#and the pandemic made it a hundred time worse

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Don’t Be Evil

Tonight (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

While some services have fallen harder and/or faster, they're all falling. When a whole cohort of services all turn sour in the same way, at the same time, it's obvious that something is happening systemically.

After all, these companies are still being led by the same people. The leaders who presided over a period in which these companies made good and useful services are also presiding over these services' decay. What factors are leading to a pandemic of rapid-onset enshittification?

Recall that enshittification is a three-stage process: first surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until they are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform.

We can think of each step in that enshittification process as the outcome of an argument. At some product planning meeting, one person will propose doing something to materially worsen the service to the company's advantage, and at the expense of end-users or business-customers.

Think of Youtube's decay. Over the past year, Google has:

Dramatically increased the cost of ad-free Youtube subscriptions;

Dramatically increased the number of ads shown to non-subscribers;

Dramatically decreased the amount of money paid to Youtube creators;

Added aggressive anti-adblock;

Then, this week, Google started adding a five-second blanking interval for non-Chrome users who have adblockers installed:

https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

These all smack of Jenga blocks that different product managers are removing in pursuit of their "key performance indicators" (KPIs):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

We can think of each of these steps as the outcome of an argument. Someone proposes a Youtube subscription price-hike, and other internal stakeholders object. These objections fall into two categories:

We shouldn't do this because it will make the product worse; and/or

We shouldn't do this because it will reduce the company's earnings.

Lots of googlers sincerely care about product quality. People like doing a good job, and they take pride in making good things. Many have sacrificed something that mattered in the service of making the product better. It's bad enough to miss your kid's school play so you can meet a work deadline – but imagine making that sacrifice and then having the excellent work you put in deliberately degraded.

I have been around Google's orbit since its early days, going to the odd company Christmas party in the early 2000s and giving talks at Google offices in cities all over the world. I've known hundreds of skilled googlers who passionately cared about making the best products they could.

For most of Google's history, those googlers won the argument. But they didn't do so merely by appealing to their colleagues' professional pride in a job well-done. For most of Google's history, the winning argument was a combination of "doing this bad thing would make me sad," and "doing this bad thing will make Google poorer."

Companies are disciplined by three forces:

Competition (the fear of losing business to a rival);

Regulation (the fear of legal penalties that would exceed the expected profits from a given course of action);

Self-help (the fear that customers or users will change their behavior, say, by installing an ad-blocker).

The ability of googlers to win enshittification arguments by appealing to the company's bottom line was a function of one or more of these three disciplining factors. The weakening of each of these factors is the reason that every tech company is sliding into enshittification at once.

For example, when Google contemplates raising the price of a Youtube subscription, the dissent might say, "Well, this will reduce viewership and might shift viewers to rivals like Tiktok" (competition). But the price-hiking side can counter, "No, because we have a giant archive, we control 90% of searches, we are embedded in the workflow of vloggers and other creators who automatically stream and archive to Youtube, and Youtube comes pre-installed on every Android device." Even if the company leaks a few viewers to Tiktok, it will still make more money in aggregate. Prices go up.

When Google contemplates increasing the number of ads shown to nonsubscribers, the dissent might say, "This will incentivize more users to install ad-blockers, and then we'll see no ad-revenue from them." The pro-ad side can counter, "No, because most Youtube viewing is in-app, and reverse-engineering the Youtube app to add an ad-blocker is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As to non-app viewers: we control the majority of browser installations and have Chrome progressively less hospitable to ad-blocking."

When Google contemplates adding anti-adblock to its web viewers, the dissent might say, "Processing users' data in order to ad-block them will violate Europe's GDPR." The anti-adblock side can counter, "But we maintain the fiction that our EU corporate headquarters is in the corporate crime-haven of Ireland, where the privacy regulator systematically underenforces the GDPR. We can expect a very long tenure of anti-adblock before we are investigated, and we might win the investigation. Even if we are punished, the expected fine is less than the additional ad-revenue we stand to make."

When Google contemplates stealing performers' wages through opaque reshufflings of its revenue-sharing system, the dissent might say, "Our best performers have options, they can go to Twitch or Tiktok." To which the pro-wage-theft side can counter, "But they have no way of taking their viewers with them. There's no way for them to offer their viewers on Youtube a tool that alerts them whenever they post a new video to a rival platform. Their archives are on Youtube, and if they move them to another platform, there's no way redirect users searching for those videos to their new homes. What's more, any attempt to unilaterally extract their users' contact info, or redirect searchers or create a multiplatform client, violates some mix of our terms of service, our rights under DMCA 1201, etc."

It's not just Google. For every giant platform, the threats of competition, regulation and self-help have been in steady decline for years, as acquisitions, underenforcement of privacy/labor/consumer law, and an increase in IP protection for incumbents have all mounted:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

When internal factions at tech companies argue about whether to make their services worse, there's a heavy weight tilting the scales towards enshittification. The lack of competition, an increase in switching costs for users and business-customers, and broad powers to prevent users from modifying the service for themselves all mean that even when a product gets worse, profits can still go up.

This is the culprit: monopoly, and its handmaiden, regulatory capture. That's why today's antimonopoly movement – and the cases against all the tech giants – are so important. The old, good internet was built by flawed tech companies whose internal ranks included the same amoral enshittifiers who are gobbling up the platforms' seed corn today. The thing that stood in their way before wasn't merely the moral character of colleagues who shrank away from these cynical maneuvers: it was the economic penalties that befell those who enshittified too rashly.

Incentives matter. Money talks and bullshit walks. Enshittification isn't due to the moral failings of individuals in tech companies. It's possible to have a good internet run by flawed people. But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

[magnetictapedatastorage]

full article under the cut

June 12, 2024

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.

[granulesofsand]

🗝️🏷️ RAMCOA intermixed with conspiracy theories

I forgot how out of pocket RAMCOA professionals(?) can be. Like, I agree we should believe people and support their healing the best we can, but this video I’m watching has more conspiracy theories from the admins than the survivors. There was one survivor who spoke about one big cult trying to normalize Luciferianism and pedophilia among other things, but they are also on the admin panel. One other survivor still hadn’t worked through the ‘specialness’ groups fed them and thought they had physical psychic powers, and even that was mild compared to the staff.

First admin to speak was the ‘global Satanic cult’ survivor, and they sincerely believe that vaccines are a lie and pandemics are made in labs. After them was a guy who was really insistent that weed and caffeine were common for mind control purposes, and that TV was made to normalize violence and put people into trace — which, he wasn’t entirely wrong, but also not too close to the bullseye there. Then one mostly normal guy who very gently asked whether the world was going to shit because of hundreds of coincidences or a plan, pretty open-ended and tolerable. Then the only guy with a degree listed seemed okay, and then started talking about abusers being soulless and COVID masking having no purpose but to remove loving emotion.

The intro to this video was a cringy song about saving the children, and the first speaker cited remote viewing as corroborating a facility in another state doing mind control (uncertainly, but he did say it).

Most of the survivor testimonies at least made sense, but half the video is over and it’s already been an hour and a half. I was hoping to add this to my list of resources for a new clinician we got through the DV shelter, but. I think not. Probably gonna go back to annotating Miller’s clinician book, cause it’s looking like that’s as good as it gets.

Yeah. We do believe governments participate in organized abuse and cooperate amongst themselves and local groups/people who can afford to get away with it, and we do understand that many products used and sold can aid in mind control, but that doesn’t mean that every piece of every story is true off the bat. Many drugs have a mostly normal history of getting onto the street, though many have ties to organizations in the present. Many trance-inducing mediums came to us naturally, though some are used (in a minority of contexts) for more nefarious purposes. They just don’t make the distinction, and the religious ideology bleeds into all of it even worse. We’re pretty open minded about sanctioned atrocities, but they go too far. And we were abused in a Satanic cult who killed children. Wild.

They just went on a whole tangent about saying COVID was overdone/a lie, and that both that and 9/11 were Satanic death rituals. Y’all. They did just get to how poverty and foster care was bad — nevermind they made it a Satanic thing again. They are taking all of these non-coincidences, but incorrectly attributing them to one big cult. Girl. The word ‘culture’ and ‘cult’ are alike because they are etymologically from the same Latin root. And they called transgenderism against humanity. It gets progressively worse. I’m listening in real time now and you can tell. Every mildly true take is followed by three more bullshit ideas.

It is an enemy of progress to assume that all issues are related by perpetrator. The events do intertwine, but we’re ignoring those intricacies and the true causes — and how to work with them as a result — to shove them under one cause we cannot prove. We will not find where they are tied if we have already decided it is this one specific way. It would be okay if it were true or at least undisputed, but much of what they talk about does not fit the research and existing examinations despite also not providing resources to support these theories. The strings laid out, I can see how they reached their conclusions, but I cannot get around the refusal to see other explanations. It weakens their argument so deeply it has nearly no integrity remaining. And they speak of rationality and sense as if they would know it if it came up and bit them.

The next segment is saying not to criticize them because it discourages conversation. I could be politer, good communication is important. This is the one guy who I would listen to again. I agree that we need to have more in-depth conversations to make heavy topics make sense. I am still not willing to tolerate faith tradition as science or accept any explanation without talking about it, but I would have a conversation with any of these people. I simply can’t listen to them speak conference style.

Why has it been so difficult to communicate? Because of you. Because you provide no sources except half-inaccurate non-academic works. Because you use every other sentence to attack another construct that is largely helpful. Because you don’t want to talk, you just want to say it. And the Christians are taking about their savior complex again.

Mmm, judges wear robes because global Satanic cult. All government is in on out. Again, some people are. There are symbols of faith traditions in government that don’t need to be there. Many stand-out details become easy places to meet or reinterpret for victims if they weren’t already made for dangerous purposes. There are many generational and governmental genuine conspiracies that do occur, people who do collaborate. Still infrequently that structured or globally involved. It’s a funky mix of things that can and do happen and calling it all one giant Satanic operation. Too many big claims with no backup.

These speakers talk about empowerment and shaking free, yet they use mind control tactics themselves. Tell us what to consume and how, from information to literal food. He called the TV a hypnobox. This is not safe. Educate people about why, host conversations about what they can do, but issuing commands and layering it with fear is half of what they are saying is Satanic.

