A bull elephant walks past a car filled with tourists in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, December 10, 2009. ( REUTERS/Mike Hutchings/File Photo)

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/06/10/south-africas-national-parks-consider-banning-wildlife-sighting-apps.html

In Silicon Valley, being ahead of the jargon curve can bring great social and financial rewards and it may even be confused for true innovation

Its as common as the hoodies and the Soylent: Silicon Valley loves its jargon while simultaneously groaning over the weight of its pretense. However, this pain point is also an opportunity for enterprising wordsmiths.

In the Valley, speaking fluent cutting-edge startup is the bare minimum required to inspire confidence. Being ahead of the jargon curve can bring great social and financial rewards. It may even be confused with true innovation.

Lets imagine a conversation between cofounders of a startup called DoubleNewSpeak, maybe as they launch a Minimum Viable Vocabulary. If the product is sticky, they will soon be considered visionaries and showered with venture capital at which point they will scale like crazy. In two years, everyone will be speaking this new language, as they shall devote their energies to overseeing the construction of an enormous Ikea-style ball pit in their open-plan office.

Twenty full minutes of ideating and six rigorous minutes of beta testing later, heres what they come up with, a linguistic guide for the aspiring tech hustler:

Evangelist? Bah! Your head of marketing should be a product demagogue. Were not conveying enthusiasm here, people were conveying dangerous rabble-rousing obsession with our product. But, you know, in an artisanal way. Growth hacker is so 2014 replace it with lumberjack.

Were all trapped in a punishing cycle of job title inflation. The future looks grim without a modern-day Scott Volcker to drag us over the coals and tame the beast (shout-out to all those 1970s monetary policy fans out there). So your former digital prophet really needs a promotion to high sparrow of the worshipful B2B CRM space. Your thought leader should probably just start borrowing directly from Kim Jong-il. Acceptable forms of address include: Mastermind of the Revolution, Ever-Victorious Iron-Willed Commander and Guiding Star of the 21st Century.

Continue that military aesthetic with a cheeky blitzkrieg no one does sprints anymore. But definitely avoid bootstrap given the Valleys woman problem, these days its garter or bust. Or bustier, I suppose.

Layoff is old-fashioned. Why not call it a freedom cull? Or a quarter quell? Perhaps even a staff detox?

Pivot is out, pirouette is in it sounds almost like I planned it.

As for adjectives sticky can be viscous, frothy is either rabid or lightly sparkling, and agile is being replaced with spry, limber or lithe.

By the way, this paradigm shift should be referred to as a thought schism.

Lets double-click on the phenomenon of tech jargon (a year ago, wed be drilling down, and two years ago, wed be going granular). Jargon is interesting because its not inherently bad. Its an efficient form of communication, initially but when new words dont actually describe a novel concept, they tend to have less benign purposes.

In the tech industry, fresh buzzwords are often a shortcut, a way to sell a less-than-impressive reality, gain unearned credibility and join an in-group. Early adopters are advantaged and holdouts exposed to increasingly high costs.

In fact, the economics of platforms and luxury goods collide in the jargon economy. Owning a dominant platform allows you to capture value from users activity. If your language becomes popular, it brings industry credibility and allows you to capitalise on the reputational boost. But your terminology can become overused and drained of meaning hello, disruptive innovation. If utility is based partly on rarity and novelty, like a Chanel bag, this tips the delicate balance; mass adoption is both the goal and the beginning of the end.

Jargon is not just a tech problem, but a classic strategy. Management consultants have been attempting to legitimize themselves with superfluous systematised vocabularies for decades. And despite its protestations, tech is not that different from other sectors; it is distinguished mainly by the scale of peoples ambitions and the super-profits made possible by infinitely reproducible solutions (software).

Ironically, in trying to avoid corporate Americas deadening euphemistic vocabulary, Silicon Valley may have created a parlance equally stripped of meaning.

