#an expansive vocabulary is it's own compensation

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

DAVE: so hype when one of the boys incorporates a new word into his vocabulary. like bro did u just describe something as “ostentatious". fuck man. thats sick. thats cool as hell

[kopivie]

stupid little mental health update from cinna.

(note: i don't use this name anywhere else, so i sat here for a couple minutes trying to figure out how to refer to myself. might change my alias yet again. not like anyone cares.)

tw: VERY self-deprecating thoughts, feelings of hopelessness

so i'm okay, i guess? i just... i took myself on a date today. i sat in a beautiful cafe with the most delicious mocha ever and amazing natural lighting; i got my shade for a glossier skin tint and finally got the makeup that i've always wanted, and i got myself new notebooks and pens! pretty good!

but... i decided to start journaling.

and.. as freeing as that was — because really, i desperately needed an outlet for my thoughts that aren't creative — i ended up unlocking a section of my thoughts that i haven't really thought about in a while.

i'm a very self-deprecating person. like, insanely so. but for the past couple of months, i've been riding high on the little compliments i've been getting from others. like when i had a crush, he told me i look good with my hair up. or people telling me that tinsel looks good in my box braids for the past week or so. or being told by the woman at sephora that i have beautiful eyes. like i've been keeping myself afloat with these little things.

but today, just before i left the house and told my parents that i'd be out for a while, my dad gave me a look. and... my vocabulary isn't expansive enough to explain just how loaded it was.

understand something: my dad loves me dearly. he does, and i know this. but he's also worried that i'm lonely because i only have one real friend irl that i talk to and hang out with. everyone else is online and let's be real, i don't talk to anybody anymore these days. (which is likely a grief response, but i'm not here to talk about the many ways in which my grief is manifesting.) he wants me to find more friends, but specifically, he wants me to find love. obviously easier said than done, but like..

you know how dads are. they get weirdly pushy about why you're not dating. my dad noticed that his insistence was pissing me off and stopped but.. i just wish you could have seen the look he gave me when i said i was going out. i did my makeup, i wore an outfit that made me happy (wearing a skirt!!)... and he just.. looked at me.

there was so much pity in his eyes. not sorrow, not compassion — pity.

he knows i'm alone. i was so happy to be alone and he just...

he made me so aware that i'm so fucking alone, dude. it took me upwards of an hour to just figure out where i'm going, and the entire time, this seed of doubt is just growing and growing. the second my pen touched my paper, the tree of doubt was in full bloom.

because why? why am i alone?

what was the point in me enjoying the compliments if nothing comes of it? why is it that despite my attempts to fit in, to be attractive, to be normal end in failure? why, why, why am i so fucking alone?

i'm all too aware that this is a hell of my own making. i was once content to be completely alone, even without my best friend irl. i like solitude. but over time, i've realized that i really don't. and my father has been steadily watering this tree of doubt, and i don't know what to do now that i've reached this point of absolute fucking defeat. because i'm defeated. i'm so, so tired.

i'm typing this on the bus and fighting back tears. i have mascara on, so it's really hard to make sure that it doesn't run. i'm heartbroken. because in the end, all my efforts are for naught. i've been trying so hard to see the joy in the little things today, but i can't overlook the fact that in the end, i have nobody.

i can't even be like "oh, kazuha would love me!" because no. no he would not. first of all, why am i compensating for my lack of human relationships by pretending that some fictional man would like me? because he makes me happy? why does he make me happy? everything that i've written about him is based on some flawed dating experiences i've had pre-autism diagnosis. kazuha behaves the way he does in my writing because that was my way of compensating for the fact that i just needed a companion, be it platonic or romantic. all of those goddamn genshin boys were just ways for me to cope. and now that i've recognized that i can't help but laugh at how fucking pathetic i am, dude.

when i was on my way to the bus earlier, some man walked past me and said "you're super pretty by the way," and kept on walking. and honestly, that was the nail in the coffin. not because i'm foolishly expecting something to come out of that encounter — i didn't even see his face. but because i realized that i've never actually been told that before.

the word beautiful makes me uncomfortable. it disgusts me. but being called pretty is.. very rare. i'll be told that something i have on is nice or something, but nobody ever actually compliments me. and that guy... i dunno if he was an angel in passing telling me the one thing i needed to hear, or if he was some fucking demon mocking me.

regardless, i'm going to get off this bus and cry on my way home. i need to cry so badly. my heart is in tatters and it's all because of some pitying look from my father. i don't blame him but... whatever.

[wordsliketears]

On Cursing, Cussing and Swearing

I grew up in a conservative fundamentalist-Christian household. Cursing and swearing were absolutely forbidden. I distinctly remember the first time I cussed. I was 4 years old. I was in the playground of my kindergarten school. I saw two kids racing, and I uttered something along the lines of: “Damn! They are running fast!” (I didn’t say it in English). I don’t remember feeling bad about it. No regrets to this day, despite it being my naughty little secret. It didn’t become something recurrent. In fact, at the public school I attended, I was counted among the well-mannered kids.

When I became a teenager, my inner life got much troubling because I became aware of the two parallel worlds I was living in. On the one hand, there was the one my family abided. It was a small world. It was coherent. It had a fixed cosmovision and a defined set of values and beliefs. It had specific rituals that gave it an ongoing steady rhythm. It had a particular vocabulary, and it was informed by a concrete compilation of stories and characters. It had its heroes and enemies. It had its own physical spaces too, and it was full of rules and taboos. From the outside, it appeared to be seamless and stable. But it reeked of hypocrisy all around.

On the other hand, there was the real world, with its messiness, with its cacophony of opinions and colliding narratives. It was a fluid and expansive world full of alleged evil, but also of endless possibilities and color, limited only by the extent of my imagination.

And so the stage was set for my rebellious adolescence.

To cope with the tension and contradictions between these two worlds, along with the default hardships of those years, I found shelter in my friends, my music, skateboarding & sports. I also started writing then and using English more than ever while living in Spain. You see, growing up there, not many people around me spoke English. I was among the lucky few that could call it my second language, so I used it as my private vehicle of expression in my notebooks. (At least when I did not travel back to the States, then it was the other way around.) It was there and then where I started releasing my anger, distress, and anxiety through words. As English was my second language, I could distance myself from the things I wrote while simultaneously letting go of all the negative energy I held within.

Thus unlike that first time, when I was an infant, I have never cussed in any other language but English, and it has worked to this day as much as it could. But lately, I have been feeling self-conscious. I have interacted with some of the people that have read my last pages. They have been kind, and they have not brought it up. But I have noticed that on their sites, they do not use the rough language that I sometimes use. And although I am not going to stop because it helps me keep my sanity, I felt the need to offer an explanation out of my respect for them.

I should not remember the first time I cussed. The fact that I do shows a glimpse of the absurd repression I had to endure in my context. And I am not alone in this. I have observed that my brother also swears exclusively in English. I now know how blessed I was to set my feet in the real world so early on. Some of my childhood friends were caged in the closed-minded and reactionary un-Jesus-like institutional fake-church setting until they reached adulthood. Among them, some might be stuck in it forever.

Not everything that Christian fundamentalism gave me was wrong or harmful, but I think that no one should live through its bullshit to gain the good that it has to offer. It does not compensate. It is totally unbalanced.

[bluewatsons]

Jennifer Schaffer, The Wife Glitch, 51 The Baffler (April 2020)

Household tech makes women’s work profitable—for men

© Evangeline Gallagher

Five summers ago, I was invited to visit an eccentric acquaintance on a picturesque island off the East Coast. The island was divided into two parts: the shingled, sea-beaten summer homes of the inherited wealthy, and the year-round homes of the working people who serviced the island’s various amenities—the old-timey movie theater, the upscale restaurants, the twelve-dollars-a-beer bars.

The acquaintance and I had become friendly years prior in San Francisco, where I had been a student and he was, by his account, a high school drop-out tech millionaire. Let’s call him Matt. I’d found him funny, kind, and more down-to-earth than the archetype would suggest. Like many Silicon Valley guys, Matt’s small talk ran five sizes too large, from the purpose of fidelity in modern society to various bodily functions he was attempting to outsmart. But he always seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say in response. Our conversations often took on the appearance of a mutual interview: Matt, interviewing me as though for a job, unsubtly trying to determine how intelligent I was; me, interviewing him as though for a profile, shamelessly provoking and storing up his most memorable lines.

It didn’t seem out of character, then, when years later Matt reached out to ask me for help on a potential moonshot philanthropic venture related to artificial intelligence and education. I happily agreed, and a few weeks later, Matt invited me to join him at his summer house, graciously encouraging me to bring along my then-boyfriend. We booked tickets later that night.

When we arrived on the island, we rented exorbitantly expensive bikes and used Google Maps to find our way to Matt’s house. The weather seemed almost self-congratulatory with temperance: sunshine diffused through fast, bright clouds; heat offset by a steady sea breeze. The house itself was beautiful, stuck in time. It had belonged to Matt’s family for generations and was littered with trinkets that went back as far as the Civil War. The floor was made of long, splintered wooden planks, and the dusty windows looked out onto a semi-wild expanse of tall, bleached grass. The Atlantic was somewhere beyond the grass; you could hear it, but you couldn’t see it.

We stayed on the island for just a few days. Matt was almost constantly busy, glued to his laptop and his phone, occasionally running mysterious errands. It wasn’t until the last full day of our trip that he decided it was time to discuss the project. Hearing him talk about the potential of artificial intelligence was like reading the script to an action movie: the possibilities were exhilarating and the vision ambitious, but it was hard to believe it’d all get made. Still, I offered my perspective in earnest, and Matt listened closely before suggesting we go for a walk on the beach. We set out, climbing a set of steep, sandy paths before arriving in front of a calm sea. Waves broke, metronomic, between two panels of rich blue. Matt began to tell me, with flat-line sincerity, about how he felt it was reasonable to assume that we were living in a simulation.

I had heard this idea before, always from men for whom life looked pretty great: wealthy men, white men, intelligent men, respected men. Here was yet another. What was it about the idea that this all might be a game, someone else’s game, that struck such a chord among those who were by all accounts winning?

I thought back to another conversation we’d had in the kitchen, two nights prior. Matt had been describing his approach to dating—a topic which he’d clearly given a great deal of thought, studying the criteria that the various four-letter billionaire tech moguls (Elon, Mark, Jeff, Bill) had used when selecting a “mate.”