We should be healthy. We should be watching out for dog whistles and nonsensical political decisions, but not every music video is a ritual and not every painting is a message. Talk to people with different opinions, see if your community’s ideas hold up against theirs. It’s not all wrong, but very little is right.

And they’re forcing spirituality again. Gross. We can believe in morals and kindness without having to share a faith tradition. And here comes Global Satanic Cult as the true enemy, describing introspection as soul. Icky icky. “Pedophile transgender agenda”. We’re not right wing conspiracy theorists tho. Created unnatural weather events. Use a source, any source, y’all are dropping these left and right. Psychopaths as any person we don’t like.

Re-educating children to keep them from doing away with gender norms. The guy talking about this one is preaching kindness while telling us we are evil for not being traditionally male or female, or, worse, transgender✨.

So basically Satanic global cult and gender roles. That’s what this was about. They spoke next to nothing about education or what to do to help survivors. Just fearmongering and ignorance.and a shitty ending song. I feel like those 2 hours were stolen. It was all just poking at wounds. Disgusting. I won’t be linking this video, I find it would cause more harm than good. We don’t need their shit, we’re doing better on our own. Good riddance.

[mariacallous]

Today’s newsletter is about a recent report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

But it’s also about a major policy initiative that helped lots of Americans even though almost nobody seems to have noticed — and how that lack of attention has made it more difficult to renew the program now that it has expired.

The subject of the report is child care. As you may know firsthand ― or if you’ve read HuffPost’s coverage of the issue ― finding quality, affordable child care providers in the U.S. is difficult. A big reason is that it costs a lot of money to run a high-performing child care center, and the fees to sustain that kind of operation are more than many families can afford.

These problems have existed for years but got even worse during the coronavirus pandemic, when public health closures and illness-related absences reduced revenue for providers, putting some into debt while forcing others to reduce capacity or close. Those that survived struggled to hire (or rehire) workers once demand returned, in part because they were increasingly competing with retail and hospitality industries that could raise wages more easily.

The federal government stepped in by providing $24 billion in emergency assistance as part of the American Rescue Plan, which Democrats in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed in early 2021. The money went directly to state governments, which, in turn, gave it to providers. Some used it for workers, while others used it to maintain equipment or acquire equipment. Others paid off debts.

All of this made a big difference, according to that new Council of Economic Advisers report I mentioned.

In particular, the council’s economists determined, emergency child care money:

“Saved families with young children who rely on paid child care,”

“Helped hundreds of thousands of women with young children enter or reenter the workforce more quickly,” and

“Boosted the child care workforce and helped raise the real wages of child care workers.”

These conclusions make intuitive sense. And although the council is part of the White House, its staff is composed of well-credentialed economists who have a legal mandate to provide objective analysis ― and these conclusions make intuitive sense. In other words, there’s good reason to think this Biden-Democratic initiative propped up child care at a moment of crisis, preserving access for a significant number of families.

That’s a big deal. Just ask any working parent — or any employer, for that matter. But few Americans even realize Biden and the Democrats in Congress took this action, let alone that it had such an impact.

So what happened? And what does that tell us about how politics works nowadays? I have a few ideas about that...

Why Nobody Noticed The Child Care Money

For one thing, the child care assistance was part of a larger bill that never generated much of a substantive debate, except when it came to its overall size. And it went through Congress at a time when other news stories, such as the distribution of (still new) COVID vaccines, were getting a lot more attention.

What’s more, the assistance wasn’t in the form of checks with Biden’s name on them that went to families. It was money that went through states directly to providers.

Then there’s the fact that the program’s effects consisted primarily of things that didn’t happen rather than things that did. Child care costs didn’t rise as fast as they would otherwise. Providers that would have closed stayed open. Workers who might have left child care for positions in retail or hospitality didn’t. Working parents, especially women, didn’t cut back hours or leave the workforce.

You’re not going to recognize this kind of effect unless you contemplate the counterfactual ― in other words, what might have happened without the assistance in place. And that’s just not how most people think.

What’s Happening To Child Care Now

As it happens, a version of that counterfactual may be starting to play out now, because the temporary assistance program has expired. On Oct. 1, the federal government stopped writing new assistance checks.

That might not seem significant, given that the pandemic emergency is effectively over. But the system’s pre-existing problems are still there ― and now appear to be compounded by other, newer factors, like those tight labor markets that make it even harder for providers to hire and retain qualified workers.

It takes a while for money to work its way through government bureaucracies, so it’s going to take time to see just how big a deal the end of federal emergency funds will be. Many experts (including several quoted in this October Vox article) have raised questions about the most dire predictions, which suggest 3 million child care slots could vanish nationwide.

But it’s hard to imagine there won’t be some fallout. Already there are reports of sporadic closures around the country. That includes in rural communities of western North Carolina, where a nonprofit agency called the Southwestern Child Development Commission announced in late October that seven centers were shutting down.

Sheila Hoyle, the commission’s executive director, confirmed to me by phone that the end of federal emergency funds was the catalyst that led to the closings, which in turn reduced available slots for children by more than 300. And while many of the kids ended up with other providers, Hoyle said, the new arrangements for families — at least, the ones that were able to find them — are generally less well-suited to parent working hours, came with higher expenses for parents, or both.

“We’re asking our parents to patch together programs that weren’t designed to fulfill the needs of working parents, and we need to ask what happens to that child,” Hoyle said. “There’s Grandma or Grandpa on Tuesday, and Daddy gets off early on Fridays, and Mama tries to do Monday and Wednesday, and then you take them to a relative’s house or a next-door neighbor’s house.”

“It’s all just getting by,” Hoyle added, “and just getting by is not what we intend for young children who need a good solid early childhood learning experience while their families work, so that they can succeed in school and eventually become successful young adults.”

How ‘Invisible’ Policy Creates Political Problems

The Biden administration and Democratic leaders in Congress want to do something about that, by restoring at least some of the funding, starting with $16 billion for the coming year. The hope is to attach something to a must-pass spending bill whenever an opportunity presents itself.

But it will take political pressure to round up the votes, especially given Republican skepticism of federal spending and conservative doubts about the structure of federal child care assistance. And it’s hard to generate pressure to restore a program most Americans never knew existed.

Of course, this is not exactly a new problem for Biden, or for Democrats more generally.

Programs nowadays frequently operate invisibly through indirect grants to states or via the tax code, in what political scientist Susan Mettler has called “the submerged state.” Other initiatives are more visible but, like the pandemic child care finding, have primarily prevented bad outcomes rather than creating good ones.

Those problems help explain why, for example, Democrats weren’t able to extend another pandemic measure, a tax credit for children, even though its existence had caused child poverty to plummet. It expired at the end of 2021. Now child poverty is back up, and virtually nobody seems to recognize what it accomplished or Biden’s role in initially reducing it ― making it even harder to get such a program going again. It’s even possible that the expiration of these programs is contributing to voter frustration with Biden, saddling him with blame for the end of assistance that he’s been trying to save.

Politics is like that sometimes, with credit or blame for policy falling in ways that align poorly with what elected officials have actually done. But if Biden and the Democrats lose next November, the chances of meaningful new investments in child care — and plenty of other, similar needs — will be even lower than they are now.

[literaticat]

i know a lot of writers lament about publishing nowadays, especially the promotion of yourself on social media. But are there things in contemporary publishing that you are glad changed and would NEVER want them to be 'like it used to be'?

Totally!

First of all, when I started as an agent, email querying and submitting was JUST coming into play as a normal thing, and there was pretty scant info about agents and whatnot online (no QueryTracker or anything like that) -- before around Y2k, authors had to, you know, type their queries, do research on agents in physical books, mail queries through the post -- and worse, agents had to print out full manuscripts and post THOSE to editors. Booo! So, a bigger barrier for entry to authors, a bigger pain in the ass for agents and editors, and all around, yuck.

Contracts -- when I started, most all contracts were still required to be multiple copies of wet ink signatures on paper -- the printing, the mailing, what an UNBELIEVABLE pain that was. (And while this was STARTING to change ten years ago or so, it didn't change across the board until the pandemic, honestly.)

Payments and statements -- when I started, no publisher or agency had direct deposit. They'd send us paper checks, and we'd in turn send paper checks to authors. All the hundreds and hundreds of pages of royalty statements came on paper, which we'd have to copy and send to authors, or scan into our own computers to email and file the paper somewhere. (I still have multiple large filing cabinets STUFFED with paper statements and contracts I'm afraid to get rid of!) -- This started to change maybe 10 years ago, as the largest publishers got electronic statements under control and some publishers and agencies got direct deposit, and then the pandemic happened, and now almost (ALMOST) everyone has both. This means people get their money more swiftly and safely, and I'm not swimming in piles of horrible paper statements come royalty time, THANK GOD.

Also, in my early days and before that, there was a LOT more open, toxic behavior tolerated. Straight up racism, misogyny, handsy men... you get the picture. Like, obvs there's still definitely some misguided statements that get made by publishers, micro-aggressions for sure exist in corporate workplaces, etc, but -- trust me when I say, back in the day, people were absolutely unafraid to say VILE things in totally matter-of-fact ways, like, just MACRO-AGGRESSIONS during business meetings and stuff, which I HOPE and believe they'd think twice about today or face repercussions for. There was also a huge drinking culture in publishing back in the day, which is far less normal today -- that can't have helped! So while, yes, I do miss the lavish parties and dinners we used to have, I definitely DON'T miss some of the stuff that came with that!

