- Trump and the Pathology of Narcissism (Rolling Stone) "Is the president mentally ill? When it comes to presidents, and perhaps all politicians, some level of narcissism is par for the course. Despite the obvious risks, having a narcissistic president doesn't always end in disaster. Another problem for narcissists on the more extreme end of the spectrum is that the skills needed to get elected are not, and have never been, identical to the skills needed to govern. For many in the mental-health field, the most troubling aspect of Trump's personality is his loose grasp of fact and fiction. 'When it comes to negative information about themselves, narcissists devalue it and they denigrate it and they don't accept it,' says Pincus. 'They'll push it away, they'll distort it, they'll blame it on somebody else, they'll lie about it, because they need to see that superior, ideal image of themselves, and they can't tolerate the idea that they have any flaws or imperfections or somebody else might be better than them at something.' This dissociation from reality, paired with Trump's knee-jerk need to assert his dominance, has led many mental-health professionals to feel that, no matter what the specific diagnosis, the traits themselves are enough to render Trump unfit for office, and that a shrink's 'duty to warn' overrides the Goldwater Rule in this instance. "'We're going to do this thing, it's going to be fantastic, amazing,'" Pincus paraphrases. 'But there's no substance to what he says. How are you going to do that? How is that going to be achieved?' If Trump does have NPD, and the setbacks to his agenda keep coming, his magical thinking about the limitlessness of his power will only continue to clash with reality, and many in the mental-health field believe that would only exacerbate the problem. 'I think we're actually looking at a deteriorating situation,' says Gartner. 'I think he's going more crazy.' As Dodes' letter to The New York Times states, Trump's attacks against 'facts and those who convey them … are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed.' Still, no matter how monumentally he fails in the next four years, says biographer Gwenda Blair, 'there's no doubt he's going to think he's done a great job. That isn't even open to question.'"
BUSINESS/INVESTING:
- Small investors' move to 'passive' stock funds becomes a stampede (LA Times) "The result: Conventional U.S. stock mutual funds that invest passively now hold $1.9 trillion in assets, triple what they had in 2007. Add in the $1.7 trillion in U.S. equity exchange-traded funds...and the total in passive funds accounts for 42% of all U.S. stock fund assets — up dramatically from 24% in 2010 and just 12% in 2000."
- America's Favorite Side Hustle Is Not What You Think (Ozy) "For the uninitiated, network marketing involves selling products through an independently contracted sales force that is paid on commission. Health and wellness is the largest product sector in the U.S., although services like signing up homeowners for solar energy are increasingly sold in this way. 'The typical direct seller is a woman, always has been,' says DSA president Joe Mariano, and 'the clear majority are working on a part-time basis, so it’s supplemental income.' According to the DSA, the median earnings of network marketers in the U.S. is $3,400 per year."
- The Gig Economy’s False Promise (NYT) "In reality, there is no utopia at companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and Handy, whose workers are often manipulated into working long hours for low wages while continually chasing the next ride or task. These companies have discovered they can harness advances in software and behavioral sciences to old-fashioned worker exploitation, according to a growing body of evidence, because employees lack the basic protections of American law."
LIFE:
- I’m Not Texting. I’m Taking Notes. (NYT) "...when he started to get into specifics...I reached for my phone. That’s what I like to use. 'Many board members noticed that you were on your phone a lot,' he said. 'If you can hold out on texting friends or checking your Twitter feed until the breaks, that would be great.' ...before we resumed the meeting, I told him that I had been taking notes on my phone... Craig seemed to appreciate that. And he was nice enough to announce after the break that if anyone needed notes from the earlier presentations, I could text them from my phone. I knew what he was doing and why. My generation will need mentors like Craig who will listen to us and look out for us."
NEWS:
- The Graveyard of Empires and Big Data (Foreign Policy) "Eventually, DARPA brought two data-mining programs to Afghanistan: a highly secretive program meant to predict insurgent attacks based on 'big data' science used by companies like Amazon to predict customers’ purchases; and a program based on the emerging science of social networks, attempting under the guise of humanitarian work to enlist an unwitting army of Afghan civilians to spy for the American military. And so DARPA’s first deployment to a war zone since Vietnam began with a group of well-intentioned hacktivists trading beer for data at Afghanistan’s only tiki bar."
- Obama’s travel expenses were $97m over eight years. Trump is already at $23m after 10 weeks (Independent) "During a campaign rally last year, Mr. Trump referred to his golf courses when he criticised Mr. Obama. He said: 'You know what – and I love golf – but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again, I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again, I own Doral in Miami, I don’t think I’d ever see many of the places that I have. I don’t ever think that I’d see anything, I just wanna stay in the White House and work my ass off, make great deals, right? Who's gonna leave? I mean, who's gonna leave?'"
- Rubio, Other GOP Candidates, Suffered From Early Russian Election Meddling, Expert Tells Lawmakers (Weekly Standard) "'It was about propping up Trump to the detriment of other candidates,' he said. 'At times when they [Russia] had a shot, they would publish an article that was detrimental.' Watts stressed that the Kremlin chooses targets based not on party lines, but on its interests."
SPORTS:
- ESPN Has Seen the Future of TV and They’re Not Really Into It (Bloomberg) "In some respects, the challenges facing ESPN are the same that confront every other media company: Young people simply aren’t consuming cable TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did, and digital outlets still aren’t lucrative enough to make up the deficit. 'Everything we do supports the pay television business,' says John Kosner, the network’s head of digital and print media. The strategy, simply put: Defend the cable-TV bundle at all costs. The executive consensus in Bristol is that the threat from cord cutting is greatly exaggerated."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse (Vanity Fair) "Elon Musk began warning about the possibility of A.I. running amok three years ago. In a startling public reproach to his friends and fellow techies, Musk warned that they could be creating the means of their own destruction. He plans on fighting this with every fiber of his carbon-based being. Musk and Altman have founded OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit company, to work for safer artificial intelligence. Some in Silicon Valley argue that Musk is interested less in saving the world than in buffing his brand, and that he is exploiting a deeply rooted conflict: the one between man and machine, and our fear that the creation will turn against us."
- Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker (Wired) "GameOver wasn’t merely a sophisticated piece of criminal malware; it was a sophisticated intelligence-gathering tool. And as best as the investigators could determine, Bogachev was the only member of the Business Club who knew about this particular feature of the botnet. He appeared to be running a covert operation right under the noses of the world’s most prolific bank robbers. The FBI and Fox-IT team couldn’t find specific evidence of a link between Bogachev and the Russian state, but some entity seemed to be feeding Slavik specific terms to search for in his vast network of zombie computers. Bogachev, it appeared, was a Russian intelligence asset."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- Watch as I Flunk NASA’s Brutal Test Pilot Training Course (Wired)
TODAY'S SONG:
- Wooden Heart (Dustin Tebbutt)
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