“I don’t want to be with someone who has my skill set,” Matt began, “I want to be with someone who has strengths in another area, who can fill in my blind spots.” He went on to describe a woman he was seeing, who he was flying out first-class the day we left. He liked, for instance, that she was good at reading people, that she was perceptive and sensitive to things like art and literature, that she was knowledgeable about cooking and food culture, that she understood his world but was not exactly of it and so could objectively add something to his field of vision. I found this odd but charming: better than the engineers I knew in college who thought it was “dating down” to be with a humanities major. Unlike them, Matt spoke eloquently about how selecting a partner was among the most pivotal choices a person made in life.

“So if we’re in a simulation,” I said, snapping back to the moment, the beach, Matt’s expectant look. “How would partnerships work?”

Matt grinned. “That would depend.”

“On what?”

“On who controlled the simulation.”

Happy Wife, Happy Life

Look: he wanted a wife. Don’t we all? Someone to think ahead about our needs; someone to make our homes and our lives orderly; someone to tend to our emotions when they’re raw and sore. Someone to track and manage the infinite details of living; someone to be responsible for our moods; someone to balance the books. We all want someone who knows us so intimately they can predict what we’ll want; someone who picks up our loose ends without complaint; someone who fills in our weaknesses with her strength; someone who does what it takes to help us succeed. Someone who attends to our desires eagerly, with a smile. Someone who means it.

But, you know, we’re progressive. We want a wife, but we want her to be happy. More than happy, we want her to be fulfilled. We want a true wife, a born wife, a wife who would feel imprisoned by any other role, so that to be our wife is in its own way a golden opportunity, a liberation. We want a wife who wears her responsibilities like a privilege.

And who could blame us! Regardless of gender expression or sexual orientation—everyone needs a wife. There isn’t enough time in the day to fulfill the demands placed on a modern human: to be available to work throughout all our waking hours; to show determination and ambition so that we are not made redundant; to service debts and taxes and run a cost-effective household; to source and consume healthful meals three times a day; to exercise our bodies the recommended amount; to maintain mental well-being amidst chaos; to care for dependents (aging parents, young children); to be present and attentive to those we interact with; to find, build, maintain, and perpetually assess the longevity of meaningful and fulfilling partnerships; to get eight hours of quality sleep. Literally: how does one do it?

For most of Western history, the answer was: the wife. Now what?

An App of One’s Own

The new answer, for those with a little disposable income, may seem obvious. Food, laundry, health, money management, well-being? There’s an app for that, honey. By which we mean: there’s underpaid labor, and a massive tech conglomerate ready to profit off that, honey! Seamless your dinner, Cleanly your laundry, Babylon your doctor’s visits, Wealthfront your savings, Headspace your sleep. Such services are either entirely automated or rely on poorly compensated human workers as a stopgap. The end goal is the same: to take work which, for most of history, has been uncompensated and drive the price of it up as high as possible to the benefit of a minute number of venture capitalists, company directors, and shareholders.

There’s an app for that, honey. By which we mean: there’s underpaid labor, and a massive tech conglomerate ready to profit off that, honey!

Of course, those with more substantial disposable income can still cut out the digital middle man and hire underpaid labor directly into their home, or proceed directly to what I like to call “artisanal wife” mode: choosing a partner with a wide set of skills who will focus their energies on servicing your various needs, without the economic imperative to pursue paid labor themselves. And then there is the highest echelon of earning power: the bunker-deep pockets of the billionaire class that reaps the profits of the underpaid workers, holding the entire sick, inverted pyramid of wealth on their shoulders like a packed delivery cooler. For those at the top, it’s always been the “lady of the manor” approach: a wife who manages an entire fleet of, you guessed it, underpaid labor. Judging by the number of extraordinarily ambitious and competent women in my graduating class whose aspirations have been funneled into marriages to hedge fund scions, the “ladies of the manor” remain in high demand.

For those without any disposable income at all—a rapidly-growing demographic made perpetually larger by tech-accelerated inequality, because irony isn’t part of Silicon Valley’s vocabulary— there are virtually no options. Most working-class women have no choice but to work one job or several—often in the precise, underpaid sectors being automated by technology—alongside providing caregiving labor at home. The direct and knock-on consequences of this second (or third, or fourth) shift labor are borne out in the growing chasm between the life expectancy of the rich and the poor. Meanwhile, the privileged middle remains perpetually marketed to by apps and products designed to give the illusion of technology-supported self-sufficiency, masking the interdependent web of individuals and stakeholders which make up any given household service.

Picture it: a bearded dad stands alone in the kitchen making a stir-fry. “Eloise?” he calls up to the ceiling, “Dinner in five.” His voice is loud but calm, pleasant. The kitchen is lit with clean blue LED lights. Four bright yellow lemons sit in a clear glass bowl, next to a full, meticulously balanced ceramic fruit platter. The only sign that there is cooking taking place is the cutting board in front of him, topped with a mound of chopped neon bell peppers. An open bottle of craft beer is placed on the center of the kitchen island; Dad wears a casual chambray button-down shirt. This is all very relaxed, the tableau suggests, but also pristine; homely, but perfect. Dad is easy-going, dinner is effortless. Eloise arrives promptly and slides into a seat at the kitchen island, where Dad serves up a nutritionally void but photogenic bowl of stir-fried cabbage. “Enjoying that?” He asks, self-satisfied, as he watches her eat. Eloise raises her eyebrows and nods. “Mum will be pleased!” Dad exclaims, and gently asks Alexa—the female voice that lives inside a smart speaker on the kitchen counter—to add stir-fry vegetables to his shopping list. She does so dutifully. Dad and Eloise retire to the sofa, where they eat ice cream together and Alexa plays a Philip Pullman audiobook.

Mum will be pleased! Or, as the identical German ad, in which the bearded British dad is simply swapped out for a slightly younger-looking bearded German dad, puts it, Mama wird sich freuen! The subtext is clear: Mother isn’t here, Mother is “leaning in.” But we—a progressive, modern family, assisted by an unobtrusive yet highly skilled and patently stylish, artificially intelligent smart speaker—are thriving.

Who Cares?

We are fast approaching the social breaking point of a historical movement in capitalism that has simultaneously brought our waged life into our private life (what’s a private life?) and the tasks of the domestic into the commodified world. In the nineteenth century, as industrial capitalism boomed, the state shunned responsibility for care work, cementing it firmly in the private sphere—giving rise to a particular kind of Victorian, feminine responsibility in the home. The twentieth century saw the rise of a “family wage” for the working class; families were expected to survive on the husband’s work alone, further ensnaring women in unpaid care roles. Pre-sexual revolution, the labor of the twentieth- century wife served as a critical support structure for the male worker. Though he was waged and she was not, the family finances depended on their combined work in clear and distinct gender roles.

During the manufacturing decline of the 1970s, as wages began to plummet for working-class men, capitalism Trojan-horsed its way into feminist liberation, warping a necessary social cause—freeing women to pursue aims outside of housework—to suit capital: freedom means working for capitalists! The result has been the normalization and subsequent necessitation of the two-wage household. Across the industrialized world, the cost of living has soared while wages have stagnated, to the point where what could once be afforded on one salary can barely be afforded on two. At the same time, right-wing commentariats lambast the low birth-rate and the death of family values, framing feminism as the root of all evil, carefully eschewing the reality that liberal and conservative governments alike have chosen the enrichment of a few over the social reproduction of the many.

Without federal assistance in the form of publicly funded childcare for all, wage protections for workers, or a universal basic income—to name but a few of the creative opportunities at hand—the individual becomes increasingly reliant on her employer. It is no coincidence that technology companies, particularly keen to co-opt and commodify historically feminized care work, offer the most pointed range of reproduction-related benefits for their employees: egg freezing and paid parental leave abound, though often not childcare.

The end result is that we now all have at least three jobs, three modes of survival to tend to: our financial survival, the survival of our communities, and the survival of our family units. The state has long shirked its responsibilities in each sphere; now, the wide, slobbering maw of the tech industry waits, ready to commodify whatever it can.

Rage Against the Machines

Perhaps you can sense the despair in my tone. Certainly, when I have broached this topic with men, the most common response has been: But come on, isn’t that better than before?

“Before” being the presumption of a wife’s place in the home as “natural” and “right,” unpaid and largely unseen? The electroshock therapy that presumption necessitated when housework drove a generation of wives clinically mad? Legal rape? Or should we go a touch further back to “wife as property”?

Is today a better state than those “befores”? Yes, of course it is, though a lobotomy might be too.

To pay wages for housework would require a wholesale transformation of the economy, revealing at the core of capitalism a fundamental reliance on the unpaid labor of women.

What troubles me, what keeps me turning the matter over and over in my head, is this: for centuries, women asked for recognition of the value of “women’s work”—which is to say, the practical labor that makes the world go round and has historically been placed on the shoulders of wives and mothers and daughters without question. Many simply asked that the work be recognized as just that: work—not a calling, not a natural state, not a pure act of love. Others asked that men take on their share of domestic labor, and in so doing, free women to pursue other, potentially more fulfilling or stimulating forms of work—and leisure. And through the Wages for Housework movement led by Silvia Federici, women even asked that that value of their work be recognized in capital’s primary currency: a wage. This demand was more radical provocation than concrete policy proposal, one which attempted to speak the language of capitalism in order to undermine it. To pay wages for housework would require a wholesale transformation of the economy, revealing at the core of capitalism a fundamental reliance on the unpaid labor of women.

How strange and predictable it is, then, that wages for housework have, at last, become widespread—but in the form of our subscription to digital services and gig economy labor. This work has become concretely valuable at the precise moment its value can be effectively captured by a small cadre of men sitting at the top of the tech industry.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It is no coincidence that the first artificial intelligence boom began around the same time as the sexual revolution; no coincidence that the history of women in computing has been roundly overwritten by the myth of male coding genius; no coincidence that the voice coming out of your smart device is almost always a woman’s. Stemming from a fundamental arrogance on the part of men—the idea that work historically performed by women is so straightforward, so mindless even, that it can be effectively programmed— the latter part of the twentieth century saw a rise in technologies aimed at making traditional women’s work faster, simpler, or redundant.

Robot mistresses, digital nurses, smartphone secretaries, algorithmic wives, and app-based mommies: huge swathes of the modern tech boom are a reaction against women’s partial liberation from housework and our increasing resistance to performing unpaid and undervalued emotional and sexual labor. When small-minded men are terrified of losing something, they belittle it; they puff their chests out and stomp their feet and declare they do not need it at all, that they have something better at hand anyway. And the rise of personified technologies in particular is a mass response from a male-dominated industry to the revelations of the twentieth century: the sexual revolution and women’s movement that upended traditional gender roles, and the economic pressures requiring women to seek employment outside of the home. The first wave of at-home artificial intelligence—embodied by Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and the nameless personality living inside the Google Home—was designed to replace or supplement roles historically filled by women: mothers, wives, mistresses, secretaries, nannies, even sex workers.