[pebblysand]

Heyyyy im dying for an update on castles!! Any hope of getting one soon?😭💗

hi anon! thanks for your message! the tl;dr answer to this is: no.

or, i don't know. maybe? sigh. it's just been a lot lately.

it's a funny one, you know? most of you will not remember this, but there used to be a time when i would share (maybe overshare - is that a word? i've always wondered why that is a word when it's your platform and your rules and people can just choose to ignore you) on tumblr. not just about fics and writing and peaky blinders, but also about me. the stuff i felt. the stuff that was going on in my life. lots of things.

i grew up in an era of blogging and livejournal (seeing dreamwidth make a comeback lately is oh-so-bizarre, btw) where people opened up online - sometimes too much. this was before doxxing, before cancel culture, before it became dangerous to do so. people would complain about their jobs, their mates - the internet was an outlet. and, i don't know if it was better or worse, i'm not here to make value judgements and i've always thought people who say "things were better in my day" sound like absolute twats, but it was undoubtedly different. i've had this conversation with someone on discord lately, about the dreamwidth comeback actually, when this person said: 'people get real personal on there, though' and i was like: 'yeah, i suppose it's just the culture of the place.' a place where, unlike tumblr and everything that came after it, most of the content produced was through words, rather than images. when the internet was still made for writers and you weren't afraid of "clogging" someone's dash with posts that were too long to be digested in less than ten seconds.

the thing is: i like writing. it makes it easier to organise thoughts. and, up to 2020 (2021, even) i used to post monthly updates on my writing, but also about my life, for you. remember how i told you when i passed my bar exam? how i quit my job, found another job, and then another one. i told you about the boy and hinted at my break-up. i told you about how one of my best friends sank into a very toxic relationship, from which i couldn't save her. i told you when my dad died. it wasn't even that long ago. and, i explained to you that for these reasons, and maybe others, i didn't have a chapter out as early as i would have liked. and, you understood. you were kept up with what was going on. it was the pandemic and a different time.

but then, gradually (oh-so-quickly and oh-so-slowly), "you" became "many." i like that word - "many" - it's what my hairdresser said the first time she cut my hair: "they are very fine, but there are very, very, many of them." i suppose that between the first chapter of castles and the latest, my follower count grew into the hundreds and i got - well, scared. scared to share: what i thought, why i wasn't posting, how much or how little i was writing, how i was feeling. because there were too many of you. because i started to hold myself up to higher standards, too.

the truth is that no one wants to listen to anyone on the internet complain. it's not fun. and, specifically, no one wants to listen to fanfiction writers complain. why would they? why would they moan about how busy they are? about how creatively drained they might be? about how maintaining a healthy balance between real life, a job, and writing, is hard, if you do it seriously. because it's a hobby. because it's not "real" writing. because it doesn't matter.

well, anon, i'll tell you something. the voice in my head, it goes like this: why are you tired? it's just fanfiction. stop taking yourself and your little stupid story so seriously. stop thinking this is Important because you're writing about something you feel is important. no one cares. and: you only wrote 80,000 words last year, people write full-blown nanos in a month, calm down. it's not that bad, you don't have children. it's not that bad, you don't have dying parents. it's not that bad, you have money. you're a white cis privileged girl who can afford to spend her free time on writing because you don't have to work multiple paying jobs to foot the bills. so many people do. people who are much busier than you write a lot more than you do. shut up, what are you crying about? why are you responding to this poor anon with anything other than "soon, i hope." they weren't even mean about it.

and, i like the word "many" because it encompasses the realness of it, the repetition of it. many, many, many. it's less theoretical than "a lot". you can't say: a lot, a lot, a lot. it's morning as i write this, irish drizzle blown in by the wind against my window, thin droplets like static and i wonder: could i isolate thirty thousand? count up to thirty thousand little drops of rain against glass and imagine what that would look like as people. that's a small stadium, isn't it? and, it's also almost how many people have clicked on castles, in the past three years. it's also how many people, in my head, are telling me to just suck it up and write the next chapter. it's been a month already, hasn't it?

to tell you the truth, i still overshare with some people. there's a very small discord i'm on which is more like a group chat with my best internet friends. it's a lot of fun. and, i'm not going to tag them here for fear that you might come at them with pitchforks, but after i was explaining this to them, how exhausted and drained and lost i've been feeling lately, i had some, last week, tell me i should just give up castles. just stop, recharge, take care of myself. it's just a fic, it doesn't matter. let it go, you know?

so, yeah. you read that right, anon dearest. people who i really love, and trust, told me i should put your beloved on an indefinite hiatus and move on with my life. how's that for an update? and, they didn't say it in a "this is a bad fic and it's not worth continuing" kind of way, but in a "it's not worth working yourself into the ground" kind of way. in a "fanfiction is a hobby" kind of way.

i typically count years from september to august (i'm still in school, in my head, sue me) and this past one has been long and hard. for reasons that i won't explain because of the "very many" issue i mentioned above. for reasons that i also won't explain because as i also mentioned above, i can't help but always compare myself to people who have it worse. but, the fact of the matter is that whilst i'm not really asking for sympathy, i do want to say this, as i hope it will help provide a bit of context to how i'm feeling right now, in terms of writing.

anon dearest, i'm exhausted. i'm bored. i'm turning thirty in 24 days. i'm sick and tired of putting everything in my life on hold "until i finish castles". i would estimate that right now (and for the past three years) castles has eaten up about 75% of my free time. i think the first couple years, i didn't really mind. because it was the pandemic. because there wasn't much else i wanted to do. but now, when i see my friends, i try to schedule it on weekday evenings because i want to keep my weekends for writing. when i travel at the weekends, take holidays, do anything that will take me more than a couple hours, it's a compromise made against writing time. a compromise i often feel guilty about because it delays the next update and because ultimately, it delays the moment when i do finish castles. when i am able to move on to something else. move on with my life and also maybe another story of my own.

these past few months, i wrote almost every day from late march until last week because i knew i'd be going home to france in august and wouldn't be able to write there, so i needed to get ahead. everything in my life is planned around writing and updating and i'm a little bit burnt out, anon. it's typical summer me, nothing to really worry about, i felt the same last year (those who were already here will remember) but it doesn't make it suck less. and, that's why people are telling me to give up. because i keep getting stuck in this cycle of overworking myself, getting burnt out, taking a month off and diving back in again. it's fanfiction and it's a hobby and it's meant to be fun and it's just not fun anymore. it feels endless and draining and like a vampire eating my "good" years. time my mates are spending getting married and having children. and, even if i don't think that's what i want for myself, precisely, i still don't feel like the life i'm currently living is one i want to be living in five years' time.

i don't want to be exhausted. i don't want to be working all the time. this groundhog day of getting up, opening up my (work, or personal) laptop, deliveroo-ing my meals, working until 9:30 pm, and repeat. i have seven chapters left to go to the end, which will take 12 to 18 months, and i don't think i can go on like this for another year. i don't want to. something's gotta give: my IRL life, my job, or this "hobby", and it is logical (oh-so-logical) that it should be the latter.

and, yet. when my pocket friends suggested this, i came at them with pitchforks. i said: no. no, no, no, no. i can't give up. i don't want to give up. i love this story. it's unnerving and draining and exhausting, but haven't touched it for a week and i already miss it - it's crazy. and, it's true: it's not fun, but writing, to me, has never been "fun". it's: fulfilling, exhilarating, meaningful, it gives me the chills and a sense of peace but it's not "fun". i don't know who the fuck writes for "fun". you can enjoy things that aren't "fun", you know? i definitely do.

and, if i had to pick one thing to give up on that list, honestly, it would be my job - 100%. i'd finish castles in six months, if i could give that up. but, i can't, lovely anon. because fanfic doesn't pay. because writing doesn't pay. and whilst i do have a savings account that i intend to use someday to take time off to write, i don't think i could justify using it for anything other than original fiction. because at least, there would be a tiny bit of hope that the book might get picked up and i could make my money back. i can't, like, quit my job to write fanfiction, can i? even if i did set up a patreon, i doubt you all would want to fund me, lol.

so, i don't know. i don't know what to do, anon. i don't want to give up castles. realistically, i probably won't. realistically, i'm probably going to keep ploughing through and overworking myself and feeling like i'm throwing my youth and my free time away into this project that everyone will most likely forget the moment it is finished. right now, to answer your question, i have about 6,000 words on the new chapter. right now, i'm also taking august off writing. to recharge, to sleep, and only write if i feel like it. later? i don't know. i think i'm in a place where i've just got 30,000 words out in three months and i'm too brain-dead to think clearly. i am acutely aware that this issue doesn't have a solution (or at least one that i like) but i might be more willing to compromise my life again after a bit of rest and holidays.

anyway, sorry for being a debbie downer, anon. and sorry i don't have an update for you. i'm dying for one, too.

[manhasetardis]

Eight TV Shows to Get To Know Me

Rules: list eight shows for your followers to get to know you.

@thedoubteriswise tagged me. Thanks Selena! 💛 (and sorry this took me so long). thinking of 8 shows for this was hard

Morangos Com Açúcar - this was a portuguese teen drama that was on from the time I was 5/6 until I was 15. sort of like degrassi and then in later seasons like glee. there was a new episode every single day. so it was almost a decade of watching a new episode every day. i'm sure it ruined my brain. the show is awful, the writing is terrible, the acting is shit, and i absolutely loved it. everyone was obsessed with it, teachers and media were always talking about how much it influenced kids. it caused an episode of mass hysteria in portugal in 2006 called the "morangos com açucar virus" where the students in the show got sick with an unknown disease and portuguese kids from hundreds of different schools started developing the same symptoms. most portuguese actors started their career on this show. there were concerts, theater shows, a movie, and the soundtrack cds still smell like strawberries. unfortunately, there will be an amazon prime remake premiering this month.

Grey's Anatomy - a show that I started watching too young. it premiered when I was 8 and I think I started watching it the following year. I was obsessed with it and unfortunately I still watch it. it became worse after Cristina left. it still means a lot to me.

House MD - another show I definitely started watching too young.shouldn't have been allowed to watch this as a child. still remember watching the finale when it aired. it's called hate crimes md for a reason. this whole show messed with my brain so much. it scarred me. throughout med school professors kept bringing it up.

Doctor Who - i mean, it's sci-fi with shitty effects, great acting, some amazing stories and it made me cry a lot. what more can i ask? i think i started watching this in high school and binged watched the first 4 seasons in 4 or 5 days. (i still haven't finished watching Jodie's run tho). will probably always be one of my favorite shows.

How I Met Your Mother - i was obsessed with this show when it aired, haven't really thought about it since it ended. still sthink i had to inlclude it.

Good Omens - i loved crowley and aziraphale from the book. the show was made specifically to mess with me. it has david tennant and michael sheen.

