her initial search for answers wasn’t much different from peoplewho trade stocks based on psychic tips—or even Nancy Reagan, who famously scheduled White House events on the advice of an astrologer. In his autobiography, John DeLorean wrote that when his car company went into receivership in 1982, he was duped into giving money to a palm reader.
According to the Boca Raton police report Zlotkin eventually filed, she paid $80 in cash for her first palm reading with Trinity, whose real name is David Miller Uwich. During the reading, she says, Uwich asked her to purchase a white rose and fill a bottle with ocean water. When she complied, he added oil to the water and told her to go home and bathe with it. She did.
Uwich may have dealt in roses, but Nygaard says the standard trick is actually a fresh white egg. The victim is told to purchase one, take it home, and either rub it on part of the body or sleep with it under the bed, sometimes both. When they bring the egg back to the ofisa, the psychic breaks it to find that inside is something hard and dark and evil. “It’s psychological manipulation,” Nygaard explains. “They want to see what they can make you do, how far you’ll go.” The egg trick is so old that Joseph Mitchell wrote about it in a 1955 New Yorker profile of what he then called “gypsies.” “Sometimes it’s a ball of tangled hair, sometimes it’s a knotted-up piece of string,” a retired police detective named Daniel Campion told Mitchell at the time. Nygaard described it to me as ” a bloody mass.”
According to Zlotkin, Urwich’s requests got weirder and more outlandish. He needed money to build a shield to fight the devil so Zlotkin’s father could get out of purgatory. He needed the Rolex watch so he could destroy it and prove that Zlotkin’s father had given up earthly needs. (Police later found the watch at a pawnshop.) “I know it sounds ridiculous,” says Zlotkin. “But he was very, very, very convincing.”
To give Uwich what he needed, Zlotkin says she ran through her savings and cashed in her retirement plan early. But no matter how much she gave him, she claims he always wanted more. “That’s when I realized, this guy is scamming me.” When she went to the police in December 2012, “they immediately showed me a picture of him and asked, ‘Is this the guy?’ They already knew about him.”
In September, the Boca Raton Police Department determined that it had enough probable cause to arrest Uwich under suspicion of organized fraud and grand theft, but so far he hasn’t been formally prosecuted. “Cases like this are tough because you have to prove that at the time they gave away money, the psychic did not intend to uphold the contract,” says Dave Aronberg, Palm Beach County State Attorney who in the early 2000s headed the state’s case against the companies that ran the Miss Cleo TV psychic hotlines. “In the Miss Cleo case, we never broached the subject of whether she was a real psychic because how do you prove something like that?,” he says. “If somebody says, ‘Pay me $100 per month and I’ll work to lift a curse,’ well, how do we know he didn’t work to lift the curse?”
While Palm Beach County seems largely stymied by its cases, New York City is actively pursuing fortune-telling fraud. The state has a law against fortune telling for anything other than entertainment, which gives the authorities extra leverage when trying to prosecute people like Sylvia Mitchell, who last month was found guilty of grand larceny and fraud.
The problem with fortune-telling bans, though, is that they’re usually overturned in court. In 2009, a Maryland court found that because “to deny compensation for certain speech will chill such speech,” banning fortune tellers is no less fair than banning newspaper horoscopes or stock market predictions. “The First Amendment prevents the government from deciding whether speech is acceptable for us to hear,” says Lee Rowland, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents fortune tellers in many of these cases. “It’s not for them to decide whether we’re too gullible to hear something.”
For its part, New York state seems to be in the unique position of having a ban and allowing fortune-tellers to operate anyway. This won’t prevent fraud, but it helps authorities shutter businesses after the frauds have been uncovered.
Michele Zlotkin doesn’t know if her case will ever be prosecuted. Even if it is, she doesn’t expect it to bring her much peace. “I’m still broke,” she says. Her credit cards are maxed-out. She’s paying taxes on the money she took out of her retirement account too early. Zlotkin would like to move to New Jersey to be with her mother, who was put into hospice care this week, but she doesn’t think her credit is good enough to buy or rent a house. The worst thing is, she still doesn’t know how she fell for such an obvious trick. “When Trinity first told me my dad was in purgatory, I didn’t even know what that was,” she says. “My family is Jewish.”
from Digg Top Stories http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-08/fortune-telling-fraud-with-first-amendment-protection#r=hp-ls
Hahaha, what? I mean, not to say it’s a bad idea, because I have no idea. Sounds terrific. But never would have occurred to me. I hope it gets more aggressive for your future possible relative.
Yayyyyyy! You are such an adult! PS my father’s wily and intelligent 529 ways are the reason I went to undergrad debt free. <3 u dad.
This is a great idea. Just a heads up, because I went thru this: I believe you can only rename the beneficiary to someone in the same generation, or younger, as the original beneficiary. Since this is in your name, you’re fine, but for other Billfoldians – it’s possible to end up with an account you can’t really take advantage of.
Note that your worst case scenario is just paying capital gains on it, like Real Rich Person. You still get the money! Just taxed!
@deepomega I had no idea… My backup plan, in case my infant son turns out not to be the intellectual type, was to use his 529 to go to pastry-making school. Or something. I hadn’t given it a ton of thought.
@deepomega you pay taxes plus a 10% penalty on any capital gains if it’s not used by the right beneficiary for college. Since the principal is already taxed you can pull that out penalty free
Wow I never would have thought of that! I’m sitting here like a sucker waiting for my newborns social security number to come in.
I found the whole ‘every state has one but don’t worry about that you can use whatever’ to be really confusing. My states plan’s benefits weren’t worth the higher fees. Better to just find a company that has a good plan and ignore which state it is attached to.