Robot mistresses, digital nurses, smartphone secretaries, algorithmic wives, and app-based mommies: huge swathes of the modern tech boom are a reaction against women’s partial liberation from housework and our increasing resistance to performing unpaid and undervalued emotional and sexual labor.

Of course, in addition to being historically female, these roles are almost always underpaid or undervalued. As philosopher Helen Hester notes, the same tasks Alexa and Cortana perform for a premium are not just ill-remunerated but often resented and mocked when performed by human women. A smart device’s insistence on helping is clever and valuable; a wife’s insistence on helping is taken for granted or viewed as frivolous nagging. It’s no surprise many women no longer want to take on the roles they’ve been programmed to perform, or that still more of us simply cannot afford to, regardless of what we desire. The system is malfunctioning; we’ve gone off script. Tech, looking for a fix to the glitch, has found it at the intersection of cheap labor, algorithms, and automation, which in concert perform thankless female labor (with no bitching or aging) for an upfront cost, to the enormous financial benefit of the overwhelmingly male industry leaders and stockholders.

Much of the writing about the sexism latent in the tech industry, and the development of artificial intelligence in particular, has focused in on three concerning realities: the dramatic underrepresentation of women at virtually every level of the industry (and the self-perpetuating, demi-god-in-a-sweat-drenched-hoodie culture that serves as both the primary cause and effect of this lack of gender diversity); the gender bias being coded into tomorrow’s (and today’s and yesterday’s) algorithms by virtue of this lack of diversity; and the portrayal of many personified tech products as servile and female, chief among them Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home which, if not real AI, still stand as most Americans’ first experience with something even remotely close.

What concerns me as much as these developments is the broader picture of which they form only a part: a world in which the exact forms of labor women have fought to have recognized and remunerated—chief among them caretaking labor, tedious household labor, buoying-the-male-ego labor, service-with-a-smile labor—are being co-opted, monetized, and sold back to us as shiny, premium, cutting-edge tech, the intermediary step of individual households outsourcing such tasks to workers primarily from the Global South having been insufficiently profitable for the Silicon Valley brain trust. As automation rises, technology will increasingly undercut the wages of these workers; the human workers who depend on these precarious gigs are viewed by the tech industry and the broader economy as a temporary inefficiency.

This is the dark ethos of the twenty-first century: most of us are performing labor that can and will be at least partially automated. We work, and as we work, we audition for the right to continue working. There is no room at the negotiation table; any unpaid work will remain unpaid until, in due course, we will pay to have that work done for us by automation. And like that, the mainstays of human life become premium services we pay for. Like that, the value only flows up.

The Future is Fembots

Pop culture and advertising have reacted in lockstep with the rise of household technologies. Disney’s Smart House, released in 1999, showed an overworked female computer scientist developing the perfect AI “smart home” to liberate women from housework, only for the “smart home” to become increasingly unwieldy and possessive—hormonal even—after a motherless teenage boy tinkers with the code to make the artificial intelligence behave more maternally. The happy ending comes when the scientist reprograms the smart home and settles down with a nice man.

More recently, Her and Ex Machina played into the heterosexual male’s neuroses that feminine affection is, in a sense, always a ruse and as replicable as code. The British television series Humans shows male and female bots—designed to perform care labor in family households and the homes of the elderly—driven to rebellion over a desire for recognition. Many early advertising campaigns for Google Home and Alexa, like the one described above, portrayed modern men aptly assisted by gentle, obedient, disembodied women. Such visions of techno-capitalist feminism abound: women empowered by technologies that free them from the unsavory realities of pregnancy or household labor or sex; men taking on new, progressive roles as a result of their obedient female-voiced assistants.

It has been quite some time since we’ve seen a direct cultural portrayal of feminized tech that has any real teeth. But if we look back to a time before Lean In feminism, there have been more honest attempts. Much of Bryan Forbes’s 1975 horror film The Stepford Wives feels oddly familiar, even millennial in its sensibility, from its pared-back interior design, its fetishization of upstate domestic life, and its portrayal of a certain type of liberal man who—while paying lip service to progressive ideas—yearns for a wife who will let him call the shots. Based on the 1972 novel by Ira Levin, the film follows Joanna Eberhart as she moves from New York City to Stepford, Connecticut, with her husband Walter and their two children. Walter quickly joins the local Men’s Association, where former technology and entertainment moguls relax with scotch and cigars. The women of Stepford, meanwhile, are uniformly beautiful and obedient, spending their days ironing sheets, watching children, and preparing casseroles: a hybrid of tradwives, Instagram influencers, and spam bots. Their husbands adore them.

Joanna, an aspiring photographer, felt coerced into moving to Stepford, but she tries to put on a game face. Hoping that her new suburban lifestyle will offer her the chance to focus more on her art, she is understandably creeped out by the passivity of the Stepford wives and her husband’s secretive involvement in the Men’s Association. She soon forms an alliance with the two other women in town not yet obsessed with housework: Bobby, an outspoken New York feminist, and Charmaine, a tennis-playing trophy wife. Together, they attempt to start a women’s group. But when they gather the women of Stepford together, the wives fall into discussing a litany of household tips: advice on starching their husbands’ collars, brand name suggestions, and vague musings on their domestic contentedness.

In the end, it becomes apparent that these beloved wives are robots, modeled on the human wives of Men’s Association members, who are summarily murdered once their robot replacements are ready. (The seventies were not known for their subtlety.) Unlike in the camp, feel-good 2004 remake, love and corporate feminism do not save the day. On the advice of a psychiatrist, Joanna tries to escape, but ends up strangled to death by her robot replacement.

The messaging is a little too obvious to be worth digging into at length: housework deadens a part of a woman, and men are desperate for control. What really stuck with me about The Stepford Wives is the way the men watch the women, both the human Joanna and their robot wives. In one scene, a Men’s Association member draws Joanna with incredible skill, making sketches of her face and her eyes. In another, a man records her voice, allegedly for a hobby project; preying on her kindness, he claims that his childhood stutter has made him fascinated with language and accents. The men look at Joanna with admiration and desire: she is beautiful, spirited, and kind. There’s lust, but it’s not quite sexual. It’s as though they genuinely want to understand the way she works, if only so that they can reconstruct her according to their own desires and ideals. It’s the same way they look at their own wives, always with a knowing confidence in their eyes.

I wonder, sometimes, if this is what it all comes down to. Perhaps our moment is just catering to a particular kind of man, the kind who longs to look at those who serve him, without ever feeling the unsettling tug of need. Who desires nothing more than to look at a woman—real or simulated, no matter—and think: I made you.

[thepoliticalpatient]

Health insurance terminology

I've been throwing around a lot of health insurance terms without explaining what they mean, so I realized I ought to provide some definitions. This will help you understand this blog, but more importantly, this will help you understand insurance.

Types of medical insurance

Employer-sponsored insurance: This is insurance you get as a "benefit" from a full time job. The ACA requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide the option of purchasing medical insurance through them. They will typically cover part of the cost of the premium which means that you pay less for your insurance. The employer-based market is typically the most stable and I highly recommend that anyone with significant medical needs get their insurance through it if at all possible.

Individual market: This is where you can purchase insurance if you don't have a full-time job, or if your company is small and doesn't offer insurance. You will have to pay the full premium yourself since you don't have an employer covering a portion of it.

Medicare: The promised land, lol. This is healthcare that is provided by the government to people 65 and over. It generally works very well for the people who have it. It is highly efficient: 98% of Medicare money goes towards covering the medical expenses of patients.

Medicaid: Another government program for insuring certain groups of people. The requirements for qualifying for Medicaid vary based on the state you live in (see Medicaid expansion below) but in general it is for covering people close to the poverty line.

COBRA: This is a law that has existed since 1985. It allows people to retain their insurance for an additional 6 months after losing it due to the loss of a job or various other reasons. It is very expensive as you’re essentially paying the full price of the insurance you had before without the help of your employer. When I had it last year it was $600/month.

Insurance vocabulary

Premium: This is the upfront cost of medical insurance, the amount you pay monthly in order to be insured. This is the primary way that insurers make their money, so they’re essentially betting that they’ll get more from you in premiums than what you’ll cost in medical care. When their costs rise, they often have to respond by raising premiums.

Deductible: This is an amount of money you pay annually before your insurer will start covering costs. For example, I have a $2,900 annual deductible. I have to pay for the first $2,900 worth of medical expenses that I have in a plan year. After that, my insurer pays the rest as long as I stay in network (see below).

Network: Each insurance plan has a group of doctors that are considered part of its network. Generally speaking, if you go to see a doctor that is outside of this network, your insurer will not cover those costs or will cover a smaller percentage of those costs. For example, after I’ve met my deductible for the year, my insurer covers 100% of in-network costs and 80% of out-of-network costs.

Co-pay: This is money that you have to pay every time you receive medical care even after you hit your deductible. For example, after you’ve hit your deductible, you may still have to pay $25 to see your primary care physician, $50 to see a specialist, $10 on one of your monthly prescriptions, etc. but your insurer picks up the rest of the tab. I actually do not have co-pays for appointments with my plan, but I do have them on my prescriptions.

Explanation of benefits: This is a piece of paper that your insurer mails to you each time you receive medical care. It’ll show what the price of the treatment was and how much of that your insurance plan covered. The difference is what you will be billed by the healthcare provider. Some EOBs will even show what the provider originally charged versus the price the insurer negotiated (as they’ll often refuse to pay the amount originally requested by the provider and will instead try to negotiate a lower price), which is always interesting information. You can see an example of one of my EOBs here.

ACA-related terms

ACA: The affordable care act, also known as Obamacare. It was enacted in 2010. It changed much about the American healthcare system in a way that generally helped protect patients. Read the below terms to see some of the ways it changed things.

Medicaid expansion: As a part of the ACA, states had the option to expand their Medicaid program. States that expanded Medicaid have made it possible for anyone near the poverty line to get covered through Medicaid. In other states, a complicated formula that takes into account health status, household size, income, and other factors is used to determine if you qualify. This makes qualifying for Medicaid is very difficult or impossible if you a non-disabled adult with no kids. The Medicaid expansion is responsible for the majority of the newly-insured under the ACA.

Pre-existing condition: A pre-existing condition is a health problem you have already, prior to applying for insurance. This only comes into play when you’re applying for insurance on the individual market. Before the ACA, insurers on the individual market could discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions (see Underwriting below). This is now illegal.