The Untamed/CQL - insane show! it's perfect. i watched it at one of the craziest times in my life (pandemic + studying for the final exam of med school that will determine which specialties you can choose). it might have saved me a little. has amazing fanfic. epic romance. yibo and xz. I have to thank my mutuals for putting this show on my dash, I never would've watched it otherwise.

BBC Sherlock - I love this show and always will. in a lot of ways it saved my life. it's a great show with great writing and acting. insane times to be online! some great experiences with the tjlcitas. probably the show that influenced my life the most.

Anyone feel free to do this if you like, I'd love to see your answers 💛💛 I'm tagging @devoursjohnlock @thepineapplering @slimegargoyle @nondeducible @melatovnik @thegeyison @widowsisa2018heistfilm @thealogie @garkgatiss @victorianpining @kinklock

[enbyhyena]

So I talk sometimes about how piss-poor the SSI payout amounts are, but I did my math on something slightly different today and I just thought I ought to share my findings. I also just wanted to do a more in-depth, comprehensive post in general. So here you go.

As of the 2023 calendar year, the maximum SSI payout amount is $914 per month.

A full-time worker will work 40 hours a week, or 160 hours a month.

If you take the payout amount and divide it by the hours of a full-time job, you get...

🥁🥁🥁

$5.71/hour.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25.

In order to be completely financially secure and comfortable, you need to make about $233k a year. As of 2021, the median household income is $71,000 a year.

According to this calculator, $914/month ($10,968 a year) is 75.23% below the federal poverty line.

Put another way, if I never spent a single cent of my SSI (which I can't do and I'll talk about why further down), and if my wages were not to increase at all (which it does by a small amount each year, but for the sake of this analogy), it would take me 21 years to make the amount of money that it takes to be comfortable for just one year. (I got this figure by taking 914 and multiplying it by the number of months (12), and then dividing 233k by the outcome [$10,968].)

Multiple resources state that people should aim to not spend above 30% of their monthly income on rent.

30% of $914 is $274.20.

Median rent cost in the United States has climbed to $2,011 per month.

Recipients of SSI are not allowed to have ANY amount above $2,000 in combined income and assets at ANY time, or else they will lose their benefits cold turkey. Meaning that even if they COULD come up with 200% of their monthly income JUST for rent (not factoring in the cost of food, meds, transportation, etc), they would be instantly cut off.

Don't even get me started on what a shit-show Section 8 is. Especially post-pandemic.

Marriage brings the income/asset limit to $3,000. So if you're a double-disabled couple, your limit is cut in half (strongly discouraging marriage). If you're a disabled person and marry to someone who works, your SSI will almost certainly drop or disappear completely—which can trap disabled people in financially abusive situations.

If you claim SSI and try to work to make a little extra money, every other dollar after $63 subtracts a dollar from your SSI payout, BEFORE taxes. So say you work full time for 2 weeks making $9 an hour—$720 before taxes.

Subtract the initial $63, and you're left with $657. Now divide that by two (for every other dollar).

SSI has just taken $328.50 from your SSI payout. Your $914 payout is now $585.50. Subtract another $328.50 for your second paycheck in one month, and that's a $256.50 payout.

This leads to a lot of disabled people, who break their bodies trying to make just a little more in spite of their illnesses, to largely break even. Usually making about the same amount they would have made if they'd just stayed home and taken care of themselves instead.

And to make it EVEN worse, earnings take 2 months to reflect on your payouts. So say you work over the holidays to treat yourself for Christmas. You may get $914 in December and January as normal, but only come February will you finally see that deduction take effect—meaning if anything happens, you have several hundred less dollars to work with.

When I worked, it took over a year AFTER I quit for my payouts to finally go back to normal, as they kept readjusting my earnings and deducting from my payouts saying that they "paid me too much".

So I don't think it needs to be said that you can fight tooth and nail to get accepted onto this program, and be shamed by society for being on it once you finally win, but as an extra kicker be FORCED to stay there with no options to escape without severe punishment.

I have known people who fought for four and ten years. While being considered, you cannot work AT ALL or they will immediately throw out your case. The average wait time is 2 years, but most wait longer. If SSA says no, you'll be sent to court to appeal. If the judge denies you, you have to start all over again. And you can get caught in the same loop over, and over, and over, and over again, getting denied support that you desperately need, and many die hoping to receive.

8,000 people file for bankruptcy and 10,000 people die a year while waiting for their SSI to be approved.

And it just keeps getting worse and worse the further down the rabbit hole you go. I made this post partially to vent my frustration with this system after being abused by it for the past 5 years (and it abusing the people I care about). But I also wanted to create a resource with citations for people to share around and throw in the faces of ANYONE who dares to think that people on welfare/claiming SSI somehow "have it easy".

As a disabled person, I spend over half of my given days either in bed too ill and/or in pain to function, or at a clinic begging a doctor to not call me fat or a hypocondriac or drug-seeking and take my (documented and diagnosed!!) illnesses seriously. I rarely ever get to just SIT there and BE sick. I often have to get up and get shit done in SPITE of being sick, even doing OTHER people's jobs and holding their hands just to make sure they're actually doing what THEY'RE being PAID to do (insurance agents, doctors, etc). Disabled people don't GET days off. Just because we don't work a "conventional" job doesn't mean we're just sitting on our asses mooching off the system. Every single goddamn day is a fight just for the basic human right to survive. And I never want to hear anyone saying that ableist, invalidating, and blatantly untrue shit around me.

[jammingkambing]

Country of Nothings and the Privilege of Grief

This is the one where my tito dies. 

I remember many details about his death: like the color of his urn and how my tita placed his glasses beside a picture of him smiling. I remember some points less clearly. I know he died in the summer months of 2021, but I don’t know if he died in April or in May. And I forgot the exact words that my mom used when she told me that he had died— if she mentioned his COVID, or if I just made that connection myself.  What I remember best, though, is the grief.

Grief was quiet— which is not to say it was mild or gentle. It wasn’t. Grief was quiet, like how I’d lie down to sleep in a silent room only to remember that I couldn’t remember the last time that I talked to my tito. I’d be looking at my phone while I was waiting for class to start and my browser would be open to the very last philosopher that my tito recommended. I’d be sitting at my desk during an empty moment, and I’d realize that I had forgotten the sound of my tito’s laugh.

This feeling, more than anything, is what Alfonso Manalastas wants to memorialize in Country of Nothings. 

The poem itself is the record of a very specific period in Philippine history. The dramatic situation is set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting deaths— thus the running count of fifteen hundred and one, hundred and two— joined with the shutdown of the ABS-CBN corporation. Here, then, is a Filipino who is trying to find meaning in the mismanagement of a country. Here is a persona who is trying to make sense of senseless deaths, rationalizing an irrationality and realizing what a privilege it is to still be here, to breathe and enjoy this grief. In telling this, the poem juxtaposes the story of an individual sadness with the tragedy of an entire country: Headlines looking more and more like obituaries / Staggering from their appointed places on the paper. 

This piece revolves around historicity. Every death and every pitch-black TV is caused by a national event or an international pandemic, respectively, and so the poem repeats, You recount the dead until you fumble over the math… You recount the dead until you fumble over the myth because these are not new events. This is not the first time that our country has experienced the crippling of free speech or the spread of a deadly virus, and it will not be the last, if only because history bears repetition.

However, for all that the poem is grounded in its context, its language explores the timelessness of mourning. On the streets, / more nothing. And from nothingness, you muster / nothing. The sensation of emptiness is not exclusive to the year 2020. Ever since injustice and ever since war and ever since illness, people have suffered loss and recounted the dead, but Manalastas' greatest achievement here is writing grief in the vernacular of this time and in the voice of this people while still retaining the universal numbness of death. And when they try to devour us with a hunger / so infinite, we will wholly surrender to them nothing.

So the poem ends with a surrender— which is itself a kind of silence. I find this fitting, if only because silence is another response to grief. Sitting in the dark until the numbers blur and your TV becomes static. Lying on a bed and trying to reconstruct a voice using fragments of memories. 

I'll tell you now that, in my better moments, I believe in an afterlife. I'm a Christian, which means that most of the time I like the idea of heaven and I look forward to the day when I ascend and I can finally ask my tito, Why did you leave me? And he'd give me the answer that I'm waiting for.

In my worse moments, though, I imagine asking that same question and receiving no reply. Nothing but the hum of a broken TV, and my grief left unanswered— as if to say that there are far worse things than the quiet.

A/N: The full text of Alfonso Manalastas' Country of Nothings was published in 2021 in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal over here in this link. Also, this is just my English homework. Hi, Sir Andy!

[bllsbailey]

There's No Better Argument Against Government-Run Programs Than the Programs Themselves

The current political climate features two sides: Those who want the government to do more for the people and those who want the government to get out of people's way. It's not necessarily a partisan issue, mind you, as there is an alarming number of folks on the right who believe that Republicans should implement more government but just wield it in a conservative way.

Whatever that means.

But when you take a look at what made the majority of the Trump administration so successful, it was Donald Trump's executive actions meant to undo a lot of the regulatory burden that has been placed on us over the years. The result was a thriving economy, and, until a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic hit, more people working and making higher wages.

The result of Trump's years in office being largely undone by Joe Biden's executive actions had the opposite effect. We now have an even more burdensome bureaucratic state - though, thankfully, the Supreme Court has been working to undo a lot of the bureaucracies' power grabs over the years - and a slowed economy. 

But, in truth, we don't have to get into the nuances of Republican governance vs. Democratic governance and have lengthy, academic debates over the regulatory state to show that government bureaucracy is the problem, not the solution. We need only look at government-run programs as they exist now, because they are the best arguments against themselves.

Take, for example, the Veteran's Administration, which has proven for years now that the dream of government-run healthcare is actually a nightmare. The problems with the VA came to a head in 2014, when then-president Barack Obama was forced to address them, but ultimately did nothing about the growing scandals.

Or, look at the U.S. Postal Service, which has operated at a loss of $67 billion between 2007 and 2020 and currently believes that the best way to save money is by delaying mail deliveries to rural areas of the country and to continues raising prices at a time when the economy is deeply impacting Americans.

Last week, the USPS tried to quietly push a new plan that would save them about $3 billion a year as part of a 10-year plan. But some of the changes could hurt Americans.