Its tone also reflects its American origins; if, say, Denmark had been the epicentre of the technological renaissance, tech would feel very different. Silicon Valleys jargon draws on manifest destiny, refusing to admit failure outside a narrative of eventual success. It tends toward hype and hyperbole, mixed with the saccharine dead-on-arrival enthusiasm of American consumer service. With its talk of
rockstars and gurus, it buys into that libertarian worship of the individual which so often teeters into celebrating arrogance.

It feels only fitting to end a whine about America with a grumpy Englishman but unfortunately, Orwell is over-quoted on the evils of doublespeak. However, Thomas Paine said it well in The Age of Reason:

All this is nothing better than the jargon of a conjuror, who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Priests and conjurors are of the same trade.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/10/tech-jargon-silicon-valley-linguistic-guide

Our lawmakers dont agree on much, but they do agree on needing to give more funds to fighting the US painkiller epidemic now that its hit white people

In an act of extraordinary bipartisanship, the Senate appropriations committee approved almost doubling funding to fight the opioid epidemic on Thursday, clearing the way for a full Senate vote.

The legislative branch is notable for how polarized it has become during the Obama administration, but Republicans and Democrats come together on opioid abuse prevention and treatment in a way that they havent for other issues arguably of equal importance, like Zika or the cancer moonshot. Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (Cara) this spring by an overwhelming majority and, last fall, under the looming threat of HIV and hepatitis outbreaks fueled by injection drug abuse, lawmakers repealed the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs.

This rare consensus in addressing opioid use stems, Id argue, from efforts to assuage angry, white, less educated, working-class Americans: the Donald Trump demographic.

Almost 90% of new heroin users in the past decade were white. Eighty percent of representatives and 94% of senators are white. As opioid abuse has become an overwhelmingly white problem, the countrys power-brokers have found it easier to empathize. Accordingly, our vocabulary has changed. Instead of talking about dope fiends and junkies, we now talk about substance abuse as a chronic medical illness.

It was easier to call for zero-tolerance policies and mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related infractions when these applied to marginalized inner-city residents. But as opioid addiction has moved into the mainstream, those touched by it have been more vocal in demanding compassionate solutions that go beyond warehousing people, instead helping them recover.

Republicans havent been similarly compassionate in re-evaluating drug laws on marijuana or crack cocaine, which come down harder on African Americans than whites. They dont want to look soft on crime.

There are many theories about what led to the explosion and mainstreaming of opioid addiction in this country: aggressive marketing of opioid pain pills by the pharmaceutical industry, inappropriate prescribing by clinicians or the widespread availability of cheap heroin.

But other factors include a shrinking middle class, loss of manufacturing and other decent-paying jobs and diminishing opportunities for social and economic advancement.

White Americans are self-medicating with opioids, trying to numb not just physical but also psychic pain. Racial stereotypes of blacks as drug addicts and dealers may have led some doctors to be less likely to prescribe opioids to black patients. And while black Americans, too, have suffered from economic trends, they didnt feel the same violation of our social contract as have whites, who have been accustomed to upward mobility with each generation.

Trump supporters include the cross-section of America most affected by opioid abuse. While House and Senate Republicans have been advised by their party leadership to distance themselves from Trump and focus on keeping control of Congress, they must appeal to this constituency.

Vulnerable Republicans like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Senator Kelly Ayotte and Representative Frank Guinta, both of New Hampshire, are campaigning on the opioid abuse issue.

But even Portman, who has a long track record of sponsoring legislation to combat substance abuse, is vulnerable to attack on this issue. Though he advocated for inclusion of substance abuse treatment and prevention funding in the $1.1tn omnibus bill that Congress passed in December, his opponent, former Ohio governor Ted Strickland, has called him hypocritical for voting against that very same bill. Portman and Ayotte, along with Illinois Republican senator Mark Kirk, crossed the aisle to support emergency funding earlier this year.

Even in states that will remain safely in the Republican column come November, theres acknowledgement there needs to be a greater emphasis on drug abuse prevention and treatment. But where Republicans continue to fall short is in going beyond policy debates to actually funding programs that combat opioid abuse. Their electorate is tired of empty promises and will grow only more disaffected if they fail to green-light needed funding.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2016/jun/09/opioids-bipartisan-issue-now-white-people-use-epidemic