Underwriting: The insurance practice of analyzing individuals based on their risk and charging them more if they’re considered riskier. For example, with home insurance (where underwriting is legal), you might get charged a higher premium to insure your home if it’s located where floods are common. In medical insurance, before the ACA, this resulted in higher premiums or even complete denial of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. This is now illegal in medical insurance under the ACA.

Cap: Before the ACA, insurance plans often had an annual or lifetime cap. For example, you might have an annual cap of $100,000 and a lifetime cap of $1,000,000. If you accrued $100,000 in medical expenses in a year, your insurer would stop covering any of your expenses for the rest of that plan year, and you’d have to cover your own medical bills for the rest of the year. If you accrued $1,000,000 in total medical expenses under that plan, they would stop covering you forever and you’d have to find insurance somewhere else. This is now illegal under the ACA. Check out my post here for an incredible story of a man who hit three separate lifetime caps before the ACA.

Individual mandate: This is the requirement under the ACA that all individuals purchase medical insurance. If they do not, they have to pay a fine instead. This is one of the most unpopular aspects of the ACA. However, it is necessary because insurers cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions anymore. If people weren’t required to purchase insurance, we could just go without it while we’re healthy and buy it after we get sick, which would cause insurers to go broke. This is similar to the requirement that all cars on the road be covered under auto insurance. If this weren’t required, people could just buy insurance after they’ve gotten into an accident. Same deal.

Employer mandate: This is the requirement under the ACA that all employers with at least 50 employees offer medical insurance as a benefit to full-time employees. This gives more people access to employer-sponsored insurance rather than having to buy insurance through the less stable and more expensive individual market.

Proposed alternatives to the ACA / anti-ACA rhetoric

High risk pool: Many enemies of the ACA suggest that we could cover people with pre-existing conditions in high-risk pools. This is a practice wherein underwriting returns and we take all the riskiest people and remove them from the normal insurance market, putting them in their own separate group called a high-risk pool. Costs will then fall for the healthy people who remain in the normal pool. However, the sick people’s (generally very high) medical costs don’t just magically disappear. They are now being funded by only the premiums of sick people - so these premiums generally go up very high - and tax dollars. High risk pools are notorious for being underfunded by the government, so we just end up with shitty, expensive coverage for the people who need healthcare the most. I talk more about high-risk pools here.

Health savings account (HSA): Another favorite of fiscal conservatives, HSAs are savings accounts that you can put your money into pre-tax (you do not have to pay income tax on the dollars you put into your HSA) and then only withdraw for health-related purchases. So it is basically a savings account with a tax advantage. HSAs are nice to have, but what is not nice is the suggestion that we should adopt them in lieu of other types of health coverage. This would mean that you’d have to pay for all your own medical expenses, with basically a ~30% or so discount because of the tax advantage. This is also utterly useless for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and have no extra money to throw into savings.

Death spiral: This is a term for a specific type of economic instability that people worried would occur when the ACA was enacted (spoiler alert: it didn’t). The idea was that when people with pre-existing conditions entered the system, insurers’ expenses would rise, and so premiums would have to rise to compensate. This did happen. But then the next step that didn’t happen was the possibility that healthy people who don’t really use their insurance would not want to pay this higher price for insurance, so they would stop buying it. This would mean that insurers would lose the income they were making from these people’s premiums, but would not lose a proportionate amount of expenses because these people were healthy and didn’t have many medical expenses. Insurers would then be in a worse financial spot, and would have to raise premiums even more to compensate. Then insurance would no longer be worth the price even to some people who aren’t totally healthy, and they’d drop out of the pool too. This would continue until only the sickest people found insurance useful. This would indicate that the market was unstable and would eventually collapse. However, it didn’t happen because the ACA mandates the purchase of insurance. Healthy people didn’t drop out of the market in large numbers because they’d have to pay a fine in order to do so. Removing the individual mandate, as was suggested in the Senate’s “skinny repeal” bill a few months ago, would have likely caused a death spiral. I talk about this at length here.

Single-payer healthcare: This is a model in which the government directly pays everyone’s medical expenses instead of having insurance companies as middle-men in the system. I support this idea because it would let us insure everybody for a lower price than it would take to insure everybody under the current system. As it is, too many of the suggested ways to lower costs involve excluding people, which I don’t think is right.

Insurers are middle-men who are making a PROFIT in a system where money dictates life and death. Their profits, as well as the paychecks of non-essential personnel like their marketing departments and sales departments, are paid with our premium dollars. Only 80% of their income is used on patients’ medical expenses, and it’s only that high because the ACA requires it - before the ACA it was closer to 65%. Compare this with 98% efficiency in Medicare, which is basically single-payer-for-old-people. In single-payer, instead of paying premiums we’d buy our insurance with a tax. And almost all of that tax money could go directly into medical care instead of at a rate of 80%. And you’d never see a medical bill again no matter who you are. Most of Europe already has single-payer healthcare, and it works pretty well for them.

---

As always, I speak from the perspective of a patient and don’t try to eliminate my biases when I write, since that would pretty much be impossible to do. These definitions are factual but obviously there is additional commentary that is colored with my own point of view.

I am tagging this with disability survival tip because I consider understanding the health insurance system to be one of the most vital survival skills of disabled people in America.

[apexcommander-blog]

So a little while ago I mentioned wanting to do some talking on Turian government, since there’s so much to dig into there; I gave it some thought at work this morning, and this is the monologue that came out of it:

One of the things that really amuses me is that Liara spent so much time envisioning the Protheans as proto-Asari, culturally speaking, whereas they actually ended up being more like proto-Turians, but with their colonial, military attitude cranked right up to eleven; a people who unified the galaxy by conquering it and assimilating all conquered cultures into their own to create a cohesive - if monolithic - whole.

The interesting thing to me is that, despite the fact that Turians are stated in codex entries to take a more colonial approach to space exploration, they seem to be slowly growing out of the worst characteristics of that approach - largely due, I think, to the influence of the other Council races, and I’d like to take a minute to chart that progression, because it’s pretty intriguing. 

We know the Turians are based primarily on the Roman Empire, so it follows, naturally, that Turian society is an expression of one of the possible ways the Roman Empire could have ended up if it had proven sustainable into the modern day and beyond. Our Roman Empire didn’t, obviously, but I would be most likely to attribute the Hierarchy’s greater longevity to a major cultural difference: Turian society is collectivist, focuses intensely on the betterment of the whole over that of the individual, and does not support ambition that doesn’t benefit the group. Think the Roman Empire, but with Confucian values bolstering it against the societal collapse that comes when an empire grows too large and too many ambitious conquerors become active in the society at the same time, tearing it to pieces between them.

Which isn’t by any means to say that this has never happened; simply that Turian culture makes it a much rarer occurrence - although when civil war does occur among Turians, it is devastating, because every civilian is a soldier and surrender isn’t in the Turian vocabulary. Personally, I would be inclined to say the Hierarchy has experienced at least two major over-arching conflicts on its road to becoming the near-monolith of contemporary times:

The first would have come pre-spaceflight, when traveling between continents was still difficult enough for Palaven to contain many, many diverse cultures. Different nations, developed and undeveloped - indigenous peoples of many kinds, clans and tribes and city-states, republics and empires. They can’t have been a single culture from the moment they gained sentience: at one point, Turians were likely as divisive and multicultural as humans are now, but we can assume that eventually one empire formed - the proto-Hierarchy - and over the course of what I’ll call several hundred years at least came to encompass the entire globe, by either conquering, colonizing, or both, and then assimilating the conquered into the whole. I doubt they were gentle about it: ‘gentle’ isn’t a tactic that works when trying to force the hand of a Turian.

Then the Hierarchy achieves spaceflight, and begins a booming expansion across what will soon be called ‘Turian space’ - and this is where they run into the second conflict, paralleling the difference between the warring Greek city-states and the Romans who eventually emerged from them as a single force. Over the course of a few hundred years they inadvertently recreated the conflicts of antiquity by putting enough distance between pockets of their people to once again support divergence of culture, and the development of many distinct demographics within the whole. As this was post-spaceflight, but pre-FTL, colony worlds that were distant enough from Palaven began to take on the characteristics of the aforementioned Greek city-states, and then to war with each other like them: this conflict becomes the Turian Unification Wars.

This conflict went on for years. The Hierarchy, self-aware of the particular danger of civil war within a people like theirs, chose to let the colonies wear themselves down with years of conflict, and only then elected to step in, crushing the strongest remaining factions and providing themselves as the only viable option to the rest for a chance to live in peace, order, and stability - all very important drives, for Turians. And while animosity between colonies remained for decades, in the seven hundred years between the end of the Unification Wars and First Contact with the Council races the Hierarchy once again managed to become a near-monolith, a united collectivist bulwark and powerhouse of an empire - and just in time for the Krogan Rebellions.

It’s important to note that the Asari and Salarians made first contact with the Turians for almost exactly the same reason they made first contact with the Krogan: because there was a galactic threat at hand they couldn’t handle, and they needed a people with a massive military to end a war for them. The Krogan were uplifted to fight the Rachni, and then the Turians were brought into the galactic fold to fight the Krogan, and I feel like it’s critical to notice the way the Asari and Salarians seemed to learn from their handling of that first shitshow in handling initial diplomatic relations with the Turians - because this is where we start to slowly see them diverge from their aggressive colonialism, and I strongly suspect the older Council races had a heavy hand in it.

The Turians put down the Krogan Rebellions with brutal efficiency, chose to deploy the genophage where even the Salarians had only hoped to use the threat of it as a deterrent, and the fact that they were invited to take a seat on the Council afterwards (as opposed to, say, the Volus, who not only got there first but also revolutionized the galactic economy) was portrayed as a gesture of gratitude for their service, and can be practically interpreted as the Council races needing muscle for peacekeeping after the loss of the Krogan. In addition to that, however, I think it was a calculated power move on the part of the older Council races: in allowing this warlike culture a seat on the Council, they not only gave the Turians a much greater say in galactic law, but also bound them to it, required them to heed the other races in their decisionmaking if they wanted to keep their influence. Giving the Turians a seat on the council gave the other races a foot in the door to help steer Turian development, for the Salarians to push for more subtlety, and the Asari to urge greater temperance. 

This probably wouldn’t have worked with a race like the Krogan, whose culture focuses on individual survival and ambition, but because the Turians were already inclined toward collectivist approaches and assimilation, this was exactly the tack to take in order to prevent the Turians from eventually becoming just as big a threat as the Krogan if they ever decided their way was better and they ought to impose it on the other races by force to promote greater order, the way the Protheans might have. The other races took the “our way is the most correct and we know what’s best for you better than you do” attitude of the colonizer and did everything in their power to minimize it in the Turians, and while it hasn’t been a perfect transition - even if nurturing slow positive change is what the Asari do, it still takes a long time to alter thousands of years of culture - it seems to be working.