The new plan, which will be filed with the USPS' regulatory commission, comes about three years after the mail service embarked on a 10-year plan to stanch billions of dollars in losses and put the agency on the path to profitability. The 10-year plan, implemented by Postmaster Louis DeJoy, also slowed delivery standards, with the service guaranteeing five-day delivery instead of its previous three-day delivery window. The proposed changes will shave about $3 billion a year, the USPS said on Thursday. But, it added, "Depending on location, time and distance, expected time to deliver will increase for some ZIP code pairs."  The USPS has also boosted the price of Forever stamps several times within the past few years, prompting some critics to say that customers are paying more for worse service. With the proposed changes, the slower service could be felt by rural areas and for mail that needs to travel long distances, DeJoy told the Washington Post. 

The new delivery schedule would mean up to a 12-24 hour delay for deliveries in rural parts of the United States (areas around where I live in south Louisiana, for example, could very easily be impacted as there are a lot of farmers and very few big urban areas). Instead of three days or less, some places could see deliveries take a bit longer. Which, if you're in dire need of something that is being mailed or shipped, can be a make-or-break situation.

But $3 billion a year for 10 years does not correct the $67 billion loss over the span of a couple of decades. And the postal service is essentially asking Americans to pay more for worse service. In fact, it's not hard to argue that saving $3 billion a year won't offset, I dunno, $6 billion a year in losses stemming from people who will use private companies for most efficient package deliveries and continue to prefer digital correspondence over traditional mail.

In the private sector, the USPS would have folded long ago. But, instead, the people who run the government continue to throw money at it and prop it up on our dime. Time and again, these government agencies providing government-run services prove better than anyone else that they are incapable of being run efficiently and effectively. The public sector has no incentive to reduce waste and inefficiency in order to improve itself and generate profits. The private sector does, and that is why it consistently outperforms the public sector.

There are few people out there really talking about this issue, but it's an extremely important one. A wasteful, inefficient government program - the mail service - is essentially going to tax us by raising its rates while providing worse service. I don't know how you can make a better argument against government-run anything.

[sugarseawitch]

PLEASE tell me about your time working in a prison if it's true😳

TW! Mention of SA and various violent actions.

I worked in a state prison for the first year of the pandemic before moving to another city.

It was medium security, there was a mix of people who did small crimes, drug dealers, full on gangsters and murderers, and the yards were divided into five sections to house everyone (I can't remember why)

My job was in the medical department and I was in charge of organizing and distributing paperwork (it's not as boring as it sounds). We were incredibly busy thanks to the pandemic.

I will say before the pandemic, the inmates were often keeping to themselves, though there were occasional fights and attempts at harm. We had one inmate who was arrested for S/Aing three children and attempted murder. When his bunkmates found out, they didn't hesitate to hurt him. They stabbed him with different items, beat him with the sports equipment, and it got to the point that he needed to be in solitary confinement .I remember the paperwork I picked up saying he was sent to the hospital for emergency surgery. I don't think he made it, but that was pre pandemic.

That being said, the inmates had a lot of rules. Yard time was on a strict schedule, you can't wear anything besides a jeans and a white shirt, you had no access to any electronics, and you had to always have a guard with you, even if you have to use the bathroom. The pandemic ended up making it a hundred times worse, but it stopped a dang gang war when one of the gang leaders died from Covid.

Fun fact, a lot of inmates were guinea pigs for the vaccine. Most refused even basic testing, but some did it in exchange for good behavior to reduce sentencing.

Semi related, I read an article about Danny Masterson's time in the prison he was sentenced too, and I can honestly say all the prisons in california offered everything he has access to. That does not mean he's having fun. He's in prison, not a resort.

[thatstormygeek]

As the man in line behind me continued to display a stunning lack of spatial awareness with every bump of his suitcase against the back of my legs, I thought fondly back to social distancing and the other public health guidelines ever-so-briefly in place to quell the spread of that pesky pandemic. The guidelines, of course, have been nothing but a remnant for years now, even though at least hundreds (often thousands) of people in the United States are still dying of COVID-19 every week. And sure, the vast majority of those casualties are the elderly and immunocompromised folks. But so what? Do the elderly and immunocompromised not deserve our solidarity? Do they not deserve to get on a plane without fear that the passenger next to them will be ill and unmasked, thus putting them at risk? I do not claim to be exemplary and this is not meant to be preachy so please don’t interpret it as such, but when I see elderly people at an event, or when my friends who are immunocompromised tell me how nervous they get about attending crowded places, I see it as an objectively very minimal sacrifice to put on a mask. But we've been taught to believe that the small things we can do for others are worth less than the minor inconvenience it takes to do them. This lack of community and solidarity, made worse by regulations that encourage individualism above all, bleeds into other areas of life. 

Instead of expressing solidarity with unarmed and largely peaceful student protesters and the thousands of faculty members around the country who have joined them, I have seen hordes of people — many of whom have remained silent as for months we Americans have continued to fund the annihilation of Gaza — rise up to defend the actions of police departments across campuses. Chilling, when we consider the trends: last year, police killed the highest number of people on record, and those victims were disproportionately young, Black and Latinx. When I see people defend a heightened police presence on college campuses, to me it heavily suggests that they care more about property than they do student safety.    As a reminder before the inevitable comment about Buildings comes up: trespassing and the occupation of (heavily insured, mind you) buildings are non-violent offenses and are tactics of civil disobedience that have been used repeatedly in protest movements throughout history.  It's just that time works as the great middleman — in a few years, maybe even decades, the same people that today shared their support for the universities risking students' safety to protect property and the illusion of neutrality will unironically share a graphic about the Brave Student Protesters of 2024. We've seen it before.   Columbia might even add it to the website.

Was police brutality, to these folks, condemnable solely because we happened to live under a Republican administration when George Floyd was murdered? If police brutality and state violence exist under a Democratic president, Democratic governor, Democratic mayor, and Democratic senators and representatives, are they suddenly unobjectionable? Does a call for law and order suddenly cease to be a dog whistle when it is uttered by a Democratic president? It sure seems like it to some people.  ... For some, solidarity has an expiration date, and it is a destabilizing thing to witness whether it comes in the shape of public health or protest movements. To watch university presidents whose supposed calling is education call upon the police, many in riot gear, some deploying tear gas, some beating and arresting students in the middle of the night, some slamming elderly professors to the ground, some using tasers on students, some firing rubber bullets directly at protesters, and all using excessive and disproportionate force, in the name of order, feels like some sort of joke. To hear people defend these actions and cheer for this crackdown of non-violent protest (over mass death made possible with American funds) feels like a nightmare. It didn’t have to come to this. A few institutions have understood that protests and demonstrations are commonplace and expected at universities — Wesleyan University has allowed the student encampment to remain, and at Brown University, the encampment was disbanded after the administration agreed to hold divestment to a vote. Day after day after day for months, we have been witnessing Palestinians getting blown to bits, their hospitals demolished, children starving to death, mass graves discovered, universities destroyed, all with bombs our tax dollars pay for. Students are using their platform and their community, which is the power they have, to demand better from the institutions to which they give their time and money. And instead of listening to the youth, to whom the future belongs, politicians have chosen to vilify them and university administrators have chosen to call the cops on them. It's a shame.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Covid pandemic made poorest countries even worse off, World Bank warns (Guardian) According to research by the World Bank “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” also applies to countries—and Covid-19 has made the problem even worse. In a report released in concert with the bank’s bi-annual meeting, the financial institution found that, over the past five years, income per capita in half of the world’s 75 poorest countries rose more slowly than incomes in developed countries, indicating a growing wealth disparity between rich and poor nations. The data also shows that one-third of the countries eligible for the bank’s International Development Association (IDA) loans were poorer than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. “These countries now account for 90% of all people facing hunger or malnutrition,” the Bank said. “Half of these countries are either in debt distress or at high risk of it. Still, except for the World Bank Group and other multilateral development donors, foreign lenders—private as well as government creditors—have been backing away from them.”

Stamps and U.S. mail decline (NPR) The cost of a Forever U.S. postage stamp will rise from 68 cents to 73 cents in July, following a price hike just this past January and the sixth increase since January 2021. Still, could be worse: Comparing the U.S. to 30 other peer countries, there are just four countries with cheaper stamps than the United States, and the 26 percent increase from June 2018 to June 2023 is half the average stamp price increase of 55 percent of those countries. One driver of the price hikes for first-class mail is declining volume, with the number of mailed items down 68 percent since 2007.

Wave of pro-Palestinian protests closes bridges, major roads across U.S. (Washington Post) Pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked roads, highways and bridges across the country on Monday, snarling traffic and sparking arrests from coast to coast in what some activists declared to be a coordinated day of economic blockade to push leaders for a cease-fire in Gaza. The disruption appeared to span the country over several hours. Protesters in San Francisco parked vehicles on the Golden Gate Bridge, stopping traffic in both directions for four hours Monday morning, while hundreds of demonstrators blocked a highway in nearby Oakland, some by chaining themselves to drums of cement, California Highway Patrol representatives told The Washington Post. In New York, dozens of protesters stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and held demonstrations on Wall Street, according to ABC7. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations were also reported in Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami and San Antonio.

Venezuelans living abroad want to vote for president this year but can’t (AP) Giovanny Tovar left Venezuela five years ago in search of a job after his country came undone under the watch of President Nicolás Maduro. He now sells empanadas and tequeños in the streets of Peru’s capital, where he pushes around a small cart outfitted with a deep fryer. Tovar wants nothing more than to vote Maduro out of office. He sees an opportunity for change in July’s highly anticipated presidential election but he won’t be able to cast a vote. Neither will millions of other Venezuelan emigrants because of costly and time-consuming government prerequisites that are nowhere to be found in Venezuela’s election laws. More than half of the estimated 7.7 million Venezuelans who have left their homeland during the complex crisis that has marked Maduro’s 11-year presidency are estimated to be registered to vote in Venezuela. Analysts and emigrants assert people who left Venezuela during the crisis would almost certainly vote against Maduro if given the chance.

In Ukraine’s West, Draft Dodgers Run, and Swim, to Avoid the War (NYT) The roiling water can be treacherous, the banks are steep and slick with mud, and the riverbed is covered in jagged, hidden boulders. Yet Ukrainian border guards often find their quarry—men seeking to escape the military draft—swimming in these hazardous conditions, trying to cross the Tysa River where it forms the border with Romania. That thousands of Ukrainian men have chosen to risk the swim rather than face the dangers as soldiers on the eastern front highlights the challenge for President Volodymyr Zelensky as he seeks to mobilize new troops after more than two years of bruising, bloody trench warfare with Russia. “We cannot judge these people,” Lieutenant Tonkoshtan said. “But if all men leave, who will defend Ukraine?”

Sydney’s second knife attack in days being investigated as terrorist act (Washington Post) The stabbing of a Sydney bishop during a live-streamed church service is being investigated as a potential act of terrorism, police said Tuesday. A 16-year-old boy is in custody after police were called to an Assyrian church in suburban Sydney on Monday evening. They found a 53-year-old man with lacerations to his head. Another man, 39, suffered lacerations and a shoulder wound after he tried to intervene, police said. The boy had been restrained inside the building by members of the public. Christ the Good Shepherd Church said in a statement Tuesday that the attacker approached Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at the lectern as he was delivering a sermon at about 7:05 p.m. local time. The attacker lunged at the bishop with a concealed knife, delivering blows to his head and body. Parish priest Isaac Royel was also injured in the attack, the church said. The attack was captured on a live stream of the service on its Facebook page and on YouTube.

The Philippine president says he won’t give US access to more local military bases (AP) The Philippine president said Monday his administration has no plan to give the United States access to more Philippine military bases and stressed that the American military’s presence in several camps and sites so far was sparked by China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who took office in 2022, allowed American forces and weapons access to four additional Philippine military bases, bringing to nine the number of sites where U.S. troops can rotate indefinitely under a 2014 agreement. Marcos’ decision last year alarmed China because two of the new sites were located just across from Taiwan and southern China. Beijing accused the Philippines of providing American forces with staging grounds, which could be used to undermine its security.

Israel’s War Leaders Don’t Trust One Another (WSJ) Six months into the conflict against Hamas, the Israeli public is deeply divided about how to win the war in the Gaza Strip. So, too, are the three top officials in the war cabinet meant to foster unity in that effort. Long-simmering grudges and arguments over how best to fight Hamas have soured relations between Israel’s wartime decision makers—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the former head of the Israeli military, Benny Gantz. The three men are at odds over the biggest decisions they need to make: how to launch a decisive military push, free Israel’s hostages and govern the postwar strip. Now, they also must make one of the biggest decisions the country has ever faced: how to respond to Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israeli territory. Their power struggle could affect whether the Gaza conflict spirals into a bigger regional fight with Iran that transforms the Middle East’s geopolitical order and shapes Israel’s relations with the U.S. for decades. “The lack of trust between these three people is so clear and so significant,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli general and national security adviser.

Retaliation for retaliation (Washington Post) After the retaliation, comes the retaliation. Israeli officials Monday said they would respond to the astonishing assault carried out two days prior by Iran that saw hundreds of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones launched from Iranian territory toward targets in the Jewish state. The Iranian barrage was successfully fended off by Israeli air defenses, backed by the United States and a number of the regional partners and allies. Nearly all of the Iranian launches were intercepted before they reached Israel. They inflicted no casualties. For Tehran, the attack was a response to an Israeli operation that killed seven senior Iranian officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at an Iranian compound in Damascus, Syria. For Israel, the Iranian response demands its own reprisal. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said Monday that “the launch of so many missiles and drones to Israeli territory will be answered with a retaliation.” What that would look like was unclear at the time of writing, though a new Israeli attack seemed in the cards. Iran and Israel have been locked for years in a tacit shadow war, punctuated by airstrikes, assassinations and acts of sabotage. But the current round of escalation has sharpened the prospect of open war between the two Middle East powers.

Ordinary Iranians Don’t Want a War With Israel (The Atlantic) You don’t need to be an expert on Iran to know some facts about Iranians in this moment: First, most are sick of the Islamic Republic and its octogenarian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been in charge since 1989, and whose rule has brought Iran economic ruin, international isolation, and now the threat of a war. You need only look at the majority of Iranians who have boycotted the past two nationwide elections, this year and in 2021, or the hundreds killed in the anti-regime protests of recent years to know that this government doesn’t represent Iranians. Second, the people of Iran have no desire to experience a war with Israel. Despite decades of indoctrination in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment by their government, Iranians harbor very little hostility toward Israel. In the past few months, many Arab capitals have seen mass demonstrations against Israel, but no such popular event has taken place in Iran. In fact, in the early stages of the Israel-Hamas war that broke out in October, many Iranians risked their lives by publicly opposing the anti-Israel campaign of the regime. Third, Iranians have a recent memory of how terrible war can be. I was born in Tehran in 1988, in the final throes of the brutal eight-year conflict that began when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and continued for way too long because of the Iranian regime’s ideological crusade. The people of Iran know that their main enemy is at home, and that war will bring them only more repression and hardship.

Critics call out plastics industry over “fraud of plastic recycling” (CBS News) an Dell is a former chemical engineer who has spent years telling an inconvenient truth about plastics. “So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” she said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.” About 48 million tons of plastic waste is generated in the U.S. each year; only 5 to 6 percent of it is actually recycled, according to the Department of Energy. The rest ends up in landfills or is burned. Dell founded a non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, to fight plastic pollution. Inside her garage in Southern California is all sorts of plastic with those little arrows on it that make us think they can be recycled. But, she said, “You’re being lied to.” Davis Allen, an investigative researcher with the Center for Climate Integrity, said the industry didn’t need for recycling to work: “They needed people to believe that it was working,” he said. “The plastics industry understands that selling recycling sells plastic, and they’ll say pretty much whatever they need to say to continue doing that. That’s how they make money.”

[mariacallous]

Beginning in 2023, we won’t have Dr. Anthony Fauci to kick around any more. After 38 years in government service, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as the White House’s chief medical advisor, is leaving his jobs—don’t say “retiring”—and, at 82, is headed to his next adventure.

It’s hard to imagine anything more adventurous than what he has been through in the past three pandemic years. The country—well, most of it—sympathized with his anguish as he tried to decode the ever-shifting challenges of Covid while his former White House boss, at various times, named the infection with a racial slur, claimed it was no worse than flu (it’s killed a million people in the US alone so far), and suggested it might be treated with a good injection of bleach. Fauci’s role as the highly qualified, avuncular explainer-in-chief heading a critical research lab won him many fans, but as the pandemic progressed, it also made him a target for those who sniffed conspiracy or simply got sick of following guidelines that might save their lives.

On the eve of Fauci’s departure from government, the nation finds itself in a strange place. We’ve pretty much declared ourselves done with Covid. But Covid isn’t done with us. It killed 2,504 Americans last week, and many thousands are living with the debilitating misery of long Covid. Yet those who wear masks at indoor gatherings—like Fauci—are mocked. Fauci himself got Covid earlier this year, when he briefly let his guard down and lowered his mask.

For my fourth interview with Dr. Fauci (you can read the previous ones here, here, and here), I decided to ask him about how he regards the psychology of denial—and also to get a glimpse of what we have in store for us this winter. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steven Levy: Let’s talk about this winter. Do you expect those two new Covid variants BQ.1 and BQ1.1—they don’t really trip off the tongue—to dominate very soon?

Anthony Fauci: It looks like it’s going in that direction. They went from a fraction of a fraction, to a few, to now double digits. I do expect that, as we’ve seen in other countries, those variants will likely play a role. But they’re not the only ones. You know, there’s BA4.6, BF.7. And then there’s the others that aren’t even here yet that are lingering in other countries.

Those variants are troublesome, right?

Yes, they’re different, somewhat evasive. They elude some of the monoclonal antibodies that have been used effectively. But if you look at the relationship between them and the currently dominant variations, they are subdivisions of that lineage. So although the vaccine isn’t precisely matched to the variant, I believe there’ll be enough cross-reactivity not to create a very serious issue among those who’ve been vaccinated, and particularly those who’ve been vaccinated and boosted.

Can we expect some sort of surge this winter?

It’s unlikely we will see a surge the likes of when Omicron hit us last November and December. I always keep an open mind because I don’t put anything past this virus. But I would be surprised if we saw a major, major surge.

One thing about a surge is that it makes people more careful. Even in communities that once were cautious, most people aren’t masked now, despite continued infections and hundreds of deaths every day. If levels of infection are about the same, we’ll have no incentive to jar us into a higher level of caution.

I believe that you have to enter something else into your equation. As we get into the cooler months of the late fall and the early winter, we’re not only going to have Covid—particularly with these other variants beginning to emerge as we just discussed—but you also have the influenza season. Some years it comes early, sometimes it comes right on time, and sometimes late. This year looks early, at least in some regions. And then there are other infections, such as respiratory syncytial virus, which is particularly problematic for children less than 5 years old and for the elderly.

People should begin masking when they’re in indoor settings during the winter. I’m not talking about mandating anything. I’m talking about using good common sense. If you are a vulnerable person, or if you live in a household with a vulnerable person, you might want to go that extra step. Even though there’s no requirement for a mask, you might want to go back to wearing a mask in an indoor setting.

So let’s talk about masking. I heard that when you got Covid yourself, you attributed it to a moment of weakness, when you took off your mask around people who were special to you and weren’t wearing masks themselves. Those of us who try to wear masks indoors have all felt that pressure. How do we get to the point where we concede the “freedom” of people not to wear a mask and thus endanger others, while the freedom to wear a mask is under assault?

I can’t explain that very well. There’s a very interesting psychological twist there, where you’re doing the right thing to protect yourself, and you feel uncomfortable, because you think that you are making other people uncomfortable. Now, I don’t want to practice psychoanalysis in our interview …

Let’s go for it.

I can tell you my feeling. I was seeing all of my friends—this was a college reunion. I walked into that room, and I had a mask, and they were there with their significant others, none of whom had a mask on. I felt badly, like I was making them feel uncomfortable because they didn’t have a mask on. So I took my mask off. It was a psychological glitch. And it cost me, because there’s no doubt that that’s where I got infected.