The example I provide for this is the Volus: they’re described as a client race of the Turians, the Volus providing mercantile expertise to compensate for the economic disadvantage Turians put themselves at with their lack of duplicity, and the Turians providing military might for protection where the Volus lack it. But the important thing to note is that the Volus are still a sovereign people, they have neither been conquered nor colonized; the only thing stopping this from being a totally equal partnership is that the Volus don’t have a seat on the Council yet, but outside the context of the Council, between just their two races, the Turians and Volus have managed to negotiate a mutually beneficial partnership in which neither culture is required to assimilate. For the Turians, this is big - this is them admitting that while their way of life may be what’s best for them, it isn’t necessarily what’s best for everyone. This is them transitioning from the conqueror to the diplomat, dramatically altering their foreign policy, and I absolutely see the hand of the Asari in that, nudging them in a more cooperative direction to the benefit of all. 

The First Contact War can be seen as a lingering manifestation of the Turians’ hardnosed, black-and-white approach to galactic threats - and honestly, given what happened the last time an unknown alien species came through a newly-activated relay (the Rachni) I can see why they jumped the gun so aggressively - but it can also be seen as a sign of progress, as we see many humans and Turians interacting peaceably less than fifty years later. Again, without any need for assimilation from either of the two cultures. That’s also very, very big. And then, since it worked once with the Turians, the Council offers a seat to the Humans; yet another militarily-powerful people with bad habits in terms of conquering and war who could easily be steered down an infinitely more constructive path if given enough intergalactic power to constrain them with the responsibility that comes part and parcel with it.

[mydrunkpoet]

After the Storm

I. A thunderstorm occurs when a mass of air grows unstable enough to overturn violently. This happens when the upper layers of air are cooler than the lower layers. There is no fixed time period within which this process occurs.

My lover and I sit on opposite sides of the boat. The water, initially choppy, is leveling to a calm. But not before it throws a few more beads of salt into our hair.

She is looking out into the horizon. Occasionally she looks my way. But she is not thinking of me. I know the shape her face takes when I am on her mind. Today, she is unrecognisable.

This is the face of your lover, as she thinks about someone else.

Memorise it, I tell myself. And each time you think “maybe”, close your eyes and re-call it like an image burned onto the insides of your lids.

We are approaching the Tioman. We have come here to break up. Two water signs parting in the ocean. Five days of limbo for the purpose of closure. Don't leave me, I want to plead. But I don't.

The calm before the storm, she says, as the boatman slows and gestures to the water. Until now, I have thought that this was just an idiom. She tells me that warm air has accumulated as a prelude to raging sky. The sea-kites prevalent to the area have ceased flying. Animals always know when something is about to hit. I search for them among clouds like charcoal speech bubbles. I wonder what the sky is saying.

My writing mentor is reading this and telling me that I should not hide emotion behind nature. No raging winds nor hearts like fire. Too easy to use elements as metaphor. Too easy to call love the sky sand forest trees clouds desert ocean mountain flood earthquake storm.

But I am not creating metaphors. I am making the storm. I sit in its eye. I grow thick with thunder. I am expanding to two, three, ten times my size. She tells me she has fallen in love with someone else. Compares it to having all her fuses blow. Such a romantic excuse for such bad behaviour. I wish to turn her switches off one by one.

Mention details instead, my mentor says. The mundane things you remember.

The weight of your hand on the small of my back. Endearment crinkling the corners of your eyes. You pulling the covers over my feet early morning as if I were something precious.

Better now than later, a friend of mine says. At least it was only three months.

***

Three weeks after our first date, she gives me the key to her apartment. Keys are scary business. I take it anyway.

I come over earlier than expected one evening and let myself in. I find her on the edge of the bed, naked. She has just come out of a shower that has taken her three times longer than it should have; she fractured her sacrum the fortnight before, falling off her bike. She looks distraught.

What's wrong? Pause. I was having a conversation with myself in the shower. Pause. I see. What did the two of you talk about? Pause. I wanted to cook you dinner . . . but I don't think my back can take it.

She begins to cry.

Stop. Wait. What's wrong? You don't have to cook me dinner!

Pause.

I know. That's the thing. You like me anyway.

The mathematics rarely adds up and at the end of three months, I know too much. The arch of her back and the length of her stride. The dip of her waist and the sound of her voice. How her mouth slackens when she falls fully asleep and the taste of her tongue in the morning. I know her posture as she reads The Economist, electric toothbrush in her mouth. Her eyes as they scan her wardrobe, screen her calls, observe my body. She dances as she cooks, cries when she talks about her grandmother. And when she is about to come, tongue against teeth, she is quiet, lips moving ever so slightly, as if whispering prayers underneath her breath.

It takes two seconds to pull a trigger; one and half to say I do. In a blink, a high impact crash might re-align your vertebrae so that you never walk again. A decade ago, as we whiled away Christmas, nature killed thousands and stranded millions, with the energy of 23,000 atomic bombs, in only a handful of hours.

The first night we went out, it took three hours for her to take my hand and three seconds for me to decide.

Come home with me, she said, kissing my palm.

We asked for the bill, and left.

***

II. Three things are required for a thunderstorm to take place: Moisture, heat and an unstable air mass.

She is leaving me for someone else. She does not know that I know. Perhaps she does not know it herself. They never expect my premonitions. Me falling upon their thoughts like rain.

Let me tell you how I know: I can smell it on her. Like chemicals bubbling to evaporation. Like moisture condensing on skin. Like uncovered leftovers. Like a memory.

It's been following us for a fortnight. I smell it on the sheets, in her hair, coming off on my own skin. It's in her voice, diminished attention, staccattoed messages that reek of compensation. She is clinging to me in thin threads. I am afraid to move, in case we break.

Reminders to herself become reminders to me. Have you ever spoken too loudly to fill a silence too big? Swaggered into a space full of people, terrified you might trip? Used kindness to make up for your lack of charm, charm to make up for feeling unintelligent, intelligence to make up for not fitting in?

Text message: Have I told you how much I really, really like you?

Text message: Did I remember to tell you how beautiful you looked last night?

I am the silence she has to fill. The crowd she needs to impress. But I am detective to our love and I will find her out.

Text message: I love waking up to you in the morning.

Terms of endearment falling like confetti all around me. She's turning pain into a party; we're supposed to be drunk on this lie. Except I am perfectly sober. Except I have unstitched her words syllable by syllable. Except I am watching everything fall; pieces into place like hearts into love:

She is leaving me, and there is nothing I can do.

***

III. The average thunderstorm releases the energy equivalent of a 20 kiloton nuclear weapon, or a small nuclear power plant.

Take me out tonight. I am a storm itching to brew. I am a cloud clenching its fists in wait of someone to drench. I am full on want, feeding on your appetite for trouble, growing fat on expired questions desire previously didn't deem fit to guide from gut to mouth.

Take me down tonight. Abuse the fact that I won't fight back. Make all my decisions. Forget I am strong. Let my name slip your mind once it falls out your mouth. Be my arms, my legs, my voice, my longing, the root of my charm, my sense of belonging. Hollow me out and fill me with you; create echoes in all the empty spaces.

Take me back tonight. Let me occupy your body like a ghost without a home. Let me race against time, good sense, your lover; let me outrun all three with the pace of my pulse. Let me steal your heart like a kiss and hold it under my tongue: Let me flutter your arteries with the chattering of my teeth.

Metaphors, the mentor sighs, shaking his head and smiling. Words should reveal, not conceal.

Fine, I say, putting my coffee down. Let me tell you instead, how we fuck. In the morning, she told me she was in love with someone else. In the evening, I went over in my heels. Trashy, snake-skin party shoes and nothing underneath my skirt. She was in the chair, wearing only a shirt. Buttons undone and legs spread. My shoes squeaked against tiles as I got down on my knees. The sound made us laugh. The laughter was short-lived.

I have gone over like this so many times before. Pantsless, primed, dressed for a fucking. She texts me while I am in the cab. Tells me I'd better be wet on arrival. I gloss my lips when I walk into the lift. I straighten my hair and push up my tits.

My lover has a thing for my zip-up stilettoes. She calls them my fuck-me heels. They arch my calves, propel my chest forward, thrust my hips towards her when I'm up against the wall. They stay on when everything else has come off and in them, I don't have a name. In them, I am four inches closer to where she is. My lover, the tower, the skyscraper. My lover, her head in the thundering clouds.

One particular night, she dressed for me too. Ted Baker lightning white, crisp like clean air. I come out of the lift. She's by the door, lights dimmed, cuffs out. She is so beautiful I could cry. I down the shot she's made me in order to dispel the nervousness. She's human that way, beneath the code names, play things, safe words. Beneath the hard surface soft sheets hard on soft skin hard core soft porn dirty talk.

Wall. Couch. Table. Bed. I want you inside me around me above below me. Do whatever you want to me. I don't even care if I come.

This is the only place in which we are equal. Where I don't have to worry about catching up. With your proper clothes, high-end job, perfect cooking, expansive vocabulary. With the fact that you're older, smarter, sharper, so much better

looking in a suit. Here, being improper is an envied virtue. Here, being imperfect is what you like. Here, me having no words makes up for all the stupid things I usually say: Forgive my love of good bargains, my badly cut hair and chipping nailpolish. Forgive my loathing of children, spiders, public events and social situations. Forget the near-fight we had over money and the fact that my bedroom looks like it belongs to a sixteen-year-old. Forgive it all. Forget it all. I want to watch you touch yourself.

Our first night together, we are soft with one another. I skip into the living room upon seeing all her books. The kissing starts at Gloria Steinem. My hand up her top by Margaret Reynolds. She has trouble with my dress. Does it go up or down? She is more familiar with undoing belts, unbuttoning jeans, not getting lipstick on her neck. By the time we get to the bedroom, we've left clothes like breadcrumbs. By the time she's going down on me, I tell her how I can't wait to fuck her.

The night before we leave, we will end the way we began. Except this time, we are not new to each other. These are maps we have explored before. We'll laugh like children. We'll cry like adults. We'll wrestle in bed and you'll ask why I bother fighting back.

This is the edge of desire from which I fall. I want to take everything that has ever hurt me and place it between your body and mine. I want to disappear into this

creature that is us. The next day, my wrist, the colour of plums where you pinned me down with your knee.

That last night, I wanted you to take me against my will; to do to my body what you'd done to my heart.

Don't tell me this doesn't turn you on.

I can't. It does. Please stop. Please don't.

Sometimes even the best sex, isn't about the sex.

Do to my body what you do to my heart.