Do you think situations like those are a victory for the science deniers?

I don’t want to give them any victories.

But that’s the reality. You’re an empirical person. This is where we are. I wouldn’t want to be in a subway without a mask. But I go on the subway and 20 percent are wearing masks.

There’s a difference. As long as we’re getting into psychoanalysis, here’s how I feel: If I go on in a subway or I get on a plane, and I’m wearing a mask, and nobody else is, I don’t really care how they feel. But when you go to a social event, you know everybody, and you don’t want them to feel uncomfortable—that’s a little bit of a different incentive. Or disincentive, as it were.

I interviewed Bill Gates recently. You must have read his book about the next pandemic.

I have indeed.

Bill and I kind of got into an argument. He said that we’re in a better position to fight the next pandemic, because we fought this one. I said we’re in a worse position, because of the mistrust and even hate now directed toward the public health world, which everyone used to respect. This hostility is something that you’ve experienced yourself. So I think that if another pandemic comes on, we’ll be starting from a disadvantage, because there’ll be a significant percentage of people who won’t accept the proper guidance on what to do to fight this next one. Where do you stand?

There are two elements to that. Overall, I agree with Bill. I think that the lessons learned, particularly among public health officials, are the kinds of things that should be applied. If those lessons are heeded, I think we’ll do better. The good news about the outbreak is that we had years of investments in basic and clinical biomedical research, which allowed us to actually develop a vaccine in unprecedented record time—from the time that we identified the virus to the time that we got a safe and effective vaccine into the arms of people. So we should absolutely remember the lesson of continuing to make investments in biomedical research. Also, heeding the lesson of what went wrong early on, with regard to the public health issues, will put us in good stead.

But in another way, you are correct. Statistically, you will never know when the next pandemic is going to be. I’ll yield to you that in the next pandemic, if it comes relatively soon, there will be people who say, “We’ve had enough of restrictions, we’re not going to have them anymore, we’re just going to go our way.” That would be a big mistake. But what likely will happen is that the next pandemic might be years and years and years from now, when people don’t remember what it was like back then. We would just start all over again. And hopefully, we wouldn’t forget the lessons.

I don’t know if we’re heeding those lessons even now. Hundreds of people a day still die of Covid, and millions are getting long Covid. In September, President Biden asked for more money to fight the virus and help the sick people. He couldn’t get the money.

Right, it’s unfortunate.

To what do you attribute that? Republicans get Covid, too, right?

Obviously, that reflects an unfortunate reality. We live in a very, very divided society. And the degree of divisiveness clearly has interfered with the optimal response to the pandemic. You have a situation where the level of vaccinations in red states versus blue states is substantially different. And the number of deaths due to Covid among Republicans is greater than among Democrats, for the simple reason there’s less of an uptake of vaccinations there. That is unfortunate and should never happen.

There should be a unified response, where everybody realizes that the enemy is the virus, not each other. We need to do everything we can to protect ourselves and protect each other. Unfortunately, that’s not been the case. Political ideologies have gotten involved in a response to an outbreak.

A Senate committee recently concluded that Covid originated from a lab in China. Do you think that’s an unreasonable assumption?

I joined a large group of highly experienced evolutionary virologists who studied this very carefully. We kept an open mind that any theory is possible: lab leak versus natural occurrence. We looked at the evidence on either side and feel that the true evidence—not the tweeting and whatever—strongly weighs on the side of this being a natural occurrence. That doesn’t prove the case. And you still keep an open mind for a lab leak. But I believe that anybody who studies this situation can’t in good conscience say that the lab leak is the most likely explanation.

How much of a practical difference would that make if we knew one way or the other?

Well, knowing which it was would prepare you for the next pandemic, or help you to prevent it from happening again. If we definitively proved that it was a natural occurrence from an animal reservoir—which I believe is the case, again—we would put much more effort into exploring that animal reservoir to see what’s out there, and putting restrictions on the utilization of wild animals in wet markets.

I’d hope we’re doing that anyway.

Well, the Chinese aren’t, when they go against their so-called regulation of not bringing in animals from the wild into the market, exposed to people in the market shopping for food. We have clear-cut proof that they actually did. We have photographs showing the animals in the market that should not have been there. We want to get much stricter on not allowing that animal-human interface.

The state attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri are charging that you colluded with Mark Zuckerberg to suppress information about a Covid lab leak. Just for the record, you didn’t collude?

That’s laughable. I mean, that is so ludicrous. It isn’t even worth commenting on. I mean, give me a break.

These are people who were elected by state populations as their chief law officers.

Yeah. And some of them are the ones who say that Biden didn’t win the election. So there you go.

Have you ever listened to Joe Rogan?

No, I have not.

Some of his interviews are fascinating and enlightening. And then he’ll have a guest like the Covid denier Robert Malone, and the two of them talk for three hours about how vaccines are more dangerous than Covid itself. It’s baffling to me. Why are even intelligent people so prone to these conspiracy theories? I know you don’t like to psychoanalyze, but you’ve been through tough times before, and it’s part of your job to deal with irrational fears. What’s behind that?

It’s not an easy explanation, Steven. You don’t know whether people really believe that or it’s just acting out. I can’t explain it. It’s too complicated.

You’re leaving your government posts in December, after an amazing career that must be ending bittersweetly because of all the invective and threats leveled against you. Do you think it’s helpful to have a single person, even a trusted one, so much out front in a national health crisis like this?

Other people have to decide that. I am not alone out there. We have the director of the CDC [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], we have the surgeon general—there are a lot of people out there. Because I’m the target of the far right, it looks like I’m the only person out there, but I’m not.

[msvorderofoperations]

Shit Life Syndrome

I am in the midst of a crisis. Well, more so than usual as my life has been one slow motion catastrophe for the last year. To sum up: I was left holding the bag by a close friend that decided that he could no longer support me. I don't wish to divulge details but I did everything in my power to accommodate him on interpersonal, financial, logistical and emotional levels. It was not enough.

In the mad rush to get ready (though I don't know exactly how/when), I contracted COVID for the second time. While still isolating and recovering, I then had to start living on my own in a partially demolished space while I tried to get my feet under me. While that happened, I underwent surgery and it went literally as badly as it could. A week after the procedure, the incision tore open and became badly infected. I was all but bedridden for the next two months. As I was beginning to feel things take a turn for the better, my dad died. He was an utter piece of shit that I do not miss, but that he made zero plans for his death meant that the entire family was in disarray for weeks.

Literally the next day, I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to leave the space I had been living, even though I had been assured that I would always have a place until I found something permanent. I suppose that was a lie. I then had to scramble to try and get *anything* going for housing, while also having to rectify that I was now almost certainly afflicted with long COVID. As this happened, understandably (I hope) I got to a very low emotional state. I have flirted with suicidal ideation a number of times in my life, but it never gets very far. This time was different, and far worse. Just as I was in the worst throes of it, I had an epiphany. I have lived through worse, and come through the other side of it. All of these things that were weighing on me I have dealt with before, just never in such close proximity. I was not going to roll over to some amateur hour horseshit as being too sad. As has been said elsewhere, if hope cannot be found, spite can be a fine substitute.

Unfortunately, what is left unsaid is that spite is not infinite.

I have now been living in a tiny storage space with no more than a mattress, my clothes and my computer with my estranged sister and her deeply dysfunctional family for 3 months. I have been paying hundreds of dollars per month for the privilege, and do not have access to the homes amenities, and am still having to buy my own groceries. The only solace that I have is that I haven't had to move back in with my mom, who is bar none the worst of my abusers. But she lives close by and is constantly making things worse.

And to top all this off, to make this work I have had to move hours away from what few other supports I have in my life. I have not seen many of my friends in years owing to the pandemic, and to see any of them now takes at least two hours of traversal, a sizable portion of which is walking. This means that if I want to do anything I have to be prepared to lose 1 or 2 days just in the recovery.

This has also put enormous strain on my relationship with my girlfriend. She has been entirely understanding about all of this and has been an absolute paragon of love and support. She has also been working her ass off to try and make things happen wherever I cannot. I know that she is going to read this and worry, but I am going to reassure her and anyone else that happens to read this that I am not going to do anything drastic. I just desperately need to get these words out.

In watching a video by one of my favourite video-essayists, he has an aside on how COVID, and the ensuing health problems afterward delayed the very project that I was watching. For nearly a year. But having the video to work towards gave some structure and an end goal he could work towards even if he felt that he might not actually have anything useful to say. That his issues mirrored my own was discomforting, but that I didn't even have anything to work towards fully unmoored me.

Yes I have had the goal of finding a place to live, but nothing about that goal is concrete. I cannot any more definitively make a place to live happen by myself than I can will myself into being healthy. It is all down to blind, simple, clueless luck. We are in the midst of a generationally unique economic crisis which is inexorably tied to an almost entirely unprecedented housing disaster. I am of very little financial means currently, and for nearly everywhere that is not good enough.

And that's the real bitch of it! I'M ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES. I'm a white, cis-male passing person who has been able to find support within the social structures for disability available to me that precious few people will ever get access to. And for all that, it counts for nearly N O T H I N G. The monthly stipend for rent payments is utterly laughable, and it was already increased last year. Before that, it was even less. For years, bordering on a decade it was the Provincial governments opinion that $375 a month should be more than adequate. That has not ever been enough in my lifetime. And yes, I understand that elsewhere in the world It would be enough! But what isn't spoken about nearly often enough is that while Vancouver is highly celebrated for a great many things, all of that comes at the cost of some of the most extortionately high cost of living anywhere in the world. But I digress.

While feeling discomfited by the feelings brought up by this video essay, I turned to some of my comfort media. I am not unique in this, but frequently dour media has helped me get through tough emotional situations. This time however, did not. I was watching Chainsaw Man, and Denji's Shit Life felt all too familiar in tone, if not necessarily in details. And then I was hit with an intrusive thought of the absolute worst kind: when looking to narratives to comfort myself I fucked up because they were just that. Narratives. Stories. That actually have to meaningfully go somewhere. The real world does not enjoy that luxury.

For weeks unto months, I have been saying to myself and other that this won't last, that things will get better. But I don't know that. How many people in my situation or worse never pull themselves out of the mire they find themselves in? How many succumb each day to the elements, malnutrition, sickness, violence or plain unfortunate accidents? We tell each other that things have to get better because we believe that there is some narrative resolution to suffering. But for so many people, that never happens. One need only look to all the senseless deaths at the hands of the genocidal maniacs that are in power right now.

I don't have a useful way to end this. I am not going to beg for donations (seriously, I have to report any and all income and I could lose my benefits permanently if they don't like what they see), and I don't have any solutions or witticisms to ponder. Hell, I can count on one hand the number of people that will actually read this. I guess...just keep an ear out if you know anybody in the Greater Vancouver Regional District is looking for a roommate.

[kammartinez]

At the end of August 2020, Tom Cruise was on a mission to prove it was safe to go back to the movies. Donning a black mask over his nose and mouth, the actor sped off to see Christopher Nolan’s Tenet as it opened in London. Such was the confusion of that summer in the film industry that even as Tenet debuted, Access Hollywood, the entertainment news TV show, pronounced the title of Nolan’s film “ten-AY,” to rhyme with bidet. “Back to the movies,” Cruise said as he entered the theater by himself, very low-key. A hundred and fifty minutes later, exiting up the stairs, he quietly answered “I loved it” to someone in the audience who asked what he thought. A perfectly timed stealth mission: Cruise swooped in and out. Theatrical film exhibition would not die on his watch.

But as watchers of his Mission: Impossible movies know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Four months later, on the set of Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One, then called simply Mission: Impossible 7, Cruise was caught on tape berating his crew for violating Covid protocols. “We are not shutting this fucking movie down!” he yelled. “If I see you do it again, you’re fucking gone…. No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down.” The recording was leaked to a British tabloid; quickly social media pointed out that the old Tom Cruise, the one notorious for manic rants during which he did things like mansplain Brooke Shields’s postpartum depression on The Today Show, was back. 

Production on the new Mission: Impossible movie had been halted three times before Cruise’s outburst, while the release of his Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, completed in 2019, had been postponed again and again. He was on edge, but as it turned out there was nothing to worry about. In a career that has been defined by the greatest luck and hardest work, these delays worked to his advantage. Finally released last summer, Maverick was an enormous hit. It has made $1.5 billion to date, and is credited—largely credited, as they say—with saving Hollywood from ruin.

Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One, also delayed about two years, came out this summer and nearly performed the same feat as Top Gun: Maverick did. It raked it in at the box office after a full year of non–Tom Cruise movies like The Flash tanked—bad movies that are part of bad cycles that have gotten worse, and which no longer make money. The new M:I movie emerges into what is arguably a more perilous time for Hollywood than the pandemic, with studios threatening to use artificial intelligence to replace writers and actors, whose unions have called strikes. This potential new digital blight is coupled with the cheapness of the studio bosses in the streaming era, who goosed their studios’ stock value during the pandemic and prefer to cut costs rather than share the wealth.   

And yet nobody is going to thank Tom Cruise twice, not this year. As we wait until next summer or later for Part Two of Cruise’s multimillion dollar cliffhanger, production of which has been shut down by the Screen Actors Guild strike, mania for the binary of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Nolan’s Oppenheimer has gripped a world suddenly rich with quality non-superhero blockbuster success stories. Add to that the very unexpected smash breakout of another long-delayed movie, the right-wing action thriller Sound of Freedom, and suddenly the movies are back. They are so back it’s almost like they have returned to a time before the superhero apocalypse—that computer-generated miasma instrumental in training AI to take over—ground them into digital dust. In that era, Cruise was the last man standing. Now all of a sudden he is underperforming, despite his movie taking in more than $400 million worldwide so far.

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Recently I saw the 1980 espionage thriller-comedy Hopscotch, starring Walter Matthau as a CIA agent fired for sticking to his old ways in an increasingly corporatized spy biz. Matthau was sixty when he made it, the same age as Tom Cruise when he was making Dead Reckoning. It goes without saying that these two quintessential American actor/movie stars have little in common. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is all action, his emotions hidden, his skills surprising, his loyalty to his team and their mission limitless. He is the master of every machine and gadget. We are meant to understand that he can do anything. Matthau, by contrast, chooses to do almost nothing. He shows no loyalty, wears his disgruntlement on his sleeve, and chews scenery. Always old before his time, Matthau lingers in cafés going over notes, scheming to make his bosses look dumb.

Hopscotch includes the things Mission: Impossible movies leave out. We see Matthau haggling over safe house rentals and forged passport prices, buying clothes for his disguises, walking around empty fields as he silently plans. As for gadgets, he uses a paperclip to short out the lights in a police station, the paperclip being the one device Hopscotch shares with Dead Reckoning. There, Hayley Atwell, playing a thief, uses one to free herself from handcuffs, then uses them to attach Cruise to the steering wheel of a Fiat 500, which is trapped in a tunnel where it is of course about to be hit by an oncoming train. 

Cruise at sixty still does his own stunts, which appear more dangerous and extreme with each of these movies, especially since he has teamed with the director-screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, starting with the fifth in the series, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (2015). Legitimately thrilling, their set pieces are nonstop inventive in the manner of can-you-top-this American know-how, returned to ultra-professional glory from the dirtbag daring of the Jackass movies, their natural competition (rather than The Flash). Matthau at sixty, on the other hand, knew one real test of cinematic greatness was the ability to sit there and do nothing and still hold the screen. We cannot picture Matthau at that age or at any age learning to hold his breath for nine minutes so he could do an underwater stunt in tactical gear holding a flashlight in his mouth.

It is hard to believe that when the first Mission: Impossible movie debuted in 1996, Cruise had already been a movie star for thirteen years. When Brian De Palma’s film version of the TV series came out with Cruise and Jon Voight, the actors from the original 1960s show complained. The movie was nihilistic, there were double agents in it, it wasn’t patriotic. These were strange objections from the stars of a series that featured extrajudicial assassinations, unofficial regime change, and state-sanctioned kidnappings.

In fact, the movie, post–cold war, kept the best parts of the show: the lifelike masks characters use to impersonate each other, allowing actors to play two parts with the same face, and the idea that espionage was a series of short or long cons more like theater acting and stage magic than diplomacy by other means.  

De Palma also linked the franchise to cinema history in a way Cruise and McQuarrie have maintained, bringing the mise-en-scene and the mood all the way back through Hitchcock to German Expressionism via the silent crime and spy movies Fritz Lang made in the 1920s, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and Spione. Right away, in the first scene of De Palma’s film, a tense interrogation is deconstructed before our eyes as the walls of the set are moved aside or flattened to reveal an empty warehouse—the soundstage itself—while the actors peel off their faces, revealing nothing beneath them but the faces of other actors.

As in Hopscotch, but not in the TV series, the enemy in the Mission: Impossible movies is within. It is always a competing government spy agency that is stopping Cruise and his team from accomplishing the mission they have chosen to accept. Beneath the deep state is a deeper state still. Fittingly, as on the TV show, the news of these missions comes from a tape recorder that self-destructs, as if Cruise has found a stray Nagra on the set that instead of being used to record dialogue has been rigged to emit some smoke before the editor cuts away from it and the theme music starts to play. That music, by Lalo Schifrin, is the prime intellectual property in this series of films, in itself a reason to keep making them, and in its dot-dash intensity a spur to make them good.

*

Cruise’s employers are always disavowing him in these movies. He returns to work like Charlie Brown coming back to kick the nuclear football while Lucy holds it for him again. Dead Reckoning, despite its setbacks, has the lucky perspicacity to appear to be seeing into the future. The overarching conspiracy here has to do with a killer AI set to take over the world’s entire OS, forever blurring the line between reality and illusion, truth and lie. More than ever, the M:I films are about the nature of the film industry itself, and the way stories are told by actors—actors who seem to act as writers, writing the movie as they go along.

The AI, therefore, can take over spy systems and imitate a familiar voice (Simon Pegg’s), then say into Cruise’s earpiece, “Go left! No, go right! No, go left!” as he chases an assassin, in imitation of the directions in a screenplay or those given by a director on set. Of course the AI paints him into a corner—it exists to ruin his performance. In Dead Reckoning, both Cruise and the entire US surveillance apparatus have to go fully analog to fight their AI enemy, a narrative turn that both reaffirms the movie’s dedication to filming real stunts in front of the camera and presciently combats the studio bosses’ insistence on a new filmmaking world of computer-generated screenplays and performances along with special effects.

One of the most admirable lines in the movie comes after Atwell’s character asks Cruise and his team why they are willing to help her, since they don’t even know her. “What difference does that make?” he asks, a fading echo of Hawksian professionalism and humanism in this globalized landscape, part of this film series’ (and Cruise’s) anti-psychological approach, where backstory always struggles to be buried and forgotten, and usually is. It’s the opposite of the maudlin nonsense about family in the Fast & Furious movies.

It is hard to ignore that Cruise has looked a little tired during the extensive, international press tour for Dead Reckoning. Visibly older than when he went to see Tenet in London three years ago, he nonetheless exudes a kind of perplexed, patient bonhomie as he travels the world to sell his film, his slightly disconnected, mechanized mien and tense bearing now newly patient, an aura that envelops the entire category “movie star.” In cinemas, before the film starts, a very short clip of Cruise and McQuarrie plays in which the star-producer and writer-director thank the audience for seeing their movie in a theater, where they made it to be seen. McQuarrie, gray-haired and gray-bearded, gets to look his age; Cruise is locked in, in more ways than one.

With the temporary shutdown of Dead Reckoning, Part Two, Cruise is once again stuck in the quagmire of twenty-first-century studio filmmaking, where every crisis resolves in stasis. Will there come a time for him when that kind of entropy beats his luck and hard work? So much went wrong in making Part One. When the young British actor Nicholas Hoult, slated to play the film’s principal villain, dropped out, Cruise and McQuarrie or someone got the idea to replace him with the journeyman trouper Esai Morales. What luck that the most calm, cool, and collected character in the movie, and the best-looking and most evil, just happens to be a man for today—a pro-union Puerto Rican TV actor from Brooklyn the exact same age as Cruise. On such accidental genius the Hollywood cinema survives another year.