Break. Touch. Steal. Play with. Heat up. Let down. Feed on. Drown.

***

IV. A thunderstorm is fueled by water vapour fed from a lower atmosphere. The air, as it is warmed, is pumped up to twelve miles in the sky, and once used up, changes into rainfall.

Gut the apartment. I wish to slit it open with my stare and disembowel it of me. Toiletries. Pushed with one hand from cupboard to bag. Toothbrush I will leave; isn't mine anyway. I believe she keeps many spare. Had I time, I would burn it.

Give me back my shoes. The fun shoes, aptly named by your ex. In your drawer, next to the pumps you wore the day you wed. Give back my friend's DVDs. Return everything. Tanktop. Underwear. Tupperware. Make-up. Let me cab to work like a department store turned on its head.

But why stop there? I should comb each and every inch of your bed for hair. No DNA of mine to be left for you. No skin shed like inhibitions. Detox the memory of me from your balcony, eating chocolate and watching birds. Grab the resident gecko that spies on us and feed it to the nearest stray. I should extract every tear I have cried into pillow, bolster, shirt and sheet and wear them round my neck like pearls. And from every corner where we have wept together, unbraid your pain from mine.

Make sure I am forgotton. Length of showers. Weight on mattress. Smell of perfume. Manner of speech. You have no right to any of it. Remove all trace of me from walls, objects, furniture, food. I never walked your floor, wore your pajamas, read your books, ate your meals. Tell your mirrors to forget how I look drawing in my eyebrows, pinning up my dress, kissing you. Disentangle my words from our coversations and let them become another lost language. And when you recount all that has been said, know that you were talking to yourself.

But that's not how it happened, did it?

Let me tell you how it happened:

We left for work. I got out of the cab because I'd left my teaching materials upstairs. Abrupt shuffle. You were in a rush and I let you go reluctantly. I had wanted to leave with you so I would not have to be alone in your apartment.

Upstairs, I am a robot. I scan all rooms with with my mechanical eyes. My databases tell me it is easier to remove myself now. I take my things. I leave a note where my clothes were. I look out the window, into the trees. This is a space best left to past tense, I tell myself. Am I being too hasty? The room still smells like sex.

I fold your pajamas and wash the dishes. I re-arrange your cushions. Push in the chair. Check that I have not left anything in the study. Shut the door quietly before I leave for class.

I come home. Dump my bag in the living room. I go to my fridge to get a drink. It has not been stocked for a week. Standing solitary on the second shelf, a carton of milk. I don't touch the stuff and you have it with your muesli. Your muesli mixed with banana, yoghurt and milk. Donkey breakfast, you like to call it. Perhaps this is why you are being an ass.

Women like me get with women like you because we're never good enough.

Women like me get with women like you because you always leave.

I stare at the milk. I reach in to take it out. It is due to expire in two days. The carton is almost full and who is going to drink it, now?

***

V. In the centre of the hurricane from which the storm rotates, air sinks, clouds erode and all things are calm. This centre is known as the eye of the storm.

You and I in bed. Eating dinners. Taking walks. Watching films. You tell me the last time you were this turned on holding hands in a cinema, was when you were with your first boyfriend.

I am trying on the jacket you wore to your wedding. I am trying not to blush each time you throw me a wink. I am trying the word 'girlfriend' on for size, despite my own resistance.

My lover, she wants to take care of me. She wants me in her space. She tells me I have taken her unexpectedly. That I have curled up next to her heart.

I held you to sleep that very first night. No question, no discomfort, no need to ask. You took my hand, held it close to your chest, locked your fingers in mine, and dozed.

Three hours later, you had to get up. A 6am run to beat the sun. You tell me to sleep in. You'll be back in awhile. But by the time you're out of the kitchen, I am fully-clothed.

Could that really be me, so unflinching, getting dressed in a fluster and ready to flee? Leave nothing behind, I told myself firmly. You might not get it back.

My lover says she wants to protect me. I laugh, saying I can protect myself. How do I let her protect me when she is what I need protection from?

She writes me into her calendar. Places my shoes in her drawer. Sends me snail mail the morning of my exhibition. Turns up for the opening in her best shirt.

She is surprised when I bring her flowers. Says she's usually the half who buys them. She looks at the box of fruit I've brought. Says that no one has peeled mandarins for her since she was a child.

She is not in love with me. And makes sure to remind me. She thinks I might be seduced by romance. I should have told her the night she bought that champagne, that I would have been happy eating crackers on the couch. As long as she was sitting next to me. As long as she was there.

The night I fell in love with you, I was preparing for a show. 3am, the moon was full and I was covered in spraymount. Ruler, penknife, paper, foam. Suddenly these objects made no sense. Suddenly my bedroom made no sense. Suddenly I was in the shower, in a cab, at your door. In your apartment, in you room, in your bed. Keys, as I mentioned, are dangerous business. I whispered your name into your ear.

It was not the weekend you spoiled me stupid. Not the sms-es sent from across the sea. Not the fact that you had read my writing. Or knew all the right things to say.

It was because you like to tell stories. Identified the bulbul that flew into my yard. Because you sleep-talk in different languages. Converse with animals in Dutch.

Because you knew the difference between a hedgehog and a porcupine. Noticed my red ankle socks. Assembled your bookcases single-handedly. Colour-code your files.

Because you hold my hand in public.

A week after we've parted, I will wake to weather so angry it slams doors. Outside, an eagle will dip against the white. And I will remember how we watched sea-kites soar lines into the sky; your bird-books, hand-illustrated, older than I am; your gentle heart that longs to take flight.

I will stand by the window and watch a solitary bird cut through the storm. And that is how I will feel right then: Like my heart keeps taking off in the rain. Keeps taking off and never stops leaving.

***

VI. Sometimes, as a storm pulls wind into its lungs, a resulting vacuum occurs.

You and I had agreed that this would not be forever...but did it really have to end like this? My distrust has turned you into a stranger. What is this place and who have I come with?

We dock at the pier. A young woman in a green dress greets us. Two men take our luggage to our room. Gemini and Libra get out of the boat. Stripped of baggage, we take each other's hands.

To tell you the truth, I have not written this chapter. I am sitting at a café and drinking my coffee. My mentor is reading my first five segments. I tell him I am having trouble with the ending.

Decide how you wish to own this memory. That is how it will end.

Our last night together, we read to each other in bed; she from Douglas Adams, me from Jeanette Winterson. We were supposed to be sharing funny excerpts. But as she drifted into sleep, I flipped to the opening page:

Why is the measure of love loss?

I do this often, you know. Talk to my lovers while they sleep. About the things I can't speak of while they are awake. I know they hear me because the body can't help but listen. I know you hear me because I hear you too. Some mornings, before I am awake. You turning to watch me as I sleep. Sometimes walking to my side of the bed, pondering my shut eyes, morning hair, limp body. Leftover mascara from the night before.

At the airport, we get reception once again. We sit side by side, in silence.

Remember that face, I tell myself, as she texts a woman who is not me. That is the face of your lover, thinking about someone else.

Love is not the fury that shorts the fuses. That particular desire is too loud to be named. I have felt it too, creature ignited by things unseen. It tramples the heart, leaps out from the ruins, runs manic circles around itself, does not take no for an answer.

After lingering above the same area of ocean for too long, a storm tends to dissipate. The surface water, used and re-used, loses heat. And without that heat, no storm survives.

Love is the difference between desire and decision. Will I care for you once the winds have calmed? Lean my head on your shoulder once the noise has died? Desire you still, with the same urgency, initially propelled by thunder and heat?

Love is what happens after the storm. When we are left in silence, wrecked upon shore. The fact that I would have stayed had you asked; kissed you by the broken pieces of what we were.

Better now than later, a friend of mine says. At least it was only three months.

I am sitting on the beach, alone. I am writing about us and I am writing about love. And somewhere in here, I am writing about you: The gust of wind that blew through my heart, leaving behind this vacuum.

She and I. We sit on the boat. We have come here to break up.

This is the face of your lover, as she thinks about someone else.

[nicholemhearn]

Our Lost Vocabulary of Social Insurance

Social insurance programs are at the center of American politics. In fiscal terms, Medicare and the Social Security Administration’s programs for retirement, disability, worker’s compensation, and worker’s life insurance amount to roughly 41 percent of the federal budget. This fiscal centrality, however, does not rest on anything like a broader, public understanding of what makes social insurance social — and thus why such programs are so important in American political life. On the contrary, over the years our vocabulary of social insurance has become increasingly replaced with a vocabulary of welfare and redistribution, creating a fundamentally misleading impression about most of what the federal government does.

In the mid-1930s, when the retirement and survivors insurance programs had their legislative start, university-educated Americans had every reason to be clear about what distinguished social insurance from its commercial counterpart. Indeed, most undergraduate programs in the social sciences took up social insurance’s rationale and history. But note the data measuring the historical use of the expression in three of America’s most important daily newspapers. The changes recorded are startling. By the end of the 20th century, the category of social insurance had seemingly lost its place in the vocabulary of American politics.

This is particularly unsettling because of the enormous importance of social insurance programs in American history. The Great Depression, which wiped out the savings of most American families, caused multiple bank failures, and saw an unemployment rate of some 25 percent, prompted demands for substantially increased government protection against economic disaster. “Welfare” was the term used for programs that made poverty status the precondition for financial aid, and President Roosevelt acknowledged that immediate aid to poor families was required. But his case for increasing the footprint of American social policy was based on the principles of social insurance, not merely poor-relief narrowly construed.

By the 1970s, social insurance programs had become major components of the federal government, but also the targets of ideological and budgetary attack. Social Security retirement, Medicare, disability, and unemployment insurance were increasingly labeled as simply “entitlements,” and charged with contributing to out of control spending via unaffordable benefits. This allowed critics to advocate for a much smaller social policy commitment, urging a less costly “safety net” for the deserving among America’s poor citizens. The semantic bait-and-switch can be seen with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks word frequencies across the American English corpus.



Yet the principles and judgments incorporated in the concept of social insurance remain central to the major policy debates of our time, most dramatically in the debates over health care reform and the affordability of Social Security retirement benefits. They are relevant to the backlash against the Affordable Care Act and to the debate, rekindled recently, between the advocates of “Medicare for All” and advocates of Medicaid expansion as the next step toward universal health coverage. More generally, they are crucial to addressing the broader conservative critique of government’s role in American social policy.

So, What is Social about Social Insurance?

Social insurance, like commercial insurance, is about protection against financial risk. It is “insurance” in the sense that people contribute to a fund to protect themselves against unpredictable financial risks. These include outliving one’s savings in old age, the early death of a breadwinner, the onset of a disability that makes work difficult if not impossible, the high costs of acute illness, involuntary unemployment, and work-related injury. Yet unlike with commercial insurance, contributions are not prices in a market and thus do not depend on the contributor’s risk profile (unless commercial regulations say otherwise, in essence creating “social” insurance through the backdoor). Instead of a contract between an enrollee and an insurer, social insurance is a system of shared protection among the insured, most comparable to mutual insurance in the commercial realm, with contributions made in proportion to one’s market income. In social insurance, the “insurer”—whether a government agency or a corporate body with a joint labor-management board—is the agent of the contributing enrollees. And unlike commercial insurance, the social insurance “contract” mandates participation by law, since otherwise adverse selection would cause its unraveling.

Social insurance spreads the costs of coverage according to a different logic than that of commercial insurers. The same risk in commercial insurance carries the same premium price. The greater the risk, the higher the price of coverage. Social insurance, by contrast, operates on the premise that contributions are calculated according to one’s income and benefits according to one’s needs. But the central political feature of social insurance is that the contributors are also beneficiaries. This is not the case with social assistance programs with means-tested eligibility standards. As important as such programs are for those who experience poverty, taxpayers do not in general identify with welfare beneficiaries.

How much difference does it make that most contemporary reporting on social insurance programs, and much social science scholarship, ignores their conceptual underpinning and distinctive operational features? Should popular voices in American social policy be criticized for using proper names to describe programs without explaining their distinctiveness from means-tested welfare programs? I would not be writing this essay if I did not believe, as one of three co-authors, that the title of our 2014 book — Social Insurance: America’s Neglected Heritage and Contested Future — identified an important problem.

“Entitlement”-talk

Words make a difference to all thinking about public policy, but this is especially the case where conflicts are over fundamental values. Consider, for example, the common use of “safety net” as a collective description of programs as diverse as Medicare and Medicaid, old age Social Security, food stamps, disability insurance, and homeless shelters. This expression collapses the distinction between means-tested welfare and social insurance programs into a metaphor suggesting that recipients have to “fall” into poverty to warrant help. This is the opposite of social insurance, which represents a platform on which one can stand before economic risks arise. The term “safety net” is even more ambiguous, particularly when modified by terms like high or low, porous or tightly knit, threadbare or generous, or applied in situations when one’s financial resources are largely “spent.”

The use of public finance terms like “income transfers” further blurs the differences between cash benefits that one receives only after income and asset tests are applied and insurance payments that kick in without such tests. Then there is the term “entitlement,” which was meant to refer to the nondiscretionary nature of the spending, but now connotes an adolescent sense of entitlement among the beneficiaries. Neither term helps us understand the robust public approval of our major social insurance programs, and indeed, are often employed by opponents of social insurance in order to obfuscate an otherwise popular concept.

The negative connotation of “entitlements” is especially misleading. When one legitimately claims some social insurance benefit, the implication is that there is a corresponding duty to provide that benefit. That is the basis of the common sentiment among recipients of retirement income Social Security that they have earned their pensions. That widely shared sentiment largely explains the political fear that any substantial reduction in those benefits is a “third rail.” Few if any critics of the program criticize the appropriateness — or desirability — of OASI, the old age retirement and survivors insurance programs, on its own terms. Instead, they concentrate on claims that the programs are unaffordable. As a result, a large proportion of the public fears for their future despite the obvious political vulnerability of such critiques.

Understood as a technical budgetary category, entitlements in American fiscal policy are simply those programs whose benefits and beneficiaries cannot be adjusted without statutory changes. Administrations cannot simply reduce a program’s benefits or change its eligibility rules on their own. That entails constraints on administrative flexibility, reflecting the idea of stable governmental commitment to social insurance protections over long periods.

Using the entitlement category in two senses is confusing and in that respect harmful. What citizens believe about the appropriateness of a program is a distinct concept from the budgetary rules about changing its provisions. Both are important, but when was the last time you, the reader, saw this distinction explained when the entitlement term was used? Instead, “entitlement” is used like a four-letter word in diatribes about the supposedly troubled future of social insurance programs.

“Solvency”-talk

Still another source of linguistic confusion is what I will call solvency talk. When policy discussion turns to the fiscal projections of social insurance programs, critics and defenders alike turn to the trust fund. If the old-age retirement actuaries forecast a revenue projection of X in 25 years and the projected outlays of Y equal more than X, the “trust fund” is, according to this logic, in trouble. It will no longer have enough to meet its “bills” at that date. And if that shortfall were to continue, the necessary result would, in this framing, be insolvency, even though few policy experts seriously doubt the sustainability of programs like Social Security given fairly modest reforms, nor the political catastrophe of allowing the trust fund to run dry. In this sense, solvency talk is a lot like the threat of government shutdown created by the Federal debt ceiling — a crisis manufactured from the intransigence of elements on both sides of the aisle rather than anything fundamental.

Reflect for a moment about budget forecasts of Department of Defense outlays. Nobody writes about the military department going “broke” or becoming “insolvent” no matter how fast the growth in the budget. Indeed, no sensible analyst would make 20, 30, or 40-year forecasts for defense expenditures. Some analysts, in discussions of the future of Social Security make conditional forecasts long into the future. These are said to be useful exercises, reminding the public that commitments now have long-term effects. But the very preoccupation with solvency generates unnecessary anxiety. Since DOD does not have a “trust fund” budgetary categorization, its future outlays are presumed to be ones over which future governments have some control.

The same legal control is available to the Social Security Administration and the Congress. The confusion is even worse in programs that combined different funding mechanisms. For instance, funding for Part A of Medicare comes from the social health insurance trust fund (HI) while Part B is funded from general revenues and beneficiary premiums; it cannot go broke, but it can be reduced. That prompts solvency talk about Medicare’s future without clarification of how the program differs in two of its component parts.

The background of most solvency questions is the widely reported growth of the future retiree population. The Census Bureau projects that the over-65 population will soon make up 20 percent of the population. Such projections, unaccompanied by estimates of what increases in funding social insurance programs will require, prompt concern. Dire predictions of “insolvency” or cuts in retirement benefits get reported in the media without much scrutiny. As a public speaker, I face such questions regularly. I urge my questioners to dwell for a moment on how a growing proportion of senior citizens can be politically compatible with large reductions in future Social Security benefits. Put another way, how could the “sacred cow” of Social Security — in the language of its critics — face such a fate under conditions that, if anything, only cement its political sanctity?

There is another irony here that warrants discussion. The original use of trust fund language in social insurance had more to do with trust than with funds. President Roosevelt rightly felt in the 1930s that the contributory ethos of social insurance would come to be central to its secure political status. A population believing that each contributing worker had earned their social insurance benefit would not tolerate substantial budgetary cutbacks. The idea of a trust fund, then, was to emphasize the special status of a program whose benefits would be decades after a contributor’s payments. Its design is to enforce time-consistency, and its language is meant to highlight reliability. Yet sadly this language has since been turned upside down, bringing needless fear of “running out” of funds and thus uncertainty about the future. Roosevelt’s protective rhetoric backfired as the original understandings of social insurance weakened, even while the popularity of the programs remained substantial.

Social Insurance, Our Neglected Heritage

There are at least two plausible criticisms of this essay’s argument about the importance of relearning the appeal of social insurance principles. One is that the world has changed dramatically since the birth of social insurance in the late 19th century, let alone since the 1934-35 Committee on Economic Security provided a blueprint for expanding social insurance in American public life. The other is that changes in long-standing European social insurance programs show that major adjustments in the American programs are required as well.

The claim that the world has changed does not necessarily mean that the economic risks against which social insurance programs offer protection have been fundamentally altered. Consider every one of the risks noted in this essay — outliving one’s savings, involuntary unemployment, medical costs, and disability. Not one has disappeared, and social insurance programs for each have been implemented in wealthy democracies. I doubt, in other words, whether social insurance is in any conceptual trouble.

But that does not mean social insurance programs don’t need to adapt to contemporary circumstances. The spread of contract employment has been particularly challenging for European countries where social insurance is a function of trade unions and other sector-level organizations. It is equally obvious in the US that employer-provided health insurance puts a damper on labor market flexibility. Reduced employment in regular jobs with health coverage will demand the search for other sources of provision. These and other realities of our changing economy will only bring to the fore the central claim of this essay: Social insurance programs dominate American social policy but what that means for our politics is too little understood or explained. And that criticism extends not only to harried reporters but to a significant amount of the public policy community, as well.

Theodore (Ted) Marmor is a Niskanen Center adjunct fellow and Professor Emeritus at The Yale School of Management.

The post Our Lost Vocabulary of Social Insurance appeared first on Niskanen Center.

from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/lost-vocabulary-of-social-insurance/

[salinaflowers27-blog]

Protection Department Set To Defend Armed forces Off Cigarette Hurts.

Since the European Commission (EC) revealed its initial query into Google.com's service practices in 2010, the company has actually been actually the subject matter from prolonged inspections through judges and competitors firms around the globe Regulatory specialists in the USA, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, and also South Korea have all opened up as well as denied identical antitrust cases. Away our company'll be able to offer metrics for various cars as well as view just what our experts like as well as just what our company want to boost. Let each Christian dwell often on those text messages, teachings and adventures which much excite and enliven his very own heart and also established in motion the tires of elevated emotion. Just how is this that folks with substantial residences as well as massive garages have to position their vehicles in the garage. This is likewise component of the vocabulary of our hymns, however is actually hardly hired in more christian tunes as well as contemporary choruses. As his lifestyle was sinking away, his mind was actually swamped with notions about his Saviour, Jesus Christ, as he prepped the four handles located in this publication for journalism.

The Cheapest Technique To Gain Your Free Ticket To gel.

Ten Points To Steer clear of In gel.

In doing this, I make use of my previous partner with Jeff Childers, especially Program Advancement as an Antitrust Treatment: Trainings from the Enforcement of the Microsoft Communications Protocol Licensing Criteria, and Determining Compliance along with Compulsory Licensing Remedies in the United States Microsoft Case. Josh as well as Maureen are to be commended for their vital additions to the discussion over the proper extent of the FTC's Part 5 administration authority. Each from the 3 mergers - Dow/DuPont, ChemChina/Syngenta, and Bayer/Monsanto - entails agrarian items, like other sort of plant foods, pesticides, and seeds. If you enjoyed this information and you would such as to get additional details concerning bargomobility.xyz kindly visit the web site. Especially, owners from sport utility vehicles and also crossovers locate themselves taking flight from their old utility motor vehicle in to an all new one. This could permit the FCC to basically create a brand new Communications Function as this goes, controling certainly not merely broadband, however edge providers like Google as well as Facebook, as well, and certainly not just neutrality yet copyright, cybersecurity as well as even more. This is on its own a really good sign that the merger will benefit consumers, partially by minimizing medical facility compensation costs under MA programs. The FTC has a long past history from intensely combating deceptive as well as deceptive advertising under its lawful authorizations, however recent efforts by FTC to impose extreme 'advertising verification' needs on providers go far past what is actually needed to deal with deceitful advertising.

gel Is Thus Famous, But Why?

Yet there is additional motoring enjoyment available if you agree to have a 2nd automobile. Done in the name of motor vehicle analysis, certainly. Many substantially, Microsoft's latest news is additional proof that both legal and technical innovations can easily (possibly-- the initiative is actually as well new to understand its own effect) completely transform competition, threaten stationary market definitions and also compromise theories of anticompetitive injury. While General Motors' full-size truck identical twins, the Ram 1500, and the Toyota Expanse have all switched to standard front-hinged door arrangements for their mid-level taxi style, Nissan is sticking to the bodystyle used due to the chart-topping truck in The United States: Ford's F-150. The concern is even more adequately taken out from the world of antitrust administration dued to the fact that the concern is really some of regulative failure, not market failing. In managing internet privacy strategies, the FTC needs to employ an incredibly light touch that worries financial analysis and also cost-benefit considerations. My granny was actually middle-class and also possessed a cottage with a tiny refrigerator, a single B&W TV, as well as one automobile in the driveway. These problems are amplified by the construct from the meals supply establishment where our company find a lot of producers as well as individuals at either edge but not a ton of competitors between. The Commission strongly believes that its authority to stop unfair methods of competitors" via Part 5 from the Federal Exchange Commission Act allows the agency to pursue perform that this can certainly not connect with under the Sherman Act, and thereby prevent the possible strictures of Trinko. While there are a variety of means to get theological right, the Forum will certainly do so by posting write-ups that plainly verbalize the mentors as well as methods from the belief in both truth as well as charitable organization. Yet the FTC's conclusion in Ardagh that light weight aluminum coulds (which in reality compose 56% of the beer packaging market) don't take on glass containers for beer packing is actually also suspect. Probably no FTC commissioner has actually been as effective in affecting FTC policy as a few commissioner-- over sustained resistance, and also in a manner that constricts the company so significantly-- as possesses Wright today. The freshly permitted ICN file on creating a competitors culture pointed the technique toward promoting better public recognition of procompetitive policies - a prerequisite for the broad-scale dismantling of existing (as well as blocking out of freshly designed) ACMDs. Nothing much more prepares the Christian to become just what he is actually contacted us to be actually, under God, compared to visibility to The lord's personal Word.

[bussinessworld-blog1]

Nonresidential Building Energy-Use Disclosure

Because 2007, there has been substantial expansion in the replenishable and alternative-energy areas in Florida. In those days, Assemblywoman Lori Saldana selected laws like the Non-Residential Building Energy-Use Disclosure System (AB1103) to promote growth and exposure for the greening of our economy. The main legislation covered vocabulary that might quickly provide one area of derision between the populace of Florida and also the gas and electrical organizations working their firms. The dialect, "On and after January 1, 2009, electronic and propane tools can preserve data of the vitality use info of all nonresidential properties to that they give service. This knowledge will be managed, in a structure works regarding adding towards the Unitedstates Environmental Protection Firm's Energy-Star Account Boss, for at-least the most up-to-date twelve monthsINCH (Saldana, 2007) supplied a basis for potential dialogue around the walkway to implementation for the legislation.

For more Info Click here title 24 energy consultant

Being a business proprietor positively involved in the benefit from these regulation, I've compensated certain focus on the different issues that include occured while in the public question. I have determined three key aspects of examination. The very first being of these regions may be the complications of administration at the gasoline and electricity energy amount. The following spot is issues of administration at the building seller levels and finally, the difficulty in working together with the Ca Energy Commission as well as the national company of Environmentally Friendly Protection Agency (EPA). Most three aspects found special troubles moving towards adoption. The different stakeholders' authorized and ethical requirements are juxtaposed as well as the affects and reactions present commentary about the method as it unfolds.

 My firm provides witnessed and enjoyed in every several aspects of research. From beta testing the EPA Collection Administrator device used in AB1103 to positioning on climatechange have attached my firm within this method. The gradual recovering economy that was specifically structural at the commercial money areas has brought at each switch to discontinuity, misunderstandings, and adoption. From your electricity viewpoint, an incident is created that these business legislation is weird to its ability to operate. Having this kind of multitude of problems and competing ideal results, it's obvious that AB1103 posed substantial and unforeseen department within Florida.

 Dialogue

 There are three principal areas of worry, which could all be viewed from unique sides based in case you are a, a company of the stateANDauthorities, or even a public utility. In Colorado, we've Trader Owned Tools (IOU). These public resources are thought as, "Any organization which supplies services towards the general public, even though it could possibly be privately-owned. Public resources contain electronic, petrol, phone, water, and tv wire systems, along with streetcar and buslines. They are authorized specified monopoly rights because of the realistic have to support complete geographical places having one method, nevertheless they are regulated by condition, district andORor metropolis public utility income under state guidelines" (Hill & Mountain, 2014). The three major themes managing through each area of issue deal with economical, technology, and philosophical dilemmas.

 First, let us examine the public power standpoint of coping with fed and state organizations. The IOUs have secured their location by testing the legalities of AB1103. "the initial worried likely region of whole constructing data regarding discharge in to the proprietor's Profile Administrator bill. The IOUs frequently specified the alleged INCHES15OR15" concept as a restriction to aggregation. The 15/15 Guideline (CPUC Choice 97-10-031) was developed from the CPUC make it possible for tools to produce aggregated knowledge to the public in certain process. The concept involves location to add at the very least 15 services accounts from different clients and that no personal company consideration might account fully for 15PERCENTAGE or even more of the total energy use. However, as protected by statements from your CPUC lawyer throughout the gatherings, the 15/15 Guideline doesn't connect with the abdominal 1103 laws. Minute, the IOUs expressed concern regarding segment 8380 of the Public Utilities Rule and recent CPUC principles about protecting buyer id in wise grid knowledge. (CPUC Choice (11-07-056), Addition D.) Personnel aide for the Electricity Commission reported that area 8380 allows for release of energy use data to adhere to state-law, for example AB 1103. (Bar. Util. Code, § 8380, subd. (age) (3).)INCHES (Mayer, 2012). Below we have push-back in the IOUs because they find clarification from the setup of AB 1103. The strategy to slowdown the ownership of AB 1103 was pushed by appropriate caution about the descriptions, restricts, and opportunity. Listed here are several cases:

[businessplaner-blog1]

Nonresidential Building Energy-Use Disclosure

Because 2007, there has been substantial expansion in the replenishable and alternative-energy areas in Florida. In those days, Assemblywoman Lori Saldana selected laws like the Non-Residential Building Energy-Use Disclosure System (AB1103) to promote growth and exposure for the greening of our economy. The main legislation covered vocabulary that might quickly provide one area of derision between the populace of Florida and also the gas and electrical organizations working their firms. The dialect, "On and after January 1, 2009, electronic and propane tools can preserve data of the vitality use info of all nonresidential properties to that they give service. This knowledge will be managed, in a structure works regarding adding towards the Unitedstates Environmental Protection Firm's Energy-Star Account Boss, for at-least the most up-to-date twelve monthsINCH (Saldana, 2007) supplied a basis for potential dialogue around the walkway to implementation for the legislation.

For more Info Click here  title 24 energy consultant

Being a business proprietor positively involved in the benefit from these regulation, I've compensated certain focus on the different issues that include occured while in the public question. I have determined three key aspects of examination. The very first being of these regions may be the complications of administration at the gasoline and electricity energy amount. The following spot is issues of administration at the building seller levels and finally, the difficulty in working together with the Ca Energy Commission as well as the national company of Environmentally Friendly Protection Agency (EPA). Most three aspects found special troubles moving towards adoption. The different stakeholders' authorized and ethical requirements are juxtaposed as well as the affects and reactions present commentary about the method as it unfolds.

 My firm provides witnessed and enjoyed in every several aspects of research. From beta testing the EPA Collection Administrator device used in AB1103 to positioning on climatechange have attached my firm within this method. The gradual recovering economy that was specifically structural at the commercial money areas has brought at each switch to discontinuity, misunderstandings, and adoption. From your electricity viewpoint, an incident is created that these business legislation is weird to its ability to operate. Having this kind of multitude of problems and competing ideal results, it's obvious that AB1103 posed substantial and unforeseen department within Florida.

 Dialogue

 There are three principal areas of worry, which could all be viewed from unique sides based in case you are a, a company of the stateANDauthorities, or even a public utility. In Colorado, we've Trader Owned Tools (IOU). These public resources are thought as, "Any organization which supplies services towards the general public, even though it could possibly be privately-owned. Public resources contain electronic, petrol, phone, water, and tv wire systems, along with streetcar and buslines. They are authorized specified monopoly rights because of the realistic have to support complete geographical places having one method, nevertheless they are regulated by condition, district andORor metropolis public utility income under state guidelines" (Hill & Mountain, 2014). The three major themes managing through each area of issue deal with economical, technology, and philosophical dilemmas.

 First, let us examine the public power standpoint of coping with fed and state organizations. The IOUs have secured their location by testing the legalities of AB1103. "the initial worried likely region of whole constructing data regarding discharge in to the proprietor's Profile Administrator bill. The IOUs frequently specified the alleged INCHES15OR15" concept as a restriction to aggregation. The 15/15 Guideline (CPUC Choice 97-10-031) was developed from the CPUC make it possible for tools to produce aggregated knowledge to the public in certain process. The concept involves location to add at the very least 15 services accounts from different clients and that no personal company consideration might account fully for 15PERCENTAGE or even more of the total energy use. However, as protected by statements from your CPUC lawyer throughout the gatherings, the 15/15 Guideline doesn't connect with the abdominal 1103 laws. Minute, the IOUs expressed concern regarding segment 8380 of the Public Utilities Rule and recent CPUC principles about protecting buyer id in wise grid knowledge. (CPUC Choice (11-07-056), Addition D.) Personnel aide for the Electricity Commission reported that area 8380 allows for release of energy use data to adhere to state-law, for example AB 1103. (Bar. Util. Code, § 8380, subd. (age) (3).)INCHES (Mayer, 2012). Below we have push-back in the IOUs because they find clarification from the setup of AB 1103. The strategy to slowdown the ownership of AB 1103 was pushed by appropriate caution about the descriptions, restricts, and opportunity. Listed here are several cases: